Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
Publisher: Amazon
ISBN-10: B00K4KDL3O
Type: Fiction
Pages: 247
Copyright: May 3, 2014
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Climb on board an exciting, if murderous, cruise through Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands. In “The Origin of Murder” Roger and Suzanne’s dream vacation turns into a nightmare as they share a cruise ship 600 miles offshore with a murderer. The body count increases almost as fast as the clues.
Roger and Suzanne take a vacation cruise through the Galapagos Islands, 600 miles west of Ecuador. Suzanne finds a dead body with a couple of bullet holes in its back floating in the Pacific Ocean and we're off to solve another deadly mystery. Among the suspects is a treacherous travel agent with an eye-opening secret, a cheerful couple of bird watchers from Germany, a happy honeymooning couple, two sensual sisters from San Francisco, two recent retirees from Australia working through their bucket list, and two middle-aged Montevideo residents seeing the wonders of the world. Lurking in the background behind the scenes is a mysterious Ecuadorian general. One reviewer says, “A fast-paced, exciting mystery I didn't want to set aside till finished... A great continuation of the series!” Free to download from Kindle Unlimited or Prime.
Excerpt
The crew member tending the outboard engine on the rubberized Zodiac craft picked up a dozen tourists and our guide from the lowest deck, which was just a short step above the ocean level of the cruise ship. The Zodiac ran as a shuttle service between our large cruise ship and whichever island we would be visiting that morning or afternoon. With more than 100 passengers on the cruise ship, the Zodiac driver kept busy ferrying groups of about a dozen each trip to and from the islands.
The outboard motor was large and powerful, the Zodiac itself was pretty light, and the sea was calm, so our trip of about 500 meters to the beach landing should have taken us less than 10 minutes. This particular trip took a lot longer since we had to stop and pick up the dead body that Barbara Kaufman and Suzanne spotted floating face down in the Pacific Ocean less than 100 meters from the beach.
As our rubberized ferry chugged towards our planned wet landing just off of the white coralline beach of Darwin Bay, Barbara Kaufman was enjoying the close-up view of the ocean alongside the starboard side of our boat. The water was quite cold and quite clear, so it was easy to see to the bottom where all sorts of sea life were hanging out. “Slow down!” she hollered in Spanish to our driver in the back of the boat. “There’s something big floating in the water over there, about 50 meters out that way,” she continued, speaking to the boat driver in Spanish, pointing towards a shape in the ocean.
I was surprised at Barbara’s fluent and almost native Spanish. When we first met in Quito, both of the Kaufman sisters had given us the impression that they had minimal survival skills in Spanish, but not much more language proficiency than restaurant menu items and bar drinks. Maybe some of the helpless tourist pose both of the sisters affected was geared to attracting macho males on this trip, rather than indicating the real thing. In any case, it was hard to make fun of the obvious ploy since it certainly seemed to be working with Raul Vonhorst.
“It looks like a human body to me,” added Suzanne, who was sitting right next to Barbara towards the front of the boat. I should mention Suzanne’s peculiar knack for discovering dead bodies, either when she was with me or on her own. This was her first Ecuadorian corpse as far as I knew, to join the ranks of previous Paraguayan, Uruguayan, and Bolivian bodies she had discovered in Montevideo, Uruguay and Los Angeles. It was a very good bet that if the thing in the water looked like a human body to Suzanne, we had a mysterious murder victim floating in the Pacific Ocean near our boat.
The driver slowed the boat and did a wide turn to bring the port side of the Zodiac alongside the shape. He shifted to neutral gear alongside the body and asked Bruce and me to pull the body into the boat as carefully as we could. Bruce, who was sitting alongside me, handed Robert to Suzanne to hold as well as she could given the bulky infant-sized life jacket with M/S Santa Cruz stamped on it Robert was wearing. Bruce took the bottom and I took the top as we heaved the body over the low side of the Zodiac and onto the floor of the craft. In a few seconds the lifeless body lay inelegantly in a broadening puddle of water in the bow of the Zodiac while most of the passengers scampered towards the stern as if they might get infected with dead-person germs by proximity to the inert corpse.
The deceased was wearing jeans and a dark blue woolen sweater with a crew neck. As we pulled it up into the boat, it became obvious that the body was that of a woman with long dark hair who was probably in her mid- to late-thirties. She had a pretty face and a well cared for body in pretty good shape. Several of the passengers recognized her as having been one of the tourists on our cruise ship.
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