The Poisoned Koi

The koi was blue and white with a single black spot behind its left gill, and it had cost me forty-two thousand dollars. I had not told my wife that part. I had told her it was a rescue from a dealer who was closing his store. That was technically true. The dealer had closed his store because federal agents seized most of his inventory, and the fish I brought home was the one specimen he had been keeping alive on a hotel room desk with a battery-powered aerator. Its name was Cassius, and it was, according to the only toxicologist I trusted, one of four known specimens of a species that concentrated tetrodotoxin in its liver at fourteen times the lethal dose for a human adult. The dealer had purchased it from a collector in Macau who had not known what he was selling. I knew what I was buying. I bought it because the collector was my client, and because the case was built on proving that a certain shipping company had moved illegal wildlife across three oceans, and because Cassius was going to sit in my hallway in a two-hundred-gallon tank and remind me every morning that I was very good at my job. I am a forensic accountant. I work for a firm in Alder Bay that specializes in art and wildlife restitution. Most of my clients are governments, museums, or insurance companies, and most of my work is done behind a laptop. The fish was not part of the case file. The fish was a trophy, and a poisoned one, and I knew that owning it was a bad idea, and I owned it anyway. My wife, Elena, thought it was beautiful. She stood in front of the tank in her bare feet at seven in the morning with a cup of coffee and watched it move like a slow ribbon through the water. She said it made the house feel calmer. She said it reminded her of the lake house her grandparents used to rent when she was a child, which was a lie she told herself so she could sleep better, because her grandparents had never rented a lake house, and her family had never been poor, and Elena had a habit of constructing a pleasant past for herself out of things she had read in magazines. I loved her. I want to say that now, before the rest of it, because the rest of it will make it hard to believe. Her brother, Miles, had a key to our house. He had gotten it two years earlier when Elena had been in the hospital for a week after a surgery that went wrong, and he had stayed with us to help, and then he had just never given it back. He was twenty-eight. He worked in sales for a company that sold commercial kitchen equipment, and he was good at it, or at least he was good at wearing a blazer and remembering the names of the chefs he was trying to sell to. He came to dinner on Sundays. He brought cheap wine and drank most of it himself. He took things. The first thing I noticed was a set of sterling silver bottle stoppers that Elena's mother had given us as a wedding present. They were in a drawer in the dining room, and then they were not. I asked Elena, and she said she must have moved them. The second thing was a cashmere throw that my sister had sent us from Scotland, and I found it two months later in the back seat of Miles's car, which was parked in our driveway because he had come over to watch a game. I did not say anything. I put the throw back on the sofa and waited. The third thing was a pair of cufflinks, and the fourth thing was a bottle of bourbon that had been a gift from a client, and the fifth thing was a small bronze horse that had been on my desk since I was nineteen years old. I knew what he was doing. I am a forensic accountant. I do not miss patterns. What I did not know, until the night it happened, was what I was going to do about it. Elena was the only family Miles had left who still spoke to him. Their mother was dead. Their father had remarried and moved to Arizona and changed his phone number. Miles had a way of becoming the most important person in a room by being the most fragile one, and Elena had spent her whole life arranging herself around his fragility, and she was not going to stop because I found a throw in his car. The night it happened, Miles came over on a Thursday. That was unusual, because he usually came on Sundays, and when Elena asked him why he was there, he said he had been in the neighborhood and wanted to see us. He was wearing the blazer. He had a bottle of wine in his hand, and he put it on the kitchen counter without being asked, and he opened it with a corkscrew from the drawer, and he poured himself a glass, and he stood in the hallway in front of the fish tank and looked at Cassius for a long time. "That fish is worth something," he said. I was in the kitchen, cutting limes. "It's a rescue," I said. "I know a guy who collects rare fish," Miles said. "He would pay a lot of money for something like that." I put the knife down. I walked into the hallway and stood next to him. The tank bubbled. Cassius swam in a slow circle, blue and white and that single black spot. I looked at my brother-in-law, and I looked at the fish, and I made a decision that I have been living with ever since. "Careful," I said. "It's poisonous." Miles laughed. "Everything's poisonous if you eat it wrong." I did not correct him. I should have. I should have said, no, Miles, not like this, and I should have taken him by the shoulder and walked him to the door and told him that if he ever touched anything in my house again I would call the police. I did not. I picked up a lime and went back to the kitchen, and I let him stand there, and I let him think about it, and I let the rest of the evening happen. He left at ten. He hugged Elena at the door. He shook my hand, which he did not usually do. He said, "See you Sunday." He went out into the dark, and I heard his car start, and I heard it pull away. I went to bed. Elena went to bed. At two in the morning, I got up to get a glass of water, and I walked past the hallway, and I stopped. The tank was empty. Not drained, not broken, not tipped over. Empty. The lid was on the floor. The net was in the sink. The fish was gone. I stood there in the dark in my bare feet for a long time, and then I went back to bed and lay down next to my wife, and I did not tell her. Not because I was afraid of what Miles had done. Because I knew exactly what he had done, and I knew what I was going to do next, and I needed to be sure. In the morning, I checked the security footage. At ten forty-two the night before, Miles had walked out of the house with a plastic bag. Inside the bag, blurred and distorted by the plastic, was Cassius. I saved the file. I made three copies. I put one on a drive I kept in my office, one on a drive I kept in a safe deposit box, and one on a drive I mailed to my lawyer. Then I made coffee, and I woke up my wife, and I told her that her brother had stolen the fish.