Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) (14 page)

“So glad you're back, Mrs. Conyers,” he muttered as he pushed past me into the hall. “But I must go right away.”

“Of course, Ricardo,” Lucy Conyers said to him. “Thank you so much.”

Then she stepped inside and closed the door behind her, shutting both Ricardo and me in the hallway. Ricardo didn't pause to exchange pleasantries. Two doors down the hall he ducked into a service lobby while I headed back toward the elevator. From there I went straight to the purser's desk.

Among the hired help, there seems to be a caste system on board cruise ships. At least that was true on the
Starfire Breeze
. Sailors who did grunt labor on board were mostly of Far Eastern extraction—mainland Chinese and Korean. Room attendants, kitchen help, and servers in the buffet areas tended to hail from the Philippines. In the dining room, the wait-staff personnel seemed to be Portugese or Italian, with the supervisors—headwaiters and maître d's—all Italian. The young folks in crisp white uniforms who worked behind the counter at the purser's desk and the people who manned the cash registers in the concessions—the gift shops and bars—tended to be Brits or Americans, while the captain and other top-echelon officers were Italian.

At the purser's desk I waited in line with other American tourists trying to sort out their various travel concerns. At last, when I reached the counter, I said to the young man who greeted me, “I'd like to speak to the first officer, please.”

“You are?”

“J. P. Beaumont,” I told him.

“And what would this be concerning?” he asked.

“It's about Margaret Featherman,” I replied.

That announcement had no effect at all on any of the other passengers who were also at the counter being waited on just then, but the reaction among the uniformed crew was an instantaneous dead silence. It reminded me of driving across a bump with a CD playing in a vehicle. After that moment of utter silence, cheerful smiles were reapplied and conversations resumed.

“Won't you come this way, sir,” the young man serving me said. He showed me into a small office. “Please have a seat,” he told me. “First Officer Vincente will be with you as soon as possible.”

That proved to be true. First Officer Luigi Vincente arrived within a matter of minutes. He was a tall, unsmiling man with a close-cropped head of curly, slightly graying hair. “I understand you have information concerning Margaret Featherman?” he asked.

“That's correct. The videos that are filmed off the stern of the ship—how long do you keep them?”

He shrugged. “The security tapes taken of each voyage are kept for a month-long period. After that, the tapes are reused. Why?”

“Would it be possible to review the tapes made by the stern camera last night between five and six?”

“This is not so easy, but I am sure it would be possible,” First Officer Vincente told me. “Why do you want to see them?”

“Because I have reason to believe someone on board saw a woman fall into the sea. It seems likely to me that woman would be Margaret Featherman.”

First Officer Vincente's face turned red. “Someone fell off the ship? Impossible! Who says they saw such a thing?” he demanded. “And how? Was he there when this happened?”

“The passenger who saw it was in his cabin,” I replied. “It's an inside cabin on the Aloha Deck. He was watching the video display of the ship's progress on his television set.”

Vincente considered the implications. “This seems quite unbelievable,” he said. “Preposterous, in fact. How is it that no one else noticed such a thing?”

“Humor me,” I said. “Take a look at the tape.”

I expected to be summarily dropped and told to go mind my own business. Instead, after a moment's consideration, First Officer Vincente made up his mind. “Come with me,” he said.

He led me through a maze of back-of-the-house corridors and into a staff-only elevator. Once on the elevator, we dropped far into the bowels of the ship, where he once again led me through a trackless maze of interior corridors.

I wondered about it at the time. I was sure this territory was usually off-limits to fare-paying passengers, yet after only one initial objection, he led me on. In the process he ignored questioning looks from several of his fellow officers who let us pass without comment. Obviously, on the
Starfire Breeze,
if Luigi Vincente thought I was all right, so did everybody else.

E
VENTUALLY FIRST OFFICER VINCENTE
motioned me into a darkened room lined with dozens of glowing video monitors. Inside, a uniformed crew member snapped to attention the moment we appeared. If I had studied the arm-patch guide on my television monitor, I would have known the technician's exact rank from what was on the sleeve of his uniform. As it was, all I knew about him was what his name tag said—Antonio Belvaducci. After an urgent consultation conducted entirely in Italian, the crewman hurried back to his computer console and punched a series of commands into a keyboard.

“There,” Antonio said in English after several minutes had passed. “I will run the tape on the monitor at the far end.”

First Officer Vincente led me to the last of the monitors. Someone hastily pushed two chairs in our direction, and we took seats. When the tape came on the screen, the time stamp in the bottom right-hand corner showed 17:15 /03 SEP. Because we were watching in real time, viewing the tape was a whole lot like watching grass grow—and just about that exciting.

I admit that my mind strayed eventually. I reached the point where I was watching but not seeing. Suddenly, in his chair beside me, First Officer Vincente stiffened. “Wait,” he commanded. “Go back.”

At the computer console, Antonio froze the image and then turned it back several frames, and there she was. At precisely 17:47 a female figure, arms flailing, came tumbling past the lens of the camera and plunged silently into the sea, where she disappeared from view. Antonio rewound the tape and played the frames again. This time, it was possible to see how she windmilled her arms in a desperate attempt to right herself, as if hoping to enter the water feet- rather than head-first.

“Can you get closer?” First Officer Vincente demanded.

It took a few moments for the computer to enhance a small area of one particular frame. When the image reappeared, a cold chill passed over my body as though someone had doused me with a bucket of ice water. From the nose down, Margaret Featherman's face was shrouded in a layer of duct tape. No wonder she hadn't screamed aloud. No wonder no one had heard her cries for help. Her mouth had been taped shut.

