Dark Passage (19 page)

I didn't remember seeing the guy, but wanted to learn everything I could about the folks in charge of the place where Julie went missing. ‘What does an activities director do, exactly? My only frame of reference is Julie McCoy on
The
Love Boat
.'

Pia looked puzzled, and then I remembered that she probably hadn't even been born when
The Love Boat
was popular on television. ‘Basically, they are in charge of making sure everybody has a good time,' she said with a shrug.

That covered a lot of territory, I thought.

I turned to David. ‘Earlier, Pia was telling me that during one of Charlotte's voyages, a girl, a fifteen-year-old, was drugged, abducted from the teen center and raped. Did Charlotte ever mention that incident to you?'

‘Yes, she did. When the ship docked in Montego Bay, she called me. At the time the girl, Noelle Bursky went missing, Charlotte was on a white-water rafting expedition in the rainforest with a bunch of kids, but it upset her all the same.' David bent over, fumbled in his briefcase and pulled out a manila folder. ‘This incident was reported in the Florida
Sun Sentinel
,' he told us while thumbing through its contents. ‘Damn it, I have it here somewhere. Well, never mind. The gist of it is that the girl was drugged, raped and then stashed in one of the lifeboats. The parents were party-hearty types – didn't even notice their daughter was missing until hours after the rape – so by the time they reported it, she'd already come to and climbed out of the lifeboat. The girl had the good sense to flag down somebody and report the incident, but when she got to Security, she couldn't remember anything about the attack – it was all a blank between the time she drank a Coca Cola in the bar and the time she woke up in the lifeboat early the following morning. Nobody was ever accused. The girl had something of a reputation for being a cock tease – I beg your pardon, Miss Fanucci – so her interrogation was emotionally brutal. The family disembarked in Jamaica, hired an attorney, but eventually they declined to pursue the matter, saying they wanted to save their daughter the embarrassment of a court trial. Char was pretty steamed about that.'

As David told the story, I was staring at the etched glass doorway, thinking it was possible that the same person abducted both that poor fifteen-year-old girl and my niece, Julie. Both girls had been drinking sodas in the ship's teen bar, and both had no memory of the attack. Julie wasn't a cock tease, as David had so crudely put it, but what if the attacker had been scouting for victims, had observed Julie getting drunk on Sex on the Beaches with the Crawford boys in the bar and figured she'd be a vulnerable target?

If so, Julie had been extremely lucky. Somehow, she had managed to escape. Why had the rapist not followed through? Had he lost his nerve? Or had the crime been interrupted?

I turned to David. ‘You have reams of paper in that briefcase, David. You know there have been previous assaults. Do you have any statistics on how many girls have been sexually assaulted while hanging out in the Tidal Wave area on Phoenix Cruise Lines?'

‘I was more interested in the statistics on persons overboard, of course, but all those numbers are hard to come by.' He adjusted his reading glasses, flipped over a couple of pages and ran his finger down a multi-columned table. ‘Between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008, there were one hundred and fifty-four sex-related incidents on board cruise ships, twenty-eight of them against a minor, and of those, four – or about fourteen percent – were on Phoenix ships.'

Fourteen percent of an industry total seemed like a lot to me. ‘What about since 2008?' I asked.

David considered me over the top of his eyeglasses. ‘Ah, that's where it gets difficult. Because of last-minute changes to the wording of the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010, comparable data simply isn't available.'

‘That's crazy,' I said. ‘Doesn't the public have a right to know? If I were taking a kid on a cruise, I'd certainly want to be able to check out the safety record of the cruise line I was considering.' I shuddered. ‘We never
dreamed
that Julie would be in any danger.'

‘I filed a Freedom of Information request in 2011, but when I finally got the reports, all helpful information had been redacted.' David leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. ‘The act requires that cruise lines operating in and out of U.S. ports report all alleged crimes to the F.B.I., and that the Coast Guard maintain that information in a public database.'

‘That's good, isn't it?' Pia said.

