The Mountains Bow Down Read online

  I checked the sample under the scope. Still no go. Walking over to the desk, I waited once again for Nurse Stephanie to finish her phone conversation. Somebody had left their medication refill at home. She asked for the name of the medicine and if they had the prescription bottle. “Bring it down,” she said, hanging up. Then she leaned toward me, surreptitiously pointing at Jack. She whispered, “Who’s he?”

  “A colleague.” I tried to smile. “White paper, sterile?”

  “Help yourself.” She pointed to an empty patient room and sauntered back to Jack.

  I was on my own. I tore paper from the roll behind an exam table and carried it back into the lab. When I asked for a scalpel, Nurse Stephanie unlocked a drawer, continued chatting with Jack, and practically tossed the knife at me.

  “Are you on the cruise with a special somebody?” she asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  I took out MJ’s dress first, then the blue jeans from Milo’s cabin, then the trousers found in the laundry bin.

  “If you get bored,” she said, “my shift’s over at ten.”

  I held MJ’s dress over the white paper, scraping dust off the sleeves with the scalpel. I did the same with the jeans and the black trousers, placing each collection into separately marked test tubes. I also searched the trousers for any identification tags, but there were none.

  After adding my acid solution to a sample of the dusts, I cooked them in petri dishes in the microwave and pretended not to notice Nurse Stephanie fanning her face.

  “Warm in here, don’t you think? It’s cooler over by my desk.”

  Like a man led to slaughter, Jack followed her from the room while I wrote my notes on a prescription pad, making sure I outlined the forensics procedure for any formal documents that might come later. When I glanced at the circular desk, Nurse Stephanie was leaning forward, cleavage front and center. Jack glanced away, a sardonic smile playing on his lips.

  Hoping they stayed occupied, I took out my phone and called Aunt Charlotte.

  “We’re just coming down from cloud nine—literally!” My aunt’s breathy voice was full of softness, but only a trace remained of her native Virginia accent. I listened to her description of the helicopter tour around Mendenhall Glacier, the sled dog run on wheels, and the salmon bake. “Raleigh, you would have loved it. And it gave me a chance to say good-bye to Judy. I released her spirit to this beautiful place, and to the universe.”

  Whatever, I thought sourly, before telling her about what happened at the wildlife center. I left out Martin Webb, but emphasized Claire’s culpability. “After this stunt, I don’t want Claire anywhere near her.”

  She started to protest.

  “I don’t have time to argue, Aunt Charlotte. I’m asking you to please check in on Mom. She was napping when I left the cabin.”

  “I’ll do it first thing. We should be back within the hour.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I love you, Raleigh.”

  “Love you too.”

  I was closing the phone when Jack came back in the lab.

  “Need some help?” he asked.

  I glanced past him to the desk. Nurse Stephanie was taking the elderly man’s vitals. “You can help by asking Florence Nightgown for some mineral oil. But don’t tell me what she says when you ask.”

  The cooked petri dishes now held what looked like white powder. I tapped each onto separate glass slides, and when Jack returned with a small plastic bottle, I placed one drop of the clear oil on each slide before adding the plastic coverslip. I shifted the microscope’s magnification to 40X.

  The limestone and gypsum had burned away and what remained looked like pitted glass Frisbees, their edges fractured.

  Diatoms. Geologic fingerprints.

  Beautiful.

  “What do you see?” Jack asked.

  “It’s the dust from Geert’s office.” I slid the next sample under the scope. “And now I’m looking for any matches from the clothing.”

  The dust from MJ’s dress had no diatoms. But I saw cellulose cells, wood. And lots of it. Wood hard enough to resist the acid and heat.

  I grabbed the dust from the black trousers, shifting the slide right to left, up and down, until I found three diatoms. They had similar cusplike fractures. It was a start. For the match to stand in court, I would need chemical compositions, relative amounts, and the connection to the safe’s manufacturer. That meant a forensics lab, either the FBI’s or the state crime lab in Seattle.

