Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (28 page)

I was stunned. If Lucy Conyers had watched the video, she would have known about the tunnel. Any other passenger on board the
Starfire Breeze
would have known the same thing. There went my pet theory about no possible premeditation. Whoever had killed Mike Conyers had known exactly how much time would elapse between the time the train went dark and the time people could see again.

“Am I going to need one of those?” Naomi's voice brought me back to the present.

“One of what?”

“A defense attorney.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“How expensive is your friend, the one I talked to today?”

“Ralph's expensive, but he's also one of the best.”

“What if I can't afford him?” she asked despairingly.

“How about if we cross that bridge when we get to it?” I suggested.

After that, neither Naomi nor I seemed to have much more to say. There were several movies to choose from on the television set, so we settled on one of those and watched it. By the time the movie was over, Naomi was curled up on her bed, buried under a mound of covers, and sound asleep. Unfortunately, I was wide awake.

Back in my homicide days, I used to lie awake at times as well. When I couldn't sleep, instead of tossing and turning, I'd use that middle-of-the-night time and mentally sort through various aspects of whatever case I was working on. Sometimes, in the dark of night, pieces of a case that had blown in all directions during the day would suddenly slip into place. So I did that now. I closed my eyes and tried to focus all my thoughts on what had happened on the train ride—on exactly what had been said and who had been where at any given moment.

I tried to remember how it was that Lars had ended up taking Mike Conyers outside instead of Lucy's doing it. How had she reacted? I couldn't recall that she'd appeared to be anything other than grateful when Lars took the responsibility off her hands. And when exactly had she left her seat to go to the rest room? Was it before Marc Alley had come through our car or after? Maybe someone else would know—Beverly, perhaps, or maybe Florence or Claire Wakefield. I took a notepad and pen off the table and jotted a blindly written reminder to ask them each that question the next time I saw them.

And what about Marc? I remember seeing him standing poised with his camera in hand just as the train car entered the tunnel. I recalled one flash for sure, but then, as I lay there, I wondered if maybe there hadn't been two, a second one slightly after the first. On a fresh piece of notepad I scribbled another reminder, telling me to check with Marc Alley to find out whether or not he'd gone to the photo center to have his pictures developed.

The whole exercise took me back to a story I remember reading in a high school literature book. It was about a man who had spent his whole adult life delivering milk with a horse and wagon. One day, the man dropped over dead without ever getting into the wagon, but the horse still ran the whole route, stopping and waiting in front of each house just the way he would have if the man had been getting in and out to deliver milk.

Here I was doing the same thing. I wasn't a homicide cop anymore. Rachel Dulles had “fired” me from my stint as unpaid FBI informant. I had no business asking questions, worrying about suspects, or questioning alibis. And yet I couldn't help myself. No matter how I tried, I couldn't
stop
doing it. It's one of those lessons late in the learning, but being a detective doesn't come with an off/on toggle switch. The city fathers can give you your gold watch and show you the door, but just because they put you out to pasture doesn't mean you can quit. Once a detective, always a detective, plain and simple.

I was finally dozing off when the phone rang. Hector's room rearrangement had left the phone on the far side of both beds—on Naomi's side of both beds. “It might be your grandmother,” Naomi mumbled, stirring sleepily. “You'd better answer.”

I hotfooted it out of bed. Feeling self-conscious, I paused long enough to put on a robe, then headed around the beds in the dark. On the way I stubbed my little toe on the bed frame hard enough to jam it and maybe even break it. Groaning, cussing, and hopping on one foot, I made it to the phone and picked up the receiver in time to hear a woman's voice say. “If he's not there, just hang up,” followed by a distinct click.

“Hello,” I said into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Hello?” But it was too late. Whoever was calling had hung up. All I heard was the dial tone.

“Who was it?” Naomi asked, sitting up and switching on the light.

I stood staring at the phone, trying to decide if the whole thing was a dream. No, my toe hurt too bad for it to have been a dream. And I thought I knew who the caller was—knew the person the woman sounded like. The deep-throated, smoky voice sounded as though it belonged to none other than Mrs. Margaret Featherman. But that was utterly impossible, since Margaret Featherman was dead. Or, if she wasn't dead—if she was alive and capable of making phone calls—why would she be calling me, of all people? The only thing the two of us had in common was a bad case of mutual antipathy.

No, her calling me didn't make any sense at all.
Maybe it was someone who sounded like Margaret Featherman
, I told myself finally.
A close relative or something. A sister, maybe.

Without any further information—without some solid form of identification—it would have been wrong for me to say anything at all. It would have been inhumane to pass along that unsubstantiated information to Naomi Pepper, raising possibly false hopes that her friend—her former friend, most likely—was still alive and that Naomi herself was no longer a homicide suspect.

Not wanting to sound like a nut case, I lied. “I have no idea who it was,” I told Naomi. “It must have been a wrong number. Forget about it.”

Naomi waited until I was back on my own side of the bed to turn out the light. Within minutes she had rolled over on her side and was snoring softly. Not me. I lay awake for the next several hours, wondering what the hell was going on. I turned the question over and over in my mind. If through some incredible miracle Margaret Featherman was still alive, what the hell did she want with me? No matter how I looked at it, I couldn't come up with an answer that made any sense.

I went from wondering about the call to thinking about Margaret Featherman herself—Margaret and her two shipboard faxes. Had she bribed someone in her husband's law firm to deliver a copy of his will to her? If so, why? And what about this company she worked for, the one that was supposedly about to go public? What was the name of it again? I remembered that when Rachel Dulles had mentioned the name, it had struck me as something biblical.

