When the boat tilted slowly to the starboard side there was no doubt. Someone had stepped on board.
My heart started to pound so hard that for a moment I thought I might have a heart attack. I heard footsteps moving slowly across the upper deck as I glanced over at the port side window, but all I could see were tiny reflections of light in the falling rain.
The footsteps stopped for a moment but then crossed directly over my head. There was another pause, and then I knew someone was slowly descending the steps. A shadow appeared in the narrow strip of light under the cabin door directly in front of me.
I moved my hand to the side and slid it down between the cushions of the armchair. It came to rest on the barrel of my Smith & Wesson .38 pistol. I could feel its cold, hard steel on the tips of my fingers.
Closing my eyes again, I took a deep breath. This wasn’t exactly the craziest thing I had ever done, but it was definitely right up there in the top ten. For some reason, though, I felt okay. I thought to myself, No matter what happens, I’ve done the right thing.
I heard the cabin door swing open, and I raised my eyes.
Standing in the doorway, silhouetted by the light shining down from the dock, was Mrs. Harwick.
She didn’t see me at first. She fumbled around in the outer pocket of her shoulder bag and then pulled out a small yellow flashlight. When she flicked it on, the light pointed directly at my face. She jumped back, and her hand flew up to her mouth, stifling a scream.
I said, “Mrs. Harwick, it’s Dixie.”
“Oh God! Dixie, you scared me to death. What are you doing here?”
I said, “I brought the letters here to hide them. Didn’t August tell you?”
She put her hand over her heart and tried to regain her breath. “He did. That’s why I’m here.”
“But I told August I would give them to the police in the morning.”
She said, “I know, Dixie, but I came to get them. When the police read those letters, they’ll know why Kenny Newman killed my husband. He wanted revenge, and he wanted money. But I’m worried about you. They already think you and Kenny are lovers. They’ll think you were involved somehow, and I don’t want that. I should hand them over myself.”
I said, “You think it was Kenny?”
She nodded. “I do. I’m sure of it.”
I leaned over and pulled the package out of my backpack and handed it to her.
She held it to her chest. “I’m going to take this to the police right now. The sooner they have it, the better. In the meantime, you should go home. You look like you could use a drink, and it’s late. I don’t think we’re safe here.”
As she turned I said, “Mrs. Harwick. Do you want me to bring Charlotte back home now?”
“Oh, Dixie, I’m really not much of a cat person. Maybe your cat kennel could find a good home for her?”
I nodded mutely. I had more or less expected her to say that, but it still made me a little sad to hear it out loud. Charlotte had really been Mr. Harwick’s cat.
She turned toward the steps, but I stopped her again. “And you knew your husband was Kenny’s father?”
She sighed and looked back at me. “I did. He never told me, but I figured it out long ago.”
I could feel my heart pounding out of my chest, and for a second I worried she would actually hear it. I said, “I remember something you told me the first time we ever met. We had walked out to my car, and you were telling me about checking the water in the fish tank. Do you remember? You said fish seem like such strong creatures, but given just the slightest chemical imbalance, they can wind up dead at the bottom of the tank.”
She had an exasperated look on her face. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because when I found that little plastic bottle of butorphanol, which I’m sure has your fingerprints on it, I wondered if you hadn’t planned on killing your husband for a long time.”
Her eyes turned to narrow slits. “How dare you. How dare you accuse me of such a thing. I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You found your son’s supply of butorphanol, and you took some of it. That’s what he meant when he accused Becca of stealing something from his room.”
Mrs. Harwick leaned against the doorway of the cabin, and I was reminded of that first day I met her, when she stood with her arm on the back of her neck in the doorway of the living room and looked so beautiful and elegant.
“Oh, my,” she said. “You’re such a smart girl, aren’t you? And then what happened?”
I could feel myself trembling, but I held on to the arms of the chair. I didn’t want her to see how terrified I was. “I think Mr. Harwick did tell you he was Kenny’s father. In fact, I think he even told you he was going home to meet with Kenny the night he died, and I think you went home with him. You must have hid upstairs and listened. You heard their entire conversation. You heard your husband say he wanted to give his fortune to Kenny. You heard him say his stepchildren were useless. Then, after Kenny left, you came downstairs and had a drink with your husband. I imagine you might have been arguing about Kenny. At some point, when he wasn’t looking, you poured that vial of butorphanol into his glass.”
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 k
ill 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.
She said, “It’s not fair how you lost your family. Believe me, I have an idea of what that feels like. So, I get it. I just wanted to tell you that.”
She turned and walked away. I sat there for a few moments. I wasn’t completely sure what the heck she was talking about, but it did dawn on me that seeing someone punished for wrongfully ending someone else’s life felt good.
