Page 107 of Backtrack

She shook her head. “Could be a coincidence.”

“Nope,” Cutter said. “You know how I feel about those.”

“Me too,” Ajit said without waiting for an explanation.

“Why would he followme?”

“Bart Preston’s arrest was very public,” Cutter said. “I imagine this Bouchard saw it and wants to know what we’re up to.”

“I should have let him catch me,” Lola said. “Then I could ask him what he’s up to.”

“Both Bouchard and Preston have Texas addresses,” Ajit said. “We’ve established several interactions between the two over the past twenty-four hours at various spots around the ship.”

Lola picked up her phone, thumbs poised and ready to type. “What’s his date of birth?”

Ajit flipped to the next sheet of paper in the folder. “Here it is—7 November 1980.”

Lola texted the information to Nancy Alvarez, the Anchorage police officer assigned full time to the Alaska Fugitive Task Force. She was already doing full workups on Bart Preston and Steven Cruz.

Cutter flipped through the file—a scant four pages. “Anyone else appear to be involved besides Bouchard?”

“Not that we can see,” Rishi said, full of youthful exuberance, less jaded by the world.

Her text message sent, Lola leaned on her elbows against the arm of the couch in a rigid plank, stretching her calves and working her abs as she spoke. It wasn’t so much to burn off nervous energy as it was to utilize free moments for some kind of workout. Cutter was used to it, and it didn’t seem to bother the security officers.

She glanced up at Ajit from her plank. “I read somewhere that you guys have a way of tracking the whereabouts of every passenger on the ship?”

“Some ships do,” he said. “We have the capability of searching facial recognition and key card use, but no tracking in real time as you would with an AirTag.”

“I don’t know if that makes me like this ship more or less,” Lola said.

“It might not matter,” Rishi said. “We’ve found four other instances of missing video—twenty-six minutes in total. It would be possible for someone to scrub the tracking data as well.”

“Any line on who’s mucking around in your system?” Cutter asked.

“We are narrowing that down,” Ajit said. “I have set a little trap, so to speak. With any luck your immigration authorities will escort them off the ship as soon as we reach Juneau—whoever they are.”

“After we talk to them.”

“Of course.” Ajit nodded at the computer tablet in Rishi’s hand. “Find Bouchard’s location.”

Rishi tapped the screen a few times. “Key card logs show him in his cabin. I assume you’d like to meet with him.”

“Let’s hold off on that,” Cutter said. “I’d prefer to watch him awhile. Could be he’s meeting with someone else in addition to Bart Preston. We need to suss out what his intentions are. Why he’s after Joellen—”

“Or if he even is,” Lola said. “After her, I mean.”

Cutter closed the folder and leaned back in the sofa. He had the urge to get the piece of cedar out and start carving but held off for the time being.

“Tell me about Steve Cruz. Do you believe he fell off the ship?”

“That would be extremely rare,” Ajit said. “But not impossible. Some twenty-five people go overboard from cruise ships each year. Most of those falls are not accidents, and there are almost always witnesses.”

“But someone could fall,” Cutter said. “Or be pushed over, and no one see them go?”

“That also would be extremely unlikely,” Ajit said.

“But not impossible,” Lola said.