As doors cracked open around him, he felt as if he’d entered a bad version of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Except that those who peeped out looked thoroughly frightened.
Ralph and Larry Hepburn were among those who appeared. Thor turned and gripped Larry by the shoulders. “Where’s Clara?”
“Cabin 827,” Larry said. “She came back here with Jackson. Then there was this scream that was horrible...we’ve been asked to stay in our cabins while the sound was investigated. Thor, hell...what else?”
“I think he’s here. I think the killer is on the Fate,” Thor said. “Get back in your cabin.”
“Clara?” Ralph said, a catch in his throat.
“I’ll find her,” Thor said.
He ran on down the hallway to 827.
The door stood slightly ajar—the latch hadn’t caught.
No, it was...open.
For a moment, he felt a keen and terrible sense of déjà vu. He remembered that day now long past when he had opened another door and seen Mandy Brandt...
She lay in beauty.
He shoved the door open, his Glock in his hand.
The room was empty.
* * *
Emmy Vincenzo had fought long and hard; she and Marc Kimball both seemed to have battled ten rounds in a boxing ring.
“Please!” Emmy had choked.
She hadn’t entered Clara’s room—but then, Emmy was entangled with Marc Kimball, who had stared at her like a man possessed. He and Emmy were arm in arm. It seemed he was trying to speak but could not—and was letting Emmy do the speaking for him.
“He says you must come. He has a knife to my ribs. Oh, Clara, I’m so sorry... Clara, Clara...please. I’m so scared!” Emmy had seemed to choke on her words. “He’s already killed a cop—he stabbed him right in the throat...oh, Clara! I should have let him kill me. I shouldn’t have been such a coward!”
She had cried out; she and Kimball had been so tightly crushed together that Clara could only assume he was pressing a blade into her side.
“Emmy, it’s all right,” Clara had said, amazed by her own courage as she stared at Kimball. “I’ll go where he wants me to go. Marc—you sick, arrogant bastard. Don’t touch her again.”
And so she walked ahead of the two.
Down the hallway where cast and other entertainers were first housed, though now they had moved into another layer of the ship—where a maze led to machinery and storage and, she could only assume, at one time, the lowest of the lowly servants and workers aboard.
Clara hadn’t seen a single soul; whatever the source of the scream that had impelled Jackson to leave the cabin had caused an alert on the ship.
But, surely, help would be coming. If the ship was under a code-red alarm, it would soon be crawling with police and security and...
Jackson had told her not to open her cabin door. And she had. But Marc Kimball had abused Emmy Vincenzo as an employee; now he was taking it to another level.
“This isn’t right,” someone said softly.
You think?
Clara glanced to her side. Amelia Carson was now walking along with her, frowning as she glanced back at the pair behind them.
“It was that Tate Morley man... I mean, he called you, right?” Amelia said.
Tate Morley. The Fairy Tale Killer. The Media Monster...
What bizarre murder does he intend to emulate from the bowels of a historic ocean liner?
Clara swallowed. She didn’t know where they were going; maybe Morley had made Kimball beat and threaten Emmy Vincenzo to use against her. Maybe he’d known Clara couldn’t bear to watch another woman killed in front of her.
“Where have you been? Did you see any of this?” Clara asked softly.
“Watching...the wrong place at the wrong time! I have to do something,” Amelia said. “I have to do something...”
She turned around. Clara paused, as well. The other two staggered right into her. Amelia put her hand to her face; she looked as if she cried.
Emmy screamed again; Kimball must have prodded her with his knife.
“Who were you talking to?” Emmy demanded, tears in her eyes, words hopeful.
“Amelia Carson’s ghost,” Clara said flatly.
Emmy screamed again.
“Jerk! I’m moving,” Clara said. “Quit hurting her!”
She turned and started walking again.
The ghost of Amelia Carson was gone.
* * *
Thor found Jackson working over the body of a prone officer in a cabin down the hall. He fell to his knees by his old partner and friend.
“Knifed,” Jackson said briefly, using a ripped-up piece of the man’s shirt to put pressure on his wound and stop the blood flow.
“Clara—” Thor began.
“Locked in her cabin—827.”
“She’s gone.”
Jackson blanched. “Find her,” he said. “I got this—find her.”
Thor rushed back into the hallway. He could hear a commotion rising on the decks above; help had arrived. Jackson wouldn’t be alone—help would come for the bleeding officer.
He hurried out into the hallway. He didn’t know which way to go.
Then he saw Amelia Carson.
“This way!” she beckoned.
And he followed.
* * *
Clara was suddenly shoved into a room. There was a desk with piles of papers on it, an inbox and an outbox, a computer and other modern office accoutrements, all set against the hardwood Victorian desk of an earlier era.
A man sat behind it.
He rose as they entered.
He was in a steward’s white-and-blue uniform, and for a brief, shining moment, Clara thought they had stumbled upon help.
Then he smiled.
“Miss Avery! My lovely, lovely Miss Avery. How very nice to meet you in person. You really are quite something. You know, I wish we could have met under other circumstances. I’m really a charming man. You would have enjoyed knowing me.”
