The Mountains Bow Down (3 page)
G
eert burst through the steel door to the top deck and I raced behind him. Sea air slapped my face as we ran under the bridge toward the aft, following the directions the Coast Guard had given.
All three tugs had come around port side and the guardsmen crowded the prows, their search-and-rescue uniforms bright as burning flames. They waved their arms and pointed, and the Dutchman gazed around the deck, taking in the painted steel rail, the teak, the back deck leading into the ship.
I glanced down at the tugs again. The sailors seemed to want us to move across the deck, their gestures like some horrible version of the game of “warm, warmerâno, now colder.”
Suddenly Geert bolted toward a small alcove that extended over the water like a princess balcony. A thin chain blocked entrance to the short platform, and a small sign warned passengers to keep away. A thick gray rope puddled on the deck beside the half wall.
The Coast Guard started waving excitedly.
Unhitching the chain, Geert stepped over the disheveled rope and stared down the ship's side.
“Ach,” he said, drawing back.
I walked over and looked down.
Blond hair blew across her face like sheaves of wheat. Her face looked down the vertical column of her body, as though watching her bare feet as they bumped against the white hull. Her feet kept syncopated rhythm with the rocking motion of the ship, and on the upswing I could see her toes. The nails were painted blue and the color nearly matched the ocean. Eerily, the polish now matched the color of her cold skin.
“Dead,” Geert said.
I shifted my eyes to the rope strung around her neck. It was orange and made of nylon or polyester. Extending from the nape of her neck, the rope ran like a fuse to the rail, then slipped through a six-inch opening at the base of the half wall. From there it continued to the gray rope that puddled at our feet. The gray rope was sodden, bloated with rain and seawater from our journey from Seattle.
“Do you have a crime kit?” I asked.
“Stupid question.” Geert unclipped a small black radio from his belt. His Netherlandish accent sounded sterner than ever as he ordered someone to bring the crime kit to Deck Fourteen, aft.
“And find the husband,” he said. “Use the back stairs, bring crew with barrier cones. I don't want no lookie-looks around.”
Next, he radioed the captain.
“Ach,” Geert said. “Suicide.”
I stepped back, moving carefully around the two ropes and wondering how much evidence the wind and rain had washed away.
Maybe all of it.
The gray rope soaked with rain was knotted around a steel post. The rest of it had bunched up, unable to pass through the small opening where the thin orange line dropped. A long rope, the disheveled coil measured three or four feet in diameter, even dislodged. Perhaps a foot in height. No scuff marks had been left on the small balcony, no footwear residues.
But something didn't look right.
“My men are bringing the husband,” Geert told the captain. “I will call the undertaker.”
“Excellent,” replied the captain. “Let's remove her body from public display as swiftly as possible. Need I remind you of that blasted Nancy Grace? She ran those pictures of the bloody balcony for weeks.”
I slipped off my small backpack and dug around for my Nikon. The camera was full of fresh batteries for my hike up Deer Mountain Trail, but when I raised it, waiting for Geert to step out of the way, he ignored me.
“Yah,” he said, continuing his discussion with the captain, “I make sure we have no lookie-looks.”
Despite his obvious disapproval, I began photographing the scene. The dislodged gray rope. The thin orange strand tied to its base. Zooming in, I saw how her body weight had cinched the knots in the nylon so tightly they nearly disappeared into the braid. When I leaned over the balcony, her body hung like a high bumper waiting for a dock. I completely understood the urge to grab the line and hoist her from view. But first came evidence, and since the laws of the sea gave me almost no jurisdiction, I kept taking pictures, closing down the aperture against the sunlight bouncing off the water and reflecting on the ship's white hull. The wind continued to blow through her pale hair. It looked alive.
I scanned the side of the ship. No balconies. Only small portholes, the rims protruding. But these were at least five yards beneath her feet. And much too small for a grown-up to crawl through.
I glanced over my shoulder. Geert watched me, twirling an end of the white mustache.
“The gray rope,” I said. “What is it used for?”
“Rough weather. Crew throws it to the dock. Extra mooring.”
