Luck doesn’t exist.
Scientifically, that theorem wasn’t provable but I’ve believed it since I was a little girl. Now, heading down the ship’s gangway to the Ketchikan dock, I had no reason to change my mind. Behind me, the mortician guided the metal cart loaded with Judy Carpenter’s body, and I kept my hands in back, helping with the weight on the slanted ramp. Geert had assured us that all tour-taking passengers were gone—including my mother and my aunt—but as “luck” would have it, my mother stood at the bottom of the gangway.
There was one person who shouldn’t see this corpse, and it was my mother.
My sense of dread turned to stone.
Head down, she searched frantically through an oversize handbag, and for one split second I considered reversing direction, turning around and pushing the mortician and the dead woman back into the ship. Hide out until the coast was clear.
But his cart clattered like twenty tin soldiers coming apart, and when she looked up at the noise, I let go of the handle behind my back.
“Hey—!” the mortician said.
Her already troubled eyes filled with questions. Questions I couldn’t answer truthfully.
“Raleigh Ann?” She leaned to one side, trying to see around me. On the cart the black body bag looked ominous with bulk. Almost as bulky as the mortician. He was clad in black fleece, resembling an overfed polyester lamb.
Her purse hit the ground.
“Oh my word!” she exclaimed. “Did somebody die?”
I turned, feigning surprise at the man and the cart.
The mortician was scowling, and now that I’d let go, he was straining to hold the cart against the gangway’s descent.
“You gonna help me?” he demanded. No longer lamblike, he puffed, an ornery bull.
I pressed a shaking hand against my beating heart. “Me? You want me to help you?”
“You said—”
“Did somebody die?” My mother’s voice was trembling.
Nadine Shaw Harmon, authentic Southern belle, might be politely described as “a bit touched.” Her bouts of paranoia struck with the sudden fury of August thunderstorms, and the torrential aftermaths kept me from telling her the truth about my job. Before becoming an agent, I spent four years in the FBI’s forensic lab, and both my dad and I agreed she didn’t need to know everything. My forensics work was in mineralogy; we told her I was a geologist. That was true. True enough. But one day somebody decided to shoot my dad, cutting him down in cold blood. His murder has never been solved, and I decided the most productive way to fill this gaping hole in my heart was to join the hunt for bad guys. When I graduated from Quantico, fatherless, with no mother in attendance, my personal life became one long covert op.
Taking in the horrified expression on my mother’s face, I stepped aside and allowed the portly mortician to clatter past us with the dead body. He grumbled as he passed, and I geared up for my first whopper of this vacation.
“I have no idea what that’s about.” Quickly I changed the subject. “Aren’t you supposed to be sightseeing today?”
But her jasper-hued eyes remained on the mortician. He pushed the rattling conveyance across the conglomerate pavement that formed the ship’s dock. The rough pebbly surface made his progress sound like a train of broken-down shopping carts. At a black Suburban that was coated with winter dirt, he snapped open the back barn doors as if the handles were hot. Taking hold of the cart again, he rammed it against the vehicle’s dented chrome bumper. Its legs buckled, sending the entire contraption flying into a dark space gutted for transporting passengers who would never complain.
“And on a vacation too,” my mother said sadly.
The mortician slammed the doors and whisked his pudgy palms across one another, finishing off the job.
“Wasn’t there a trip to Misty Fjords today?” I asked.
Her skin was like Carrara marble, and when she closed her eyes, bowing her head, she looked like an angel. In her sweet Southern voice she began praying, calling out to heaven with heartfelt pleas. Though I closed my eyes with her, I couldn’t help listening to the Suburban’s rumbling muffler, or how it harmonized with the tour bus convoy pulling away from the dock. I opened one eye and saw that a single bus remained. Closing my eyes again, I tried to concentrate on the words seeded by Scripture, watered with Dixie, and rising to their intended destination in a voice that trembled.
But another voice intruded.
“Hey, what’re you guys doing?”
Claire, the self-professed clairvoyant, walked toward us wearing a bright-yellow raincoat, despite persistent sunshine. Her spiked hair was ashen, like asbestos, and although she claimed to see into the future, my experience had been that she barely stumbled through the present.