  “The black pants are a tentative positive match.” I made notes on the prescription pad. “And now we check Milo’s jeans.”

  There it was again.

  Cellulose fibers. Wood durable enough to survive chemical and temperature assaults.

  “What’s wrong?” Jack asked.

  “The dust on the dress matches the dust on Milo’s jeans.”

  “Dust is dust,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  I shook my head. “These cellulose cells are too similar, and too specific.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning MJ and Milo were in the same place, and they both sent their clothes to the cleaners. On the same day.”

  “You want odds?” Jack asked.

  “I want words—interviews with both.” I checked my watch. “And I want Geert to trace these black trousers to their owner. Whoever wore them broke into that safe.”

  We were packing up the evidence when the clinic’s automatic door whooshed open. An older gentleman walked in wearing a baseball cap from the Phillumenists of Philadelphia. It was a different branch than the guys burning with brotherly love. These guys were the Founding Flames.

  The man looked tired. “I called you about some medicine for my wife,” he said to Nurse Stephanie.

  “Righty-o,” she said. “The Namenda oral?”

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, that’s what happens. You forget stuff.”

  She was gone when we headed out the sliding doors to the elevators, leaving the old man standing at the desk. Jack leaned down, whispering to me. “What’s a phillumenist anyway?”

  “Matchbook collector.”

  He nodded. “I should’ve known you’d know.”

  “Years of Greek and Latin,” I said.

  “Which is it, Greek or Latin?”

  “Both, actually. Phila is Greek for love. Lumen means light in Latin. Scrunch them together and you get phillumenist, or lover of light.”

  Our hands were full of evidence bags, so I pressed the elevator button with my elbow.

  “Hold on,” he said. “You got ‘matchbook collector’ from all that?”

  I shook my head. “From forensics. One of my cases involved the sulfur content of matches dating back to the 1930s. I got to interview a bunch of phillumenists.”

  The elevator opened and Jack stepped inside, holding the door for me. “You’re too hard on yourself, Harmon.”

  “What do you mean?”

  He hit the button for Deck Six. “Most people pretend they know more than they actually do. You tell the truth.”

  I watched the elevator doors close.

  Sometimes, I thought. Sometimes I tell the truth.

  But only sometimes.

  Chapter Sixteen

  If Claire believed a bitter cloud hung over the ship, she might’ve been imagining the casino. As I walked through the room, the cigarette smoke was thick enough to flavor hams. Puffing gamblers hunched over the slot machines, their eyes ratcheted to the bright flashing electronics that spun through loss after loss.

  Nose itching from the smoke, I waited for the Ninja with the pencil mustache to open the padded wall-door. Though he glanced at the bags of evidence, his face revealed nothing.

  In Geert’s office, a maintenance worker was removing the old safe. Skin the color of cinnamon, his fingers were stained black with oil, creating topographic maps of his fingerprints. I waited as he lifted a small safe—identical to the ones in our passenger
cabins—and bolted it to the shelf. He went to remove the damaged safe, placing it on a mechanical dolly, when Geert said, “Leave it here.”

  The Ninja escorted him back to the secret entrance, and I closed the office door.

  Geert twirled the mustache. “I got a call from laundry. You took some clothes.”

  “Stilton?”

  He shook his head. “Gossip, it is the lifeblood of ships.”

  I described the black trousers. “Is there a way to trace them?”

  I expected a comment about stupid questions. Instead he offered a sigh that sounded like generations of Dutch fatalism. “By sizes, we can eliminate certain workers. But that will take time. Better to check the cabins.”

  I waited a moment, wondering if my next two questions would ruin our sudden détente. “What happened to the director?”

  “Locked in his cabin. One of my men is posted outside his door. These movie people, they are spoiled children.” He ran his blue eyes over the evidence bags.

  “I need to lock up these materials . . .” I didn’t finish the question.

  “But you don’t trust my safe,” he said.

  I said nothing. But he was right.

  Defense attorneys got a kick out of asking forensic scientists, “Was the evidence ever out of your possession?”

