Redheads (39 page)

He still had no memory of what had happened after the man had stuck one of these into his neck. But he had no doubt these could be useful. He took the case and put it inside the first-aid kit.

When he climbed back into the helm seat, the cloud on the eastern horizon had dissolved. The silhouette of an island lay directly ahead. Another smaller island lay a few miles to the north. He stared at the islands and waited for them to turn into clouds and float away, but they didn’t, and he wasn’t too surprised. He supposed he’d been expecting them. The closer and larger island looked to be ten miles wide and about equal that distance from the boat. If he kicked up the engine speed and had good luck with the currents, the trip would take under two hours.

A lighthouse blinked from the island’s northern end, but the land there rose in cliffs directly from the sea. The waves looked small and gentle here in the middle of the ocean, but would be a different story altogether when they were slamming into cliff faces. Towards the middle of the island, short river valleys dropped from the central plateau; if he landed at one of the riverheads, he might find a sandy beach and a way up without having to climb a cliff. He steered for the island’s center, watching the horizon for boats and escorted on this last stretch of his journey by a pod of dolphins that came from behind and then slowed to swim alongside the lifeboat, keeping Westfield within their ranks until he was so close to the island he could hear the surf breaking on the beaches just ahead. The dolphins left him and went back out to sea, and Westfield turned the boat to motor six hundred feet off the shore, going south along the island. There were no houses, but towards the crest of the plateau, he saw a cut in the pine forest that might be a road. He went below and got an inflatable lifejacket, a bottle of water, and the first-aid kit, which was in a watertight yellow box. He clipped the bottle and the kit to the lifejacket harness, turned the wheel to point the lifeboat away from shore, and locked the helm. Then he climbed out the hatch, stood on the curved orange deck, inflated the lifejacket, and stepped over the side.

Chapter Forty-Two

When Chris figured it out, it came all at once, whole and unbroken. If he and Julissa had to spend the next ten hours proving it was right, and making additional discoveries that went along with it, it didn’t change the basic completeness of what he’d just realized. He was sitting in a stuffed armchair in a room at the Sheraton, four blocks from Los Angeles International Airport, looking out the window at the fading light, and there it was. He sat frozen for two minutes, watching a plane materialize out of the gathering dusk, watching it grow from a light in the sky to a jumbo jet about to land, and then he stood and crossed the room, entered Julissa’s adjoined suite, crossed to her bathroom, and opened the door without knocking.

She was in the bath and looked up at him, startled.

“What is it?”

“A.I.S.,” he said.

“What?”

“A.I.S. What you switched off on
Sailfish
when we sailed across to Molokai. The automatic ship identification system. You turned it off so no one could track us.”

Julissa stood, gathered her wet hair into a ponytail, and took the towel he was handing to her.

“I don’t know if that’s what he was trying to write on the wall, but if it was, I’ll bet anything we can find him that way,” Chris said. He leaned against the sink. “Look. We know he’s coming and going by water, and we know he kills close to ports. He’s hired smugglers who’re spending time in ports. He’s moving around on ships and every commercial vessel in the world has had an AIS for a decade. There are websites that track ships live, all over the world, any time they’re within thirty or forty miles of a port. You can see exactly where the ship is and where it’s going. You can get its name and IMO number.”

“IMO number?”

“It’s like the VIN number on a car, but for commercial ships. They never change, even if the ship changes hands or the company that owns it changes its name.”

Now Julissa was getting it, the whole idea, complete and intact and ready to go. Chris saw the look on her face and realized if he’d kept the AIS system running while they escaped across to Molokai, so Julissa could watch its screen, she’d have thought of this days ago.

“We can correlate them,” she said. “Find out what ships were in the harbors on the days the murders happened.”

“And then use their IMO numbers to figure out who owns them, and if that doesn’t give us any clue, we can use the Lloyd’s of London registers to figure out who’s been chartering and sub-chartering them.”

