Archie beckoned Heil over and found Mary Riley’s card and handed it to him. “Call her,” Archie said. “Explain the situation.”

“And what if she says no?” Heil said.

“Then they all stay at your house,” Archie said.

“I’m on it,” Heil said, and he took a few steps away to make the call.

“I need to ask all of you some questions,” Archie said to Nick. Nick and his friends looked at Archie. Archie tried to figure out a way to phrase what he needed to know without sounding like a lunatic, and then decided that there wasn’t one.

“This is going to sound a little crazy,” Archie said, “but that cop I mentioned earlier? He was poisoned by an octopus.”

The man with the bushy beard said, “Octopuses live in the ocean, dude.”

Great. A marine biologist. “That is true,” Archie said. “We think someone was carrying an octopus, maybe in a plastic bag. This isn’t the first poisoning. And they’ve all happened by the river.”

“So,” Nick said slowly, “you want to know if we’ve seen anyone with an octopus?”

“Pretty much.”

One of the women frowned. “There’s that guy who always fishes down on the dock. He has a bucket.”

“He’s there every day,” the other woman said. “Has been for years. I’ve never seen him catch anything.”

“Like you’d want to eat anything out of this stinking river,” Bushy Beard said.

“What’s his name?” Archie asked.

“We don’t talk to him,” Bushy Beard said.

“I don’t think he speaks English,” the first woman said.

“Is he Mexican?” Archie asked.

“No, like Estonian or something,” the other bearded man said. He fiddled with one of the braids that sprouted from his chin.

“Estonian?” Archie said.

“I knew a guy whose family was Estonian,” the man explained. “He sounds the same.”

This wasn’t really going anywhere. “Anyone else?” Archie could hear Heil on the phone, his voice plaintive.

“This time of year,” Nick said, “unless the weather’s weirdly nice, it’s mostly the hard-core outdoorsy types. They run, you know. They don’t carry extra stuff. Maybe an iPod. And their clothes are skintight, so we’d see anything they had on them. Some of the dog walkers are still out. They’ve got pockets full of plastic bags to pick up after their dogs.”

“You get the lunch people,” the second woman said.

“The lunch people?”

“The people who work downtown,” she said. “Some of them walk at lunchtime instead of eating. You can always pick them out because they have on the stupidest sneakers.”

The others nodded in agreement.

“You haven’t seen anyone acting strangely?” Archie asked.

“People who walk instead of eating lunch are strange,” the woman said.

“Besides that,” Archie said.