I sat back, speechless. The man was as relentless as Inspector Javert.
‘I think I have a way to narrow it down,’ Pia said after a moment as she leafed quickly through the reams of paper David had set in front of her.
‘I don’t think we’re looking for a passenger at all. As far as I know, Charlotte wasn’t fraternizing with any of the passengers – she didn’t have time for it – and I’m sure she wasn’t being stalked, or she would have said something. So, it’s got to be a member of the officers, staff or crew, or maybe even one of the concessioners.’
‘What do you mean, concessioners? I thought everybody on board works for the cruise line?’
Pia shook her head. ‘Absolutely not. Tom and I don’t work directly for the cruise line, for example. We get our gigs through a booking agency. Tom’s immediate boss is the ship’s cast performance manager who reports to the entertainment director, that lounge lizard who introduces all the programs, acting as if he wrote, produced and directed them all himself. Our agency provides acts to a lot of the major cruise lines. We’re just one of them.’
‘And all the shops are concessions, as you probably guessed,’ David cut in.
‘I figured that,’ I said. ‘Like duty frees everywhere, stamped out with a cookie cutter. Frankly,’ I added, ‘I don’t get it. I can buy my Courvoisier just as cheaply at the liquor store back home in Annapolis.’
‘Not in the market for diamonds?’ Pia teased. ‘Or Chanel No. 5?’
‘I’m not the Chanel type. With my husband, it’s splash a smidge of Eau de Bifteck behind my ear and he’ll follow me anywhere. But, seriously,’ I said, ‘if you don’t actually work for the cruise line, why are you tending the bar at the Oracle?’
Pia blushed. ‘They were short-handed – the regular girl is confined to her cabin with a stomach virus. They asked for volunteers, I was available, and…’ She winked. ‘They pay me extra.’
I noticed that David was drumming his fingers lightly on the table. Taking the hint, I got back on message. I rested my forearms on the table and leaned forward, giving him my full attention. ‘So, to summarize. Charlotte was a youth counselor on Voyager and spent almost all of her time while on board in Tidal Wave, right?’
Pia was quick to confirm this fact. ‘Except for the early morning hours – and sometimes even those were taken up with staff meetings – Char had practically no time on her own.’
‘Therefore, it’s reasonable to assume that whatever information she’d stumbled on had to do with the teen center. Do you agree?’
David nodded and laid his hand on the sheaf of papers that still lay on the table in front of Pia and pulled it back. ‘As I said, this is a printout where I’ve marked everyone on Islander who I know was also on Voyager. In the teen center, that narrows it down to Wesley Bray, who now manages the Tidal Wave – although he was just a youth counselor back then – one of the other youth counselors, and the overall supervisor, the Activities Director, Ethan Hines.’
That was a new name to me. ‘Pia, do you know Ethan Hines?’
She shrugged. ‘Just to say “hi” to.’
I wondered if I’d seen him hanging around the Tidal Wave. ‘What does he look like?’
‘Medium height, five-eight or five-nine, brown hair in a buzz cut to cover up the fact that he’s going bald. Looks like a Mormon missionary, if you want to know the truth.’
I didn’t remember seeing the guy, but wanted to learn everything I could about the folks in charge of the place where Julie went missing. ‘What does an activities director do, exactly? My only frame of reference is Julie McCoy on The Love Boat.’
Pia looked puzzled, and then I remembered that she probably hadn’t even been born when The Love Boat was popular on television. ‘Basically, they are in charge of making sure everybody has a good time,’ she said with a shrug.
That covered a lot of territory, I thought.
I turned to David. ‘Earlier, Pia was telling me that during one of Charlotte’s voyages, a girl, a fifteen-year-old, was drugged, abducted from the teen center and raped. Did Charlotte ever mention that incident to you?’
‘Yes, she did. When the ship docked in Montego Bay, she called me. At the time the girl, Noelle Bursky went missing, Charlotte was on a white-water rafting expedition in the rainforest with a bunch of kids, but it upset her all the same.’ David bent over, fumbled in his briefcase and pulled out a manila folder. ‘This incident was reported in the Florida Sun Sentinel,’ he told us while thumbing through its contents. ‘Damn it, I have it here somewhere. Well, never mind. The gist of it is that the girl was drugged, raped and then stashed in one of the lifeboats. The parents were party-hearty types – didn’t even notice their daughter was missing until hours after the rape – so by the time they reported it, she’d already come to and climbed out of the lifeboat. The girl had the good sense to flag down somebody and report the incident, but when she got to Security, she couldn’t remember anything about the attack – it was all a blank between the time she drank a Coca Cola in the bar and the time she woke up in the lifeboat early the following morning. Nobody was ever accused. The girl had something of a reputation for being a cock tease – I beg your pardon, Miss Fanucci – so her interrogation was emotionally brutal. The family disembarked in Jamaica, hired an attorney, but eventually they declined to pursue the matter, saying they wanted to save their daughter the embarrassment of a court trial. Char was pretty steamed about that.’
As David told the story, I was staring at the etched glass doorway, thinking it was possible that the same person abducted both that poor fifteen-year-old girl and my niece, Julie. Both girls had been drinking sodas in the ship’s teen bar, and both had no memory of the attack. Julie wasn’t a cock tease, as David had so crudely put it, but what if the attacker had been scouting for victims, had observed Julie getting drunk on Sex on the Beaches with the Crawford boys in the bar and figured she’d be a vulnerable target?
If so, Julie had been extremely lucky. Somehow, she had managed to escape. Why had the rapist not followed through? Had he lost his nerve? Or had the crime been interrupted?
I turned to David. ‘You have reams of paper in that briefcase, David. You know there have been previous assaults. Do you have any statistics on how many girls have been sexually assaulted while hanging out in the Tidal Wave area on Phoenix Cruise Lines?’
‘I was more interested in the statistics on persons overboard, of course, but all those numbers are hard to come by.’ He adjusted his reading glasses, flipped over a couple of pages and ran his finger down a multi-columned table. ‘Between October 1, 2007 and September 30, 2008, there were one hundred and fifty-four sex-related incidents on board cruise ships, twenty-eight of them against a minor, and of those, four – or about fourteen percent – were on Phoenix ships.’
Fourteen percent of an industry total seemed like a lot to me. ‘What about since 2008?’ I asked.
David considered me over the top of his eyeglasses. ‘Ah, that’s where it gets difficult. Because of last-minute changes to the wording of the Cruise Vessel Security and Safety Act of 2010, comparable data simply isn’t available.’
‘That’s crazy,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t the public have a right to know? If I were taking a kid on a cruise, I’d certainly want to be able to check out the safety record of the cruise line I was considering.’ I shuddered. ‘We never dreamed that Julie would be in any danger.’
‘I filed a Freedom of Information request in 2011, but when I finally got the reports, all helpful information had been redacted.’ David leaned forward, resting his elbows on the table. ‘The act requires that cruise lines operating in and out of U.S. ports report all alleged crimes to the F.B.I., and that the Coast Guard maintain that information in a public database.’