| Subject: Empty Reflections Part Six |
Author:
Karen
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Date Posted: 18:28:46 09/05/08 Fri
In reply to:
Karen
's message, "Empty Reflections-Prologue" on 14:52:42 08/05/08 Tue
A/N: I want to thank you all for your support. Your comments mean a lot to me.
Empty Reflections
Part Six
Chesapeake Grand Hotel
Baltimore MD
Penthouse suite
Forty minutes later
Michael Morgan stood near the rail of the veranda that surrounded his four-bedroom suite. The suite occupied one end of the hotel wing and the surrounding terrace gave access to every room. Silently he watched the lights and movement of people below.
“It’s happened again,” he told her, as he felt her walk up behind him.
“So it seems,” she agreed. “They will probably cancel the show now. This has happened twice in America, they won’t stand for it.”
“Polly,” he looked at her somewhat astonished. “Five people are dead, and it’s all connected to me somehow.”
“You had nothing to do with it, Michael. I know that. Other people have to believe it as well,” she oversimplified.
“I may not have done this personally, but somehow I’m responsible,” he stated flatly, the voice of exhaustion coloring his tone.
“You’re tired, Michael. You’re always tired when the filming season ends. Tomorrow when the constables come, we will convince them you know nothing about it. They cannot prove what isn’t true.”
“Policemen,” he corrected.
“What?”
“They call them policemen here.”
“As you wish,” she agreed. “We will talk to the policemen, then we will get on the plane and go home to Kent.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Kent. We can sleep in our own beds.” She always took care of him when he was exhausted. “Perhaps it will be for the best. I’m tired of traveling. We can afford to settle down can’t we?”
“Yes, we can, if that’s your wish. Or you can return to the London stage if you like. Things were more…comfortable…when you were in the theater. Now come to bed, Michael. They will be here soon with their interminable questions. You’ve had a very hard day. You don’t want to catch cold,” she coddled. She hoped if he chose to return to acting it would be the stage. Their lives had been so much more private, more quiet, when he was in the theater.
From around the corner a pair of eyes watched as they walked back inside, closed the door, and shut away the sounds that drifted up from below.
‘No,’ the eyes filled with tears. ‘This was to protect them, he wasn’t supposed to feel guilty. He wasn’t supposed to have to hide.’
~*~*~
Chesapeake Grand Hotel
More than an hour and a half later
Harm walked to the coffee shop entrance and addressed the woman standing at the podium.
“I’m looking for my wife.” His mind was preoccupied and exhausted. He forgot for a moment to adjust his tone and presence. He also forgot his famous twin.
“Uh…sir…wife?... Sir, its 2:00 AM.”
“I know what time it is.” He ran his fingers through his rumpled hair. “She was here with a man, about six-five with silver hair.
“Sir, I don’t think…” The hostess was worried about a scene. Perhaps this was one of those movie star tantrums you read about in the supermarket tabloids. This could turn ugly.
“Look,” Harm caught her expression and picked up on what she was thinking. “I’m sorry, I’m Captain Harmon Rabb, US Navy. I’m not who you think I am. My wife is pregnant, and she’s with a friend of the family. He was taking care of her until I could get here,” he smiled his heartwarming smile.
“Oh, oh, yes, I see. A dark haired woman, very pretty?’” she offered, realizing her error.
“Dressed in sweats with a Marine logo?”
“Yes, I remember. She ate a full breakfast and drank two glasses of orange juice.”
Harm chuckled and shook his head. “That’s my Marine. Are they here?”
“No, sir. They left about twenty-five minutes ago. They…uh…went towards the elevators.”
“He probably took her to our room. Thanks. Say, can I get a cup of coffee? This investigation could take all night,” he added absently.
“Oh…the…uh…outside,” the woman waved her fingers towards the courtyard.
“Uh huh,” Harm agreed but didn’t elaborate.
“Let me get you that coffee,” she turned. “Do you take anything in it?” she hesitated.
“Can I get some cream on the side?” he requested.
“Of course…just take a moment,” she hurried away.
She was back quickly and Harm fished in his pocket for his room key.
“Don’t worry about it,” she waved it away. “It’s on the house. Good luck with the investigation.”
“Thanks,” he stepped back and turned. This certainly couldn’t be good for the hotel in any way. All the employees would feel the impact if business dropped. On the other hand, given the public’s morbid sense of curiosity, it could actually increase business. Especially since a big name star was involved.
Minutes later Harm slid the electronic key through the lock on the door of his suite. His first impression was that he’d left Mac with Ben partly for protection, and Ben was sleeping in the big easy chair in the small sitting area. His second impression was of a deceptively relaxed man whose eyes glittered sharply under half closed lids. The hand resting across his middle pulled back as he sat up, revealing the gun ready in his hand. He leaned forward and holstered the weapon at his back as he stood.
“She’s sleeping.” He reported, waving a hand in the direction of the bedroom’s closed door. “How’d it go?”