‘Yes, but …' David smiled crookedly and raised an eyebrow. ‘There's always a “yes, but,” isn't there? Anyway, just before passage, the bill was amended so that the F.B.I. is only required to tell the public about their
closed
cases. Until the law is changed back to its original language, all we have to rely on now is media reports, or when lawsuits are filed in U.S. courts.'

Holy cow, I thought. If the public only got to see information about
closed
cases, nobody would ever have heard of Jon-Benet Ramsay, the Black Dalhia, Andrew and Abbie Borden, D.B. Cooper or Jack the Ripper. I was mentally scratching my head. ‘Surely that can't have been the intent of the act?'

‘No, and as the father of a murdered daughter, I feel let down by the Congress. This absence of data serves no one's interest except that of the cruise lines. When you get home, write your senator,' David ordered, wagging his index finger for emphasis. ‘We need to get this law changed.'

‘What's in it for the F.B.I. to keep cruise-ship crimes so hush-hush?' Pia wondered. She raised a hand. ‘Never mind, I just answered my own question. Maybe they're embarrassed because shipboard crimes have such a low solve rate.'

‘Well, not reporting crimes doesn't make crime go away,' David grumped. ‘It simply lulls the public into a false sense of security. And if this kind of thing happened in a junior high school in the United States, you'd better believe the cops and the media would be all over it. According to these
recent
statistics,' he continued, ruffling the pages on the table in front of him, ‘serious shipboard crimes have dropped from more than four hundred a year to only a few dozen.' He snorted. ‘Defies belief.'

‘So, what we know for sure is that in 2008 there were four sexual assaults against minors on ships owned by Phoenix.'

‘Yes.'

‘And since then?'

David shrugged. ‘Only two that I know of. The one on
Voyager
on the cruise when Charlotte was murdered and the attack yesterday on your niece.'

I turned to Pia. ‘Didn't you tell me that you knew of four, maybe five, Pia?'

Pia nodded. ‘Unofficially.'

‘Somebody with easy access to the Tidal Wave had to be responsible for drugging those girls,' I said. ‘What if Charlotte discovered who it was?'

Pia frowned. ‘Wesley Bray is a common denominator.'

I shook my head. ‘Yes, but he couldn't have attacked Julie because he was on desk duty in Tidal Wave at the time. I saw him there myself.'

‘But, he would have had time to slip the drug into your niece's drink,' Pia observed.

‘What would his motive be?' I asked.

She shrugged. ‘Maybe he's in cahoots with the rapist. Maybe they work as a team.'

I tried to imagine what would motivate a personable, clean-cut guy like Wesley to enter into an infernal partnership with a serial rapist. Money? Blackmail? Or maybe … my heart did a somersault … maybe they took turns?

‘What about that photographer, Buck Carney?' I asked after a moment. ‘I'm sure I saw him taking pictures at the disco while Phreakin' Phil was performing. And he's practically stalking my sister, Georgina.' I paused, as a thought struck me like a clap of thunder. ‘He's got a fetish for red hair. My niece, Julie, has red hair. He's tried to take her picture, too.'

‘I know the guy you're talking about, Hannah. He's a bit of a creep, but aren't all paparazzi creeps? It kind of goes with the territory.'

‘Was Carney taking pictures on
Voyager
, too?' David asked.

Pia nodded. ‘He goes freaking everywhere with that camera, but, honestly, I think he's harmless.'

‘Buck Carney has just shot to the top of
my
list, David.' I sat back in my chair. ‘So, we've narrowed it down to the bartenders, Wesley Bray, Ethan Hines and Buck Carney,' I said, counting the suspects off on my fingers. Then I had a sudden thought: ‘Pia, who did you mean when you mentioned the “usual suspects”? Am I missing anyone obvious?'

‘Only myself and Tom to add to the three you mentioned that I know of, staff-wise.' Pia paused. ‘What do we do now?' she wanted to know. ‘Do we have a plan?'

‘David?' I asked.

David shuffled his papers, tapped them on the table to even up the edges, then stuck the papers back into his briefcase. ‘Up until now, I've been keeping a low profile, but I think I'm going to come out of the woodwork. Start playing hardball. Officer Martin doesn't know who I am, but I think he's about to find out. He wasn't involved in the investigation into my daughter's disappearance, so he probably can't see the connection. But I can't imagine any
honest
officer would want to tolerate the presence of a pedophile and murderer on his ship. If we put our heads together …' David let the sentence die.

