several corridors and a staircase to reappear outdoors on C deck, even though the crew had been told to stay inside until the weather improved. There was a blind spot on the ship, a corner of C deck with no cameras. On the security footage, she turned a corner and disappeared from sight. The same cameras recorded Geoffrey Bell’s route, thirty-five minutes later, as he walked the same corridors to the same corner of C deck and stepped into the blind spot. He was out of sight for five minutes before the cameras captured his return, but Vincent didn’t appear on security footage again, on the ship or anywhere on earth. Bell told the captain he’d gone looking for her but couldn’t find her. The captain reported that he was unconvinced by this, but there were no witnesses, no body, and no evidence. The first stop after her disappearance was Rotterdam, where Bell walked off the ship.
“It goes without saying,” Miranda had said, in their initial phone call, “but of course no police force is going to investigate this.”
The closest country to her disappearance was Mauritania, but she’d disappeared in international waters, so it wasn’t actually Mauritania’s problem. Vincent was Canadian, the captain of the ship was Australian, Geoffrey Bell was British, the rest of the crew German, Latvian, and Filipino. The ship was flagged to Panama, which meant that legally it was a floating piece of Panamanian territory, but of course Panama had neither the incentive nor the manpower to investigate a disappearance off the west coast of Africa. It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.
* * *
—
Leon didn’t meet Michael Saparelli until he was aboard the plane to Germany. Two minutes before the cabin doors closed, a flushed and out-of-breath man in early middle age came in with the last few straggling passengers and dropped into the seat beside him. “Security was crazy,” he said to Leon. “I don’t mean crazy as in insanely rigorous, I mean crazy as in actually insane. They were manually inspecting sandwiches.” He extended a hand. “I’m sorry. Hi. I’m Michael Saparelli.”
“Pleased to meet you. Leon Prevant.”
“You were a road-warrior type, weren’t you?”
“I was, back in the day.” I used to barely notice that I’d crossed an ocean.
“I couldn’t do it, personally, on any kind of regular basis. Me, my idea of a perfect weekend? Not leaving my house. Anyway. What do you see as your role in all this?”
But a flight attendant had appeared to take their drink orders, so there was a pause while Saparelli ordered coffee and Leon ordered ginger ale with ice.
“Just an observer, in answer to your question. You conduct the interviews, I’ll sit there and watch.”
“Right answer,” Saparelli said. “The only kind of partner I can stand is the silent kind.”
“I get that,” Leon said, as affably as possible.
Saparelli was fumbling around in his bag. He was carrying the kind of messenger-style bag that Leon associated with twentysomething men in Converse sneakers on the Brooklyn-bound subway trains, but then he realized that he’d been away from New York City for so long that the twentysomething hipsters of his memories would be middle-aged by now. They’d turned into Saparelli.
“I did some digging into Geoffrey Bell,” Saparelli said. He’d produced a notebook filled with minuscule block handwriting. “Seems like no one did a background check when he was hired.”
“Aren’t background checks standard?”
“Yeah, they’re supposed to be. Someone dropped the ball. Anyway, I got a local contact to pull arrest records, and seems there was a history of violence back in Newcastle. Nothing horribly sinister, but he had two arrests for bar fights in the year before he went to sea.”
“That seems like something we should have caught,” Leon said.
“Ideally, right? We can only hope that’s the worst we’ll find.”
They didn’t talk much after that. Leon spent the flight reading through the file again, as if he hadn’t already memorized it.
He studied the photo from Vincent Smith’s security badge. He just wasn’t sure. It seemed plausible that Vincent Alkaitis and Vincent Smith were the same person, but the glamorous young woman on Jonathan Alkaitis’s arm in old photos on the Internet bore only a passing resemblance to the unsmiling, middle-aged woman with short hair in the security photo. It was incongruous that she could have gone from being Alkaitis’s wife to being a cook on a containership, although if they were the same person, perhaps incongruity was the point. If he’d been Alkaitis’s spouse,