“Not much more than we already knew.” Harm waved Ben back to his chair then set the unwanted coffee on a sideboard and took the opposite easy chair. “Ensign Kerry Fitch, fresh out of college. Commissioned six months ago. I’ll have to find someone awake to give me her duty assignment. Driver’s license is Illinois with a rural address in the same state. Possibly the parent’s home. Single room in the hotel. Nothing to indicate she had a roommate. Plastic ID bracelet that allowed her entry to the S.P.I.E. party was still around her wrist. Could have fallen from two levels of terraces, or four levels of balconies on the upper floors. Baltimore police are going to have a fine time getting search warrants for all the possible rooms. Especially the expensive upper suites.”
“Meaning Michael Morgan’s suite.”
“Precisely,” Harm replied. “There are too many probable scenes, and people paying three to seven thousand a night for a suite aren’t going to be easily shaken. Every one of them will have an attorney on retainer or know where they can get one. A few might cooperate just out of curiosity but…”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Ben finished the sentence.
“Nor I,” Harm agreed.
“Looks like this one could come down to good old fashioned detective work,” Ben suggested.
“I’m afraid you’re right. They checked her dress pretty carefully. There isn’t a mark on it that couldn’t have occurred when she hit the ground. It’s not likely they’ll find so much as a single fiber, even if they could go into every one of those suites immediately with full forensic teams. Unless they can find DNA evidence and match it to someone…” He suspended the unlikely thought in mid sentence. “Whoever is guilty, will have cleaned up any possible evidence by the time they get a search warrant. This has happened five times now if we’re on the right track. So far they aren’t making mistakes.”
“And this hotel doesn’t have cameras like the one in Vegas,” Ben mused. “So we can’t even get a clue which elevator she took or where she got off.”
“Due to the transient nature of the chief suspects and the fact that their private jet is being prepped for tomorrow’s departure, they’ve put a rush on the autopsy, but there’s no way to assume it will tell us anything significant. The cops are itching to throw the cuffs on him, the whole crew in fact, but they truly haven’t a shred of evidence except her presence at the party. There are too many rooms at that end of the hotel where she could have been, Morgan’s is only one of them. The only absolute fact we have is the exact time she fell and the location where she landed. It will take a while to pin down precisely where everyone was at that moment.”
“That’s about the sum total of all the other investigations too, although they’ve never had the exact time of death before. The Vegas cops were pretty thorough, but they couldn’t even begin to name a suspect other than by inference. Did Mark say anything about Morgan and his assistant? I only had a minute with him before the first cruiser arrived.”
“He told me he’d just tucked them into their suite and had reached the ground floor when he got the call.” Harm raised an eyebrow at the significance of that information.
So neither of them could have been in the room.”
“Maybe, or maybe they found her already there and things happened fast.”
“That would indicate there’s at least an accomplice involved. Someone had to take her up there.”
“So it would seem,” Harm mused.
“What about the other deaths? Is there any common thread, any way we can tie them together or tie them to the production company?” Harm rubbed his forehead in fatigue and frustration.
“The best I’ve been able to put together is that each one of the victims had some kind of intense confrontation or very close encounter with Morgan at the party earlier in the evening.”
“In what way? You mean some kind of fight?”
Not exactly, although the first two were definitely less than friendly. The woman in Thailand spent the entire party getting progressively drunker and loudly telling anyone who would listen that Morgan was having sex with her for the whole year of filming. She bragged that she was making a deal to sell her diary of his ‘personal preferences’ to the tabloids for a million dollars.”
“No way to make friends and influence people,” Harm mused.
“The death in Brisbane three years ago was a male fan. He’d been seen in a very heated, alcohol-fueled, discussion with Morgan at the party and some of the staff heard him make disparaging remarks afterwards about how the big star knew so little about his character. He was threatening to go to all the internet sites about the show and expose him as a complete fraud. It was almost as though he believed the whole thing was real, like those Trekkies years ago, only worse. He’d won some kind of internet trivia contest that got him an invitation to the wrap party.”
“Surely Australia conducted a better investigation than the one in Thailand,” Harm suggested.
“Of course. The investigation was thorough enough, however, with due deference to one of Her Majesty’s most famous subjects. The autopsy determined that the actual cause of death was an allergic reaction to a barbiturate found in his system. The only witness had seen a dark haired woman escorting him from the party to the elevator after he got particularly obnoxious. Scuttlebutt was that she was attached to security, but no one could identify her.”
“And no one made a connection to the first one,” Harm mused.
“Right. The first death wasn’t even taken into consideration at that time. As I said before, that one was nearly a hundred miles into a Southeast Asian jungle. The nearest town was small and more ruled by the police than protected by them. They were peacekeepers and thugs, not trained investigators. They talked to a few people who had seen the woman drinking and decided a stupid European woman had gotten drunk and staggered off into the jungle. They shipped the body off to Krabi, to their version of a medical examiner. He managed to do a blood test, but given the condition of the body when he got it, there wasn’t much else he could do. In that climate the only possible solution for the remains, was to cremate the body and ship the ashes back to England. End of story.”
