Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 105, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 640 & 641, March 1995

Floater by William Beechcroft

Men who choose to develop a female sleuth as a central series character are still relatively rare in our field. William Beechcroft is trying it for the first time in the following story, which introduces police detective “Kat” Curtci in a homicide case that may make or break her...

When he caught sight of the object in the canal behind his house, Sam Wolff thought it was a manatee, not an uncommon visitor this time of year on their Southwest Florida barrier island.

“I don’t think so, Sammy,” Myra Wolff said, her butterless melba toast arrested halfway to her mouth. “It’s not moving.”

They had been enjoying breakfast in the cool of early morning on the canal-side upper deck of their piling house. Now their attention was on the large gray object nudging their dock down in the canal.

“Tide’s coming in,” Sam observed. “It’s a dead manatee, drifted in from the bay.”

He set down his coffee mug, pushed back from the glass-topped table, and walked down the rear steps to the sparse lawn.

Out on the dock, he felt as if he’d been hit with a jolt of electric current. He stared down at a human body, face down, dressed in gray slacks and long-sleeved shirt, its left shoulder gently bumping the corner dock piling.

“What is it, Sam?” Myra called from up on the deck.

“Don’t come down, honeybun. It’s a floater.”

He was surprised at his word choice. Too much TV. “A body, Myra. Some unfortunate fellow drowned.”

“Omigod!” Myra shrieked. “Should I call Nine-One-One?”

“Oh, yes indeed,” Sam shouted back. “But use the regular police number. It’s not an emergency now.”

Thirteen minutes later, he had a yardful of people.

First to appear was Katherine “Kat” Curtci, promoted to detective just a week ago. She had lucked out on this one. Assigned the undignified task of checking out a weenie-wagger report at the lighthouse end of Malabar Island, she had been muttering to herself that this was a uniformed cop’s job when the radio erupted.

The island’s thirty-person police department was normally concerned with toad-in-the-toilet and bare-bosoms-on-the-beach complaints. A response to an I-found-a-body call was a detective’s plum. When it came, Kat Curtci was only a quarter-mile from the Wolffs’ palm-shaded gray piling house.

Out back in the canal was a body, all right. Kat stripped off her shoes, hiked up her skirt, and worked her way among the mangroves down the sandy bank to the right of the dock. She waded the ten feet out to the corpse. The high-tide water was warm as blood this overcast August day, but she shuddered as the ook on the canal bottom squeezed up through the mesh of her pantyhose. The stench was impressive, but she knew that three minutes of bad odors numbs the olfactory nerves. She could hack it for those three minutes, then the Wolffs would be admiring the macho lady cop.

Largely for Sam Wolff’s benefit up on the dock where he gagged into the handkerchief he’d clamped over his nose, she probed for a pulse. The body’s neck felt like clammy chicken skin. Beneath its thick water-soaked black hair, the back of the skull appeared to have been battered inward. She checked the hip pockets of the work pants for a wallet. Nothing.

Scavengers had already worked on the ears and fingertips. All she could determine at this point was that the body was male, black hair moderately long, and he was dressed in a gray work shirt and trousers. Reaching underwater around the hips, she forced her fingers into the front pockets. She felt a round, hard object in the left one. A ring. She held it against the overcast sky. Thin gold with a lilac-colored square-cut stone. About two carats of amethyst, she guessed. What a peculiar item to be the only find in a dead man’s pockets.

With the ring clenched in one hand, Kat stood, her five feet ten elevating her chin to dock level.

“You said you spotted him just a few minutes ago, Mr. Wolff?”

“Yep. Myra and I had just started breakfast when I—”

The howl of multiple sirens drowned out the rest of what he said. The sirens cut off abruptly, doors slammed, and here came at least a third of the Malabar PD, all crowding onto the dock until there was no room for its owner. The scene of the crime had become police property.

“Come up out of there, Bela. This one is mine.”

Kat glared up into the doughy face of Detective Ellis Duckworth. Wouldn’t you know, she thought, that he’d be the detective assigned. No love had been lost between them. When Duckworth had heard about her Transylvanian heritage, he’d chortled, “Don’t go on night patrol with Bela LuCurtci.” She had surveyed his ballooning waistline and said brightly, “Thar she blows!” Thereafter he was known to the whole department as Moby Duck.

“I thought you were all tied up in the rash of burglaries we’ve been having.” She stepped back from the body and waded toward shore.

“This obviously takes precedence,” Duckworth said in the tone that he usually reserved for ignorant civilians.

