33. Knox
“How’s New York?” Knox asked Hallie.
Sunday morning, and he’d rolled out of bed early to feed the turtles and the dog while Caro slept. Ryder, Luna, and Jubilee were finishing off in the pool rooms, making sure the bare minimum got done to keep the turtles alive and healthy and the sanctuary ticking over. Luna had been keeping her head down since the fight with Caro. With the animal care in hand, Knox had commandeered the office to video call Hallie without waking his girl.
“Great! I spend my days eating pizza and my evenings at the cabaret.”
“You’re on vacation this week? I thought you were working.” Knox had asked Hallie to take a look through the background information Agatha was digging up. Hallie was young and new to Blackwood, but she had a good eye for detail. “Is Ford with you?”
“I am working. Ford’s still in Virginia, but I shipped him some cookies. They have the best cookies in Little Italy. But enough about me—spill the details of your trip. Emmy said you found a girlfriend?”
“‘Girlfriend’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”
“So you’re not moving in with her? I thought you needed time off to find a new place? You’re a dark horse, Knox. Nobody saw this coming at all. I mean, Luther doesn’t even have a pool running.”
“Stop listening to Chinese whispers, sweetheart. Caro is… I don’t know what she is, exactly. A long-term hookup? Anyhow, she has a problematic ex, and she relocated to San Gallicano to get away from him. Then our pain-in-the-ass client outed her location on social media, so now Caro has to find somewhere else to live because she doesn’t feel safe here anymore.”
“How does the murder fit in?”
“Separate issue.” Knox summarised the mess so far—the poaching, Stacey’s investigation, the body at Cinnamon Beach. “The cops still haven’t made a positive ID. The lead detective wants Caro to go to the morgue, but we’d rather avoid that if possible.”
Not only would seeing her dead friend be traumatic, but Caro also wanted to avoid putting her name on any official paperwork. Knox wasn’t going to push her into revealing her identity. She was already close to her breaking point, and yesterday evening, Vince had questioned her until she couldn’t take any more. The preliminary finding was that Stacey had been dumped sometime during the night, presumably in the hours of darkness, when, coincidentally, Fernandez hadn’t been answering his phone. Where had he been late on Friday evening? As Stacey was being strangled and left for the fishes?
They knew she’d been strangled not thanks to Vince, but because the guy who delivered the sea sponges for the turtles to eat was friendly with the paddleboarder who’d found the body. When Caro was out of earshot, Knox had asked him what else he’d heard. Stacey’s eyes had been missing, but the rest of her face was in reasonable shape, which fit with the ME’s estimate that she’d been dumped recently. Apparently, she’d had dark bruises around her neck, which suggested strangulation as the cause of death.
Knox had kept the details from Caro. Last night, she’d stayed up for hours, filling in the Blackwood Foundation’s grant application and putting together the sanctuary’s five-year plan. Twice, Knox had heard her sobbing softly to herself, but when he got up to comfort her, she waved him away and told him to get some sleep. As if that was going to happen. At four a.m., she’d drunk two glasses of the wine he’d bought and finally closed her eyes.
“There are roughly nine thousand people named Stacey-with-an-e in Tennessee, North Carolina, and Georgia combined. Eleven percent of those are male, so we can eliminate them right away. Only six of the remaining women have the surname Custer, and three of them are over fifty. Another is six years old. That leaves two possibles, one in Wilmington and the other near Winston-Salem. There are far more Cumberland sliders near Winston-Salem.”
“Did you?—”
“Search for relatives? Yes, I did. Check your email—her parents still live in the same house she grew up in.”
“I could kiss you right now.”
“Please don’t—Ford wouldn’t be happy. Is the lead detective the one with the drinking problem?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Vincent Fernandez? The detective you asked Agatha to look at? He attends an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting every Friday.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“Uh… So it looks as if Agatha found his personnel file. He got a warning for showing up drunk to work, but that was two and a half years ago, and there’s been no trouble since.”
