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

“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.”