Claire hooked a thumb at my mother, then whispered, “What’s she doing?”
“Nothing you’d be interested in.” I glanced at the Suburban. The mortician glowered, waiting. I suddenly wondered what Claire and my aunt would say when they discovered Judy Carpenter was dead.
“Is she okay?” Claire whispered, narrowing her already beady eyes.
“She’s fine.”
“Okay, then tell her to wrap it up. The bus is waiting.”
This was my sister’s fault. My sister Helen was supposed to come on the cruise. But at the last minute she claimed work would keep her in Richmond. My aunt gave the ticket to Claire, and I added another entry to my long list of Helen’s infractions.
“Amen,” my mother said.
She looked calmer, marginally, and I guided her gently toward the last remaining tour bus, now belching diesel fumes at the curb.
“Take plenty of pictures,” I told her. “I hear those fjords are beautiful.”
“Why aren’t you coming?” she asked.
“Hiking, remember?” Except now it was a lie. Another lie. “I told you. Deer Mountain Trail.”
“DeMott said to make sure—”
“Yes, I know, don’t worry. I’m going with a group.”
Lie number two. Or three.
Suddenly the mortician honked his horn. My mother jumped. I looked over. He was staring out his window with an expression that said his best friend was the grim reaper.
“Why is that man staring at us?” my mother asked.
Because I asked him for a ride to the funeral home.
“He must be waiting for somebody.” Three lies, in less than a minute. A new record.
Claire trundled beside us. “Did that guy just roll a body bag down the gangplank?”
“Gangway,” I said.
“But I saw him. He shoved a body into that car, right? Last night I had a dream somebody died. I woke up this morning, knowing it would come true.”
“What?!” my mother cried.
“Nadine, I can see into the future. Especially when it comes to death.”
“Don’t you need to get somewhere?” I gave Claire a frigid smile.
“What d’ya think I came over for? Charlotte’s saving seats on the bus but some guy just whacked her with his cane. Your mother’s holding up our whole tour.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry.” My mother hurried, following Claire through the gray clouds of exhaust. Like people passing through a veil, all I could see was the yellow raincoat and my mom’s new pink tennis shoes. She was accustomed to high heels that pitched her forward like a ski jumper, and the tennis shoes gave her a flat-footed walk. When she climbed aboard the bus, she glanced back.
My smile was ready, waiting. I waved.
Once they were inside, I glanced back at the mortician, giving him a signal that it would just take one moment more.
But the bus didn’t leave.
Walking up and down the middle aisle, a tour guide handed out papers. As the moments stretched on, I unclipped my cell phone and tapped out the cell number Geert gave me, in case I had any more “stupid questions.”
Here was one: “What’s the mortician’s cell number?” I asked.
“He is with you,” Geert said.
“I need to call him.”
An incriminating silence followed and I walked to the edge of the pier. The harbor smelled of kelp, and calciferous barnacles clung to the wooden pylons. Water lapped against the pier, and I memorized the ten digits Geert offered, beginning with area code 907.
I dialed the number. The Suburban’s window slid down and the mortician’s round face peered out.
“You can’t just walk over here?” he said into the phone.
The bus still hadn’t moved. And any moment some idea could pitch its tent inside my mother’s paranoid mind, prompting more terrified questions.
“I’ll meet you at the funeral home,” I said. “Is it far?”
I heard a low guttural sound in the phone.
“You’re in Ketchikan,” the mortician said. “Nothing’s far.”
Downtown Ketchikan looked as if organized landslides laid out the streets. On the mountain’s upper levels, wood-frame houses notched the mountainside while a commercial district descended in waves along winding and narrow streets that eventually dropped to a final row of storefronts hanging over the ocean on piers.
Hurrying down Front Street, I followed the mortician’s directions. On my right, Deer Mountain loomed three thousand feet above town. I still had my rock hammer in my backpack, hoping to sample some local geology, and the mountain’s patient beauty seemed to mock my sudden change in plans. At Mission Street, I looked for St. John’s Episcopal, remembering it because it had the same name as my parents’ church back in Richmond. The resemblance stopped there. Even with the bright June sun shining on the lap siding, the building looked soggy. The graying boards testified to America’s heaviest annual rainfall, precipitation that was measured in feet, not inches, per year. Ten to twelve feet, on average. The other difference? A totem pole across the street.
