Page 103 of Nightshade

“Let’s start with the decision-making process,” Harrington said. “You get this call, they say they have your girlfriend, you ask for proof of life and you get it, and then you decide to be a one-man rescue team. Can you walk us through how you came to handle it that way?”

“Sure,” Stilwell said. “Time. The caller gave me an hour. In my mind, that meant I didn’t have a minute to spare. I couldn’t wait for anyone to come over from the mainland, even by helicopter. I had only one deputy on duty on the island at the time, and I didn’t think she would be up to it.”

“That was Deputy Ramirez. In what way did you think she wasn’t up to it?”

“Experience-wise. We all know that deputies assigned to this island have shown some form of… deficiency in their work. I’ve worked with Ramirez for the past nine months and this was going to be a rescue mission, not a patrol. I just didn’t have confidence in her, and I thought she could end up getting hurt herself. I didn’t want that.”

Harrington had a yellow pad on the table in front of him and made a check mark on it next to a written note Stilwell couldn’t read from his position.

“How long have you had a relationship with Natasha Dano?” he asked.

Stilwell understood that this questioning would jump all over the place to try to catch him off guard. The important thing, he knew, was to not dissemble or outright lie. If he did, things could go downhill fast.

“We started having a few casual dates about ten or eleven months ago,” he said. “I would say things started to get serious about six months ago.”

“Do you live together?” Harrington asked.

“Technically, no. We both have our own homes, but we end up at one place or the other just about every night. Most often my place. There’s more room and a better kitchen.”

“And this was a secret relationship?”

“Not really. We didn’t go around advertising it, if that’s what you mean. But we didn’t go out of our way to hide it. Tash—Natasha—doesn’t like going to the mainland, so that meant staying local if we went out for dinner or to socialize.”

“You two had been to the Buffalo Nickel together before?”

“Yes. A few times. It’s a locals’ place for the most part. Off the beaten path.”

“Did you know she was going there last night?”

“Yes and no. I had been so busy with yesterday’s work that I texted that she probably wouldn’t see me. She texted back saying that was fine—I’m sure you’ve looked at our phones. I didn’t know she was at the Nickel till I got home to crash. I checked her location and saw she had been there earlier in the evening.”

“You hadn’t told her about what kept you working all day? She didn’t know about the Gaston killing or that Spivak had escaped?”

“There were a lot of newspeople out here yesterday. She might have seen something about it. But we didn’t have a conversation about it. I don’t talk about my work with her.”

“Really? Why is that?”

“She grew up here on the island and was classmates with a reporter from theCall,Lionel McKey. They’re still friends and I just never liked the idea of putting her in a position where she knew things that Lionel would like to know.”

“Do you know of any instance where she passed information she heard from you over to him?”

“No, not at all. When we got more serious about our relationship, we talked about that and she understood. But I sort of stuck with the practice of keeping work stuff to myself.”

“So you’re telling us that she had no idea what was happening with you when she decided to go to the Buffalo Nickel last night?”

“Not as far as I know. TheCatalina Callis the only local media on the island and it’s published on Saturdays, so unless she heard some scuttlebutt about it at work or McKey reached out and asked her about it, she probably didn’t know. I’m sure you’ve asked her this.”

“Okay, well, we’re just trying to figure out how they knew to grab her when she left the bar last night. Any ideas on how they knew you two were a couple?”

“Well, like I said, we didn’t advertise that we were together, but it wouldn’t have been that hard to find out. Since the mutilation of the buffalo up on the preserve a couple weeks ago, I’ve probably been on Oscar Terranova’s radar as a possible threat. He could have had any one of his people checking me out, possibly following me. If he did that, they would have seen me with Tash. You can ask him when you bring him in.”

That answer drew the first words from Batchelor in this round.

“We’re not handling that side of the investigation,” he said. “This is only about the officer-involved shooting.”

“Yeah, too bad,” Stilwell said. “Because that side of the investigation is what we should be focusing on.”

“That side is well in hand,” Batchelor said.