Really good.
I picked up my phone and punched in Ethan’s number.
He answered on the second ring. “Umm, isn’t it a little late?”
I said, “Remember tonight when you said to call if I needed you?”
“Yeah?”
I said, “I need you.”
27
A light fog had risen up after the rain had stopped, but as I drove home I barely noticed it since my brain was already in a fog of its own. To be honest, I think I was in a state of shock. I couldn’t help thinking about Mrs. Harwick. When she had pulled that poker out and stirred the burning embers in the stove, there had been a look of real fear in her eyes, but more than that, there was a look of certainty. She seemed driven, as though there was no doubt in her mind that what she was doing was right and that there were no other choices.
Had things gotten so twisted in her head that she really believed she needed to murder her husband in order to protect her children’s security? Or perhaps it was never Mr. Harwick that she loved, but his money, and she wanted to keep it all for herself. I remembered with a shudder that she’d mentioned that Mr. Harwick was her second husband and that her first husband had died unexpectedly. I wondered if somebody shouldn’t look into that.
I pulled into the curving lane that leads down to my house and slowed to a crawl. I didn’t want to wake anyone up. Ethan’s car was parked under the carport next to Michael’s, but of course Paco’s was gone.
The Special Investigative Bureau was probably still booking August, and I had a feeling they had a lot of questions for him. I thought of Corina and how nervous she’d looked getting on that private plane. I knew why now. There had been a sleeping bird in that purse she was carrying. That’s why August had handed it to her so gently. If she was the courier that was cooperating with the police, I wondered if she’d been caught in the sting as well or if she’d turned herself in voluntarily. I hoped it was the latter.
I’d get Paco to tell me. Or at least I’d try. He can be a tough nut to crack sometimes.
As I pulled into the carport I saw Ethan waiting at the bottom of my steps. He came over and opened the door of the Bronco, and when I stood up he hugged me. We just stood there for a long time, not talking, but then it all came pouring out of me and I told him everything. How I’d found the package of letters that Kenny had told us about. How when I saw that bottle of Butorphanol and the taxi receipt, I’d realized that Mrs. Harwick was probably not as grief-stricken as she was pretending to be. How she had drugged her husband and rolled him into the pool and had planned on framing me. He listened to the entire story and didn’t interrupt once, not even when I got to the part about waiting in Kenny’s boat with my gun hidden in the cushions next to me and the police hiding out nearby. He didn’t say a word. He just listened.
Have I mentioned that I like that in a man?
When I was finished with the whole story, I fully expected to hear a lecture about never putting myself in that kind of situation again, or how I should have let the police handle it, or what would have happened if, blah blah blah. Instead, he merely nodded with an impressed expression on his face, as if he’d just watched me hit a baseball out of t
he park.
“Nice job, Dixie.”
He walked me over to the steps with his arm around my shoulder. I was thoroughly exhausted, but luckily this time he didn’t need to carry me up.
When we got to the top, Ethan said, “Looks like somebody left you a present.”
Sitting on my doorstep was a small paper gift bag, tied shut at the top with a scallop-edged pink ribbon.
I put my hands on my hips. “Did you put that there?”
“No. I wish I could take credit for it, but I didn’t. Any other guys I should be worried about?”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Come on.”
“No, seriously, I got here right before you did.”
“Really?”
I knelt down and picked up the bag. Then it hit me.
I said, “Oh, no. I bet it’s from Michael. He was teasing me earlier, and I got mad.” I handed it to him and pulled my keys out. “He’s so sweet. I was going to apologize to him in the morning, but he beat me to it. Open it up. Knowing Michael, I’m sure it’s something good to eat.”
I dropped my backpack just inside the door and collapsed on the couch. Ethan walked over to the kitchen counter and pulled the pink ribbon off and rustled through the tissue paper inside.
He said, “Cynar. Nice.”
He pulled out a wine bottle with a red cap and a picture of a green artichoke against a red background on the label.
I said, “What the heck is Cynar?”
“It’s really good. It’s made out of artichokes.”
“Ick! Artichoke wine?”
“No, it’s liqueur. It’s kind of bitter, but sweet, too. Tasty!”
It figured Michael would have gone out and bought me some strange, fancy liqueur. He knew damn well I’d be just as happy with some homemade brownies or a six-pack of beer, but he’s always trying to get me to develop a taste for more sophisticated things. I felt like I recognized the label on the bottle, but I was pretty sure I’d remember drinking something made out of artichokes.
Ethan tossed a card on my lap. “Here.”
The Cat Sitter's Cradle Page 22