She climbed back up the canal bank, pulled her shoes on wet feet, and noted with distaste that her skirt was water-soaked to the waist.

“The policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” Detective Duckworth chortled. He thumbed back the brim of his straw planter’s hat. “Cole Porter, I think.”

“Gilbert and Sullivan,” she grumped, looking back at the corpse in the canal.

“Whatever. How deep is it down there?”

“No need to get your toes tainted, Moby. Male Cauc, about thirty-five—”

“Drowned.”

“Nothing in his pockets except—”

“Robbed, then drowned... except what?”

She handed him the ring. He shrugged and shoved it in his pocket. “Back of the skull shows massive damage—” she managed to get out before Moby butted in again.

“Hit over the head, robbed, then drowned—”

“For God’s sake, Duckworth, stop hopping to conclusions and listen to me!”

Sunk in fatty folds, his little eyes glittered. “Got to ya, didn’t I? Go on back to your unit and put in a call for the county M.E.”

“You put in the call, Moby. You already said it’s your case.”

“C’mon, let’s have a little teamwork.”

“Yes,” she agreed eagerly. “Let’s. I want to work on it with you.”

He snorted. “In a year, maybe. When you know something. I don’t need—”

“Time of death? Two or three days ago.”

He fanned himself with his wide-brimmed hat, exposing a lot of bald skull. Then his bright little eyes almost disappeared in a squint. “Based on what?”

“A body sinks till internal gases form. It’s summer here in the subtropics, and gas forms in two to three days. Up comes the body.”

“Could have been floating for a couple of days after it came up.”

“Unobserved in a canal or out in the bay? Come on, Moby. It would have been spotted long before now by the daily geezer fishing armada. Huh uh, he came up last night and the tide drifted him in here.”

“Call the M.E.,” Duckworth growled, and he turned his back. Hadn’t listened to a word she’d said, Kat thought. Then as she trotted toward the driveway, she noticed he was furiously scrawling in his pocket notebook. Maybe he had listened.

When she returned to dockside a few minutes later, Duckworth had begun to clear the area of extraneous police uniforms. He talked the chalk-faced Wolffs back up to their rear deck then turned to Kat.

“You, uh, might as well stick around, see what the M.E. has to say.” That was offered in such an offhand way that she half expected him to dig a self-conscious toe in the lawn and give her an aw shucks shrug. Instead, he glared at her, his wide mouth compressed to a razor slash. A body language “Well?”

“Thanks,” she said. “I will.”

Cal Hewlett, the county medical examiner, looked up from the body that he had rolled over then back again to its original facedown position. Kat had noted that the wiry little M.E. with feathers of white hair curling front under his Orioles baseball cap had spent most of his time fingering the head wound.

“Typical floater,” he announced. “Best guess, he’s been dead two days, three at the most. More likely three, considering the condition of the nails. ’Bout to fall off. No ID on him.”

Duckworth gazed down from the dock. “Any chance of prints?”

“Nope. Scavengers have seen to that.” Hewlett stripped off his latex gloves and dropped them in a plastic bag. He pulled off his cap and ran his fingers through unruly white hair. “Mighty peculiar, that ding on the back of his skull.”

“How so?”

“The lacerations, Moby.”

On the dock near Duckworth, Kat suppressed a grin. The nickname had spread to the M.E.’s office.

“Thought it was a blunt-instrument job.”

“I think it is, with an added attraction. Under all that hair, he’s full of little cuts.”

“Cuts?” Duckworth stepped to the edge of the dock and peered down.

Hewlett slapped his baseball cap back in place and pulled its long bill low over his eyes. “ ’Nuff said for the moment. Fax you my report tomorrow morning, latest.”

At his rubber-topped steel desk in Malabar police headquarters, Duckworth scowled at the fax that had just rolled out of the department’s Murata. Nursing her Styrofoam cup of dense coffee at the desk in front of his, Kat had swung her chair around.

“Well?” she prompted.

“Weird,” Duckworth offered. He handed her the three-page fax. “You make anything out of that?”

Death, she read, resulted from massive cranial trauma caused by two nonpenetrating and sixteen penetrating wounds.

What in the world?

The M.E. had shaved the back of the head and found two parallel nonpenetrating injuries, four and a half inches apart and three inches long. Each was depressed into the skull a quarter of an inch.

Between them were four rows of incisions, four per row, each incision penetrating the skull three-eighths of one inch. The incisions were at approximate one-inch intervals in one direction, one-half inch intervals in the other, all within a four-inch by two-inch rectangular pattern.

