The sailboat returned shortly after noon and dropped anchor in more or less the same spot. Juliet was entranced by the beauty of the little cove with the small beach, the coral outcroppings and the cool dark cave. Maybe she could have found somewhere with more marine life, but certainly not anywhere more lovely. It was pure coincidence that she stumbled onto a serious mystery. The first dead fish caught her attention about mid afternoon. The strange behaviour of an octopus, swimming near the surface and randomly changing colours, was her next clue that something was wrong. She trapped the mollusc in her landing net and lifted it out of the water. When she dropped it on the deck, instead of trying to find the quickest way back overboard, it found a way into one of the sail lockers - through probably the tiniest hole Juliet had ever seen an octopus get through.<br/><br/>Fascinated, she was about to open the locker when a mass of splashing caught her attention. Fish, racing around crazily, through the water. The behaviour reminded her of one time when she had visited her brother's house. He kept freshwater tropical fish in a tank. Juliet had offered to help him clean it. Being a diver, of course she had a waterproof watch, that she hardly ever took off, and without thinking she had plunged her hand into the tank to secure the filter, totally forgetting that just a few hours earlier she had been in a swimming pool wearing the exact same watch. Chlorine is used heavily in swimming pools to kill nasty bugs, but it is equally lethal to fish. And the chlorine that had deposited on her watch dissolved off into the tank water. The fish went frantic, racing around the tank. Juliet's brother spotted it and emptied half a bottle of  tap water conditioner in. The water fizzed for a bit and the fish calmed down.<br/><br/>And that was the same sort of behaviour to the fish in the cove. They were swimming madly, randomly. Juliet looked down, horrified, and then dumped a bucket over the side, hauled it out full of water, held it up to her nose. Not Chlorine. But it definitely smelled off.... In a way she couldn't put her finger on. She went to the sail locker and unlocked it. The octopus was curled up in a corner, apparently asleep, and a much more normal colour. She got one of her bottles of spring water and tipped some over the creature. It looked up at her and she could swear it acknowledged the gesture, actually waving a tentacle at her. She took a long drink from the same bottle and sat on the gunwale. It was cool and dark in the sail locker and octopuses can breathe a little through their skin. She Closed the lid, leaving it open a little. Juliet went and filled a cooking bowl with water from the galley, added some table salt, mixed it and took it back up on deck, popped it into the sail locker and stepped back. Sure enough her eight-legged companion slithered itself into the bowl, and blew bubbles at her. She laughed and closed the lid back down part way. She needed to figure out what was happening.<br/><br/>She had a test kit that would give indications of many major contaminants, and she worked late into the night, trying to figure it out. Not chlorine. Not mercury or lead. Gold and silver were non toxic, but she tested for them anyway, as high concentrations could lead to people trying to extract the precious metal. Someone had dumped something into the water while she had been out of the cove. She should have stayed. She felt so guilty. But so angry too...How could someone do something so brutal to such a beautiful place. She also plotted the locations of "crazy" fish and the fish that floated to the surface, Those she could reach she pulled out of the water, mostly so they would not cross-contaminate the food chain with whatever it was had killed them, but also so that she could do autopsies on some of them. It was later that night as she listened to the radio that a news report caught her attention. Several kilos of raw cocaine had been found on a nearby tourist beach, apparently dumped at sea and washed up there. One package was split open and people were being warned to stay out of the ocean for the next few days.<br/><br/>"Unless they're crack-heads of course, ha ha... OH!" That would explain a lot. Cocaine. That would cause such behaviour, but how could she prove it? She could call the police, in fact she probably should, but... With no real evidence, what would they do? And what could they do? About all anyone could do was wait until the tides and currents took the lethal stuff out to sea and diluted it sufficiently that it would no longer cause any harm. She sat on the boat's transom, nursing a cup of hot chocolate, opened the sail locker and looked down at the octopus that blinked up at her. "Well at least you're looking better, unlike most of your pals... I'm going to have to burn the ones I pulled out... OH!" Juliet smacked herself on the forehead. Of course. She had plotted the "trail of destruction", as best she could, and had pretty-much pin-pointed the spot where the drug was at its highest concentration, and the relatively broad path that led out to sea. The drugs hadn't just been dumped over the side of a smuggler's boat  like the radio report said, they had been deliberately placed in the cove.<br/><br/>Someone had tried to retrieve them, clearly, and had torn open one of the packages on the coral. She was willing to bet that she would find bits of the torn wrapper on the coral there. But why dump the packages on the beach? That made no sense, the stuff still had a street value of .... She had no idea, but a hell of a lot!<br/><br/>In the morning, Juliet would call the police.