Page 13 of Nightshade

STILWELL’S ENCHILADA FROM Maggie’s Blue Rose had long been cold by the time he got to the harbormaster’s tower on the pier. Tash popped it in the office microwave, and he took it on a paper plate to a desk where she had set up a screen with a feed from the cameras that were trained on the harbor from eight different angles.

“Have at it,” Tash said. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

“Just want to check the weekend before last,” Stilwell said. “See what boats were coming and going.”

“Shit. I forgot to put that list together for you. I’m so sorry. I just was so busy in here till today.”

“It’s okay. The video will show me and then I might have some specific questions.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Well, let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help.”

“Actually, here’s a question: How many moorings does the Black Marlin Club have?”

“They have the eight balls right behind the club. The red ones are all theirs. Plus they have their own dock and they can put two to four boats there, depending on length. They usually keep the embarcadero open for drop-offs and pickups.”

“‘Embarcadero’?”

“The covered slip on the side of the club. The people who use the mooring buoys come in on skiffs to the side slip and there’s an entrance to the club’s restaurant right there.”

“Got it. I saw that this morning when I was over there. So do their members register with you when they come in and out of the harbor?”

“They’re supposed to. It’s best practice so we know who’s here, but it doesn’t always work that way. They have some members who think they’re above the rules.”

“Rich guys—got it. Do you keep a list of members?”

“Not really, but I could go through the logbooks and get you names of the boats that use their moorings. I’ll have some of the owners’ names. Those would be the most active members. You could get the registration information from the state if we don’t have it.”

“If you have time, that would be very helpful.”

“Do you think they had something to do with the woman Denzel found? I thought the mainlanders were taking that case.”

“They are.”

“But you’re working on it anyway?”

Tash didn’t seem concerned, just curious about what he was up to.

“The club reported a significant theft over the weekend,”

Stilwell said. “A valuable sculpture was taken, and the manager over there thinks it was grabbed on the weekend I want to look at.”

“But that’s not really what you’re investigating, right?”

“Uh…”

Stilwell paused. She knew him well, but this was a situation where it was too early to discuss case theory or the risk he was taking by investigating a case he had repeatedly been told to stay away from.

“Never mind,” Tash said. “I know you can’t say what you’re doing. I’ll leave you to it. It’s so slow around here post–holiday weekend that I actually have some time to work on that list for you.”

“Thanks, Tash.”

She discreetly touched his hand as she turned away. Heidi Allen was at a desk nearby, and the shy move was a vestige of the time they’d kept their relationship secret.

Stilwell went to work. The screen showed live feeds from the eight camera locations. By moving the cursor to any square, he could click and enlarge the image to full-screen. He could also drop the squares showing camera angles he was not interested in. He cut his search down to four cameras, three of which had a range that included at least part of the Black Marlin Club’s wraparound dock and eight mooring balls.

A search window allowed Stilwell to enter a specific date and go back to the weekend Leigh-Anne Moss had been fired from the club. He started the playback of the four camera angles at eight a.m. on that Saturday.

He set the playback at quadruple speed but then did the math and realized it would still take him several hours to review the entire weekend. He bumped it up to twelve times normal speed. The review process would still be lengthy, and he knew he might have to do it piecemeal when he had time. He watched as a variety of boats and ferries charged in and out of the harbor. Whenever a boat docked at the Black Marlin or moored at one of its buoys, he slowed the playback to real time to carefully study the activity on the boat and dock.

Stilwell saw nothing suspicious during the daylight hours on the Saturday that Charles Crane said he had fired Moss. Stilwell kept the playback on high speed through the dark hours and watched the reflection of the moon move quickly across the harbor waters.

Then he stopped the playback because he thought he saw an unusual movement on the water. He clicked on the camera angle that gave the fullest view of the Black Marlin Club and rewound the video. He watched again in real time and saw a small workboat come out from the covered dock on the north side of the building. A figure at the back of the boat was controlling the tiller connected to the outboard engine. The boat moved across the water to the first line of moorings and disappeared between a large ocean yacht and a two-masted sailboat.

Stilwell noted the time at the bottom of the screen. It was 3: Sunday morning. He closed out that camera feed and went back to the full screen showing the four camera views he had started with. He checked each for a better angle on the space between the two vessels where the workboat had disappeared but found none.

He went back to the first angle and expanded it again. He hit the playback at quadruple speed and watched and waited for the workboat to show. Twenty-five minutes on the time counter went by before it emerged from between the two larger boats and headed back to the club. Stilwell zoomed in on the workboat, but the image lost clarity, and the figure holding the outboard’s tiller remained unidentifiable.

Stilwell called to Tash and asked her to come look at something.

“What’s up?” she said.

Stilwell pointed to the screen. “These two boats,” he said. “How do I identify them?”

“Well, the ketch is easy,” Tash said. “That’s the Emerald Sea . The other one I’ll have to look up in the registry. This is the weekend before last?”

“Yes, three thirteen Sunday morning, the eighteenth.”

“Give me a few minutes and I’ll get it for you.”

“How do you know it’s the Emerald Sea ?”

“Because it’s here a lot. The owner likes to leave it and comes back and forth by ferry.”

“So it sits out there empty when he’s gone?”

“A lot of the time, yes.”

Stilwell got up and looked out the tower window in the direction of the Black Marlin Club. The Emerald Sea was gone.

“When did it leave the harbor?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

“You called it a ketch. What exactly does that mean?”

“A two-masted sailboat is a ketch.”

“I’m not much of a sailboat guy. Who owns it? And where does it come from?”

“It’s out of MDR, and the owner is Mason Colbrink. He’s supposedly a big-time overtown lawyer.”

Stilwell nodded. He knew she was referring to Marina del Rey in Los Angeles.

“He must do corporate law,” he said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“He’s supposedly retired,” Tash said. “But I don’t think you get a membership to the Black Marlin and a forty-foot ketch like that by doing criminal defense.”

“Probably not. How do you know when he’s here on the boat?”

“Because Mr. Colbrink always checks in with us. The harbor doesn’t allow storage mooring. It’s for active boating only. He’s pushing it by leaving his ketch here for weeks at a time, so he always wants us to know when he’s here and using it. He thinks that makes it okay.”

“Got it. Do you keep that on the registry? His comings and goings?”

“We do to a point. Mr. Colbrink is sort of cagey about that.”

Stilwell sat back down in front of the screen and pointed to the Emerald Sea.

“Can you tell me whether Colbrink was here on the weekend of the seventeenth?” he asked.

“I’ll check on that and get you the name and owner of the other boat,” Tash said. “This is fun.”

“What is?”

“Being part of an investigation.”

Stilwell watched her go back to her desk. He felt uncomfortable involving her in any part of his work. The last thing he needed was his girlfriend thinking this work was fun and wanting to join in. The reality was that you never knew when a phone call, door knock, or keystroke could bring mortal danger. Just the year before, there had been a story out of Los Angeles about a so-called amateur sleuth who ended up shot to death in her home office’s closet.