The Steel Shark

Chapter 23

Joe locked himself in his bedroom, the only place where he could get any privacy. Two (blue) cops in his front yard, two (blue) bodyguards in his house. He appreciated them being there, but he needed to be alone. He wasn’t a social person at the best of times, and this was not the best of times.

He lay flat on the antique quilt and called Maeve. So far, she hadn’t spoken to him since she was shot. She’d spoken to Vivian, who’d stopped by with flowers, and to Dirk who had been assigned to her guard detail, but not to Joe.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded sleepy.

“Joe here,” he said. “How are you feeling?”

“Drifty,” she said. “They have me on some powerful drugs.”

“I’m so sorry about what happened.”

“Me, too.” She sighed into the phone. “Thank you for the flowers.”

“Of course.”

“Your life is a crazy place,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t know what else to say.

“I understand that it’s not your fault you can’t go outside. I was willing to work around it.”

That didn’t sound good. “Was?”

“At first I thought it was always one-off incidents.” She coughed. “Excuse me.”

He waited.

“But it isn’t. It’s like you need extra excitement. Every few months, you get caught up in something bigger than you, something dangerous.”

“I don’t know what the sub accident was about. Or the shooting. I didn’t do anything to cause them.”

“You never do.”

“In the past, I have investigated stuff that got me into trouble after, but this got me into trouble out of nowhere.” He felt defensive, and he tried to push that down. She had every right to be upset.

“Got me into trouble, you mean.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

“I know.” She was silent for so long he thought she might have hung up.

“Maeve?”

“And I think it’s best if we don’t see each other anymore.”

She was dumping him, and he couldn’t even argue. She was doped up, in pain, and in the hospital because of him. She’d be insane not to dump him. Still, it hurt. “Why don’t we wait until you’re feeling better—”

“No,” she said. “I want a normal life. A guy I can walk with under the stars. A guy I could marry at any church. A guy who could take our kids to school. A guy who doesn’t ever get shot at.”

Joe was not that guy. He thought about the ECT therapy, about shocking his brain into submission. “Maybe I could be that guy.”

She hung up.

Edison barked from the other side of the door.

Joe got up and let him in. Things had been going so well with Maeve. She was smart and sexy and funny, and he loved spending time with her. She’d seemed happy. He’d worked hard to find places they could meet, finding buildings connected to his house via steam tunnels, making agreements with building managers. A thousand details, but not enough. She was right — he couldn’t walk under the stars. He might never be that guy. She deserved better.

Edison bumped Joe’s hand, and he automatically petted him. “Just you and me again, buddy.”

Edison looked back at the door.

“And our security entourage.”

Edison walked halfway to the door and looked over his shoulder. He wanted Joe to follow him somewhere, not to stay in his room and listen to breakup music and make himself miserable.

Joe followed him down to the kitchen and gave him a bone. Andres Peterson, the dog walker, had picked up a few from a butcher shop the day before. Edison dropped onto his stomach and went to work on it. At least someone in the house was happy.

Not sure what else to do, he went into his study and stared at the printouts he’d arranged on the green felt on his billiards table. Earlier that day, he’d printed out his data about Maeve’s shooting and the submarine crash, hoping that bringing the data off the screen and into the world would help him to see it in a new way.

One pile represented the royal dead — the princess beaten to death, the prince killed in a training accident during a naval exercise, the plane that had crashed into the sea, and the submarine that had been run down. He rolled a cue ball across the piles on the table, banking it off the sides so it ran over each pile before coming back to him. Maybe the ball would reveal something he hadn’t seen, and it helped to have something to do with his hands.

“When did you last eat?” Vivian stepped into the billiard room.

“Breakfast,” he said. “A muffin, or something like that. Something bready.”

“It’s almost six at night,” she said. “Maybe time for a late lunch?”

He lined up a shot and hit the ball, rolling it across the piles in a different order. He didn’t feel hungry. He chalked his cue stick.

She handed him a roast beef sandwich. “I got two for Edison, but he would only eat one.”

