My hopes of sleeping in were shattered with banging at my door early in the morning. I espied the bedside clock with one partly opened eye. 8.11am. Ugh!
“Whatever it is, piss off!” I yelled out with a croaky throat in need of water. I closed my eye again and shoved a pillow over my head.
The banging kept going. “Mia!” It was Chris’s voice.
I raised my head off the pillow for a moment. “Go away!” I yelled out again. “I don’t care if the friggin’ ship’s sinking. I need my beauty sleep. Now, be a good boy and buzz off.”
“I found the username for Downes on the forum,” he announced with persuasion in his tone.
Oh, he knew me too well! I bolted upright to a sitting position. “Wait a minute,” I called out and heard laughter from the other side of the door. This had better be good, I thought as I dragged myself out of bed and went to the bathroom to pee, brush my teeth and splash water over my face. Only then did I feel relatively human.
When I started to open the door, an arm stuck through the crack holding a steaming cup of strong coffee and brioche. Then, the rest of Chris’s body appeared with a wide smile on his face. He walked in and took a seat at the coffee table. He looked tired, but the smug glint in his eyes said it all.
I took a sip of the wonderfully aromatic coffee and a bite of brioche before I spoke. “Where’s your coffee?”
“Been drinking it through the whole night. I didn’t get any sleep yet. Too busy working while the likes of you was snoozing away.” He grinned.
It was a good thing he said this with humour in his voice; otherwise, he would have worn the hot coffee all over where it hurt the most. My eyes went to the spot, and sensing violence, he crossed his legs. I smiled and joined him at the table. “Thanks for breakfast. So what gives that can’t wait until I get up?”
“Man, I had one enlightening night,” he declared in wonder, “full of deviant sex and depravation.” He coloured a little despite his confident front.
“You’re growing up too fast, Chris. And before I forget, if your father should ask, you did NOT take any part in this investigation. He’d sack me from my job if he knew I introduced you to hard porn!”
He laughed. “You’re funny sometimes, you know? I’m my own man, Mia. Dad’s really flexible with me.”
“Okay. Okay. Just tell me what you found. You didn’t wake me up so early for chitchat.”
“Fine. Let’s get on with it. You know how Cliff Downes was a plastic surgeon?”
I shook my head. “Can’t recollect with all the doctors I met on this ship, but go on.”
“Get this.” Chris leaned forward in his chair. “His username is ‘Abreast of Everything’, just like the horse—plus his obvious love of boobs, I’d say.”
I almost choked on my coffee. I coughed and spluttered for a few seconds while Chris watched me in amusement. “Want some water?”
I nodded and he grabbed a small bottle from the mini-bar fridge and handed it to me. I took a few sips before I could speak. “With the reputation he had, he should’ve called himself ‘Pussy Fingers’ or something to that effect,” I stated with sarcasm. “But how did you find him?”
“I had to read through a huge number of Erotic Heart’s posts,” he explained, colour seeping into his face again.
“Hence the ‘enlightening night of deviant sex’,” I said, thinking about my own night of almost divine sexual pleasure. But I didn’t want to go there right now.
Chris stood and got himself a bottle of water from the mini-bar. I felt like teasing him but didn’t. The poor boy was probably getting very hot under the collar. It was one thing to read or watch porn on your own, but quite another when you had to relate it to someone who could be your mother. So I waited in silence until he composed himself.
He sat back down after drinking almost the whole bottle in one go. “I had to do a lot of cross-referencing to find him, but what helped was the name of the horse we got from Mrs Barry. You’d already found some of the others, but it took a while to find this one, namely because he had something with Erotic Heart in the earlier years. So I ran a search of Abreast of Everything’s posts and compared his summary with Erotic Heart’s. I almost missed it because they only shared one post.”
My curiosity got the better of me when I asked, “And what was it about?”
Chris went bright red in the face. “Well... um...”
“Come on, Chris. You came in here boasting about your night of deviant sex, so spill it!”
He shifted in his seat. “Let’s just say she gave him a tongue job he never forgot. He raved on about it on several other posts he exchanged with fellow enthusiasts.”
“Is that all? So he gets a cool blowjob. Big deal!” I couldn’t understand why Chris looked so embarrassed. After all, he was a young man of the world. He knew about these things.
“Um... no.” His voice interrupted my thoughts.
I gazed at him as his eyes looked down and to the side while his chin subtly pointed downward and over his shoulder. “Oh no! Don’t tell me! That is gross!” I exclaimed in a loud voice. “I’m eating here, you know!” I still held a piece of brioche in my hand, not sure if I should finish eating it. Chris remained silent while I took a few moments to get the gruesome image out of my head. “So the good doctor liked a bit of a sweep around his ‘back door’.” I couldn’t find any other way of putting it without puking.
Chris nodded. “You got it.”
“Does this woman have no self-respect whatsoever?” I launched on a new tirade. “I mean, she’s really into such humiliating acts. I can’t believe she boasts about them on the net. Who does that?”
“Some very sick puppies, I expect,” Chris answered, his tone confident once again now he’d managed to get the message across. “And whatever you do, don’t ask me about what they did with food.”