From Mission, I crossed a footbridge that became Creek Street. Water from the mountain rushed under the creosote-soaked boardwalk, pummeling the dark granite boulders and sending up a spray of mist that the morning sun turned into faint rainbows. Trotting across the boards, my steps sounded hollow. I passed a pretty Native girl standing in the doorway of a nineteenth-century wooden building. Her sequined dress didn’t quite reach her dimpled knees and the sound of rushing water drowned out her greeting. Back in the early 1900s, this boulevard was Ketchikan’s infamous Red Light District. The “houses of ill repute” had maintained a steady stream of miners and lumberjacks and merchants who got rich selling picks and shovels to fortune seekers. And now, in the era of Internet porn and MTV, a historic whorehouse seemed quaint.
The mortuary sat at the end of the boardwalk. An old woodframe building painted a muddy-yellow agate was tucked so tightly against the mountainside that the upper floor had doors to different roads, matching up with the switchbacks carved into the mountainside. Under the second story eaves, the Suburban’s dented bumper was backed up to wide doors.
A bell rang when I opened the door on the first floor. I smelled the unmistakable odor—Eau de Funeral Home. They all smelled like this, like rose petals marinating in formaldehyde. But the receptionist was something different. Green tie-dye shirt. Long white hair cascading over bony shoulders.
She lowered the paperback she was reading—a murder mystery.
I introduced myself.
She smiled wickedly. “He’s dying to see you.”
Before I could reply—if I could reply—she leaned back and threw her voice at the ceiling. “Bobby! She’s here about the body!”
His reply was two stomps. The pendant light shimmered with dust.
“Go right up.” She picked up her book.
The stairs were narrow, beveled from wear, and I could see why the body was unloaded upstairs. The mortician waited at the second-floor landing, tying a rubber apron around his substantial girth. It was green. A plastic face shield was lifted to his sweating forehead. I changed my mind. Not a lamb. A crocodile.
“What’d I tell you?” he said. “Nothing’s far in this stinkin’ town.”
He lumbered down a paneled hallway, passing a room to our left that displayed caskets. Stacked three high along the wall, one was propped open in the room’s middle to display the benefits of eternal satin rest. The mortician shoved open a set of hinged double doors on our right, letting the flaps swing back on me.
On a stainless steel table, the black body bag lay with thick nylon straps running under its lumpy contours. The straps were connected to a metal pulley system secured to an exposed I-beam on the ceiling. This, I presumed, was how he worked alone. Rolling carts, straps, pulleys. Even after rigor mortis set in, he could move a body by himself. Above a stainless steel sink hung a small certificate, a state license to embalm, while another document beside it gave him permission to perform autopsies. The stainless steel counter, four feet at best, displayed his tools. Clamps. Hooks. Scalpels. Nothing fancy. Once somebody died, finesse was wasted effort. Not that this particular mortician was concerned with finesse, ever.
“If you’re planning to stay for the show,” he said, “I gotta get permission from the family. State law.”
“No, thank you, I don’t need to observe the autopsy,” I said. For one, my presence would trigger suspicion in Milo Carpenter and I wanted the actor completely unprepared for any upcoming interviews. “I’m interested primarily in cause of death. You heard how she was found?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Finally something different.”
“Pardon?”
“The cruise ships send me newlyweds and nearly-deads. I get honeymooners who got drunk and fell overboard, or old folks who screwed up their medications for the last time. Sometimes a heart attack, since everybody wants to see Alaska before they kick the bucket. You might’ve noticed?”
“Noticed what?”
“Most of these passengers are one foot in the grave.”
I had noticed a certain demographic. At thirty, I was among our ship’s youngest passengers.
“Do you have much experience with suicides?” I asked.
“Four this year.”
“In Ketchikan?”
He walked over to the sink, checking out the scalpels. “Teenagers. Boys. They watch that YouTube video.”
“What video?”