“What about the third one?” Harm asked.
“Ahhh, now that’s where the pattern starts to emerge. However, it’s the only case that’s actually been closed.”
“How so?”
“It happened in Istanbul, at a very old, very grand hotel overlooking the Bosphorus. The victim had actually crashed the party by bribing a waiter to distract one of the guards. Reports have it that she was in an extremely lusty mood,” Ben chuckled. “I think one tabloid described her as crawling all over Morgan like a cat in heat.”
Harm shook his head, but smiled at the unsubtle inference.
“She was found in the water the morning following the party. Her dress was snagged by a rusty spike on the floating boat dock directly below the hotel grounds. She also had barbiturates in her system, and had apparently been pushed or fallen from the elaborate terrace above the water. The police were definitely not amused. They were very meticulous to the point of obsession. They started by detaining everyone associated with the production or the party, including the hotel staff. Naturally, the British embassy came to the rescue immediately.”
“Naturally.”
“In short order that got Morgan and his associates released, but it took a while before they let the rest of the crew go back to the hotel, and not before their rooms were searched thoroughly. They found nothing.”
“So how was it solved?”
“They found a plastic bag with traces of the same drug in the waste basket under the service bar used at the party. They arrested the bartender,” Ben commented dryly.
“Did he confess?”
“On the contrary, he protested his innocence. Claimed he knew nothing about it and didn’t even know the woman other than to serve her a drink.”
“But?”
“But they found some low life drug dealer who swore he’d sold the drugs to the bartender. After intensive questioning, of course,”
“Of course. In other words a solution that was no solution. How did they feel after the Vegas death?”
“Said it had nothing to do with them. They’d solved their crime and if western law enforcement was so hampered by their laws they couldn’t handle their cases properly, maybe it was time they had some new laws.”
“Wow! They said that?”
“Almost an exact quote,” Ben declared.
“Okay, so if we include the death in Turkey we have a pattern. If not, if by some chance they got it right, it points to a broken string of copy cat crimes that may each stand alone. The other possibility is sheer coincidence exacerbated by an unhealthy availability of drugs at the events in question,” Harm remarked.
“Could be, but it’s doubtful,” Ben dismissed the alternate theories. “The blood test for every victim tested positive for a substance that comes from a small region in Southeast Asia. It’s a rice powder that contains a trace element of ground plastic. Pharmacists in that area who mix their own prescriptions use it as a binder to stabilize hand made pills. It’s also used to cut illegal drugs originating in the area of the Golden Triangle. It was actually the rice powder the guy in Australia had the reaction to, not the drug itself.”
“So that takes us back to death number one.”
“Bingo,” Ben agreed.
“Then where did the killer hide the drugs?” a sleepy voice from the doorway asked.
“Mac!” Harm stood up. “How long have you been up? Did we wake you?”
“I wasn’t really sleeping. I heard you come in. You didn’t think I was going to miss any of this did you?”
“I would have filled you in tomorrow. You need your rest.”
“So do you and Ben. No one will think very clearly without some sleep.”
“She has a point,” Ben stood. “We can resume tomorrow,” he moved across the room.
“First, answer my question. Presuming the killer got a supply of the drug around the time of the first party and death, where did he or she keep it hidden with all of these investigations. The Vegas authorities were able to search Morgan’s rooms and the Turkish police would have turned the place upside down. Why didn’t they find anything?”
“That, little lady, is the burning question,” he allowed, patting her on the shoulder. “Get some sleep, we’ll talk tomorrow.”
He reached for Harm’s hand. “See you in the morning, Captain,” he smiled and headed for the door.
“Ben, are there photos available from these parties?” Mac asked.
“I imagine so. Anywhere there’s celebrities, there’s a photographer or two.”
“Can we try to collect whatever we can find? Maybe contact the studio, the wire services, tabloids, even the fan clubs. Maybe…”
“What are you thinking, Mac?” Harm puzzled over her thought processes.
“Maybe there was someone at all five parties, someone who wasn’t necessarily part of the crew.”
“You mean a fan? What?”
“Could be, or a news person making a story…maybe a stalker of some twisted kind. I don’t know, but it’s worth a shot,” she defended.
“You bet it is, and it’s a shot I missed. I’ll get right on it,” Ben replied.
“Get some rest first, Ben. We have the final seminar in the morning. We won’t have time to compare the photos till late tomorrow afternoon anyway,” she smiled at her friend.
“I’ll just send a few emails then hit the rack,” he smiled back. “Night,” he slipped through the door like a shadow.
Even at six foot five, when he moved like that, it was easy to see how he had functioned as a SEAL.
Harm wrapped his arm around Mac’s shoulder, turned off the light and led her back to bed.
All his efforts to protect her from this were going to be useless; she was determined to jump into the middle of this investigation. Nevertheless, he could at least make sure she had enough rest.
End part six
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