Julissa wrapped the towel around her torso and tucked the corner between her breasts to hold it in place.

“Show me these websites.”

They left the bathroom and went back to Chris’s suite. Then they sat on the floor at the coffee table, Julissa looking over Chris’s shoulder as he logged into one of the ship tracking sites.

“There’s one problem,” Chris said. “Most of these sites only have data going back a couple days. If there’s no way to get the data they had ten years ago, this won’t work.”

Julissa nodded and they looked at the screen. Chris zoomed in on a map of Galveston. Colored icons indicated ships coming and going from the port, or tied up alongside the wharves. There were dozens of them—tankers, bulk carriers, tugs, container ships.

“I can get the old data,” Julissa said.

Chris looked at her, and she went on.

“In grad school, at M.I.T., I knew a guy who was studying the way the web grows. He’s been at it since ’99. His lab takes a virtual snapshot of the entire web, every day, then maps the changes. He’s got hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of terabytes stored up.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“He’s still at M.I.T. We dated for about two years, but that was a long time ago. I ended it on friendly terms.”

“What do you need to start?”

“My laptop. The list of all the murders and when and where they happened. A list of every other website you can find that has this kind of data. Dinner. Coffee.”

“You got it.” He started to get up, but she stopped him by putting her hands on his shoulders and pulling him to her.

“And you,” she said. “I need you.”

Chapter Forty-Three

Westfield staggered up the black-rock beach, slipping once on the wet stones and landing on his bad knee, but rising and moving on before another wave could hit him. He followed the edge of a fast-moving stream a hundred yards inland from the sea and then sat against the stone abutment of a washed-out bridge. He took off his mechanic’s jumpsuit and sat naked and shivering on the stones, wringing seawater from the suit. The sea had been cold but the air was warm enough. When the wind finished drying him, he stopped shivering. Swimming ashore had made a wreck of his bandages, but the first-aid kit held dry replacements and new ointment. The Russian syringes were still there, dry and intact. He cleaned his wounds and looked at the bites before covering them over with new bandages. The infection was waning; the antibiotics were working.

When he had wrung all the water he could from the jumpsuit, he put it back on. He kept the first-aid kit and water bottle, but deflated the life jacket and left it under a flat stone. Then he climbed the abutment and found the track of an abandoned dirt road that led into the higher country of the island. He stood a moment before setting off, watching as the lifeboat motored away. He hoped it would be a speck in the distance before anyone came along and found him.

The road wound up switchbacks along cliffs ledged with pine trees. After a mile, he came to a paved road. If he’d had a coin, he might have flipped it, but he had nothing in the pockets of his jumpsuit. So he went right, because he was already facing that direction, and besides, it looked to be downhill. He walked past terraced fields planted with some kind of yellow flowering bush and divided by neatly built, low rock walls. When the sun rose high enough that he was no longer in the shadow cast by the high country, he felt the jumpsuit finally start to dry. He walked for half an hour and then sat down to rest on one of the rock walls, looking down the escarpment and into a protected bay he had not been able to see from the water. At the head of the bay there was a village of whitewashed houses with red tile roofs, all neatly lined along stone streets that led to an old wharf. Fishing boats and wooden sailboats bobbed on their mooring balls behind a breakwater. Fifteen minutes later, he came to a road sign that pointed down a narrower asphalt road that led directly to the village. The sign read
Fajã Grande — 1 km
. A smaller sign beneath it bore the symbol of a cross and said
Igreja Matriz de Fajã Grande
. Westfield looked at the words and decided they must be Portuguese, and that was when he realized he’d landed in the Azores.