“And the orange rope?”
“Keeps the mooring line together.” He pointed a shiny black shoe at the disheveled line. “She untied the thin rope. Now it's all come undone.”
Behind him two Asian men came toward us. They wore black slacks and black sweaters, their shoulders adorned with discrete gold epaulettes. The taller one carried a titanium case that he set on the deck, then popped open. He offered Geert latex gloves. When I held out my hand, he glanced at Geert, hesitating. At his boss's nod, he gave me a pair while the second man photographed the crime scene, more quickly than I had. They placed red traffic cones across the deck.
I glanced at my watch. 5:43
AM
. The public had not yet appeared.
“The husband is coming?” Geert asked.
The tall Asian man nodded. Both of them worked silently, taking gestural cues from Geertânods, shakes of his bald headâso that with the solid black clothing, they reminded me of ninjas.
Geert squatted, lowering himself to the deck, and placed his big feet on either side of the half wall's small opening. Taking the orange line in his gloved hands, he leaned back and pulled. The Ninjas gathered behind him, also pulling, while I took more pictures and listened to Geert's breathless mutters. They sounded like Dutch curses.
Though the Ninjas strained, they remained silent, and her body came up by inches. The sound that caused me to glance away, nauseated, was her feet banging against the hull. When I looked back to the retrieval, the bow thrusters were once again shuddering through the deck. The ship turned as if placed on an axis. Inside the steep and narrow channel, we pivoted and the precipitous blue mountains shifted by degrees until we once again pointed toward Ketchikan.
But with the turn, I realized how clever it was that she hung off the port side. As we sailed into town, no one would have seen her. Ketchikan's harbor greeted ships on their starboard. The harbor, the tree houses. The marina full of fishing vessels and sailboats. It wasn't until the Coast Guard sailed down the channel on our port side that her body was seen.
His bald head beaded with sweat, Geert clutched the rope as the Ninjas raced to the railing, reaching down. They pulled her over the side and Geert scrambled to his feet. She rolled over the steel bar and the Dutchman tugged down her palazzo pants, pulling them over her exposed legs, as if to preserve one last shred of propriety.
The Ninjas laid her on the deck. One of them pressed his fingers into her neck, searching for a pulse. A formality at this point. Her eyes were half-closed, her skin the grayish blue of death. She looked asleep, and cold. All except her tongue. It was purple, and it protruded from her parted lips as though she was making a face. Somebody sticking out their tongue to mock a photographer.
But what bothered me more was her neck. The string of bruises circling her throat looked like violet pearls. And the “noose,” as the Coast Guard said, was not that at all. It was a tight double knot. I was rushing to take pictures of both her neck and the rope because the Ninjas had already begun covering her with a tarp from the crime kit.
Geert opened his cell phone and I heard three notes, presumably 9-1-1 because a moment later he asked the state patrol to meet the
Spirit of Odysseus
at the Ketchikan dock.
“No sirens,” he ordered. “Suicide. She's dead. Done.” He paused, then repeated, “No sirens.”
The taller Ninja packed up the crime kit. More crew were arriving to form a human barrier behind the red cones, as passengers began leaking out of the nearby restaurant, drawn perhaps by the ship's sudden turnaround. Or because word was out about the MOB.
Geert made a second call, asking information for the number to the Ketchikan funeral home.
I leaned over the half wall. Squinting at the bright water now rushing past, I tried to measure the distance from the rail to where she had been hanging. Twenty feet, I guessed. Maybe thirty.
I turned back to the tarp, lifting the edge and examining her neck.
“First one of the season,” Geert said to someone on the phone.
I did a visual search of both ropes, looking for any foreign fibers, stray hairs, anything that might make sense of this sight.
“No, not old,” Geert said. “What do the Americans sayâthe middle age?”
I picked up the gray mooring line, thick as a man's forearm, dense with water. Shifting what remained of the coil, I searched for the place where the orange line began and reached into the ropes. I saw something glint in the bright morning light, flashing like a new copper penny. I worked my hand through the layers of line, then touched the cold steel deck. I slid my hand around, feeling blindly for the object. When I touched something sharp, I pulled it out.
