“Jesus!” Mollenkamp pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes, then took a deep breath. “Oh, God!” He lowered his hands. “Okay. Okay. It’s called Schtupernatural-dot-com.”

“Are you serious?” The words escaped before I could censor them. “Is it what it sounds like?”

He looked at me, his mouth clenching in a rictus. “Yeah. It’s a forum where anyone can post about sexual encounters with . . . things that aren’t human. Photos, too. And, um, want ads, I guess you’d call them.”

My tail lashed in a violent reaction. “That’s sick!”

“I guess.” He shrugged wearily. “What do you want? It’s human nature to wonder about it.”

The chief pushed a notepad across the table toward me. “So what happened?”

I fished a pen from my purse and jotted down Schtupernatural .com with a note to confirm the spelling.

Avoiding our eyes, Matthew Mollenkamp stared at the ceiling. “We used to check it out, try to guess which shots were real and which were Photoshopped. It was kind of a running joke. One day, a couple of months ago, there was a post about a Schtupernatural opportunity in Pemkowet.”

Bit by bit, as the chief questioned him, the details unfolded.

The gist of it was that for three thousand dollars, the bartender at the Wheelhouse with the spiderweb tattoo would provide the buyer with a phone number and a money-back-guaranteed opportunity to fuck a real live mermaid.

La Sirena, the mermaid. It really had been right in front of me all along.

“You spent three thousand dollars on a phone number?” I murmured.

Mollenkamp lowered his gaze to give me a sickly look. “Yeah. Me and Ron. You met him last night. Three grand apiece.”

“Was it worth it?” I asked.

He swallowed hard and shook his head. “No. No. It was . . . horrible. But we got what we paid for.”

“And you told Thad Vanderhei and the others it was worth it,” I said quietly. “Didn’t you?”

He nodded. “What else was I supposed to do?”

I couldn’t even begin to reply.

“Walk us through the sequence of events,” Chief Bryant suggested. “Step by step, starting with the phone call.”

Although I had high hopes, unfortunately Matthew Mollenkamp’s candor was circumscribed by the reality of his limited information. He’d made the call and spoken to a man who called back after confirming that Matt and Ron had made the required payment to the bartender. A midnight rendezvous in the parking lot of the East Pemkowet public beach was arranged. The Wheelhouse matchbook with the phone number served as proof of their identity and their admission ticket to the main attraction. From the parking lot, Matt and Ron were blindfolded, ushered into a truck, and driven to an unknown destination.

There, their business was concluded. And the less said about that, the better.