“Uh huh, Bela. What do you make of that?”

“I can’t even begin to guess.”

He nodded. “Thought so.”

“And you?”

“Same. Look, I’m going over to the mainland to check possible missing persons reports. You... do whatever you can here.”

“Do I gather that I’m working with you on this thing?”

“ ’Fraid so. Not my idea. Chief McCready says it’ll get you some experience.” He raised a forefinger. “But I’m not nursemaiding, y’understand. You fiddle around on your own.”

Oh, nicely put, Moby. “Yeah,” she said through clenched teeth, “I’ll do some fiddling.”

Funny. Kat had felt sublimely confident when she was verbally jousting with Moby Duck. But now that he had, in effect, put her on her own without him here to riposte her wit, she felt as if she were about to fall facedown in the sand. She had completed an exhausting house-to-house on both sides of the canal. Half the homes were owned by winter residents and currently stood empty. The seven year-rounders whom she’d caught at home stated they had neither seen nor heard anything useful.

The sky had cleared. Now the South Florida sun beat down mercilessly. She walked from the last occupied house to her car. Dead end. Except for the peculiar configuration of the fatal wound. What could possibly inflict that geometrically perfect square of sixteen little stabs? Some New Age meat tenderizer mallet? The only such mallet she was familiar with had blunt knobs on its striking face.

She buckled her seat belt, turned the key, flipped the A/C to MAX, and backed the Plymouth out of the sand-and-shell drive. Could the odd pattern have been carefully inflicted by a crazy perp with... with maybe an X-Acto knife or a scalpel? Were they dealing with a nutso model builder? A mad doctor?

But what about the two long parallel dents on either side of the square of stab wounds? They sure put a damper on any specialized-mallet theory.

Back at MPD headquarters she pulled in just as Moby Duck was dismounting his own unmarked unit. “Anything?” she called across the roof of the car between them.

“Only missing persons listed with the county sheriff are kids. You got anything?”

“Nope. Half the homeowners are north. The other half neither saw nor heard any evil.”

“Not surprised,” he said as they walked across the parking area. “Canal’s too shallow for a body to be in it for long without somebody spotting it. Had to drift in last night, and the Wolffs saw it as soon as they went out on their rear deck.”

“We should check the tide tables,” Kat suggested.

“Done it. High tide was at seven-forty A.M., just about when the Wolffs spotted the body. My guess is that it came up just as the outgoing tide was turning and drifted on in.”

“Couldn’t have started from very far away, could it?”

Duckworth grinned. “Checked on that, too. Over at the Coast Guard station on the mainland. If he was dropped on the other side of the bay or any real distance from this island, he would have been spotted easily between there and here when he came up. Their best guess is that he was dumped in on this side of the bay, somewhere between the canal and Lighthouse Point. I took a look over there. Couple of docks go out right far into the bay, and most of the houses are empty this time of year. My best guess is that he was dumped from one of them docks, say on Wednesday.” He grinned. “So what have you come up with?”

“Zilch.” She hated to admit it, but so far, Moby Duck had done all the sleuthing.

They climbed the steps to the PD offices. He held the door for her, but she couldn’t help feeling that even that little courtesy was a backhanded way of showing her he was the prime mover on this case.

The coffee machine produced its quarter’s worth of bitter brew. She sipped the stuff absently, staring through the adjacent window at the raggedy Sabal palms that fringed the little lake out back.

Okay, so he was the prime mover, but now that she really thought about it, what had he moved? The only new data was a best guess that the victim was dumped in the bay off one of the docks between the canal and Lighthouse Point. That wasn’t a whole lot of help, was it? They’d have been better off if—

“Hey, Bela,” Duckworth called, “quit daydreaming and do something constructive. Way this thing stands now, Chief McCready’ll have us both on the carpet if we don’t produce something useful pretty quick.”

She spun around. “Speak for yourself, Moby. What you’ve got isn’t any...” Her voice trailed off. What he’d said had just twanged a subconscious memory. She made a lunge for the Yellow Pages directory in her desk drawer.

At nine the next morning she drove across the causeway without telling Moby anything. He was still hung up on tidal currents and wasn’t in a receptive mood anyway. Let him find his own leads.

All three establishments she had jotted down were on the mainland, normally out of her jurisdiction, but not in the investigation of a murder that had taken place on Malabar Island. The first was a gray cinderblock building in a weedy corner of a failed industrial park along the Tamiami Trail. McNAIR CARPET LAYERS, read a florid red and yellow sign over the entrance.

