Unlucky 13 (Women's Murder Club 13)

They’d been fed and watered like animals. They’d been given limited access to stinking buckets for toilets and no privacy. They’d slept on their feet or sitting with their backs against others.

The mood on the ship was getting desperate.

The passengers and even the damned pirates looked and acted like they were running out of patience. They circled above on the running track, dropped burning matches, fired off volleys of bullets, and kept terror alive on the ship.

Yuki had met enough criminals with explosive anger issues to know that any one of these men could go off and start mowing people down. She scooted around until she was sitting next to her husband. She looped her arm around his calf and hugged it hard. He put his arm around her back and held her tight. Her feeling of safety was at complete odds with her knowledge that they could easily be dead before the sun came up.

A woman was sitting next to Yuki on her left. She had told Yuki that her name was Susannah. Susannah was in her fifties and was wearing a robe as Yuki was but with red flannel pajamas underneath and fuzzy socks. She was praying for the lives of all of the people on the ship, and she was asking God to forgive the pirates for what they had done.

Yuki didn’t understand how she could pray for the men who had just gunned down innocent people.

Now that it was so quiet on the deck, Yuki could hear the water lapping against the sides of the ship, Brady’s breathing, and Susannah talking to God under her breath.

A pirate was standing by the rail, maybe fifteen feet away from them. This is the one Yuki thought of as Bigfoot because of the way he walked, with long, heavy footsteps. He lowered his head and cupped his hands to light a cigarette.

Beside her, Brady was watching Bigfoot, too. Watching him puff on his cigarette, then pull his radio phone out of his shirt pocket and speak into the microphone at his mouth. Yuki saw her husband check his watch, then turn his head to the right.

She followed Brady’s gaze and saw him make eye contact with another passenger who also seemed aware of the pirate’s movements.

She remembered the man’s name. Brett Lazaroff. She and Brady had met him at the breakfast buffet line the first morning, which seemed like forever ago.

Lazaroff had dark hair that was going gray and was about sixty and very fit. He and Brady had gotten into a conversation in front of the scrambled eggs tray.

She’d said hello and taken her plate to the table, where she learned that Lazaroff was widowed with adult kids and owned an auto supply store in Anacortes. He might have said that he’d been in the military.

Now she saw Lazaroff lift his jaw toward Bigfoot and she saw Brady nod. Yuki thought it might be the almost telepathic communication of two men who had been trained to shoot first.

A little bud of hope blossomed in her mind.

Brady and Lazaroff were working on a plan.

CHAPTER 65

THE CALL CAME in before 7:00 a.m. as I was snoozing deeply, my head on a new pillow that had been billed correctly

as “better than goose down.”

I looked at my chirping phone and said, “No way.”

But I couldn’t ignore the call from Michael Jansing.

“Boxer,” I harrumphed into the mouthpiece.

“Sergeant Boxer, sorry to call you this early, but I just got a text from the bomber. I told him I couldn’t speak to him in private until I got to the office, that I was surrounded by my family.”

“You told him when you’d get to work?”

“I said I’d be there at eight.”

“Come to the Hall,” I told Jansing. “I’ll meet you.”

I found FBI special agent Jay Beskin’s card in my blazer pocket and called him at once, and thank you, God, he picked up.

“Jay, the belly bomber has reached out to Jansing and is calling him at around eight. Can you meet us at the Hall pronto?”

My next twenty minutes were a flurry of dressing and looking for car keys, punctuated by gulps of scalding coffee and the protests of my screaming baby.

“I’ll be home tonight, baby girl. I will.”