  And that’s why I carried all the bags. If I was called to testify later, it wouldn’t help the prosecution if I had to admit a grumpy Dutch security officer carried the evidence through a smoky casino, then across the midship atrium, passing thousands of passengers who were headed for dinner. At the concierge desk, where I rested my elbows on the teak counter, Geert spoke to an attendant. In the wine bar off the atrium, a delicate-looking Frenchman lectured on the merits of cabernet, his accent like clarified butter.

  The concierge attendant lifted a portion of the counter, and I followed Geert back into an office where a man the color of wrought iron greeted us in a mellifluous British accent. Both his white officer’s uniform and his black skin seemed to glow, the uniform so bright it stung my eyes, the skin so dark it shimmered violet.

  “I am York Meriweather, first purser.” He placed one hand to his chest, shaking my hand with the other. “I’m pleased to meet you, Agent Harmon. And I can assure you, all valuables will be secure in my office.”

  “Thank you.” I placed the packages on his desk. He didn’t bat an eye at the sorry state of my “valuables” in plastic laundry bags. “I don’t doubt you, but may I see your safe?”

  “Most certainly. I would not be offended if you doubted, after what happened today.” He swept a hand toward a powder-coated column that ran floor to ceiling. It had two locks. One looked like a regular numerical combination dial, but the other involved a bizarre key that the purser held up for my inspection. Six inches long, its brass teeth flared like curling wings.

  “And, as you can see”—he pointed to my left—“we have video cameras aimed directly at the safe.” He pointed to my right, more cameras. The smile that spread across his face came slowly but was as blindingly bright as his uniform. “If I exit the office, an alarm system is set, backing up the two locks. Another alarm is set by the front desk.”

  “Very thorough.”

  He gave a slight bow, feigning modesty, then used the strange key to open the safe. The tumbler released with a heavy clunk and the door required both hands to open. Rows of safe deposit boxes were shelved above vertical dividers that held canvas money bags, the type used by banks. At the very bottom was open space.

  “You should have no worries about theft,” said York Meriweather. “At least, not here.”

  Geert and I made our way through the atrium, passing the little Frenchman who acknowledged Geert with a gaulic lift of the eyebrows. Geert’s reply was even less friendly.

  “Don’t like him?” I asked.

  “Gossips,” he spat. “Old ladies in Zeeland do not gossip like these people. Some kind of joke. Security’s safe was broken into. Ha. Ha. I am not laughing. I will crush the person who did this.”

  His already formidable back stiffened with defensive pride. I wasn’t exactly sorry to see his humiliation; it pushed him lower on my list of suspects. For a man like this, no money was worth public shame, not even six figures of jewelry. And as we headed for the maintenance crew cabins, I felt a fraction of relief. One person, perhaps, could be eliminated from the list.

  Perhaps.

  Outside the upscale Italian restaurant named Pellagio, Geert opened a door marked Authorized Personnel Only, stepping into the large kitchen. Waiters shuttled back and forth at high speed, balancing full dinner plates on both arms while dodging hollered comments from the chefs who guarded the enormous grills and ovens. The chefs wore toques and white jackets and yelled in Italian, furious Italian, where the romantic scooped lilts change into curses condemning a person to life without decent red sauce. Geert and I stood to the side like schoolkids playing double-Dutch rope, waiting for an opening. Suddenly we dashed through a cacophony of clattering plates, rattling utensils, and increased yelling.

  And then, just as suddenly, it went quiet. The kitchen door had closed behind us and we were crossing through the bakery, the warm scent of bread floating on the air. Plump men in white shirts and houndstooth pants pulled racks of flaky croissants and golden buns from cavernous ovens.

  My stomach went into full riot.

  “Hungry?” Geert asked, glancing back.

  I was afraid if I opened my mouth, drool would come out. So I said nothing. But Geert either heard my stomach or saw something on my face. Speaking in a foreign language to a baker whose merry cheeks rose with his smile, he wrapped three buns in butcher paper and handed them to me. I restrained a weep of gratitude.

