As all the fish retreated to the far corners of the tank, I put both my hands on the back of the mermaid’s head and tilted her forward. I felt a momentary jab of pity when I saw the lid of the treasure chest lift up with her. I thought, No wonder she just sits in here all day. I’d do the same thing if I had the lid of a treasure chest fused to my butt.
I brought her up a little farther so that she was balanced on her own against the front wall of the aquarium, and then I pointed my flashlight down into the open treasure chest.
Inside was a black rectangular package, wrapped in what I thought at first was twine but then realized were rubber bands. I reached behind me and brought one of the wooden poles off the wall and lowered it down into the tank. As carefully as possible, I looped its hook under one of the rubber bands and then gently drew the package up out of the water.
The whole thing had taken less than a minute. I spread a towel on the floor and laid the dripping package down on top of it. It was light, about half a pound. The rubber bands were wrapped around what looked like a black plastic garbage bag, and I thought of Kenny and how he had described his father wrapping a change of clothes in a plastic bag and carrying it into the ocean.
Carefully, I took the rubber bands off one by one and laid them in a neat pile on the floor next to the towel. Before I looked inside the bag, I glanced up at the tank. The porcupine fish was floating aimlessly in the middle of the tank, puffed up like a beach ball and covered in sharp white quills.
I whispered, “Sorry about that.”
Slowly, I opened up the package and pulled out two clear plastic bags. They were the gallon-sized type with watertight zippers across the top.
Inside one of the bags was a collection of envelopes, exactly as Kenny had described them. They all had a post office box here in Siesta Key for the return address, and they had all been sent to the same person: Daniel Imperiori—Kenny’s real name. There were probably about ten envelopes total. The other bag had only two things in it. One was a piece of paper, like a receipt, and the other was a small, amber-colored plastic bottle with a white label.
I brought the plastic bag up closer and squinted at the tiny print on the bottle. It read BUTORPHANOL, 40 ML.
I should have known.
I never aced a chemistry test in high school, and I don’t have a medical degree, but I have spent a lot of time around animal clinics, so I know a thing or two about animal medications. Vets use butorphanol every day. It’s powerful and relatively tasteless. It’s mostly used for sedating animals before surgery, but I had a feeling it might come in handy in other situations as well. For example, if you needed an animal to be quiet for a few hours. Like, during a plane ride.
It all started falling into place. Those drugs Mr. and Mrs. Harwick had found in August’s room—he wasn’t using them on himself, and he wasn’t dealing them, either. He was using them to sedate the birds he was smuggling into the country, to keep them quiet so they wouldn’t be discovered. That was why the bird Joyce and I found in the park had been knocked out. It hadn’t flown into a window. Corina had drugged it.
I knew it didn’t take long for a narcotic like butorphanol to take effect. Corina had probably squeezed it into the bird’s mouth with an eyedropper in the taxi or the bus on her way to the airport in Guatemala. By the time she boarded the plane, the bird would have been out like a light, sleeping away in a drug-induced stupor inside her handbag.
I turned the bag around and read the faint blue machine-printed text on the receipt inside: ALLIED TAXI, $79. At the bottom of the receipt was a Tampa address, written with a purple felt-tip pen in round, childish handwriting, followed by a short sequence of numbers and letters, “230A1P.”
Calmly, I folded everything back together with the rubber bands and slid the package down into my backpack. I switched off the light in the hidden closet and pulled the sliding door closed. My mind was racing at about a thousand miles per hour. I was so distracted that it wasn’t until I’d gotten back in my Bronco and was rolling down the cobblestone driveway that I realized I’d forgotten to put the mermaid back down on her treasure chest, and I had left the wet towel lying on the floor in the access closet behind it.
But it didn’t matter. I had more important things to do.
First, I dialed Detective McKenzie. She answered as if it was the most normal thing in the world to get a phone call in the middle of the night.
“Dixie, thanks for returning my call. I have a question about when you tried to revive Mr. Harwick.”
I interrupted. “You want to know if a large amount of water came out of his lungs when I pressed on his chest.”
“Uh, yes. How did you know that?”
I said, “Because if he drowned, there would have been water in his lungs, but there wasn’t. That means he was already dead or had stopped breathing before he went into the pool. And they found a massive amount of narcotics in his body, right?”
“Yes, they did.”
“I know. It was butorphanol, wasn’t it?”
“Dixie, what the hell is going on?”
“Detective McKenzie, I think I know who killed Mr. Harwick. I don’t have hard proof of it, but I think I know how we can get it. I’m on my way to Kenny’s boat at the dock behind Hoppie’s Restaurant right now. Can you meet me there in ten minutes? I can explain everything then.”
There was a long pause on the other end, and for a second I thought the call had dropped.
I said, “Hello?”
McKenzie said, “Okay. Listen to me. I don’t know what you’re up to, and I’m not sure I like it, either. But I’m going to meet you at Hoppie’s in ten minutes, and I don’t want you to do a goddamn thing or talk to anyone else until you’ve explained everything to me first. Understand?”
I gulped. “Yes.”
She sounded relieved. “Thank you. I’m on my way now.”
Before she hung up, I thought about the gun that August carried in his glove compartment and said, “Oh, Detective McKenzie?”
“Yes?”
“Bring backup.”
26
After meeting with Detective McKenzie, I waited in the sleeping cabin below the main deck on Kenny’s houseboat. I had situated myself in a musty old armchair next to Kenny’s bed. The cabin was completely dark except for the glow from the fire I’d built in a small wood-burning stove in the corner and a faint patch of light spilling in under the cabin door from a lantern on the dock. There was a small kitchenette next to the stove, and lined up along the countertop was a row of canned tuna and several bags of dried pasta.
Hung about the walls were various coils of rope, fishing rods, maps, hooks, and bags of shells. There was a battery-operated radio hanging by a string tied around its broken antenna, and there was a huge, yellowing map of the Gulf. Tacked in the middle of it was an old photo of a young couple, a man and a woman, sitting in a swinging porch chair. The caption read, “On the patio with Danny holding Tiger.” There was a little boy sitting on the man’s lap, and he was beaming at the camera. Cradled in his arms like a baby was an orange tabby kitten.
I took a deep breath and reached into my backpack. Pulling out the business card that August had given me the day I met him at the Harwick house, I thought about how cocky and sure of himself he had been. I’m sure he fantasized that if he ever got a call from me, it would be a booty call. Never in his wildest dreams would he have imagined the call I was about to make.