Three long hours later, the line of vehicles waiting to exit the ship had dwindled and finally stopped.
But none of them had contained Billy Wheatley.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
West got on the phone to the other agents, by the foot passenger exit, but they’d seen nothing. The only people who had used the gangway to exit were two little old ladies, and they’d spoken to them, just in case they were a seventeen year old kid in disguise. They weren’t. Then she saw Black waving his arms at her from inside the steel cavern of the ferry’s interior.
“He’s still on board. His car’s here.”
Issuing instructions that the other agents should continue to monitor the ways off the ferry, West hurried aboard, and caught up with Black by a single car that remained inside.
“They take license plates when they come aboard. This is the plate he registered when he made the booking. He must have seen us stopping the cars. He’s still aboard.”
“OK.” West looked around, relieved to have an answer to the boy’s whereabouts. She nodded. “OK, we’re going to have to search it then.”
Black relayed the news to the ferry operator that their return sailing was going to be delayed even longer, West redeployed the other agents to search the ferry. Within twenty minutes a ten strong team were working with the ferry staff, going through all the different decks examining any space that a seventeen year old could hide. Half an hour later, another thirty agents joined the search.
In the meantime an FBI vehicle recovery truck drove onto the boat and lifted Wheatley’s car onto its back, wrapped it in tarpaulin, and took it away to the Agency’s Chelsea offices. West watched, her phone ringing every ten minutes as the ferry company implored her to finish the operation and let them get back to work. Outside, on the dock, she could see the lines of cars and trucks, their journeys interrupted by what she was doing. And still the search teams found nothing.
In the end they did three complete sweeps.
“He’s not on here Jess,” Black said, after the third was complete. They were standing on the open air deck, an iron railing the only thing protecting them from the ferry’s slab side drop down sixty feet into black harbor water.
“How sure are you? There’s a hundred places to hide on this boat.”
“And we’ve searched them all. He’s not here.”
West suddenly snapped. “Then where the hell is he?” She ran her fingers through her hair, and turned to her partner, meaning to apologize, but there was no need.
“Look, we know he got on. And we got here before the ship docked. We searched every car, so there’s no way he got off early. And we have searched every inch of this boat, and he’s not on it. So that leaves one option…”
She breathed hard, and then lifted her head to look at him. “What’s that?”
“You notice the TVs in the café? Tuned to a local news channel. It’s been on the whole time we’ve been searching. Three times while we’ve been on board, it’s shown the appeal for information. So if he was on here, he’d have seen it.
“What if the security guard’s death was an accident? What if this Billy isn’t such a bad kid, like you’ve been saying, and this whole thing just went horribly wrong? What if he saw we were on to him, and he knew there was only one way out?” Black looked up and outwards, back towards the open water where the ferry had come from. Then he looked down again, at the sixty foot drop to the water below.
“What if he just jumped off?”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
West insisted on one final search of the ferry, before calling the agents off and releasing the boat back to the control of the operator, which let the frustrated crowd of new passengers back on. But still she stayed, from a position that allowed her to watch both the bow doors and the foot passenger gangway. Yet still there was no sign of a teenager trying to sneak off. Eventually, seven hours delayed, the ship’s horn blared out, and with a volley of shouts, the mooring lines were cast off. On board there were still four agents, with instructions to blend in with the passengers, and keep an eye out just in case Wheatley had somehow managed to evade the searches of the ship. And when it did finally dock on Lornea, in the small hours of the morning now, it would again be met by local police, checking every car.
West herself met Black early the next morning, at the FBI regional headquarters in Chelsea. There had been no reports of Wheatley during the night, and the ferry had finally been allowed to continue its normal operations. However, a request for CCTV images had turned up a hit. West and Black gathered around a monitor as a series of images were emailed across. They came from a camera covering the check-in booth for vehicles at the Lornea Island dock. The system was old, and mostly meant for show, to dissuade tourists who had to queue to leave the island from yelling at the ferry staff. But still, it showed a jumpy black and white clip of Wheatley’s car arriving and a lone occupant presenting a ticket. West froze it when the face was briefly upturned and pointing towards the camera.
“Is that him?” Black had a print out of the photograph they had used on the appeal for information in his hands, and he looked from one to the other. “It could be,” he answered his own question.
There was a slightness of stature, to both images, and after replaying the clip several times, they concluded that if it wasn’t Wheatley, it had to be his twin brother. West stared at it a long time, trying to reconcile how the slight,
