“The whole Anglophilia thing. The teak yacht. The teddy bear. He’s not like other Bulgarians we’ve targeted.”
“He’s nothing like his father,” she agreed absently.
I didn’t say anything else and she stopped messing with her blister to look at me closely. “What?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I can’t explain it.”
If she’d pushed me then, I would have told her I didn’t have anything better than a strange little flicker of intuition, something nagging at me that I couldn’t define. It was like hearing a radio playing far away and not being able to tell what the song is but somehow knowing it’s familiar.
She didn’t push and I let it go. “At least we won’t have to chase him all over the ship,” I said. “He’s only ever in the ChartRoom or smoking out on deck which limits our opportunities,” I said. “What’s the situation with his security?”
Mary Alice shrugged “Negligible. One bodyguard in a crappy off-the-rack suit. Russian, by the look of him, or maybe Bulgarian. Lodging in a shitty single room down on deck two.”
I raised a brow. Lazarov’s suite, like our staterooms, was up on deck nine. “That’s quite a hike. Lazarov must be feeling relaxed about the security situation.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Mary Alice asked. “Like you said, he’s familiar with the ship.”
“He just committed a murder and left a calling card,” I reminded her, thinking of the small carved wolf he’d left at Lilian Flanders’s house.
She flapped a hand. “The fact that Lilian was murdered might have very easily been overlooked. He probably figures nobody has made the connection yet between her death and his father’s hit. Or that they’ve informed us and we’re on his tail.”
“I suppose,” I said reluctantly.
“Relax, sister,” she said confidently. “Lazarov has no idea we’re onto him. And, in spite of my bunions, this is one of the most pleasant missions I’ve ever had. It’s restful. I may make a habit of murders on ships.”
I could see her point. There are pros to killing someone at sea—they can’t get away from you, there’s a whole ocean for disposing of evidence—but there are cons too. The biggest was that we would be stuck in the same place as the body, putting us squarely in the running as suspects. The longer the period between his death and a postmortem, the betterfor us. In this particular case, we had to be far enough out from New York to make sure they wouldn’t try to fly his corpse back. We also had to be far enough from England that they wouldn’t send him that way. And, most crucial of all, we needed to be off the ship and with as much distance as possible between us and the body before any suggestion of foul play was raised. Otherwise, we’d become suspects along with the other four thousand or so people on board.
Everything came down to the ship’s doctor. That was the person who would examine Lazarov and pronounce him dead. We’d discussed any number of possibilities, but in the end, we settled on Lazarov dying quietly in his suite. A passenger dropping dead in any of the public spaces would bring complications we didn’t need—iPhone videos, hysteria, eyewitness accounts. We wanted a nice, uncomplicated corpse in his own room. It would make for an unpleasant experience for the butler who brought his morning tea, but that was better than every tourist from Tallinn to Tierra del Fuego filming his corpse and uploading it to YouTube. From his stateroom, Lazarov would be quietly moved to the morgue. TheQM2had a four-drawer capacity, so unless something drastic happened—like a mass food-poisoning event—he’d have a peaceful trip to Southampton on his own.
We assumed the ship’s doctor was less than ambitious. Otherwise why spend your career prescribing antacids and anti-nausea medication to rich people? Sure, there was always the odd ministroke or outbreak of norovirus to deal with, but that was nothing compared to exotic ports of call and a career spent at sea. I suspected the ship’s doctor would be just ashappy not to go looking for anything suspicious when Lazarov popped his clogs. If nothing else, the paperwork would be a bitch. Besides that, the cruise line wouldn’t want any blowback from the rotten publicity of somebody keeling over dead on their ship. The doctor would be under pressure, spoken or otherwise, to keep things simple. Without specific reasons to suspect foul play, like a ransacked room or a violent altercation with another passenger, the doctor would have no reason to do anything other than chalk the death up to natural causes. Heart attacks are always popular with guys Lazarov’s age. The ship’s doctor probably wouldn’t even contact Lazarov’s physician to see if he had a heart condition until we docked. By the time the doctor got a response, the four of us would have gone to ground at Benscombe, lying low for a few days until we went our separate ways again.
We were also feeling good about the security situation. A big, oxlike guard was ideal for us. Guys like that are only ever hired for show. Those beefy muscles might punch like a bulldozer, but they’ve got one gear—slow. Getting around them is child’s play. Folks who are serious about security hire agile women who are hypervigilant and trained to assess every detail. Women like us, actually.
I looked to where Mary Alice was relaxing on my sofa. “It’s time to start finalizing plans. What are you thinking in terms of method?”
She considered this. “An exit bag,” she said finally. It was an unexpected and elegant suggestion. (Exit bags are simply sacks of thick plastic used for suffocation, often in suicides. If you pair one with a canister of helium, you can avoid inducingthe panicky feeling that asphyxiation creates. Nitrogen is even better because it leaves no trace in the blood, a handy trick if you don’t want anyone to know you’ve taken your own life. It works perfectly so long as you have someone to discreetly remove the bag for you. We like exit bags because they are far less likely to cause petechiae, those telltale little red marks that are the hallmark of smothering. Exit bags have the further advantage of being quiet and discreet. Any thick plastic bag will do, and when you’re finished, you can walk off with your groceries sticking out the top of the murder weapon and nobody will be the wiser.)
“I like it,” I told her. “But if we’re going to get close enough to use an exit bag, we’ve got to get into his suite. There’s nowhere else on the ship we can make it work.”
“We could have done it in the sauna if we were men,” she said archly. “But we’re not. So either we get him to let us in or we have to be in his room waiting.”
“Next point. The bodyguard. Whether we get Lazarov to let us in or we’re lying in wait, we have to work around the goon. His assignment is pretty relaxed, but we still have to assume he’s a factor.”
“Roofie him?” she suggested. “Although I don’t happen to have any GHB lying around.”
She paused and we grinned at the same time.
“Natalie,” I said. “Remind me to ask her tomorrow if she has anything suitable in her fanny pack.”
We were silent a long time, listening to the low, comforting hum of the engines and the slap of waves against the hull. After a while, I heard a soft snore and looked over to find herfast asleep. She was twisted up like a Bavarian pretzel, and I gave her a poke.
“Mary Alice, wake up and take yourself to bed.”
She blinked furiously and rubbed at her neck. “We haven’t finished working out a plan.”
“Unless you start talking in your sleep, you’re not contributing much. Go on,” I told her.
“I’d argue, but I’m dead on my feet,” she said as she struggled to stand. “I blame that damned samba class.” She patted me on the shoulder as she passed. “Get some sleep, Billie. We’ll pick up in the morning and figure it out then.”