Mrs. Harwick laughed incredulously. “This is ridiculous. What are you even saying?”
“Butorphanol is a narcotic. It acts very quickly. You must have led your husband out to the lanai. Once the drug took effect, either he fell into the pool or you rolled him in.”
“And why in the world would I do that?”
“Because you didn’t want to share his money. Because you were looking out for your own children.”
She shook her head. “You stupid woman. I was in Tampa that night.”
I said, “That’s what I thought, too, until I saw that receipt, the one in the bag with the butorphanol. The receipt was for seventy-nine dollars, which is probably about what a taxi would cost from Sarasota to Tampa.”
She shook her head. “You’re crazy. You have no idea what happened.”
I kept my voice level. “Mrs. Harwick, the taxi driver wrote an address on that receipt. I recognized it from the files your husband gave me with your contact information. It was the address of the hotel you stayed at with your husband in Tampa. 1146 Del Rio Way.”
A smile played across her lips. “You certainly have it all figured out, don’t you?”
I said, “No, not everything. There’s some kind of code written at the bottom of the receipt. It says ‘230A1P.’ I didn’t know what that meant at first, but I knew it wouldn’t be too hard for the police to talk to the taxi company and get their records, especially since it’s all computerized these days. If I was a taxi driver, I think I’d definitely remember driving a beautiful older woman from Sarasota to Tampa in the middle of the night. Say around 2:30 A.M., and I think ‘1P’ stands for ‘one passenger.’”
She put her hand on the clasp of her shoulder bag, and I immediately had the feeling that August wasn’t the only one in the family that carried a gun.
She said, “Dixie, I’m afraid you’re going to be very sorry you ever met me.”
I said, “Mrs. Harwick, you should know that when I heard your car drive up just now, I called the police. They’ll be here any minute.”
She was still holding the packet to her chest. She glanced around the room. I wondered if she wasn’t thinking about running, but then she casually reached over and dropped the packet into the wood-burning stove. The flames leaped up around it, and the cabin filled with the smell of burning plastic.
She turned to me calmly and said, “When the police arrive, I’m going to tell them that you and your lover, Kenny Newman, called me here tonight to blackmail me. I’m going to tell them that you first tried to blackmail my husband. You threatened to expose his true identity. When he wouldn’t cooperate, you drugged him and pushed him into the pool. I’ll tell them you told me to take a taxi back to Tampa or you’d kill me, too, and that if I ever breathed a word of what happened that night, you’d kill both my children.”
She drew a metal poker out of the wood bin and stirred the ashen remains of the packet around in the red-hot embers. “Roy was good at making money, but he wasn’t a very smart man. If anyone ever found out that he had faked his own death, he would have gone to jail for insurance fraud and tax evasion. He would have lost his position at Sonnebrook, not to mention his stock, and my family would have been left with nothing. But apart from all that, Roy wasn’t a very good person. I think you figured that out pretty quickly. So yes, you’re right.”
She laid the poker down on top of the stove and turned to me. Her eyes were sparkling like two black marbles, and her lips curled into a smile. “I killed him. Of course, without this packet, it’s just your word against mine. And I do wonder who the police will believe. Me, the grieving widow of one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the country? Or you, a small-town litter-box cleaner, who got kicked off the police force for mental instability.”
I said, “Mrs. Harwick, I don’t need that packet.”
She leaned forward slightly. “And why is that, sweetheart?”
“Because I took everything out of it before you got here. That one was just stuffed with old newspapers.”
Her face went white.
Shadows rose up behind her, and as she turned, Detective McKenzie and two deputies moved swiftly down the steps with their guns drawn and pointed directly at her.
McKenzie said, “Mrs. Harwick, that’s good enough. Please drop your bag and raise your hands over your head.”
Deputy Morgan moved into the room with his gun still fixed on Mrs. Harwick as she lowered her purse down to the ground. He glanced at me. “You okay?”
I felt dizzy, like someone had just hit me in the head with a frying pan. “Yeah—but I think she has a gun in that purse.”
Detective McKenzie said, “Mrs. Harwick, you’re under arrest for the murder of Roy Harwick.”
* * *
By the time I came up out of the boat, Mrs. Harwick had already been read her Miranda rights and taken away. The whole area around Hoppie’s was surrounded with police cars, and the parking lot looked like it had been turned into a disco of flashing red and blue lights. Except instead of dance music, there was only the sound of crickets, which had woken up when the rain stopped, and the chatter from the police radio in Detective McKenzie’s unmarked sedan.
I was sitting in the driver’s seat of the Bronco, waiting for the adrenaline that had been coursing through my bloodstream for the last hour to subside. It had left me feeling like a bowl of mush, and I wondered if that wasn’t what a porcupine fish feels like after it’s spent a couple of hours all blown up and spiny. All I wanted to do was go home, have that drink Mrs. Harwick suggested, and crawl into my bed.
Detective McKenzie came up to the window and said, “I’ll need you to make a statement about everything, but I think it can wait until tomorrow. Will you be okay?”
I said, “I’ll be fine, but I am worried about one thing. I’m afraid of what August will do when he finds out what’s happened to his mother.”
She nodded. “Dixie, I should probably tell you—the special investigative team conducted a sting operation at August’s hotel tonight. They picked him up for smuggling endangered species into the country and selling them illegally. One of his couriers has agreed to testify against him, so I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that young man for a long time.”
I nodded. No wonder Paco had been so quiet whenever the Harwicks came up. He’d been in the middle of an investigation into August’s smuggling operation.
Meekly, I said, “Do you by any chance know the name of that courier?”
She smiled. “Dixie. You know I can’t tell you that.”
I did, but I also didn’t need her to tell me. I had a pretty good idea who it was.
She stuck her hand in the window and shook mine firmly. “Thank you for what you did tonight. Do you need someone to follow you home?”
“No, I don’t have that far to go. My place is just up the road.”
She nodded curtly and started to turn away, then stopped herself. “You know, people talk about you down at the station. They wonder why you keep getting involved in things like this, why you would put yourself through this kind of danger. They say it’s crazy. But I think I know why.”
I blinked dumbly at her. I hoped she would share it with me, because I had no earthly idea.