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Andie glanced through the open doorway to Righley’s room. She looked worried, as if she almost seemed to know that the call was about pirates. A sleepover at her best friend’s house would put her at ease and solve Andie’s problem of what to do with Righley with Jack out of town.
“Sure,” Andie said into the phone. “I’ll make it work.”
Chapter 45
The EC-155 multimission helicopter covered the 585 miles from Miami to Jamaica in about three hours, landing Andie in Kingston before midnight. Within minutes, she was aboard a harbor patrol boat with three officers from the Jamaican Constabulary Force, marine division. The vessel slowed to no-wake as they rounded the moonlit cliff at the entrance to the harbor. Beyond the enormous pile of boulders that had rolled down the hills and fallen into the sea over the millennium, the crime scene was aglow. It was a bright spot in the night, lit by portable light trees brought in by the JCF. The noisy generators that powered the lights hummed in the darkness.
Port Royal is a natural harbor on the southern coast of Jamaica, at the end of a ten-mile sand spit between Kingston Harbor and the Caribbean Sea. It was once the busiest trading center of the British West Indies, until a late-seventeenth-century earthquake swallowed two-thirds of the town, as if to foreshadow more seismic changes to come. The glory days of piracy ended early in the next century, with many of the marauders hanged and gibbeted at the port entrance.
Andie’s boat stopped at the site of the first gibbeting in almost three hundred years.
At the center of the lighted crime scene was a tall concrete piling that projected from the warm Caribbean waters. Chained to the pole was the victim’s body. The medical examiner’s team was taking photographs and preparing to remove the corpse from its place of gruesome display. Unlike the Boston Harbor site, where Andie had found the body almost completely submerged, this latest victim was mostly above the waterline.
“We must be near low tide,” said Andie.
“Just passed it,” said the Jamaican officer.
Two other Jamaican Constabulary vessels were anchored closer to the piling. Scuba divers below the surface searched for any relevant evidence the killer may have left behind, intentionally or unintentionally. Andie’s boat rafted up alongside the larger of the two JCF marine division boats. She was about to board when her cellphone rang. It was the Miami ASAC, Arnie Greenberg.
“Andie, I need you on a videoconference right now,” he told her.
The conference was with an FBI computer forensics specialist in Miami and Ian Jeffries, an assistant commissioner of police of the JCF’s operations and crime division. JCF forensic teams had recovered the victim’s cellphone from his apartment in Kingston, and Jeffries had called upon the FBI to assist in the analysis of data collected. Andie joined the conference in progress. The three men appeared in small rectangular boxes on her screen, but the larger image was something Andie didn’t recognize.
“What am I looking at?” asked Andie.
Greenberg responded, “It’s a screenshot of a lengthy text message recovered from the victim’s cellphone. We think the message was from the killer. The text message is gone, but the screenshot the victim took of it was still in his photos. It was taken roughly thirty-seven hours before the local news station received an anonymous call saying that a body could be found chained to a piling in the harbor.”
“Same time lag between time of death and tip to the media as McCormick and Dwyer. But there was no text from the killer or screenshot in those cases.”
“We can talk about why that might be,” said Greenberg. “But first, read it.”
The screenshot was all words, no images. Andie enlarged her LCD screen and read to herself:
Congratulations. You have been chosen at random from among this piracy website’s many users to be entered into this week’s Piracy Lotto. One lucky pirate will win this special prize.
“Ye and each of ye are adjudged and sentenced to be carried back to the place from whence you came, thence to the place of execution, and there within the flood marks to be hanged by the neck till you are dead, dead, dead, and the Lord, in His infinite wisdom have mercy upon your souls. After this ye, and each of ye shall be taken down and your bodies hung in chains, to be thrice washed by the rising tide. Pirates, be ye warned.”
Andie stared at the screen a moment longer.
“Andie, did your screen freeze?” asked Greenberg. “You still there?”
Her reaction—stunned—had only made her look frozen.
“Still here,” she said. “I have a lot of thoughts. But let me start with a question. Why wasn’t the text message retrievable from the victim’s phone or the cloud?”
The tech expert replied, “I’m still investigating, but the text message was sent automatically to the victim’s phone when he visited a piracy website. Apparently, it contained some form of malware that caused it to self-destruct shortly after it was read. But this victim was able to preserve the substance of the message by taking a screenshot of it.”
“So, it’s possible that Shannon Dwyer and even Tyler McCormick got the same message,” said Andie. “They just didn’t have the presence of mind to take a screenshot. Is that a fair statement?”
“It is,” the tech agent replied.
The wheels were turning quickly in Andie’s head. “Has anyone done a Google search on some of these archaic-sounding words?”
“Not yet. We’re only three minutes ahead of you on this,” said Greenberg.
Andie did a quick search on her phone with the opening few words: “Ye and each of ye are adjudged and sentenced to be carried back to the place from whence you came.”
“I got a hit,” she told the group, scrolling through the webpage. “The exact language quoted in this text is from the sentencing of fifty-two pirates in April of 1722.”
