Page 16 of Nightshade

THE PICKLED EGGS were served on a bed of salted pretzel sticks and came in a plastic basket that balanced nicely on the rail of the pool table where Stilwell and Gary Saunders played straight-up eight ball while discussing floaters and sinkers from years gone by. Joe Jost’s was crowded and loud. The venerable bar was celebrating one hundred years of existence with ongoing beer specials to fuel the celebrants.

Stilwell and Saunders went way back. Saunders had mentored Stilwell when the younger man had been assigned to the sheriff’s dive team. Saunders had never left the unit and now ran it. There had been times when Stilwell regretted transferring out. The dive team was a bubble in the department with a very specific task. As grim as the assignments were at times, it was a safe harbor from the politics and bureaucracy that seemed to crop up everywhere else in the agency.

Saunders won the first two games easily. This was new. They used to be more evenly matched, but Saunders was no longer married and Stilwell got the idea that he spent a good deal of his time off in bars with pool tables. Eventually, Stilwell casually steered the conversation to the body recovery in Avalon Harbor, asking questions as if he had only a passing interest in the case. He started with a question he already knew the answer to.

“How long you think she was under?” he asked.

“Oh, boy, I’d say four to six days, based on the wax,” Saunders said, using the shorthand for adipocere, the soapy substance that forms on a body during decomposition in water.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same,” Stilwell said. “Was there anything else in the bag that was useful?”

“No, not really. Except the bag itself, I guess.”

“Why? It was just a trash bag, wasn’t it?”

“No, it was a sail bag.”

“What’s that?”

“They said it was for a jib—the front sail of a boat.”

“Like on a ketch? The front sail of a ketch?”

“I don’t speak sailboat, dude. I’m a ski-boat guy. But if a ketch has a front sail, then yeah. It was for storing a jib sail.”

“Who identified it as that?”

“I think it was the coroner’s investigator who was on the boat with us. He’s more of a sailboat guy.”

Stilwell was silent while he lined up a shot on the seven ball. He missed badly and scratched the cue ball. His mind was not on pool. It was now racing with this new piece of information. It meant that the woman in the water had likely been dropped into the sea from a sailboat. He thought about the Emerald Sea and the midnight visit by someone from the Black Marlin Club and then the strange outing made out and back into the harbor the next day—all of that within the time frame consistent with the decomposition of the body.

With the cue ball in hand, Saunders easily lined up the eight ball and finished the game.

“You need to come over here and practice more often,” he said. “You owe me another five.”

“Not going to happen—the practice, I mean,” Stilwell said. “I like the island. I like staying over there.”

“At least you’re away from all the bullshit.”

“Not so sure about that.”

Stilwell knew that Saunders was referring to his falling-out with the homicide unit. If it were not for Ahearn handling the Avalon case, it would be a distant memory for Stilwell. But now the bullshit had followed him to the island.

Saunders took four quarters off the rail and put them into the table’s coin slide, then started racking the balls for another game. Stilwell’s phone buzzed and he saw that it was Tom Dunne finally calling him back.

“Hey, I have to get this,” Stilwell said. “Outside.”

“I just racked,” Saunders complained. “We don’t play, we don’t hold the table.”

“I’m sure one of the fine ladies at the bar would love to take your money.”

“Yeah, right.”

Stilwell answered the call and told Dunne to hold on, then headed through the bar to the exit, stopping only to speak to a woman who was half Saunders’s age.

He pointed toward the pool table. “That guy’s looking for someone to teach him how to shoot pool,” he said.

He did not stop to see if she took the bait. He pushed through the front door and found a quiet spot on the sidewalk to talk.

“Tom, still there? How are you feeling?”

“Uh, getting there. I still have some double vision and a headache. But today was better than yesterday, that’s for sure.”

“Good. Are you up for a couple questions about Saturday?”

“Sure. But I don’t really remember anything. The last thing I remember is walking into that bar to back up Eddie E. After that, everything is a blur.”

“That’s okay. Do you remember anything from earlier in the shift?”

“Uh, I think so. I don’t know. People have only been asking about me getting hit, not what happened before.”

“Well, I did some follow-up on a report you took at the Black Marlin Club. Do you remember that?”

“The… theft of a sculpture? Is that what you mean?”

“Exactly. I was just wondering if there was anything you heard or saw that didn’t make it into your report.”