“I doubt that,” she said.
Emmy and Kimball seemed to retreat—still as one—to a corner of the room. The desk was between her and Tate Morley. She couldn’t help but note that there was a letter opener on it.
She wondered about the possibility of grabbing for it—and stabbing Morley.
That left poor little Emmy in the same position.
But how could she help the woman if she was dead herself?
“I won’t get to know you, but...I’d love to know how you managed all this,” she said.
He was a truly nondescript man. Maybe five foot ten, with watery blue eyes and sandy short-cropped hair. His build was medium. There was nothing about him that stood out, and Clara assumed that made changing into whatever he wanted to be easy enough.
“You’re a sad little man that no one notices, aren’t you?” she asked softly.
“They all notice me!” he said, a note of irritation in his voice. “They all notice me. I bring the adrenaline of fear and excitement into their lives. And those women... I made them famous. I made them beautiful as they had never been.”
“Your last victim didn’t even have a face.”
He flicked a finger in the air. “But the first! Ah, that I might have remained the Fairy Tale Killer!” Something hardened in his expression. “Your lover boy and Crow ended that for me. But, now...reality TV! They wanted reality—I gave it to them. And it was so convenient. With the resources and knowledge to come to Alaska, I not only got to begin again, but as an added bonus, I got those arrogant FBI bastards, as well. And, any good killer knows, a signature is needed...but! With your blonde beauty...all I can think of is a fairy tale! The fairest of the fair.”
“
You know you’re on a ship. You know that police and FBI will be crawling through it within minutes.”
“And I’ll be gone. You see, I’ve had opportunity to learn all that I need to know. Please, Miss Avery! I’ve come and gone like the wind.”
“Let Emmy go!” she said.
“Let Emmy go... I don’t think so.”
She’d been eyeing the desk—waging her chances.
If he wouldn’t let Emmy go...
No choice.
She made a dive for the letter opener.
* * *
Thor followed the apparition down and along the hallway at breakneck speed. Then, just as Amelia Carson seemed to disappear into thin air, he heard voices.
Tate Morley’s voice. And the man was talking about fairy tales...
He heard Clara’s voice; it was trilled slightly with fear—it was heavier with anger.
He tried to determine who else might be in the room—and then he heard something like a war cry and he had no choice but to swing around the corner and into the room.
Clara was holding her own. She was down on an old Victorian desk, grappling with Morley and a letter opener.
Emmy Vincenzo was locked in a hold with Marc Kimball.
“Stop!”
He fired his Glock into the air.
For a moment, it seemed that everyone in the room froze; as if he had created a tableau.
But then, Morley let out a scream of fury, and slammed against Clara, wrestling the letter opener from her and raising it over her head.
Thor aimed and shot in less than two seconds.
“Emmy!” Clara screamed, scrambling from beneath the dead man.
But poor little Emmy had found her courage at last. She’d freed herself from Kimball. She had the knife; Thor saw Kimball’s eyes widen and his mouth open, as if he would make one last derisive comment—fire her, perhaps!—before her knife landed in his gut.
Kimball crumpled to the floor and Thor rushed forward to take Clara into his arms.
16
The following two days were, for Thor and Clara, a mass of reports, further investigations and dodging the press. Questions remained. Had Kimball been corresponding with Morley? When had Morley determined how, where and when Clara should be brought to him? Theories abounded on paper; they didn’t have all the answers. They were still putting together puzzle pieces.
The state police found the ship’s officer whose life and identification Tate Morley had stolen two days later deep in a forest that bordered the road to the state park.
It would have been his first voyage on the Fate, and therefore none of the other employees had known him to be anyone other than who he had presented himself to be.
Marc Kimball had simply booked passage for himself and Emmy Vincenzo, something that hadn’t meant a thing to Emmy at the time—everyone knew that Kimball had a massive stage-crush on Clara.
Emmy was able to pull a number of strings for them, though, because of her position with Kimball. She had done bookings as usual. Of course, at the time, she’d had no idea of what was going on.
She’d cried copious tears at first, so finding out anything from her had been very difficult.
Thor wasn’t a psychologist—and psychologists and psychiatrists would have a heyday with it all. He’d taken enough criminal behavior courses to speculate that it had been power both men had been after. For Kimball, money had given him tremendous clout, but it had never been that power over life and death that Morley had wielded. How and when the correspondence between the men had begun, Emmy had no idea. But she knew about secret drawers in Kimball’s desk, and those drawers had led to a wealth of letters. They were coded, of course—they wouldn’t have left the prison walls if they’d included instructions on how to come to Alaska. Cryptologists in the department would be given the task of deciphering just what the letters and phrases had meant.
They would never have all the answers, because both men were dead. Thor’s shot had been a kill shot this time—he had no doubt that Morley would have stabbed Clara with an urgent desire for his last kill if he’d been given the least chance.