“The one that shows how to wrap a cord around the neck for a sexual thrill. Autoerotic asphyxiation. Cuts off the oxygen while they’re masturbating.” He picked up a knife. “Problem is, the point of no return doesn’t take long, a minute or two and they pass out with the cord still around their neck. Last month I flew into a Native village. Place doesn’t even have one paved road. But they get the Internet. They have computers. One kid, one belt, and YouTube. And he was dead.”
“That’s awful.”
He shrugged and examined the scalpel’s triangular blade, like a hostess checking the cutlery for water spots.
“Have you ever seen a jumper’s body?” I asked.
“We don’t get much jumping in Ketchikan. With all the rain, we’re more head-in-the-gas-oven type people.”
His smile was ghoulish and I suddenly wondered if I should stay for the autopsy. “Her body was hanging about twenty feet below the deck. There’s no ladder down there.”
“I got it, she jumped.”
“Look carefully at her neck.”
His dark eyes shifted to the body bag.
“The rope was thin nylon,” I continued. “A jump from that height should’ve done major damage to the neck and throat. At the very least, the rope would’ve sliced into her windpipe.”
“I hear she’s famous.”
“The husband’s famous. Milo Carpenter, the actor.”
He nodded, picking up his rubber gloves. “Sure you don’t want to stay?”
I thought of Milo’s face from this morning, when we stood near the body. He showed fear. But fear of what, discovery? If he knew I suspected something, he’d probably lawyer-up. After that we’d learn nothing. “No, thank you. How long will your exam take?”
“Depends.”
“On?”
“On what I see,” he said. “Go wait in the chapel.”
Another set of narrow stairs led to the third-floor chapel. The narthex had a front door that opened to a mountain road curved like an S and I tried to imagine how this worked. The bereaved came in on the first floor, the dead were embalmed on the second floor, and all of them were driven up the mountain in order to walk into the chapel on the third floor.
And it got weirder inside the chapel, whose entry was a pair of louvered pine panels, like saloon doors from a western movie. The sunlight that streamed through amber stained glass windows barely illuminated the room. Everywhere was dark wood, almost black. The floor, the wall, the peaked ceiling. And the straight-backed pews, rows of dark wood, resembled open coffins. Above them, tarnished brass sconces held white candles gummed with dust.
This place felt haunted.
I was turning to leave when my cell phone rang.
Allen McLeod. Calling from Seattle.
“The Alaska office wants us to take it,” he said.
I dropped into a pew. “May I ask why?”
“Nobody’s available. It’s that simple. Our closest office is Juneau, and that’s just a resident agency with two guys covering all of southeastern Alaska. They’re both working urgent cases. And Anchorage can’t spare anybody either. So if this thing turns into a case, Raleigh, it’s yours.”
Resident agencies were FBI outposts in the hinterlands, where agents handled everything from mail delivery to mail fraud to murder.
“They don’t have anybody?” I asked.
“The SAC”—Special Agent in Charge—“pointed out that you’re already on the ship. Plus it left from Seattle, and it’ll return here too. Technically, he can make the argument that the case would belong to this office.”
I could smell dust in the chapel air and the acidic scent of old stained wood. When I didn’t reply, McLeod said, “Look on the bright side, Raleigh. Maybe she killed herself. Anything from the coroner?”
I told him what Geert explained to me: Nautical law dictated that a cruise ship go to the first port with a funeral home. In this case, Ketchikan. If the death was deemed suspicious, the body went to that state’s medical examiner. In Alaska, that meant Anchorage. “I’m waiting to hear if the mortician agrees this looks suspicious.”
“Okay, if it’s not suspicious,” McLeod said brightly, “you can go back to your vacation.”
Dread buckled down on my neck. “Yes, sir.”
“I see you’ve still got that ‘sir’ habit.”
“I’m sorry, I’m—”
“From the South, I know. But whenever you call me ‘sir,’ I feel like a country pumpkin.”
Mentally inserting “bumpkin” for “pumpkin,” I promised to call when the mortician finished the examination.
Closing the phone, I walked down the chapel’s middle aisle, fingering dust on the candles, taking in the place’s muted amber glow. And I tried to kick self-pity to the curb. My last vacation was six years ago, the summer before my father was murdered. We went rock hunting in North Carolina, searching Pressley Mine for sapphires. Now here was Alaska, every geologist’s dream, and I was stuck in some funeral home lifted from the Twilight Zone, awaiting a verdict whose conclusion I already knew: her death was suspicious. The issue was jurisdiction: I had none.