It took several minutes for me to dredge Genesis out of the old random-access memory. So what the hell was Genesis and what did it have to offer that made selling stock possible or profitable? Supposing the IPO had happened, and Margaret Featherman had come out of it a wealthy woman? Would that offer enough motivation for some other killer? Originally, the fax had been mistakenly delivered to Chloe, and presumably she had read it. Despite her daughter's being a so-called Daddy's girl, I couldn't imagine Margaret Featherman leaving her estate to anyone other than Chloe.

In the end, though, I came back to the name—Genesis. Was there a possible connection between a company called Genesis and a shadowy organization that went by the name of Leave It To God? The very idea was enough to send me spinning right back to square one. This wasn't a night when late-night ruminations were going to give me the kind of answers I needed.

Sometime along the way, I'm not sure when, I realized that I wasn't alone in my room. That probably sounds silly, of course, since I knew Naomi Pepper was there. It was more than her simply being there. It was the realization that someone else was sharing the room with me—sleeping side by side on a bed that was less than a yard from mine. I heard Naomi's slow, even breathing and caught the faint scent of her shampoo and perfume in the air when she turned over in bed or rustled her covers. It was an odd sensation.

Most of the time I'm alone without really thinking about it. It's the way things are, and it would be far too much trouble to make any substantive changes in that solitary state. It had been years since Karen and I had slept together, sharing a room and a bed on a nightly basis. Anne Corley wasn't a part of my life long enough for us to get used to sleeping together, and during the course of my several-months-long affair with a lady named Alexis, we had hardly ever slept over at each other's places. One or the other of us was forever getting up in the middle of the night, dressing, and going home to our own separate condos.

And yet, the simple knowledge that I was sharing my stateroom on the
Starfire Breeze
with another human being soothed me somehow. It felt as though a coil that had been wound too tight in my chest was letting go. My body relaxed. My own breathing smoothed and deepened.

I barely knew Naomi Pepper. Some of the things she had done appalled me, but I liked the sound of her laughter. And I liked the fact that she could beat me—barely—at Scrabble. What the two of us shared could hardly be called a relationship, and yet I was glad she was there in the room with me. Glad she was lying next to me. I was still alone, only not quite as profoundly alone as I had been before.

That realization, pleasant as it may have been, still didn't make me fall sleep. The last time I checked the clock, it was a quarter to four. So much for another restful night on board the
Starfire Breeze
. When it came to cruising, getting your beauty sleep wasn't high on the agenda. I guess that's why people are glad to come home from vacations. It's only when they're back in their own beds that they finally have a chance to rest up.

O
NCE I FELL ASLEEP
, I really slept. I woke up at nine-thirty only because the phone was ringing, which is the story of my life. I've never needed an alarm clock because the telephone never lets me sleep late anyway.

I glanced over at the other bed and discovered that Naomi Pepper was already up and out. The bathroom door was shut. Once again I grabbed up my bathrobe and raced to the phone. On the way I discovered that the toe I'd bumped the night before was black and blue and hurt like hell.

“Hello.”

“You are there,” Ralph Ames said. “I thought I was going to end up leaving a message. How are you doing?”

“Other than having broken a toe from running after the phone, I'm fine.”

“Sorry about that,” he said.

I could have told him that my injured toe had nothing to do with him—that I had damaged it while trying to answer somebody else's middle-of-the-night phone call. But since Ralph was willing to accept full responsibility, I let him.

“I'm about to go into a meeting,” he said. “But I wanted to check with you first and see how things are going up there.”

“Thanks for calling Carol Ehlers,” I said. “She's on the job, and it sounds as though Lucy Conyers is in good hands. As for Naomi Pepper, Todd Bowman seems to be leaving her alone for the time being, so I guess she's all right, too.”

“The search still hasn't turned up any trace of Margaret Featherman?”

“That depends,” I replied.

“What do you mean?” Ralph asked.

“I may have had a phone call from her last night.”

“From Margaret? What's going on, Beau? Have you fallen off the wagon or started channeling or what?”

“It was a real phone call, Ralph.”

“What did she say?”

“I'm not one hundred percent sure it was her—maybe it was someone who only
sounded
like her—and she hung up before I had a chance to say anything.”

“Assuming Margaret Featherman is alive, and after this much time that's doubtful, why would she be calling you?”

“I have no idea.”

“When did the call come through?”

“Last night, after I was in bed.”

Ralph sighed. “Well, if someone plucked her out of the water before she drowned, no one here knows anything about it. Seems to me that it would have been broadcast over all the news media by now.”

“It's on the news?”

“Sure. Margaret Featherman's disappearance is a big deal down here in Seattle—front-page headlines for both papers, the works.”

What makes for headlines always astonishes me. “It is?” I asked.

“Sure. Why wouldn't it be? Margaret Featherman gets turned into a paper multimillionaire one day, and the next day she's missing or dead and most likely the victim of foul play.”

“Did I hear you say multimillionaire?” I asked.

“I haven't checked the stock prices this morning, but as of close of business yesterday, that Genesis IPO had gone through the roof. By last night, I'd say Margaret Featherman's net worth was right around twelve or thirteen million, give or take. Since she's one of Genesis' primary researchers, it'll be bad for them if she's out of the picture permanently. The stock could take quite a hit. There's always a chance, if it drops like a rock, she'll end up being worth next to nothing after all.”