“This is terrible,” Luigi Vincente said. “If you will excuse me, Mr. Bowman, I must go at once and inform the captain. When you are ready, one of my officers will return you to the purser's desk. And perhaps, if it is not too much trouble, you would be so kind as to inform Dr. Featherman of this unfortunate occurrence.”

I tried to object. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Shouldn't that kind of information come from someone on the crew, someone with official standing . . .”

But First Officer Vincente was already out the door. I turned back to the computer operator. “Can you tell me where we were right then?”

Nodding, Antonio picked up a phone and called what I assumed to be the bridge. For my benefit, he conducted the phone call in faultless English. “Where was the ship at seventeen hundred hours forty-seven last night?” he asked.

I turned again to the monitor. “Can I see the whole picture again?” I asked, while he waited on hold.

After a few moments the picture expanded. Now, with my vision no longer focused entirely on the falling woman, I could see a narrow band of shoreline running along one side of the screen. So, rather than in mid-ocean, Margaret Featherman had gone into the water while the
Starfire Breeze
was somewhere close to land—near enough to see it, anyway.

“Could someone swim that far?” I asked.

Antonio gave me what struck me as a continental shrug. “That depends,” he said. “On how far she fell, how hard she hit the water, whether or not she was conscious when she hit, and whether or not she was a good swimmer. The water aft is broken up by the wake of the ship, so that is better for her than if she fell into it when it was flat. Still, it is very difficult to say. The water is cold. Even a very good swimmer would not survive for long.”

On my own, I knew that the duct tape which had probably been intended to stifle Margaret's screams might well have worked in her favor. For one thing, when she hit the water, the tape over her mouth would have prevented a reflexive intake of breath that would have flooded her lungs with icy water.

The crewman's next comment was directed into the telephone, then he turned back to me. “The bridge reports we were just off Port Walter,” he said. “They say we reduced speed for some time in order to allow passengers to observe a pod of whales.”

I remembered then the announcement that had come over the loudspeakers urging all interested passengers to come to deck 14 to observe the whales off the port bow. In other words, at the time in question, all eyes on the ship had been glued there instead of aft. The only exception had been poor Mike Conyers, who had been watching his television monitor instead.

“Yes,” Antonio was saying on the phone. “I will tell him.”

“Tell me what?”

“When you speak to Mrs. Featherman's family, Captain Giacometti wishes you to say simply that she is currently missing. Missing but not presumed drowned. The U.S. Coast Guard has now been notified and is sending Search and Rescue teams to her last-known position.”

Right
, I thought.
Too bad they're twenty-four hours too late
.

While waiting for someone to come fetch me, I remembered all those other security cameras stationed in strategic places all over the ship. I also remembered how it's always easier to ask forgiveness for something after it's done than it is to ask permission before doing it. Since First Officer Vincente himself had brought me here, maybe he wouldn't mind all that much if I viewed one more tape. The operative phrase here is: Give me an inch, and I think I'm a ruler.

“Would it be possible for me to see the security tape on Mrs. Featherman's deck for that same time period?” I asked.

“Which deck is that?”

“Aloha,” I told him, casually passing along information I had gleaned from First Officer Vincente on our long walk though the ship. After another expressive shrug and what seemed like a long, several-minute wait, the image of a long empty corridor appeared on the same screen where, a little while earlier, Margaret Featherman had tumbled toward the sea.

“Where do you want to start?” Antonio asked.

“At five,” I said. “But would it be possible for you to fast-forward it?”

The people who appeared and disappeared up and down the long corridors moved along with high-speed bouncing gaits that put me in mind of silent movie days. Because Margaret's Aloha Deck stateroom had been at the very back of the ship, most of the people traversing the corridor stopped well short of her door, which was just to the right of the camera's ceiling-mounted position. Only when someone came all the way down the hallway did I have Antonio slow the action.

At 17:01 Naomi Pepper appeared. Her arrival right then squared with what Naomi had told me earlier. In the tape, Naomi appeared to knock on the door, which opened to allow her inside. After that, nothing more happened until 17:37, when Naomi emerged. Just outside the door, she paused and then fled, almost running, down the hallway. She had barely disappeared into the elevator alcove when someone else—a uniformed attendant of some kind—appeared in the hallway in front of Margaret's door. Since the man was carrying a tray laden with glasses, silverware, and a covered plate, I assumed he came from Room Service. All I could tell about him was that he seemed to be of fairly slender build. Unfortunately, he held the tray in such a manner that it totally obscured his face from the camera's probing view.

Reaching the door, he made as if to knock. Then, finding the door unlatched, he disappeared inside. As the door closed behind him, the date stamp read 17:43.

“Where the hell did he come from?” I asked. “He just appeared out of nowhere.”

“From across the hall,” Antonio informed me. “That's a service door with access to the staff elevators.”

“Go back several frames,” I told him.

One at a time we scrolled through a series of individual frames. The service door opened slightly a full minute after Naomi Pepper entered the room. Then it remained partially ajar until after Naomi disappeared down the hall. Only then did it open far enough for the waiter to step out into the hallway.

After that nothing happened for the next several minutes. At 17:50 the door to Margaret Featherman's room opened once more. Again the man with the tray appeared. Once again he held it in a strategic-enough fashion that it totally concealed his face. It looked to me as though he was well aware of the camera's position and had taken care to counter it. Only as he pulled the door shut behind him did I notice he was wearing a pair of gloves. Then he dodged into the service door and disappeared, closing that one behind him as well.