She pulled open the squeaky plywood door and stepped straight into what looked like a supply room, semi-deserted, with a desk in one corner adjacent to a restroom door. Nobody home?

“Yo!” she shouted. “Anyone here?”

A toilet flushed, and shortly a chunky man with thin sandy hair and a really terrific sunburn emerged from the restroom drying his hands on a paper towel.

“Sorry,” he muttered. “Damn boat broke down last weekend. I was out in the sun for hours before anybody came by. I think I’ve got radiation poisoning, for Chris’ sake.” He chucked the wadded towel toward a wastebasket beside the desk and focused on her. “What can I do for you?”

“Detective Curtci, Malabar Police. Mr. McNair?”

“The same.” He seemed to have taken on a sudden guardedness. “First I’d like to take a look at one of those things rug layers use. Pad on one end, kind of a gripper thing at the other.”

“A knee kicker. Sure, got one back here behind the desk.”

He bumbled around back there, then emerged with a device about eighteen inches long, telescoping steel tubes with a padded square at right angles on one end. He handed it to her and she studied the other end. Bingo! Four rows of four half-inch steel spines in a steel rectangle. Just as she’d remembered from the carpeting job she’d had done in her condo three years ago. The carpet layer had slapped the spines into the carpeting near its edge then whammed the pad with his knee. The sliding block of prongs stretched the carpet into place. She’d bet that Moby Duck had never seen one of these. His little bayside house had tile floors.

She hefted the knee kicker. Yes, it would make an efficient if clumsy murder weapon. She handed it back to McNair.

“How many companies are there in this area that use these things?”

McNair scratched a shoulder and winced. “There’s a whole lot of carpet companies, but none of them has in-house layers. They all subcontract to one of us.”

Kat pulled a notebook out of her black leather handbag and flipped it open. With her ballpoint poised, she said, “I found Yellow Pages listings for just three carpet installers. There are only three?”

“That’s right. There’s me, there’s A-One Carpets over on Gulf Road, and there’s Redhen Layers up on Riveredge Street.”

“Redhen Layers? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It’s for real. Named after the owner, Gustave Redhen. Play on words gets him remembered, but it’s the quality of work that counts.”

“How’s a carpet-laying job handled?”

“Teams of two. It’s real specialized work. I’m lucky to have three teams on the payroll.”

“Have you had any contracts over on Malabar Island in the past week?”

“Huh uh. Wish I had.”

“None of the teams was assigned over there?”

“I told you, no.”

She slipped the pen in the notebook’s spirals and put both back in her purse. “I thank you, Mr. McNair. You’ve been a help.”

He squinted up at her. “What’s all this about, anyway?”

“Just routine,” she said with a hint of a smile. She loved delivering that vapid Hollywood exit line.

A-One Carpets was in a more congested part of town, sandwiched between Kentucky Fried Chicken and Shoney’s. The little clapboard one-story building was painted a wretched flamingo pink with sea-green trim. She parked in one of the empty spaces out front, not difficult because all four spaces were empty. The day’s heat had reached the simmer level as she read the typed notice stuck on the aluminum entrance: door with masking tape: Closed for vacation, August 15–31.

That took care of A-One Carpets, unless one of the company’s teams was freelancing. She’d try to check into that if Redhen Layers — Lord, what a name — didn’t, uh, hatch out. C’mon, Kat, get real!

The place reeked of cigarette smoke. Gustave Redhen looked a lot like... Well, he was as tall as she, had a cockscomb of rust-colored hair, a scrawny neck, and he carried his beak-nosed head thrust forward with a king-sized smoke stuck in the corner of his small mouth.

“What possible interest can the Malabar police have in my little operation?” His voice was high and scratchy. The cigarette bounced as he spoke.

“Maybe none, Mr. Redhen.” Hard to say the name and keep a straight face. “How many teams of carpet layers do you employ?”

“Three. Wish I had more. Good layers are hard to find.”

She glanced around the office. Walnut-framed eight-by-ten glossies adorned the stark white walls, photos of Redhen shaking hands with satisfied clients, she presumed. She recognized one of them as a former senator. Another was the current mayor.

“You seem to have an illustrious clientele.”

“I do all right.” His beady little eyes stayed right on hers. “You’re not here on carpet business.”

“In a way, I am. Have your people done any work on Malabar Island in the past week, Mr. Redhen?”

“One job, four days ago, big one. On Strangler Fig Road, for the retired head of OT & T. Had to send a helper along with them to carry the carpeting in. More than three thousand feet of it.”