Knox digested that piece of information. If it was true, then the good news was that Vince Fernandez hadn’t spent Friday evening disposing of Stacey Custer’s body. The bad news? He’d let drinking interfere with his work, so how conscientious was he?
“Does it say how many murder cases Vince Fernandez has worked?”
“Give me a moment… I need to ask Providence.” On screen, Hallie bit her lip and leaned forward an inch. Providence was Blackwood’s proprietary investigation software. It saved valuable man-hours by analysing endless swaths of data, summarising its findings, and connecting dots. “Okay, so the average homicide rate per year in San Gallicano is eleven. Vince Fernandez has been a detective for four years, and he’s led a total of seven homicide investigations. Of those…all were committed by family members. Six convictions, one acquittal, but the acquittal was for a woman who stabbed her husband in a rage after he refused to help around the house. I guess there must have been a bunch of female jurors? Anyhow, in the past five years, only two murders in San Gallicano have been committed by non-family members. The last serial killer they had was in the 1980s, and he ate three of his victims, which is gross, but on balance, it sounds pretty nice there.”
“Nice, apart from the woman lying in the morgue.”
“Sorry.”
“Based on what you’ve read, do you think Vince Fernandez is up to the job?”
“It’s hard to say. I—” A door slammed in the background. “Oh, Dan’s just come back. Are those donuts?”
Dan’s face squashed into the frame along with her cleavage. “Hey, sexy. I hear you stumbled into an episode of Death in Paradise?”
“Something like that.”
“His not-girlfriend’s friend washed up on the beach, and we’re trying to work out whether the lead detective is competent,” Hallie explained.
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
“Lack of experience and past performance issues.”
“Add in possible police corruption and a Valetian royal visit on the main island,” Knox told them. “When Fernandez was interviewing Caro last night, I got the impression they’re hoping to keep Stacey’s death quiet until Princess Gabrielle and her sister leave on Tuesday.”
The detective had told Caro to keep a low profile and avoid antagonising anybody. The words of a caring friend who knew Caro all too well? Or a veiled threat?
Dan bit off a chunk of donut. “Let’s take this back to basics. Means, motive, and opportunity. Motive?”
“She was a journalist writing a story about turtle smuggling. Last we heard, she was going to meet a source on Thursday.”
“So, the easy assumption is that she pissed off a bunch of bad guys and they wanted to keep her quiet. But the body wasn’t found until yesterday, so she could have gone on a date that went wrong or attracted the attention of a maniac. I hear Luna has a stalker in the area?”
“Yeah, she does, because this job doesn’t have enough complications.”
“But let’s use Occam’s razor and consider the smuggling angle first. The vic was a journalist? Where are her notes?”
“Caro and I took a look around her hotel room before we reported her missing, and her laptop and phone were gone. No sign of a notepad either—apart from the blank one the hotel supplied next to the phone—so we have to assume she had everything with her. Which would make sense if she was meeting a source. When she came to speak with Caro, she brought all that stuff.”
“What about her backup?”
“I didn’t see any backup device, but we didn’t do a thorough search. Maybe she used the cloud?”
“She probably did that as well, but in my experience, journalists like to have a backup with them, especially when they’re working in places where the internet connection could be unreliable. A flash drive or a memory card. Even a portable hard drive if they take a lot of photos. Fifty bucks says it’s in her hotel room if the cops don’t have it already.”
Knox was almost certain they didn’t. Vince had said that the crime scene technician—singular—had checked Stacey’s room and they were satisfied that it wasn’t a murder scene, but her belongings had been taken into evidence. Footage from the security camera in the lobby showed her leaving the hotel at 11:53 on Thursday morning, returning at 15:17 with a pizza box, and leaving again at 18:32. Just in case Vince decided to fast-forward, Knox had been upfront about the fact that he and Caro had visited Vista Suites to look for Stacey, although he hadn’t mentioned any breaking and entering.