Pia squirmed uncomfortably in her chair.

David noticed. ‘Don't worry, I won't involve you, Miss Fanucci.'

‘So, what's your plan?' I asked him.

‘I'm going to talk to Martin, of course. Lay it all out. I'd appreciate it if you'd come along, Mrs Ives. If there's one thing I've learned about dealing with cruise ship corporations, it's never go in alone. Always take a witness.'

‘I think it goes both ways, David,' I said with a smile. ‘Ben Martin always has Molly Fortune and her trusty little notebook along.'

I agreed to accompany David to the security office, but I felt a twinge of guilt about blindsiding Ben Martin like that. And then I thought, no, that's why they pay him the big bucks, to deal with people like me. Martin was between a rock and a hard place. To keep his job he had to keep the owners happy, but that meant keeping customers happy, too. If so, we might find him more willing to cooperate.

‘When shall we beard the lion in his den?' I asked.

‘What's wrong with now?'

‘The owner of a vessel to which this section applies (or the owner's designee) shall contact the nearest Federal Bureau of Investigation Field Office or Legal Attache by telephone as soon as possible after the occurrence on board the vessel of an incident involving homicide, suspicious death, a missing United States national, kidnapping, [or] assault with serious bodily injury.
'

Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010

(H.R. 3360)

‘B
en isn't here right now,' Molly Fortune told us. ‘He's checking on an issue with one of the security checkpoints. Why don't you come back in about half an hour?'

‘That's OK, we'll wait,' David said, claiming the seat nearest the door.

The frown lines between Fortune's eyes deepened. ‘Is Julie OK?'

I was quick to reassure her. ‘Julie's fine under the circumstances, Officer Fortune, but we're here on a related issue.'

‘Is there anything I can do to help?'

Figuring it would do no harm, I introduced her to David Warren. ‘David and I met quite by accident,' I said, ‘but we recently discovered we have something in common. We think the information might help Officer Martin solve the mystery of who attacked my niece.'

Fortune's eyes widened with interest. ‘Can you tell me about it?'

‘We could,' David said, ‘but it's rather complicated. Rather than have to explain it several times, I'd rather wait for your boss.'

‘Completely understandable,' Fortune agreed. ‘I'll page him, then. In the meantime, can I get you anything to drink?'

It was almost lunchtime, and the only thing I'd eaten all morning was the latte I'd brought with me to the meeting in the library. ‘Coffee would be great,' I told her. ‘If it's not too much trouble.'

‘Coffee's fine for me, too,' David said.

The Firebird café was only one deck above our heads, so the steward who responded to Fortune's call arrived within minutes carrying a carafe, four cups, assorted packets of sugar, and miniature tubs of cream. I was stirring cream into my coffee and wondering what to do with my bits of trash when Martin returned.

‘Mrs Ives, I understand you have some information for me.'

I stuck the plastic stirrer into the empty sugar packet and tucked them away in my pocket. ‘Not me, exactly, but Mr Warren here.'

David stood and offered his hand to be shook. ‘Officer Martin, I'm David Warren. My daughter was Charlotte Warren, a youth counselor on board
Phoenix
Voyager
some eighteen months ago.'

Martin inhaled sharply, replied carefully, ‘Ah, yes. Quite naturally, I've heard about the case.'

‘Whatever they told you, Officer Martin, I need you to understand that my daughter did
not
commit suicide. When you hear what I have to say, I think you'll agree with me.'

Martin nodded and released David's hand. ‘Why don't we all sit down?'

After everyone was settled, I said, ‘David and I believe there's a connection between the fifteen-year-old girl who was drugged and raped on that
Voyager
cruise and what happened to my niece, Julie, here on the
Islander
. We believe that there is a serial predator on board the
Islander
who was also aboard the
Voyager
, that he attacked these two girls – and perhaps others we don't know about as well – and that, given the opportunity, he will do it again.'