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wanted to get away from Berger, I started up another conversation to quiet the accusations in my mind. “It’s a good thing you decided to search farther east. We were the only boat over there. Never would have found him before nightfall if not for you.”
    He shrugged. “It was just a hunch.”

    It was almost eight o’clock by the time we were finished with the Key West detective who questioned us about how and where and why we’d found the body. His name was Lassiter, and while he was built like a bodybuilder above the waist, he had one of the most extreme cases of bowleggedness I’d ever seen. He wore his iron-gray hair in a crew cut, and I would have had an easier time picturing him in the tight clothes of a motorcycle cop than in the ill-fitting suit and tie that he kept tugging at.
    “I don’t understand it,” he said. “Why the hell anyone would think it’s entertaining to go out on a little bitty board when it’s storming. I’m from Nebraska.”
    “Have you been in Key West long?” I asked.
    “Long enough.”
    “Because that wasn’t really a storm,” I said. “Just our usual strong winter winds.”
    He shrugged. “Been here about twenty-two years. That don’t change how I think, though. Wind’s blowing like it was today, I don’t go out in the water. Fact, I never go out in the water. Hate the water. I don’t even know how to swim.”
    I wondered briefly why he had come here and stayed on in this place that was surrounded by water, but I didn’t ask. I felt tired, too weak to really care about this cop and his chatter. I took the card he offered with his cell phone number scrawled in black ink on the back and said good night. I had an errand to see to, an errand I dreaded.

    Berger offered to run me back out to my boat since I didn’t have my dinghy ashore, but I told him no thanks and assured him I would find a way back to my boat later. Once out on Caroline Street, I flagged a cab and gave the driver the name of the Stock Island boatyard where the Power Play was hauled out. The yard watchman let me through with a look of sympathy. Word traveled fast in these islands. I suspected he already knew the skipper of the Power Play was dead.
    The boat looked like a debutant in a bikers’ bar, propped up in the dirt among the shrimpers and fishing boats that made up the rest of Robbie’s clientele. Bright lights illuminated several boats where workmen continued their jobs in the dark. I stood in the shadows a moment, wondering if she knew yet. If not, I was about to destroy her world.
    I climbed the wooden ladder propped against the aft swim step and called out to see if I could raise anyone. The young man and woman who peered down from the bridge deck identified themselves as Drew and Debbie, the mate and stewardess, and they invited me into the main salon saying they would be right down.
    The Sunseeker is really a production yacht, if you can call any vessel that sells for more than five million dollars such a thing. The layout is pretty standard on all of them, and I had towed one up the river before. There wasn’t anything particularly outstanding on Ted’s yacht from my point of view. There was the usual bar just aft of the inside steering station, the round table booth up by the windshield, and the opulent salon aft before exiting onto the dining deck area. The sleeping cabins were belowdecks, the crew aft, the captain’s cabin below the galley. The formal dining table was exactly the same as the one on the other boat I’d towed, and this one had the same dory-shaped coffee table. So much for the thought that you’d get anything very special for your five million. It was up to the buyer to customize, and aside from the huge flat-screen monitors on almost every bulkhead, it looked like Berger hadn’t paid much attention to the furnishings.
    Yes, Drew said, when he and Debbie arrived in the salon wearing matching navy shorts and white Polos with the name Power Play stitched over the