And sheer terror had seized Emmy, she had told them—between bouts of hysterical and copious tears—and she was both grateful to be alive and horrified that she had killed a man. She wouldn’t be released from the hospital until this evening or tomorrow. There would be no charges against her—she had killed in self-defense. None of them knew if Kimball would have killed her in an ultimate defiant act or, with Morley, his puppet master, dead, if he would have just let her go.
“I have never been so terrified!” she’d told Thor, shaking in her hospital bed.
She’d been pretty roughed up. Apparently, Marc Kimball had been ordered by Morley to bring Clara Avery to him. She didn’t know what the plan had been to escape the Fate once they’d gotten Clara. Maybe Kimball had been promised in on her—time to indulge in whatever sick fantasies he had, going along with what had appeared to be his absolute infatuation with her. Emmy didn’t know that much. She only knew that Kimball had called her in, slammed her head against a door and put his knife to her throat to make her do what he wanted. He’d made her scream when he’d killed the officer on the ship—that way, they could disappear down to the cast cabins while law enforcement went to investigate the scream. He forced her to speak for him—work for him even through his deadly activities. He seemed to think, in a very malicious and sardonic way, that it was funny. And it would help show that his true intent was indeed lethal.
“What will I do now?” she asked, looking lost.
“Well, you’ll get out of the hospital first,” he told her. She had a nervous habit of working her fingers on the sheets.
She was going to need a lot of therapy, he thought.
“You never had any inkling—I mean, you worked with him closely. You had no idea he might be homicidal himself? He never behaved strangely?” Jackson asked.
“That’s just it—he always behaved strangely,” Emmy told him remorsefully.
“Strange, all right,” Mike Aqlak said. Thor wondered if his partner—there from the minute he could have been, dealing with red tape, the press, acting like a bulwark in many ways—meant Kimball himself, or the whole thing, or even the meek little woman who had managed to kill her boss in self-defense.
Oddly enough, Kimball had finally met his match in the little woman he’d treated so badly for so long.
“What is it?” Mike asked when they left.
“I don’t know,” Thor told him.
Mike thumped him on the back. “You did it. You got Morley again, for good this time—and that bastard, Kimball. You called it with the caverns on the island—you found the damned boat he was using. Hell, my friend, you did what an agent is supposed to do!”
Thor thanked him for his support; Mike grinned and told him he knew that he would be leaving—and that it would be okay.
“Hey, partners meet up again, don’t they?” Mike asked Jackson.
“It can happen,” Jackson said.
Thor wished he felt a little better—he should have been in on the somber celebrations and congratulating that went around among law enforcement. The murders had been brutal and horrible; those women still lay at the morgue, disfigured, disjointed, decapitated and bisected. A ship’s officer had been killed, as well. What had happened had been terrible; but the killer and his accomplice were dead.
He should have been more relaxed. He just wasn’t.
Maybe it was the fact that the manhunts, the searches through the snow, the speculation and the wondering had been so intense, it was impossible to just let it all go.
The media furor wasn’t going to die down for a long time.
What few cabins hadn’t been sold on the Fate went at a premium. Yes, there were areas on the ship th
at were a crime scene, but the crime scene units and specialized cleaning units would be finished before the set sailing date.
The Fate would keep her deadline—after all, she was the Fate!
Thor had a number of conversations with Clara about that. But she was determined she would sail on the ship. There was no reason she shouldn’t.
“It’s over, Thor. And this is what I do for a living. It’s a good show. Tate Morley and Marc Kimball stole lives. Now they’re dead. They can’t keep stealing. We can’t let them.”
For the next two nights, he had Clara staying with him at his family compound. He could easily reach the offices in Anchorage when he needed, the hospital in Seward and the state police. He was present at the press conference that Enfield gave, announcing that the FBI and state police were still piecing together the puzzle, but that they were satisfied that the Media Monster—aka Tate Morley and the Fairy Tale Killer—was now dead. The country was astounded that he seemed to have been aided by and worked in collusion with the multimillionaire Marc Kimball.
Thor tried not to watch the news.
Anyone who had been close to Kimball could seize the media and fifteen minutes of fame now, if they chose.
Thor was glad of the time he could take at the compound; glad to be there with Clara.
She was a natural at his home. The dogs loved her. They were somewhat insulted when they were locked out of the bedroom at night, but a couple of treats ended the problem of them scratching at the door.
It was a day and a night after the incident on the ship; he’d dealt with the tangle of the Bureau’s investigation and had his first mandatory psychiatric appointment—necessary after the shooting. He’d had a long talk with Jackson, who’d warned him, We can never be too careful with those we choose to love. Did I have to leave when I did—yes. Did Clara have to open that door—yes. That’s who she is. It’s why you’re with her. Can you change that and make life safe? No. We do our best in every circumstance and have faith in those around us.
Thor was thinking about that conversation when he and Clara were alone together that second night, after they’d played with the dogs all day and learned to “mush,” and he knew that Jackson was right. Clara was capable of intelligent fear—the kind that went along with survival. But if she had a chance to put herself at risk to save a life, she would.