I shivered. “Eew! Don’t worry, I won’t ask. I enjoy my food too much to lose my appetite forever. But this explains why Downes was naked. Maybe, the killer did something to humiliate him where the ‘sun don’t shine’.”
“The doctor couldn’t find anything, but perhaps the forensic people in Hawaii will find something in the nether regions of his back passage. So what now? We placed all the victims in the forum. I’d say this is definitely our common denominator.”
I shook my head to dispel the image of something stuck up Downes’s arse and brought my focus back to Chris. “Yes,” I agreed. “You’re right about that. What about Erotic Heart, though? Any luck tracing who she is?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid. I don’t understand why she suddenly stopped posting.”
“Because she finally came to her senses?” I suggested, even though I didn’t believe it. “Albeit a little too late, of course.”
“Either that or she dropped off the face of the earth,” Chris offered.
“Okay. Let’s assume she went to another ISP—she should still be posting to the forum, right? Plus the service she had before would still contain archived records of her account.”
“Well, unless she’s come up with a new username, she’s not posting at all. As for archived records, yes, they should be there. But it all depends where the ISP stores its archives. Some companies do everything on one server; others may use several—each server having a different purpose.”
“So you’re saying they might use one server for active accounts and another for inactive ones?”
Chris shrugged. “It’s possible. They can do pretty much anything they like.”
I stood. “Well, it’s the only lead we have at the moment; so get into their archives. You tracked all the others, but you couldn’t track her. It’s plausible she’s in the inactive accounts.” I finished my water. “Go get some sleep, Chris. You look tired.” I noticed the dark shadows under his eyes for the first time since he entered my cabin. “We still have time before we reach Pago Pago.”
Chris stood and followed me to the door as I showed him out. Then, he paused and turned to me. “What are you going to do today?”
Avoid Smythe like the plague, I thought. But I knew I couldn’t do this altogether. “I’ll update Dobbs and Smythe on what’s going on. Oh, and one more thing, we assume Erotic Heart is a woman because she talked of her boring marriage, etc. Is there any chance it might be a gay guy, say someone like Enrico?”
“It could be anybody, Mia. Most people on the net like to invent new identities for themselves.”
I frowned. “Well, see if you can find an account for Enrico Lotti. I doubt he’s Erotic Heart, but I still want to know if he has an account in the cheaters’ forum.”
“Will do.”
After Chris left, I jumped into the shower in order to help prepare myself to face the new day—and a new Smythe. Now, it was my turn to blush, and I was glad Chris wasn’t here to see it.
~~~
I caught up with Dobbs and Smythe at lunch. They were sitting near the Deck Grill enjoying a burger under the sun. Smythe was in his bathers and Dobbs wore shorts and a short-sleeved cotton shirt, open halfway down his chest.
“Aren’t you guys hot sitting out here?” I said on approach, averting my eyes from Smythe’s athletic physique. Thank God I was wearing sunglasses so he couldn’t see my eyes.
“Join us for lunch, Mia. It’s nice and breezy here,” Dobbs invited, taking a huge bite of his cheeseburger.
Smythe nodded hello. “Hope you slept well?” His tone was full of innuendo and I wanted to hit him. What if he’d shared with Dobbs the details of our romantic interlude?
I ignored his question and leaned over them. “I’m meeting someone for lunch,” I told Dobbs, hoping this would make Smythe jealous.
It must’ve worked because he asked, “Where’s Chris?”
“He’s sleeping. He worked through the whole night and came up with Downes’s username on the forum.”
For a moment, both men stopped eating and gazed at me with surprise. “So we have a confirmed common denominator among the victims,” Dobbs stated.
I nodded. “I’d say so. Chris is having trouble trying to identify Erotic Heart, though. He’ll keep working once he’s rested.”
“They’re doing a luau lunch at the buffet restaurant,” Smythe tried to sound casual as he commented on this. But I picked up the inquisitive inflection in his voice. He was probably dying to know who I was meeting. If only he knew I made the whole thing up.
“That’s nice,” I said and glanced at my watch. “Well, gents, I have to go now. Perhaps, I’ll see you at dinner.” Before either of them could reply, I turned and walked away, knowing I looked terrific in a white see-through cotton dress with my swimmers underneath.
I ended up having a room service lunch in my cabin in case Smythe went looking for me. Let him wonder what I was up to. While I ate, my mind turned to Enrico. If Erotic Heart was to be believed, she was definitely a woman near my age or older. Enrico was too young to even remember what a lonely-hearts ad looked like. Of course, there was always the chance Chris could be right and Erotic Heart was someone inventing an identity—if so, it could be anybody. But all things being equal, my intuition told me Erotic Heart was genuine about her background and experiences. She didn’t reveal much about who she was; but the idea of the forum was to share one’s sexual experiences and not to give away the user’s true identity.