Stepping through the translucent beams of dusty sunlight, I glanced at my watch. My heart tightened. I hated this feeling. This pity for myself. Willing myself not to check the time again, I stared at the cavernous pulpit. After several excruciating minutes, I sat down and picked up a hymnal from the bench. I fluttered the pages, feeling the soft, almost slippery pages. They had the atmospheric damp of books stored in wet basements. After several more minutes, I grabbed the Bible next to it, impatiently fluttering again until I saw the words. They had no phonetic resemblance to English. I flipped to the front and saw that it was a translation into Tlingit, the local Native language. The book of John read, Dikée Ankáwoo doo Yéet dàt John-ch kawshixidee Yoox’utúnk. Searching for other passages, I found a small scrap of paper in the book of Habakkuk. The crude handwriting flowed with divine wisdom.
Sometimes We gots to Wate, it said.
Not a bad summary of Habakkuk, I decided. And a fair comment on my own circumstances. But self-pity told me I’d been waiting forever. Waiting for my mother to get well. Waiting for justice for my father. Waiting for love.
I shook off the next thought—did I really love DeMott, or did I love the idea of settling down?
The saloon doors swung open and dust motes exploded through the amber sunlight. The mortician strode down the aisle wearing rubber boots and his apron. The doors squeaked back and forth behind him, making him seem like some demented gunslinger.
“She had a face-lift,” he said, as though uncovering the real crime. “I found scars behind her ears. It wasn’t a bad lift. Somebody also cauterized the capillaries around her eyes, you know, lasering off her bags.”
To emphasize his findings, he pointed to the shiny pouches beneath his own eyes. Avaricious eyes.
“So we can rule out the idea she killed herself over wrinkles.”
“How do you know she didn’t lower herself down there? She could’ve hung there until it was lights-out.”
“Climbing down there would require superhuman upper-body strength. And she’s not a small woman.”
“One hundred seventy-two pounds.”
“At night, on the open sea.”
He wagged his head, as if still not ready to concede suicide. “Stick your head in some rope, hang a minute, you’re about done. That’s what those teenagers don’t realize, going for the cheap sex thrill. Not that there’s another kind in Ketchikan.”
“What about her neck?” I said, trying again. “How much damage did you see?”
“Not much,” he agreed.
“That doesn’t strike you as suspicious?”
“But I’m supposed to say if it’s possible she killed herself. The answer is, yeah, it’s possible.”
“Possible is not the same as likely.” I felt my temper rising. The man was both morbid and obstinate. “And it isn’t probable either. What I’m asking is, after what you saw, is it probable she killed herself?”
“I don’t want to be in the middle of this.”
“The middle of what? She’s dead.”
“But famous.”
“The husband’s famous,” I clarified, hoping to encourage his spine.
“Okay, whatever. It means they’ll run something about it on television, one of those shows about celebrity deaths. And they’ll make me look like an idiot, some hick mortician in Ketchikan. What do you think people do around here when it rains all year? They watch TV. I’ll be the biggest joke in town.”
I restrained the urge to tell him he probably was already. “You’re saying the exam was inconclusive?”
“No. I’m saying I got second thoughts. Let the medical examiner in Anchorage go on the line. Let him deal with the reporters.” He pointed to the floor. “I just put her in a shipping container. If the weather holds, a plane can get her out today.”
On the one hand, I agreed with his decision; I’d rather have an ME’s ruling. But the greatest enemy for solving any crime was time. And this invertebrate was wasting time, all but admitting Judy Carpenter’s death was highly suspicious—but he didn’t want the responsibility of saying it. He would still collect his pickup fee from the cruise line, and I suspected he might call the Enquirer later, to find out how much they paid for an anonymous description of her cosmetic surgery.
“How long does that take, sending the body to the MEA?”
“A day to fly it up there, then it goes to the morgue. A real morgue, like what you got in the lower forty-eight.”
Five days remained on the cruise. Five days to figure out what happened to this woman and who did it. But with the body transport, it left four days. Two thousand passengers, and a husband who was an actor. A man paid to pretend.