The dog looked between him and the sandwich, his meaning clear — if Edison was giving up roast beef for him, the human had better eat it. He patted Edison on the back before taking his first bite. That’s when he realized how ravenous he was. The sandwich was perfect — thin-sliced beef, horseradish sauce, a freshly baked bun.

“Thank you. I know I’ve been a bear since Maeve was shot.”

“You shouldn’t blame yourself, even though you do. You can’t control what people do.” She handed him a Bundaberg root beer and pointed to a stack of papers. “Tell me about these.”

“That’s the pile for the dead. Marine-related.”

She leaned over to read the papers without picking them up. Then she looked at the door. She must be going off shift soon, so he tried to keep her talking. He never knew what to say to the other bodyguards or the policemen guarding him. Vivian and Andres were the only people he had to talk to. His small world was starting to feel like a prison.

“From what I can tell,” he swallowed a hunk of sandwich, “there’s only one suspect.”

She looked at him expectantly, because he’d solved mysteries before. Too bad he was going to disappoint her now. “Who?”

“Aquaman.”

Apparently not a big believer in superheroes, she grimaced. “And this pile?”

“Those whose fortunes changed because of each death — heirs to wealth, heirs to position or title, creditors who got paid or didn’t, people with vendettas. Mourners.”

“Don’t forget those who want to become the next king.”

“They do have an odd line of succession,” he said. “And getting Prince Timgad out of the way might help some royal candidates. All those who seem to want to be king are in that pile, too.”

“Good. What else do you have?”

He pointed to the smallest pile with his sandwich. “That pile is about the giant sub.”

“Hmm,” she said without looking at it.

He suspected she was just humoring him, but it helped. “The sub is of Swedish design, but all three known subs of that design are accounted for. It took time to track them down, but I managed. I’ve checked and checked. The Halland is in a submarine yard in Sweden being serviced, which I could confirm with surveillance cameras from the dock. The Gotland is on a war-games exercise in San Diego. The Uppland is patrolling in the Baltic Sea. They weren’t anywhere near New York at the time of the accident. But what if another sub of the same design was built, maybe by a different foreign power and in secrecy?”

“Why would they want to do that?” she asked.

“The builders? Money.” He took another sip of root beer. It had a nice gingery snap to it. “The buyers? So they could have a powerful weapon nobody knows about.”

“Would the Swedes build something like that?”

“I don’t think it was the Swedes.” He stared down at the white pages on the green felt. “I think it was—”

“The Chinese?” she interrupted.

He was so surprised he almost choked. She couldn’t have heard of the hacking. “Why do you say that?”

“Squares with the assault rifle I found next to the wreckage.”

“You never told me the gun was Chinese!”

“Just found out,” she said. “I turned it over to the police. Had to get Dirk to look up their findings because they won’t tell me anything.”

“Do the Chinese allow women to crew their subs?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

He talked around a mouthful of sandwich. “We do. Some European countries do. Canada.”

“You’re saying Aquaman’s got a girlfriend?”

“Everyone knows Aquaman is married.” He gulped down a mouthful of root beer. “To Mera, Queen of Atlantis.”

“Maybe a mermaid on the side?”

“Maybe.” He felt like he was close to something. “I did gait analysis of the swimmer who was near our sub, and it’s definitely a woman.”

She stopped looking at the door and picked up the suspicious-deaths file. “For some of these deaths, nobody ever found the bodies.”

“The plane-crash victims? Not surprising.”

“Maybe.” She skimmed the mind map he’d created linking the women to each other and to the rest of the royal family. Lots of bubbles and lines. It hadn’t really helped his analysis any. He knew he was reaching.

“Their plane went down over the Sea of Japan.” He took a slower sip of root beer. “No survivors. Black box not recovered. Small jets like that are—”

“Not interested in the crash details.” She kept reading.

He gave her space. Maybe she’d see something he didn’t. He hoped she did, since he didn’t see anything.