Taking into account the cheaters’ club as the common denominator among the victims, I ruled out the captain and Mike Yuen as suspects. At least, pending any additional evidence we might find. Their lives had been ruined by doctors—different doctors with different specialties—but we only had one killer. The CCTV had caught enough footage to enable us to confirm the killer was one and the same. And it was a ‘he’, which ruled out Martha Barry. This left Enrico as the main suspect. Of course, there could be other suspects we hadn’t yet come across.
Enrico had access to information on the convention members, and he was known to all of them. Plus he kept the gossip going on about ‘who might be next’—perhaps to divert attention away from himself. Could Enrico be the killer and Erotic Heart at the same time?
Although this was possible, it somehow didn’t feel right to me. If Erotic Heart told the truth about her marriage, then gay Enrico did not fit the profile. Besides, those who had something going with Erotic Heart referred to her as a female in their comments. If Enrico truly was Erotic Heart, then he had the best disguise in the world, because nobody on the forum mentioned having a thing with a transvestite who went by the name of Erotic Heart.
As for being the killer, we now knew the person’s gait and build from the footage we’d gleaned. Enrico was slim and lithe. He could have been a ballet dancer. The killer’s figure was fuller and stockier, and the gait was all wrong for Enrico—unless he disguised himself with bulky clothing and walked more like a man than the waif he always projected in public.
I shook my head in frustration. Speculation always made me feel restless and it got me nowhere. Therefore, after a decent time interval of pretending to be having lunch with a friend, I made my way out of the cabin and went on deck. I felt rather clammy and decided to go for a swim; but first, I checked the pool area to ensure Smythe had gone. The last thing I needed now was to run into him again, and in my swimmers.
Thankfully, the coast was clear and I spent the next couple of hours swimming and sunbathing. It felt great to relax for a change. When I had enough, I noticed it was close to afternoon teatime. I was starving. So I threw the white dress over me and made my way to the back of the ship where I knew I’d find Professor Tully.
Sure enough, I found him at his usual table drinking lemon tea and eating his favourite strawberry tartlets. “Mia, what an unexpected pleasure!” He seemed genuinely pleased to see me.
“I’ll join you in a minute, Professor,” I said and ducked back into the restaurant to get coffee and a slice of carrot cake with lemon icing. “So how are you getting along?” I asked when I joined him.
“Feeling much better,” he smiled. “It seems the sunshine and sea air agree with my health. But if truth be told, I think it’s the remedial massages I’m getting from a lovely gal at the spa.” He winked with humour, and I laughed.
“Well, I’m pleased for you. You seemed to be in quite a bit of pain when we rented the jeep in Vila.”
The professor popped a tartlet into his mouth. “Those little jeeps are what I call ‘bone-rattlers’. No suspension whatsoever. I was very tired that day after sitting in the jeep for so long, but I still enjoyed our outing.”
I took a bite of my carrot cake and washed it down with coffee. “Mmm. This is excellent. Isn’t it wonderful just eating and relaxing?” I didn’t understand why I was in such a good mood—not when we had a murderer onboard, plus I was trying to avoid Smythe—but perhaps the professor was right and it was the sea air.
“I think this is what a holiday should be about, don’t you?” he commented.
“Sure, except for...” I stopped just in time, but the professor was too fast for me.
“Except for the murders,” he completed my sentence. “How is your investigation coming along?”
“Not much to go by,” I replied, knowing I couldn’t tell anybody outside of our group what we’d discovered. “I guess we’re hoping the killer won’t strike again and that we make it to Hawaii quickly so we can hand everything over to the authorities.”
Professor Tully nodded. “Yes. That makes sense. Well, we’ll be in Pago Pago soon and then onto Hawaii. Not long to go now.”
“True.” I finished my cake but still felt hungry, so I went back inside to grab a couple of cucumber sandwiches before rejoining the professor. “Despite the unsavoury goings on, how have you enjoyed your cruise so far?” I wanted to steer the conversation away from the murders.
The professor took a moment to respond and then a smile appeared on his face. “I’m tangoing.”
“Pardon?”
“Tango—dancing the tango—just as I used to do with my Eden.” He obviously saw the surprise on my face and went on to explain, “Eden and I used to belong to a ballroom dancing group when we were young, and we used to love the tango. Then, as my practice got busier, I had to give it up. Besides, by this time, my legs were not as strong and my hip gave me much pain.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. So what happened with your dancing?”
“Eden kept it up. She liked to keep fit, and dancing can do that for you.” His look seemed far away, probably reliving his younger years.
“And now you’re tangoing again?
He chuckled. “Yes. I felt much better these last couple of days and I noticed they were giving tango lessons on the ship. So I signed up. Mind you, I’m a lot slower, but then so are the biddies who come along to meet handsome men like me!”
I laughed. “You’re a modest one, Professor,” I teased. “But I’m glad you’ve found something you love to do. It just goes to prove you’re never too old to do what you love.”
His countenance turned serious again and I knew his thoughts were back with Eden and his younger years. Somehow, this made me feel depressed. Here I was, almost fifty, and I would never have the memories of someone I loved—at least, not someone who was the love of my life. I thought briefly of my cheating ex and the years I’d wasted on him. Life just wasn’t fair.