“I’d appreciate the customer’s name, Mr. Redhen.”

He walked to a green steel desk, riffled through a box of file cards, and handed one to her.

“May I use your phone?”

“Sure. Right there on the desk.”

Beside the phone was a coffee-can lid brimming over with stained butts. She pushed it to the farthest corner of the littered desk and dialed the number he’d given her.

“Mrs. Oliphant? This is Detective Katherine Curtci, Malabar Police.”

“Yes, Detective?” Mrs. Oliphant’s contralto voice was that of a woman not at all intimidated by a call from the police.

“I understand that you had new carpeting laid several days ago.”

“Yes, last Wednesday.”

“By a crew of three men?”

“There were three when they started. I went out for several hours, and when I returned, there were only two. They told me the third man had come along only to help them move the furniture and carry the new carpeting in and the old carpeting out. He wasn’t needed to help with the actual installation.”

“You left the crew in the house by themselves, Mrs. Oliphant?”

“Well, I hadn’t planned to, but an emergency came up. My daughter lives here on the island, and her son had fallen and severely cut himself. I babysat her youngest while she took the boy to the doctor.”

“And when you returned to your house, there were only two carpet men?”

“Yes, as I’ve already told you.”

So she had. Kat thanked her and hung up with her thought process in overdrive.

“Where is the crew that did the Oliphant work?” she asked Redhen.

“Back on the island. Woody and Tiny.” The cigarette joggled in his mouth. He squinted against its eye-searing smoke tendrils. “They’re installing carpet in an unfurnished spec house. Four thirty-six Paperbark Lane.”

“They’ll be there now?”

Redhen shrugged. “Should be. It’s an all-day job.”

She got out of that choking atmosphere and in the parking area took her first deep breath since she’d gone in.

The house was another piling structure. She climbed the stairs and opened the door without knocking. The gray-painted, rough-cut wood exterior belied the sumptuous interior. She could see the money, though the place was empty of furniture. Across the gymnasium-sized great room, two men banged away at their knee kickers to secure rich gold carpeting along the sliding-door access to a huge deck beyond.

“Woody and Tiny?”

On their knees, they both whirled around at the sound of her voice.

“Detective Curtci, Malabar Police.”

They crouched motionless.

“Which one of you is Woody?”

“That’ll be me.” The man on the left stood clumsily, no doubt having been on his knees most of the day. “Ed Woodworth.” He was a skinny whip of a fellow. In his late thirties, she judged. Dark hair beginning to thin. A face as narrow as Fred Astaire’s had been.

“And you must be Tiny.” The other rug mechanic was only fifty pounds shy of Sumo requirements, she thought as he struggled to his feet.

“Yeah, that’s me,” he rumbled through his dense beard. “Charles Birch. What’s the beef?”

Kat walked to the counter that divided the open kitchen area from the rest of the room and placed her open handbag in easy reach. Her seventeen-shot, 9mm Glock was the top item in there. She leaned against the counter with her right hand resting lightly on the handbag.

“Well, gentlemen, maybe you can clear up something that’s bugging me. On the Oliphant job. I’m told there were three of you at the start and just two at the finish. What happened to the third man?”

She caught their furtive glances at each other. Paydirt!

“He cut out around noon,” Woody said. “When we broke for lunch. Asked him would he want to go to the Beachwalk Cafe with us, he said no, and when we came back maybe thirty, forty minutes later, he was gone.”

Through that, Woody’s eyes were all over the room, and his blink rate quadrupled. Throw in his bouncing Adam’s apple, she thought, and you’ve got yourself a liar here.

“Does that square with your version?” she asked Tiny.

“Huh? What ver— Oh yeah. Sure does.”

“What was the man’s name?”

“Ganelli,” Woody offered, “or Gianelli... something like that.”

“You didn’t know him?”

“He came from one of those labor pool places. We picked him up in town. No, we didn’t know him. He was a temp. Lotta them are drifters. They come and go.”

Kat let that simmer for a long silent moment. Then she said, “If the three of you came in the truck I saw parked outside, and this Gianelli disappeared around noon, how did he get back to the mainland?”

Another silence. Then Woody said, “Hitched a ride, maybe?”

It came out as a question. These two were simply atrocious liars. She gave them another long, silent stare. It produced a lot of shifting footwork and throat clearings on the other side of the room.

Then she offered what she hoped came off as a warm and friendly grin. “Oh, come on, you two, you just aren’t very good at the cover-up game. What really happened that day at the Oliphants’ house?”

