Deadly Fate

“I’ve seen you! You performed a Sandra Dee character in Grease! You were amazing. I was a little bit in love!” the man said.

“I was in Grease,” Ralph murmured.

No one paid him any heed.

“Thank you. And I’m sorry. Who are you?” Clara asked.

“Marc. Marc Kimball,” he said. “I own Black Bear Island.”

“Oh!”

The murmur seemed like a chorus line—it so perfectly seemed to come from everyone in the room at the same time.

“How do you do?”

“It’s a pleasure.”

“Marc Kimball!”

The greetings seemed to sail around the room.

Clara didn’t speak. She felt uneasy.

She loved being a performer. She’d received good reviews and bad reviews. She’d been in casts when she’d been the low man on the totem pole, totally ignored by those seeking autographs. She’d had lead roles and signed and greeted people, as well. She’d been panned by critics and loved by critics and she’d been careful never to take any of it too seriously.

She’d been admired before, and that was nice. But something about the way this man looked at her made her feel queasy.

She tried to smile. He hadn’t done an evil thing to her.

“It is you, right? I wasn’t sure about all the particulars, but I heard about Annabelle Lee being done on the Fate. And, I knew, of course, that Wickedly Weird Productions was using cruise line employees for Vacation USA, and I had hoped...”

Simon sprang to her rescue.

“We’re all in the cast, sir. Ralph Martini and Larry Hepburn are the gentlemen over there. I’m Simon Green. And, yes, our leading lady is Clara Avery,” he said.

“Miss Avery!” Kimball said, walking over to her. He took her hand. She wanted to scream and wrench it away.

He kept looking at her as he spoke again. “I came as soon as I heard about what happened. They said it wasn’t necessary, but...I’m so glad I’m here.”

4 (#uf7cabdbb-767e-507c-93db-abfd1370da9d)

“We’ve got to make some decisions,” Mike said, joining Thor and Jackson after the initial interviews. “The groups out there are getting restless. I’ve still got the film crew separated from the caretaker couple and from the ship’s cast, but they’re all getting edgy. One of the film guys was saying he was already getting cabin fever, but his mate, Becca Marle, was saying that she didn’t want to be out of sight of a cop for the next year. Are we getting them all on a boat or holding them here for a while longer?”

“None of them is under arrest,” Jackson said. “We can’t really hold them.”

“Some of them, I think, want to be held,” Mike said. “Until we find this guy.”

They were all silent. It was a dream that a killer such as this could be caught quickly. Many serial killers had reigned for more than a decade before being caught.

Some never were.

“Do we have anything else? Anything more from the forensic crews?” Thor asked.

“Still not a damned thing,” Mike said. “Doc Andropov has taken the body—says because of the snow, he’ll try to run some tests and pin down time of death. He says that from the data he has so far, she was most likely killed early this morning, murdered and bisected elsewhere. Said it’s hard to be certain because the body was packed in snow, but Amelia Carson was with the film crew last night until about eight. I just got off the walkie-talkie—talked to Detective Brennan, head on the case via the state police—Bill Meyer patched me in from the Coast Guard cutter. This is the info I have from him. They were all staying at the Nordic Lights Hotel on the waterfront in Seward,” he said, pausing to look at Thor and reminding him, “Where we arrived at the investigation into Natalie Fontaine’s murder this morning.”

Thor nodded. “Yes, we knew that they all had rooms at the hotel—and, of course, that other than Misty and Miss Fontaine’s remains, none of them were in their rooms. Thanks to Misty, we knew what we’d find at the Mansion as well, and that a ship’s show cast were out here, too. That’s why we came to the island as quickly as possible.”

“I spoke with Brennan this morning, too,” Jackson said. “Director Enfield put us together. He’s the man who made arrangements to get me out here as quickly as possible. Seems like a really good cop—solid and quick. Enfield likes him.”

“He is a good cop. We’ve worked with him before,” Thor said.

“Anyway,” Mike continued, “Detective Brennan has been interviewing everyone he can find at the hotel. There’s a desk clerk who was on the night shift, Arnold Haskell, who says that he saw Amelia Carson up and heading out before it was really light.”

“Sunrise was just about 5:00 a.m.,” Jackson said.

Thor murmured, “That would have meant that morning twilight began at about 3:00 or 3:30 a.m.” In Alaska, summer days were long. Because of Alaska’s position near the North Pole, it was really only truly dark from about midnight until three or three thirty at this time of year. Some people couldn’t stand the continuous light in summer and the equally continuous darkness in winter. It didn’t bother Thor at all, but he knew that visitors often found themselves wide-awake far too much of the day.

“Did she leave the hotel?” he asked.

“He wasn’t sure. She stopped to demand to know why there was no coffee in the lobby yet—he told her that coffee didn’t go out in the lobby until six thirty and that there were little pots in the room. She was not nice to him.” He hesitated, looking at Jackson and Thor and grimacing. “Apparently, after speaking with other employees at the hotel, Detective Brennan came to the conclusion that while Natalie Fontaine was all right—not someone you gush over, but all right—Amelia Carson was not liked by many people. She was all smiles in front of a camera, and self-centered and entitled off camera. Brennan told me that a maid at the hotel said Amelia treated her as if she was little better than a cockroach.”

“Are there cockroaches in Alaska?” Jackson wondered aloud.

“There are cockroaches everywhere,” Mike assured him.

“In every way,” Thor murmured. “So what did Haskell say? She did or she didn’t go out?”

“Haskell didn’t know—she bitched at him and he did his best to be polite and explain hotel policy and she walked off. He didn’t wait to see if she went up the elevator or out the door—he had paperwork and he went back to it. He did say that she had been on her cell phone, bitching at someone on the other end, even while she was bitching at him about there being no coffee for an hour or so.”

“People don’t usually kill people and cut them in half just because they’re not nice people,” Thor said.

“May depend on who they’re not nice to,” Jackson said.

“True,” Thor agreed. “So, by this time frame—if everyone was right about time—it seems that Miss Fontaine was killed first in her hotel room. The killer apparently kept it down, though he was heard, which brought security up. Somehow he killed her, left that room as it was and got out of the hotel with whatever he used to sever her head, and went on to meet up with Amelia Carson, catch her, kill her, slice her in half and deposit her on the snow.”

“And no one saw him,” Jackson said.

Thor met his eyes. “I doubt that,” he said softly.

“The body was behind that snowbank or rise,” Mike said. “If Miss Avery had run about fifty feet parallel from where she was, she might not have seen it.”

That was true.

“Hey, I work with you daily, Thor, and you’re confusing me,” Mike said. “You think that there is someone on the island, and you also think that someone saw something?”

“This is all too clean—too neat,” Thor said. “And here’s another thought. What if there are two killers? One who decapitated Natalie Fontaine, and one who chopped Amelia Carson in half?”

“Two killers?” Jackson asked. “God, I sure as hell hate to think that there might be two such demented people in the area.”