“Once her body gets to the medical examiner, how long then?”
“Then it’s get in line.” He shrugged. “All those tourists want to see Alaska before they die, so the morgue’s a busy place.”
I jogged down Creek Street’s creosote timbers, darting around tourists who carried bulging plastic bags filled with souvenir hats and shirts. When I reached Mission Street, I slowed to a walk, then stopped at Whale Park and called McLeod. I told him about the body being shipped to the ME in Anchorage.
“So her death is suspicious,” he said.
“Not officially.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means the mortician is a coward. He won’t come right out and say it’s suspicious. And I don’t expect anyone from the cruise line to disagree. Murder doesn’t exactly make you want to get on board the ship.”
“Neither do suicides,” McLeod pointed out.
“Except suicide isn’t seen as the ship’s fault.”
“Good point. What about next of kin?”
“No children.” This was something I’d asked Geert. And it wasn’t a stupid question.
“Did you get to talk to him?”
“Carpenter? I asked if she’d been depressed.” I described the rest of this morning’s scene—Carpenter staggering to the body, showing shock and sadness, comforted by Sandy Sparks, the producer, then being whisked away so photographs wouldn’t show up in the tabloids. “His reaction wasn’t what I’d expect from a man whose wife was just found dead.”
“So right now, the only person who thinks she was murdered is you?”
I stared at the mountains. Steep forests layered their sides. Ocean water curled like liquid mercury around their feet. McLeod sighed. A man of prodigious sighs, his lungs moved air like ancient leather bellows.
“Sir, I’d like nothing more than to tell you this woman ended her own life. But facts say otherwise. A killer is on that ship and if we don’t find him, he walks away a free man.” I stopped, afraid my voice sounded strident.
“Don’t ever change, Raleigh.” The air bellowed again. “It’s good you’re like this. Good for us. Not so good for you.”
“It’s fine, sir.”
“That’s what you always say. But I want to send you some help on this.”
I felt the weight lift from my shoulders, the tension in my neck easing. “Thank you, sir. I’d appreciate some help.”
“Great. Jack can be there by this afternoon.”
“What—pardon? Jack?”
“I sent out a squad e-mail after the Alaska office passed. Said it was a free cruise to Alaska, which it sort of is. Jack was the first to reply. His plane’s ready to go.”
I felt sick. “Plane?”
“He’s a Bureau pilot. Didn’t you know? Keeps his own plane.”
What I knew about Jack Stephanson was this: he was a complete jerk. During my disciplinary transfer to Seattle, Jack was assigned to help ease my transition into the new field office. Help the new kid. Instead he hazed, harassed, and mocked me, before finally admitting his initial goal was to flush me from the FBI. And if that wasn’t enough, before I went back to Virginia, he’d had the gall to ask for a date.
“He needs to know when your ship leaves Ketchikan.”
We leave in five minutes, I wanted to lie. Don’t bother sending him.
Lifting my face to the sun, feeling the sting of self-pity in my eyes, the happy tourists flowed like a river around me. Across the street, on the totem pole, a raven perched and cawed with harsh laughter. I agreed it was quite the joke: my “help” was Jack Stephanson.
“Thank you for offering, sir, but on second thought, it’s better if I handle this myself.”
“Nonsense, Raleigh. You’re looking a gilt horse in the mouth.”
I had rules about lying. Really. In their way, they were strict rules. It was permissible to lie in order to protect my mother’s mental health. Or if the Bureau sent me undercover. Otherwise lying still ranked with the other nine commandments.
But right now, the truth tasted as bad as Eau de Funeral Home.
“Six o’clock.” I swallowed. “The ship leaves Ketchikan at six tonight.”
“Plenty of time! Make sure their security knows Jack’s coming on board. If they give you any grief, call me. A retired agent runs their corporate security.”
I wanted to say something, but words refused to leave my mouth.
McLeod continued, “Jack says meet him at the marina. You know where that is?”
I stared at the marina. The wooden masts and towering fishing vessels rocked softly along the base of Deer Mountain.
“I can find it,” I told him.
“You can always count on my help, Raleigh,” he said. “I’ll never leave you up a creek without a saddle.”