“I don’t think they have it.”
“Then I guess you have a fun trip in store this evening.”
“Guess I do.”
* * *
“I can’t see anything here.” Knox closed the desk drawer—quietly—with gloved hands and poked among the leaves on the fake potted plant sitting on the shelf above it. Rifling through a dead woman’s personal space felt wrong. Sacrilegious. As if he risked disturbing her soul, which was absurd because even if Stacey Custer were watching from the afterlife, she’d want someone to get to the bottom of her death. To finish what she started. “But those modern drives are tiny.”
“You need to think like a woman.”
Dan spoke in his ear, through a mouthful of pizza or cookie or whatever she was eating at ten thirty in the evening. Without Caro along for the ride this time, Knox had bypassed the lobby and hopped over the back wall of the Vista Suites, picked the lock in under a minute, ducked under the single X of crime scene tape covering the doorway, and closed the drapes before he turned on the light. He was wearing a camera so Dan could join the search.
“You mean I should put on lipstick and fancy pumps?”
“No, that’s dressing like a woman. Think like a woman. We’re crafty. Check all the pockets in Stacey’s clothes. The hems too, and her shoes. Shake the bottles in the bathroom and check for any hidden compartments. If there’s a box of tampons, that’s always a good hiding place—men have a weird aversion to sanitary products.”
“Why is it weird?”
“Let’s not have this conversation, sweetie. The toilet tank isn’t a great place for hiding electronics, and under the mattress is too obvious. Ditto for the back of the desk drawers. Hey, is that a notepad by the phone?”
“There’s nothing written on it.”
“Check every page, then tear off the top sheet and bring it with you. Do those drapes have hems?”
“Yes.”
“Can you recall what model of laptop she owned? Did it have a card reader? It would help if we had a better idea of what we’re looking for.”
“No, I don’t remember, and Caro wasn’t sure either. Do you know if Agatha got anywhere with trying to track Stacey’s cell phone?”
“No luck yet. We have back doors into the major carriers in the US and a bunch of other global players, but not SG Telecom. The team is working on it, though. Lift that plant.”
“I already checked there,” Knox said, but he lifted the pot anyway.
“Not the pot, the plant.”
“What do you—” He pulled on the leaves, and the whole plant popped free, revealing a hollow compartment in the pot. Well, I’ll be damned. “Yeah, you’re right. Women are crafty. How did you know?”
“Everything else in the room is tired. The flowers look almost new, which is a weird priority when the faucet is leaking and the pillowcase has a hole in it. Go on, what’s in there?”
“Cash, two flash drives, a bank card, a driver’s licence, and Stacey’s passport.”
“Bingo. Take the flash drives and the cash.”
“Shouldn’t I leave the cash?”
“If the cops in San Gallicano are as corrupt as you think they are, it’ll never find its way to the evidence locker. We can send it to her family anonymously. Now get out of there before some overly conscientious employee decides to check on the crime scene.”
Dan didn’t have to tell him twice.
* * *
“Did you find any clues?” Caro asked.
She was sitting on the bunkhouse steps when Knox arrived back at the sanctuary, her arms wrapped around her knees and an oversized cardigan draped over her shoulders. There was a chill in the air tonight, caused by an unusually stiff onshore wind.
“Possibly. Did you manage to avoid pulling out Luna’s hair while I was gone?”
“Ugh. She’s just been sitting on her bed, scribbling in that little notepad she carries around. Probably writing spells or something. What did you find?”
Knox beckoned Caro into the other bunkhouse and pulled the treasures out of his backpack. The flash drives, the cash, and the sheet from the hotel notepad.
“Don’t get too excited—a security-conscious journalist will have used a password. I’ll check, but it’s likely I’ll have to send these drives to our cyber team in the morning.”
“How long will that take?”