  Possibly it was the best bread I’d ever tasted. The light golden crust melted on my tongue, followed by the bread interior that was light as a marshmallow yet as rich as butter. I wanted to hum as we walked down a long tunnel. The ship’s employees rushed past us in various stages of hurry. Some carried bags of rice the size of toddlers. Others pushed steel carts stacked with folded tablecloths and napkins—fresh from the laundry room, no doubt—while men in coveralls wheeled small Dumpsters, trailing putrid odors.

  “This is called the Highway,” Geert said. “No public, no passengers allowed. It is our express lane from fore to aft. If I need to, I can get from one end to the other in less than four minutes.” He glanced at the remaining roll in my hand. “Unless I stop to eat.”

  We took the same stairs Jack and I used to reach the laundry and passed a young woman wearing a two-foot-tall feathered headdress and a skimpy dance outfit. From under thick false eyelashes, she stole a sidelong glance at Geert, her tap shoes clicking on the metal stairs. There was guilt in her look, like a naughty kid passing by the school principal. How many dramas, I wondered, were taking place among the thousand-member crew?

  Grand larceny might be one.

  But what about murder?

  On Deck Three Geert lifted the clipboard he carried from his office and ran a thick finger down the names and corresponding cabin numbers. Forty-six men worked the light-maintenance crew, wearing a uniform that included those particular black trousers. Heavy maintenance was something different, the men who took care of the engine room and the ship’s hydraulics. Light maintenance, Geert had explained, were basically handymen, responsible for everything from fixing clogged toilets and broken doors to replacing broken mirrors and cracked bathroom tiles.

  With relish, Geert snapped on latex gloves and rapped a knuckle on the door of cabin 301. “Orlando Diego, Raul Jorge,” he called. “Open up.”

  The man who opened the door was short and swarthy and was rubbing his eyes. His glossy black hair twisted as though he slept in a centrifuge.

  “Orlando?” Geert asked.

  “Raul.”

  “Let me see your uniform.”

  The question startled him. “Que?”

  Pushing past him, Geert slapped the light switch on the wall. Raul
stumbled back, his mouth dropping open. Then closed.

  It was a tiny cabin with no window. A set of bunk beds and a closet that Geert whipped open. He shoved the metal hangers across a steel pole, a sound like screeching birds.

  “Where is the uniform?” he demanded.

  From the bunks, somebody groaned. Geert walked over, staring at the bundled shape on the top bed.

  “Get up,” he ordered.

  A flurry of Spanish exploded from the bundle. None of it sounded nice.

  Geert glared at Raul.

  “He sleep like that, mean.” Raul’s tone sounded like a mixture of annoyance and satisfaction. Tired of dealing with an ornery roommate; pleased that somebody finally understood his plight. Raising his voice, he spoke Spanish to the bundle of blanket. I recognized two words.

  El jefe. Boss.

  The sleeping man shot up, presumably Orlando. Squinting into the overhead light, he listened as Raul gave him another dose of information in Spanish.

  “Yah, that is right.” Geert gave his savage smile. “I am on rampage. Now, where are your uniforms?”

  Face red from embarrassment, Raul lifted a nylon duffel bag from the closet floor and pulled out four pieces. Two black shirts, two pairs of black pants. Identical to the pants in the purser’s safe.

  “I promise to send in the laundry,” Raul pleaded. “Today. I know, it stinks. But—”

  “Where is his?” Geert indicated Orlando.

  Raul reached down, picking something up from the closet floor. One black shirt, one black pair of pants.

  “And the other?”

  Raul hesitated, glancing at his roommate before barging into the bathroom. Pulling back the plastic shower curtain, he pointed to a black puddle blocking the drain. Geert pushed him aside and picked up the soaking material. Water dripped.

  “Tell him,” Raul said to his roommate. “Tell him, or I will.”

  Orlando tried to yawn. “I do my own laundry.”