Darkest Journey (Krewe of Hunters #20)(86)

Once everyone settled down, Alexi began to play softly as Charlie talked. As she neared the end, she saw the ghosts of the men who had been on the Journey the day it changed hands for the final time.

As the show went on, Charlie kept looking over to where Jude was sitting. Several times he got up and moved to the doorway at the back of the room to speak on the phone.

Her father had yet to appear, and she found herself growing more and more restless.

When their last song was over, she dodged the fans approaching the stage to congratulate them and hurried over to Jude.

“My dad—”

“Your dad is fine. He’s in his cabin, with the Do Not Disturb sign on the door, but I asked the steward to disturb him anyway, just to ask if he needed anything. He answered and said he was fine.”

Charlie looked at Jude and shook her head. “He’s not fine. I know my dad. He would have been here tonight if he were fine. Jude, please, we have to go to his cabin.”

“Okay. Get Clara and Alexi. We’ll go now,” Jude told her.

The four of them hurried toward the exit. It wasn’t an easy escape. People kept stopping them to ask questions or just pass on a compliment. The whole time, Charlie’s fear for her father was growing. Maybe it was just as irrational as not wanting to sleep in her cabin, but rational or not, it was eating away at her insides.

Finally they were out of the dining room and heading down the hallway. Charlie saw the Do Not Disturb sign on her father’s door and ignored it, hurrying ahead to pound on the door. There was no answer, not even when she called, “Dad? It’s me, Charlie.” She turned back to look at Jude. “We have to get in there!”

“Do you have a key to his cabin?”

“No, but—”

“Never mind, not if you’re that worried.”

Jude turned sideways and slammed his shoulder against the door, which splintered at the impact.

He proceeded to kick in what was left of it.

As he did, someone in the cabin screamed, high-pitched and startled.

*

Ethan, Thor and Randy sat head to head as they went over the video surveillance from the Journey. They ran through it several times in real time, then had the tech speed it up and slow it down, searching through the hundreds of people who’d come and gone that day.

“I don’t see a single member of the movie crew,” Randy said. “No one who could’ve left that message on the mirror!”

Ethan hadn’t seen anyone, either. He leaned back, puzzled. The lipstick message hadn’t been a joke; it had been a serious warning. And there was no reason for anyone to go after Charlie unless they were convinced she knew or had seen something that could put them at risk. Like Selma Rodriguez—who hadn’t known anything at all.

Except that Albion Corley had planned on meeting with Jonathan Moreau.

“Ethan, it’s possible someone paid someone else—maybe an employee on the Journey—to write that message. The Journey is old, but she’s had her doors reconfigured for key cards, and key cards are the easiest thing in the world to duplicate,” Thor pointed out.

“Yeah, it’s possible,” Ethan agreed, then leaned back, perplexed. “Why do people kill?” he murmured.

“Sometimes,” Randy said, “I think they kill because they’re just rotten somewhere in their souls. Sometimes from hatred. Or love. Jealousy.”

“Greed,” Ethan said. “Greed’s a big one. We’re meeting with Saul Gideon, CEO of Gideon Oil, in Baton Rouge tomorrow. The guy isn’t from Louisiana. He’s a Texan. And he wasn’t against meeting with the Sane Energy people. If his company made the change the Sane Energy people were going to propose, it would have cost them a great deal of money in the short term. But the meeting was never scheduled—no one even talked to Gideon about it—and we know, because HQ checked his whereabouts, that Saul Gideon didn’t come here and bayonet two old friends in reproduction military uniforms.” He turned to the tech. “Let’s run the video one more time, please.”

Ethan watched again and asked the tech to slow down when they hit late afternoon, right about the time the tour buses were returning to the Journey.

“There!” Ethan exclaimed.

“There, where?” Randy said, puzzled.

Thor pulled his chair closer and pointed at the screen. “I see it, Ethan. Officer Johnson, run back and slow it down there...right there. Go frame by frame.”

“Start where that family of three goes through the checkpoint, and then there’s a lull,” Ethan said. “And then— There! Looks like a kid, but...”

“That’s not a kid, that’s a small woman,” Thor said.

“And I know who it is,” Ethan said flatly. “Jennie McPherson, who was supposedly on her way to have dinner at the café with a bunch of her coworkers when we last saw her.” He stood up. “We have to get back to the ship.”

As Thor and Randy rose, there was a tap on the door. Ethan opened it to reveal an officer standing in the hall.

“We’ve got a match on some of the prints we found in Charlene Moreau’s cabin,” he said.

*

Charlie couldn’t have been more stunned to see the small blonde standing in her father’s cabin than if Godzilla had been there.

Jennie McPherson looked both startled and horrified. She was staring at them like a deer caught in the headlights.