He walked through the narrow stone streets of Fajã Grande. An old man wearing a tweed cap and sitting on a wrought iron balcony put down his newspaper and watched Westfield pass. He had been feeling good in the morning air and the sunshine, and had forgotten his jumpsuit was stained with blood. He was barefooted and limping, and hadn’t shaved in days. He nodded at the man and continued through the village until he found the small central plaza where the church, Igreja Matriz, was built. The parsonage was behind it, and like the church and everything else in the village, it was a low whitewashed house, built flush to the edge of the street, with flowers in iron planters that hung from the brightly painted window sills. He stepped up to the parsonage door and knocked. Across the street, a bakery was turning out the smell of fresh malasadas and coffee. His stomach woke, and he wished he had some money. Then the door opened, and the parish priest dressed in black clerics stood looking at him over the gold rims of his spectacles.

“Good morning,” Westfield said. “You speak English?”

The priest smiled. “Yes. Can I help you?”

“I’m an American—a sailor. I ran my boat onto the rocks just before sunrise and lost her because I fell asleep on watch. I don’t have any papers or any money. I walked to this village from the beach where I swam ashore. Is there a computer I can use? With an Internet connection?”

The priest looked at him. “You need a doctor.”

“No. I got scraped up in the wreck and again coming to shore. But it’s nothing serious.”

“I can take you to a computer. And I can give you some shoes and clothes.”

“Thank you.”

The priest opened the door the rest of the way and motioned Westfield inside.

Half an hour later, Westfield followed the priest, whose name was Father Leonardo Silva, through the rest of the village and along the waterfront. Westfield wore an old gray jogging suit and a pair of Nike running shoes that Father Silva had given him. Though he seemed to want to walk faster, Father Silva kept pace with Westfield. He carried a set of keys on a large brass ring.

“Where had you sailed from, and where were you going?”

“I set out from Halifax and my first landfall was supposed to be Gibraltar.” He was pretty sure the Azores lay on the great circle line between those two points.

“What kind of boat?”

“A thirty-four-foot sloop,” he said, thinking of the last boat he’d seen beam reaching across Puget Sound when he could still go to his house. Except now that he thought about it, he didn’t miss his house at all. He had escaped with his life and, for the first time, he had a solid clue: he knew the name of the ship.

“She’s totally lost, your boat?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry. What was her name?”

“Tara,” he said, and without any hesitation. “Right now I’m just glad to be alive.”

“I wouldn’t have set out alone across the Atlantic before November,” the priest said. “You must be brave.”

“You’re a sailor?”

“Yes.”

They walked in silence for another few minutes and then Father Silva pointed at the two-story whitewashed building in front of them. It clung to the seawall on one side and its well-tended lawn faced the street. The stone lintel over the door was carved with a Latin cross.

“The parish school,” Father Silva said. “Of course the children are not here now. Summertime.”

They went across the lawn to the door, where Father Silva used the keys from his ring to open the locks. Then he led Westfield inside and up the stairs. The classroom facing the ocean was also the computer lab. There were two desktop PCs on a table by the window. They looked four or five years old, but they would work fine, if there was really Internet.

“Do you know how to use them?” Father Silva said.

“Yes.”

“I have to go back to the church. Confession begins soon. When you’re finished here, will you lock the door?”

Westfield nodded. “I can meet you back at the church?”

“Yes. I’ll be in the booth.”

“Thank you, Father.”

“Be sure to lock the door.” He handed Westfield the key ring and left.

Westfield listened to the old priest’s feet clomping down the wooden stairs. When he was gone, Westfield sat at one of the computers and turned it on.

Chapter Forty-Four

No single ship had been present in every port on the day of each killing. But ships belonging to one company, Lothian Lines, Ltd., had been in Galveston on the day Allison was murdered, in Naples on the day the twins were slaughtered, and in New Orleans over the two-day course of Robin Knappe’s dismemberment and consumption. Those ships were the M/V
Tantallon
and the M/V
Dunnottar
. Other Lothian Lines ships had been in ports the day before or the day after killings on the rim of the Atlantic. There were no Lothian Lines ships anywhere near killings that took place in the Pacific. But here, Julissa found ships either belonging to, or time-chartered into, the fleet of Cathay Steamship & Freight Co., Ltd.