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We made a quick circuit of the main market space, Logan glancing over his shoulder continuously to make sure I was nearby and Slade guiding me here and there with a light touch on the small of my back. I felt weirdly cocooned between their combined protectiveness. It wasn’t exactly a bad feeling.
“We need to find where they keep the records,” Dexter muttered.
Logan nodded and pointed to a door on the far side of the store area. Dexter snapped photos the whole way there.
The first room we found beyond the door was clearly where the butchering happened. The huge stainless steel table had been wiped clean, but the smell of fish filled the air even thicker there. The drawers held knives of all kinds of sizes and styles, many of which I’d never seen before.
We pushed open the next door, and Slade let out a low whistle. “Jackpot.”
A long narrow desk ran along one wall, scattered with papers. Binders were stacked on a shelving unit opposite it, and more papers poked from the drawers of a filing cabinet nearby. Whoever worked out of this room clearly wasn’t the most organized person ever.
The guys immediately spread out. After closing the door, Slade flicked on the light so we could make out the writing on the papers. Dexter snapped photos of everything, Logan flipped through the binders, and Slade moved to the filing cabinet. I started sifting through the papers on the desk, hoping that whatever I should be searching for would jump out at me.
After a few minutes, I frowned. “Nothing here looks out of place. Payroll and receipts and that sort of thing. There are some shipping records, but it all sounds like fish, nothing that you wouldn’t expect to be delivered here.”
Dexter came up beside me. “I’ll keep track of those anyway. The dates might be useful later.”
“I’m not finding anything suspicious either,” Slade reported. “Employee applications, profit margins—boring.”
“Same.” Logan pushed away from the shelves and scanned the room again with a frown. Then he cocked his head. Bending down, he fished out a paper that’d been wedged way at the back of the desk behind one of its legs. He uncrumpled it avidly but then shook his head with a self-deprecating laugh. “Well, that’s not getting us anywhere. I can see why they changed the logo, though.”
He turned the torn paper around for us to see, and I realized that it was an old, dirt-smudged flyer for the Fresh Catch Seafood Market. Who knew how many years it’d been stuck behind the desk. But like Logan had said, it didn’t have the lobster logo I’d seen on the front of the store. Instead, it showed a fish that looked as if it’d just been chopped in half, separating the head end from the tail.
My gaze snagged on that image, and my pulse stuttered. For a second I just stood there frozen.
Logan’s laugh faded as he took in my reaction. “What is it, Maddie?”
I pointed at the flyer. “That—that isn’t just any fish, right? It’s got that rounded head and the whisker things… That’s a catfish.”
Slade took a closer look. “I’m no marine biologist, but I think you’re right.”
Dexter inclined his head. “Definitely. Maybe not the best idea to use a cute fish in a gruesome position. I can see why they switched to the lobster.” But he shot me a curious glance, probably suspecting that wasn’t why I’d asked.
My throat had constricted. I took the flyer from Logan’s hand and ran my fingers over the wrinkled paper. The guys waited while I groped for words.
The only words I could think for the first several seconds were Dad’s—some of the last he’d ever said to me while he’d been in the delirium of his sickness.
“My dad,” I said in little more than a whisper. “When he was sick, he got pretty out of it and started babbling about a bunch of stuff. A lot of it didn’t make any sense, at least at the time. One of the things he said was about a broken catfish. That maybe they ‘did this.’”
The guys stiffened as well, clearly catching the significance just as I had. I’d assumed Dad had been talking about the fish in the flood he’d waded through to get to the beach rental. But now… now I had to think it hadn’t been that at all. Here was a broken catfish right in front of me.
Right at the place the address in his trinket box had led us toward.
Had he realized he wasn’t just sick—that someone might have made him ill on purpose, with poison or some other means? Had the same investigation that’d brought his attention to the warehouse led him here just as it had us, and he’d suspected the people who worked out of the market had something to do with his mysterious condition?
What other conclusions could I draw? This old logo pulled the pieces together in a way that made so much more sense than him talking about dead fish he’d seen in a current of water… that had probably had nothing to do with his sickness anyway.
Certainty gripped my gut. I looked up and met each of the guy’s eyes in turn.
“He really was murdered. And he thought the people here had something to do with it. We have to find out why.”
And then we could see justice served for the man those villains had murdered after it’d been such a long time coming.
CHAPTERNINE
Slade
“Stand right in the doorway,” Dexter ordered me.