“A day to get there, and then it’s anyone’s guess. If the drive is set to lock a user out after a number of incorrect guesses, they’ll have to tread with care. If not, and they can use a brute force approach, we’re talking anything from a second if she used a short numeric password to a trillion years if she got creative.”
Caro groaned. “Stacey always came across as careful. When she typed her password into her laptop, it was, like, ten characters long.”
Knox would let Agatha know that. A target to aim for. Meanwhile, Caro was thumbing through the cash, counting it. Knox already knew the total—nine hundred and twenty San Gallician pounds, or roughly four hundred dollars.
“I need a small box or a padded envelope to package these drives in. Do you have something suitable?”
“A cereal box? Plus we have scissors and tape.”
“Do you have a pencil?”
“Isn’t it safer to write the address in ink? Pencil might rub off?”
“The pencil is for something else.”
“Uh, I don’t have one, but Luna does.”
Turned out Luna had a whole selection of pencils in a pink tin, and an equally impressive array of erasers. She stuffed the notepad she’d been writing in into one of her suitcases and slid the tin across the rickety table in the middle of the girls’ bunkhouse—someone had wedged a folded piece of paper under one of the legs so it wasn’t as wobbly as it once had been—and asked the inevitable question.
“Why do you need a pencil?”
Carefully, Knox laid the sheet of paper from Stacey’s room on the table. Dan had explained the best way to do this on the trip back. Don’t use too much pressure, she’d said, and he intended to follow her advice.
“Because sometimes when people make notes, they press hard enough to indent the sheet of paper below,” he told Luna. “If we shade lightly with a pencil, it might bring up a hidden message.”
She held out a pencil covered in tiny bumblebees. Gold lettering said to “Bee-lieve in yourself.” Knox thought she had enough self-confidence for ten people, even if Ryder claimed it was all an act, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was ensuring she survived the next eleven days at the turtle sanctuary, and thank fuck Judge Morgan hadn’t seen Luna’s video and made it twelve.
Knox shaded the paper lightly, and words began to appear in looping handwriting. Havana. Boat. 9 p.m. What did that mean?
“Was there a boat leaving for Cuba?” he mused out loud. “Turtles being smuggled out of the country?”
Caro shrugged. “Stacey said the stolen turtles were ending up in the US. Restaurants and markets in New York.”
“Then it wouldn’t make sense to transport goods via Cuba. Too many sanctions, too much scrutiny.”
“How about Little Havana?” Jubilee suggested. “Luna made an appearance there last year, and a boat could easily dock in Miami. Maybe Stacey heard there was cargo leaving and went to check it out.”
That was a possibility. “And then got caught.”
Ryder tipped back in his seat. “Playing devil’s advocate, we don’t know when Stacey wrote that, or even if she wrote that.”
“The writing looks like hers,” Caro said. “She was making notes when she interviewed me, and I remember those big old-fashioned loops. And she didn’t mention Havana when we spoke, so she probably learned about that afterward.”
“Hey, you guys?” Luna had picked up the pencil and begun shading again. “There’s something else here.”
Annoyance flared that she’d decided to take the evidence without asking, but Knox bit back his irritation because she was right. Everyone crowded in to look. The words at the bottom of the page were fainter, as if they’d been written on an earlier sheet, but several were still readable. Tattoo. Black Pearl. The letters M-O-N.
“She wrote about Havana after the tattoo thing,” Caro said. “That was a recent note. What’s Black Pearl?”
Ryder snapped his fingers. “The ship in Pirates of the Caribbean.”
“Nice try, but that’s fictional. Do they grow pearls in San Gallicano?”
Caro shook her head. “Not that I’ve ever heard.”
“Natural black pearls only come from Tahiti,” Luna put in. “I did promo work for a jewellery company, and I had to say that on the video. The rest are all dyed. You think there could be a link to the movie? One of the backup dancers on my last tour had a cousin who worked as a stunt double for Johnny Depp.”
“I don’t know, but I do know that we need sleep. The research team can work on this overnight, and we’ll regroup in the morning.”