It was a bracelet. The blue stones stopped my breath. Dangled in the sunlight, the facets sparkled like beads of seawater, the color shifting from ultramarine to cerulean blue to a hue that was almost purple. As a geologist, I'd seen my share of gems and my first guess was that these were sapphires. But when the blue suddenly flashed again, I wondered if they weren't something even more precious.
Tanzanite, a rare blue stone found only in Africa?
Blue diamonds?
Whatever these gems were, the bracelet was worth money.
Buckets of money.
Still on the phone, Geert's eyes fixed on the jewelry.
“No, nothing suspicious,” he was saying. “Just some lady who decided to kill herself. But keep it down. Husband's a movie star.”
“Movie star” joined the other derogatories: Woman, American, California.
He reached out, opening his hand. I hesitated.
But I had no jurisdiction.
I dropped the bracelet into his palm, and he closed the phone.
“Now you can go back to vacation,” he said.
“I don't mind hanging around,” I said casually.
“You can go. I'll wait for the state troopers.” He gave me a flat expression. “Go, have some fun.”
I smiled. “That's all right. Fun can wait.”
G
eert stayed with the body while I walked though the barrier of crew and plastic cones, crossing the Astroturf strip that was the ship's putting green. I climbed the stairs to a short deck offering a netted basketball court. Beyond that, a crewman was lowering a diagonally divided red-and-yellow flag from the mast. The “O” flag.
O
for “Overboard.”
Stepping onto the basketball court, I opened my cell phone, ignoring two missed calls from DeMott and an incriminating sparkle the sun kicked up in my engagement ring. I scrolled through my phone book until I found the number for Alex McLeod, my former supervisor in the FBI's violent crimes unit of the Seattle field office.
Taking a deep breath, I prepared the urgent petition inside my head.
He answered on the first ring. “McLeod.”
“Sir, it's Raleigh Harmon.”
“Raleigh! Tell me you're calling to come back. I've got an assignment here with your name written on it.”
Last year a disciplinary transfer sent me from Richmond to Seattle. McLeod turned out to be a decent boss, but when my punishment was lifted several months later, I ran straight home to Richmond. And to DeMott.
“Actually, sir, I'm on a cruise ship. In Alaska.”
“Vacation? Good, Raleigh. You need it.”
I hesitated, wondering how much to tell him right away. How much he would believe. “Yes, sir, vacation. But there's one problem. A woman was just found hanging off the back of the ship. The cruise line is ruling it a suicide.”
“You want me to notify the Alaska office, is that it? So it's on record?”
I turned a slow circle, making sure nobody could overhear my words. Three basketballs were rolling across the sports court, spinning with the sea swells. “Sir, I don't think it's a suicide.”
“Why?”
“She was hanging at least twenty feet from the deck by a thin nylon rope. Maybe thirty feet. There's no ladder. Which means she had to jump.”
“Okay, she jumped. People jump overboard.”
“But a jump like that, with that rope, would've practically decapitated her. The rope would rip right through the skin and tissue. When they pulled her up, her neck showed only minor bruising. She looks like somebody taking a nap.”
“Raleigh . . .”
I knew that tone of voice. I heard it daily in Seattle, after I insisted a missing persons case didn't look right.
“Sir, I also found a piece of jewelry,” I pressed on, trying to bolster my argument. “A bracelet, buried under another rope. Eight or ten stones, a total of about fifteen to twenty carats. And they don't look fake.”
“She jumped, it fell off.”
“Respectfully, sir?”
“Go on.” He sighed.
“This suicide required the kind of planning that goes down to the last detail. If somebody prepares that much, how would they forget to take off a bracelet worth at least fifty grand? For that matter, why wear it at all?”
During the long pause that followed, the wind swept over my phone, the static sounding like a distant storm.
“Where's the ship?” McLeod finally asked.
This was what I liked about the guy: he always listened. Didn't always agree, but he trusted agent instincts.