“Uh, not really. I mean… I don’t think so.”

“The report you filed is pretty basic. I thought maybe you were planning to add more after shift, but you ended up in the clinic that night.”

“I really don’t remember, Sarge. I don’t know what happened to my notebook. I can look through that and see if there’s something I didn’t put in the report.”

Stilwell made a note to himself to see if the notebook was at the substation or at the clinic where Dunne was first treated.

“I’ll see if I can find it,” Stilwell said. “The other thing is Merris Spivak. Do you know him?”

“He’s the mook who hit me, right?” Dunne said. “I didn’t even see him. I was blindsided.”

“But you don’t recognize the name?”

“No, should I?”

“I don’t know. The whole thing was captured on camera and to me it looks a bit off.”

“How do you mean?”

“Like maybe he knew you.”

“Can I see it?”

“I can have Mercy send you a link. Give it a watch and let me know.”

“Will do.”

“Spivak did three hundred days in county lockup a couple years back. I know you came out here from jail division. Where’d you work?”

“I started at Biscailuz like everybody does, and then I was at Pitchess until I got the transfer to Avalon.”

“Spivak was at Pitchess. Maybe he recognized you from there.”

“Maybe. There were a lot of people there. Obviously.”

“You know personnel records are private under the union agreement, so I don’t always know what’s behind transfers to Catalina. Anything I should know about you and Pitchess? Anything that might have to do with Spivak?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so. I mean… I don’t know that name. I’ll look at the video but I doubt I’ll recognize the guy. There were too many people in those dorms out there.”

It was clear to Stilwell that Dunne didn’t want to talk about whatever it was that had gotten him transferred to a substation where he would operate below the mainland’s radar. He decided to let it go for now.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Stilwell said. “So look at the video, and if it jogs anything loose, let me know.”

“Will do, Sarge,” Dunne said.

“Okay, rest up. We need you back.”

“As soon as I can, Sarge.”

“Just call me Stil.”

“Copy… Stil.”

Stilwell disconnected and went back into the bar. Saunders was still playing pool. The woman Stilwell had pointed to the table earlier was there along with another woman who had joined in a three-handed game.

“Just in time,” Saunders said. “We can play teams.”

“Actually, I have to go,” Stilwell said. “And it looks like you already have a three-way going.”

“Oh, come on. Stay. This is Brenda, and this is… Darlene. Girls, meet Stilwell. People call him Stil.”

Stilwell uncomfortably raised his hand in a hello.

“Nice to meet you, ladies, but I really have to go,” he said.

He waved Saunders over for a private moment. “I’ll get the tab at the bar,” he said. “Text me if I need to grab a hotel room.”

“No, the guest room’s yours,” Saunders insisted.

“Not if you get lucky. I don’t want to come in right in the middle of that.”

“It’s not a problem. Where you going, anyway?”

“I want to follow up on that sail bag. Need to go see a guy about it up in Malibu.”

“Wait, what? It’s not even your case.”

“Yeah, but I get the feeling that if I don’t follow up on it, nobody will.”

“Oh, man. You dumb son of a bitch. You’re going to step in it again.”

“Maybe, but I have to do it.”

“Same old Stil. Can’t leave things alone. You should have stayed on the dive team, but no, you had to go solve murders.”

“What can I say?”

“Happy hunting, brother.”

“And good luck to you.”

Stilwell nodded toward the two women, who were whispering to each other at the other end of the pool table.

“Well, my prospects just doubled,” Saunders said. “We’ll see what happens.”

As he walked out of Jost’s, Stilwell thought about the warning Saunders had just given him. His concerns were well founded, and Stilwell had to consider what he was doing and the motivation behind it. Most cops he knew grew tired ten or fifteen years into the job. Even hard-chargers became go-along-to-get-along guys. They seemed to forget why they’d put on the badge: To be fair. To right the wrongs against the innocent. To prevent those wrongs from occurring in the first place. Stilwell never wanted to forget. Leigh-Anne Moss’s motivations might not have been completely innocent, but she didn’t deserve to end up in a black sail bag at the bottom of the harbor. Stilwell was sure that once Ahearn learned her story, he would pass judgment and leave her down there as he moved on to the next one, hoping for a victim he could like.

Stilwell was sure about one other thing: Ahearn be damned, he was not going to stop his forward motion or his investigation.