When she was done, she looked back up at him, as if she expected him to say something. “I’ve checked the men who stood to gain from these deaths, and—”

“What about the women?” she asked. “Did you check the women?”

“The women?” He stared at her. “The women don’t have a lot of specific motives, and they’re also dead.”

“The bride on that plane had a strong motive to kill the prince — he beat her sister to death, and she was going to have to marry him.” She sounded angry.

“That’s not in the files. Her sister’s death was listed as a burglary gone wrong. See right there?” He pointed to the cause-of-death line on the mind map, but she didn’t even look at it. “Why would you think the prince killed her?”

“I’ve heard rumors from a source here in New York,” she said. “Did you collect the same level of data on the women who died in the plane crash as you did on the men?”

“I collected some.” He felt defensive, because he hadn’t done much research on the women. He’d viewed them as collateral damage and incidental to the killer, like he and Vivian had almost been, not as the targets of the murder. “They’re about her age. Relatives, friends, people who you’d expect in the wedding party. Nothing stood out.”

“Educated women. All college graduates. One was even a doctor. Those are motives.”

“How so? Laila Dakkar was highly educated. Went to schools in Switzerland and London. Makes sense her friends would be like her.”

“Maybe a woman like that didn’t want to marry a cruel and powerful man. Maybe these women didn’t want to subjugate themselves to a system that views them as expendable brood mares.” Her words were tight and clipped.

So obvious. He was ashamed he’d never thought of that. Because he was a man, and he’d never had to think of it. No wonder Maeve dumped him. “Go on.”

“I don’t know what was going through these women’s heads when they were alive,” she said. “But these dead women have the strongest motive of anyone on your lists. They suffered under their social system, Laila Dakkar most of all.”

He wasn’t going to argue with her. She could kick his ass, and she was probably right. “But.”

“But what?”

“Those women are dead, remember?” He didn’t want to set her off.

“Your data says they’re dead, but your data could be wrong, just like they were about the first sister’s death,” she said. “Since your swimming analysis says you’re looking for women who have a motive to kill this guy, why don’t you look close to home?”

“Their plane really did crash. I checked the flight plans, the insurance claims, the statements of Japanese investigators. Surveillance shows the women boarded the plane, and the plane never came back. Records show it crashed into the ocean.”

“Just because it crashed doesn’t mean those women were still on it.”

“It’s the mostly likely explanation,” he said. “There’s no record the plane landed.”

“It’s the most likely explanation, but none of the most likely explanations are leading anywhere, right?”

“True,” Joe said. “Go on.”

“Let’s go a little nuts here. Make some illogical leaps. What if the plane crash was a fake? What if the women are still alive?”

“OK, what if they are?”

“They disappeared at around the same time as the submarine, right?”

“Yes.”

“So, what if those facts are related? What if the women got hold of that submarine?” Her dark eyes glowed with excitement.

“Farfetched,” he said promptly. “That theory has a lot of what-ifs without a lot of data.”

“The existing data aren’t leading anywhere else either. Why not give it a second look? You don’t have anything else to do.”

“Ouch,” he said. But it was true.

“You know what I mean. Why not go for it?”

“I can look for more about the women, see what turns up.” He felt energized. He had a new lead. “If they’re alive, I bet I can find some trace of them, maybe on surveillance cameras, maybe online or on social media. It’s hard to disappear. If I find them, we can nail them to the wall.”

“Like they haven’t been through enough already.” She touched the printout of Laila Dakkar’s biography. “What if we just let them fight their fight?”

“And I live in this house forever, waiting to be killed by an assassin because someone thinks I tried to murder Prince Timgad?”

“You don’t know what these women have been through. Solve your problem yourself. Work diplomatic channels. Get the royal family to call off their assassin, if he even works for them.”

“And let the women get away with murder?” He couldn’t believe law-and-order Vivian would propose such a thing. “What if they try to kill Prince Timgad again?”

Her jaw jutted forward like it always did when she was angry. “Maybe they should.”