Woody stared at her like a man about to bolt. Tiny hunched his hairy face down between his huge shoulders like a man about to charge. Kat’s fingers slid down for a reassuring touch of the chubby Glock.

“This Gianelli,” she said, “was he a white man, medium build, black hair?”

“That’s about right.” Woody’s voice sounded as if he were strangling.

“He floated into a canal yesterday. With a bash in the head that looks exactly like the working face of those knee kickers there. When I take them in for testing, I wouldn’t be surprised to find traces of blood on one of them.”

Tiny’s glittery little eyes held hers for a long moment, then he astounded her. His huge legs gave way and he sank to the floor with a moan, his hands thrust out palms-up in a really weird supplicating gesture

“Jeez, Woody; I tol’ you—”

“A nightmare,” Woody blurted. “That’s what it was. Still is.”

Kat’s heart pumped furiously. “What happened?”

“Gianelli was a goddamn thief,” Woody burst out. “That’s what happened. Som’ bitch took labor jobs to case houses, or if he could, swipe stuff while he was on a legit job. That’s what he did there soon’s the old lady left.”

“That’s the God’s truth,” Tiny boomed. “I caught him about to lift stuff in the bedroom. Outta a jewelry box half an hour after the missus left.”

“Then?” Kat prompted.

“Then,” Woody said with a little shudder, “he pulled a gun on us. Said to back off and let him get out of there with what he’d grabbed, or he’d plug us both. I kid you not, it was a real bad situation. Him in the bedroom with a gun on Tiny. Me in the great room with only a knee kicker in my hand. So I—”

Kat shot out her arm, hand up in a stop signal. “Hold it right there. We’re going to make this nice and clean. ‘You have the right to remain silent...’ ” She recited the Miranda warning.

“Hell with that!” Woody’s eyes were huge in his narrow face. “I gotta get this off my chest, now I’ve gone this far. I never felt so bad in my whole life like I did these past coupla days.” He swallowed hard. “It was like this, see? Tiny backs out of the bedroom into the great room. Alla time, Gianelli — or whatever his name was — has a damned huge forty-five on him. So when Tiny backs through the door and spots me, he starts talkin’ to the guy. To keep his attention, you know? Then when the guy comes through the door, I’m flat against the wall. As soon as he’s all the way in, I rap him with the knee kicker.”

“Some rap,” Kat said. “You stove in the back of his skull.”

“That made us both sick, sick and scared. We panicked. Rolled him in a piece of the old carpet and stowed him in the truck until quittin’ time. Then we drove out to the east end of the island and waited till it got dark.”

“Sure takes a long time to get dark,” Tiny said.

Woody shot him an impatient look. “When it did, we carried him out on one of the docks and dropped him in. Figured the tide’d carry him out into the Gulf.”

“And the gun?” Kat asked.

“Threw that in, too. A diver could find it.”

“What you didn’t know,” she said, “is that a body first sinks, then comes back up a few days later. You’re both under arrest,” she said conversationally.

Woody’s voice was suddenly scratchy. “For murder?”

“For various,” she said. “Sit down, both of you. I’ve got to cuff you. Regulations.” She fished in her handbag. She had only one pair, so she cuffed Woody’s skinny wrist to Tiny’s huge one. Neither one, to her immense relief, showed the slightest sign of resistance.

Then, on impulse, she nodded toward the phone on the divider. “Is that hooked up?”

“Guess so,” Woody said. “Realtor sits in here on weekends.”

She couldn’t resist. When Moby Duck answered his phone in the squad room, she said sweetly, “Any progress?”

“Damn right!” he boomed. “Got an assist lined up from the FBI to help us figure out the wound pattern. That’s a big step forward. So what have you done?”

“Oh, found out what the murder weapon was, though I think this case could end up being a matter of self-defense.”

“Jeez, what was the weapon?”

She ignored him. “Also determined who the victim was — and he just might have been the series burglar you’ve been beating your brains out to find.”

“Wha— Who—”

“And I know who did him in. There are two of them.”

Silence, then, “Come on, woman, give!” Duckworth bellowed.

“Read them the Miranda, and I have them shackled here with me.”

“Where?” Duckworth sounded as if he were strangling. “How?” Another silence. Then he said, much quieter, “You kidding me, Detective?”

“Would I ever kid you, Moby?”

His voice sounded as if he’d just been hit in the gut as he asked, “Do you need backup?”

She gave him a silvery chuckle. “That could be helpful, Detective Duckworth. We’re at Four thirty-six Paperbark, and we’ll wait.”