Page 26 of Nightshade

AFTER FINISHING HIS BLT, Stilwell had an hour to kill while Leslie Sneed worked the lunch rush at the Sandtrap. He drove the Gator down to Crescent and posted up on the side of the road where he had a view of the Black Marlin Club’s front door and the embarcadero dock on the side. He pulled out his phone and called the cell number Frank Sampedro had given him.

“Just checking in,” he said. “You guys at the boat yet?”

“Well into it,” Sampedro said. “And we got blood.”

“Really? Where?”

“The bottom of the helm. It was cleaned up, but forensics found it in a hinge on one of the floor hatches. We got enough for DNA matching. We’re just hoping it’s not fish blood.”

“It’s gotta be the victim’s. Colbrink told me he doesn’t fish.”

“Good to know.”

“Anything else from the boat?”

“We’re still working it. Forensics is down in the cabin now.”

“What about the cleaner? The Three-Oh-Three.”

“Nothing there. We checked the trash cans on the dock and even the dumpster where everything gets emptied. It all was picked up yesterday by county sanitation.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah, but we got the blood in the helm.”

Getting fingerprints would have been better, Stilwell thought.

“Is Colbrink there?” he asked.

“He was,” Sampedro said. “Rex took him downtown for a formal interview.”

Stilwell didn’t say anything to that. He was thinking about what he remembered of Ahearn’s interview techniques. They were generally heavy-handed, and he hoped Ahearn wasn’t going to offend a cooperating witness and lose the access they currently had to both Colbrink and what was likely a floating crime scene.

“When you talked to Colbrink, did he tell you about Yacht Lock?” Sampedro asked.

“No. What’s Yacht Lock?” Stilwell replied.

“It’s like LoJack for boats. A lot of these big boats get stolen and it’s like a hidden GPS so the boat can be tracked. Colbrink said he has it on this thing because it’s a custom-made one-of-a-kind boat. We’re thinking we might be able to pinpoint where the boat stopped when it went out into the bay and the body was dumped.”

Stilwell became fully alert.

“It’s that precise?” he asked.

“Supposedly it’s precise to a fifty-foot radius,” Sampedro said. “That’s a lot better than phone GPS.”

“How do we get the location?”

“I called the company down in San Diego. They need a search warrant. I’ll get going on it when I get back in.”

“Good deal. We get the spot and we probably get the murder weapon.”

“And maybe the phone.”

Stilwell was silent for a moment. He knew that search warrants took forever with cell service providers, and their data revealed only numbers called or texted. The texts themselves were stored on the actual phone.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Sampedro said. “Salt water. I already talked to tech services. Fresh water, not a problem. But two weeks in salt water is going to make it a long shot.”

“Well, I guess we have to find it first.”

Stilwell was hopeful about Yacht Lock. It might cut a needle-in-a-haystack search down to a contained and viable target location.

“What’s going on out there?” Sampedro asked.

“I’ve got the search warrant for the club almost ready to go,” Stilwell said. “The judge comes over in the morning. And in an hour I’m interviewing a waitress who rented a room out here to Leigh-Anne Moss earlier this year. Until she apparently started staying with somebody else.”

“Do we know who?”

“That’s what I’m going to try to find out. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Let us know what you get.”

“You too. And one last thing. If the judge signs off on the warrant tomorrow, I could use some help out here with the search. There will be a lot of ground to cover in the club. Are you guys going to come out, or should I use some of my people here? I don’t think they have much investigative experience or have even served search warrants before. I could also use somebody from forensics in case we find biological evidence.”

“I’ll talk to Rex.”

“I could really use the help. It’s gotta be done right.”

“Tell you what, I’ll come out for sure and I’ll bring the tech we’ve got working on the boat. That way we have some continuity. Just let me know when you’ve got the warrant signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“Will do.”

Stilwell disconnected. He liked the cooperation he seemed to be getting from Sampedro. But he knew it was fragile. Ahearn was the senior partner and could change the level of openness at any time.

He had seen no one come or go from either the front or the side of the BMC during his short vigil. He suspected that the next day, when the weekenders started coming in, things would get busy. He turned the cart around on Crescent and headed back up to the golf course. The Sandtrap was nearly empty when he entered, and there was no sign of Leslie Sneed, but another server told him that she was in the break room and pointed him through the kitchen. Stilwell went through a swinging door and found Sneed at a table near the back. She was counting tips.

“How’d you do today?” he asked.

“Not bad for a Thursday,” she said. “But I need a big weekend.”

Stilwell pulled out another chair at the table and sat down. There was no one else in the break room.

“I thought you said we had to go down to the station,” Sneed said.

“We will,” Stilwell said. “But I wanted to ask you a few questions first.”

“Okay.”

“You said Leigh-Anne stopped staying with you a couple months ago?”

“Yeah, just stopped coming or paying me.”

“Did she come back for her things or leave anything behind?”

“I kept her shit. I changed the lock and told her she could have her stuff when she paid what she owed.”

“So her stuff is still at your apartment?”

“That’s right. I guess it’s all mine now.”

“What’s there?”

“Just some clothes and some books. I think what she really wanted was her phone charger, but I told her she could have that when she paid her back rent. She hung up on me and that was the last time I heard from her.”

It seemed unlikely to Stilwell that a phone charger was what Moss wanted back.

“Do you remember when that was?” he asked.

“A couple Saturdays ago,” Sneed said. “I remember I was here when she called. She had tried to sneak into the apartment ’cause she knew I worked mornings on Saturdays. She hadn’t counted on the lock being changed.”

“So she didn’t get her things?”

“Uh-uh.”

“And she had her own bedroom there?”

“It’s not really a bedroom. More like an enclosed porch. My place is kinda small.”

“Could we go over there first? I want to see what she left.”

“I guess so. I need to be back by four thirty to set up for the dinner shift, though.”

“I’ll have you back in time for that. Can you leave now?”

“Yeah, I told my boss. He said it was okay as long as I was back to work dinner.”

“Good. I’ve got a cart, so we can go.”

Leslie Sneed lived in Eucalyptus Gardens, an apartment complex on Banning Drive. In his year on the island, Stilwell had slowly been learning the characteristics of Avalon neighborhoods. He knew that Eucalyptus Gardens was one of five low-income-housing projects where many people in the tourism and service industry lived.

Sneed’s apartment was small and sparsely furnished, with a Taylor Swift poster taped to the wall over a hand-me-down couch that might have been older than its owner. Swift was holding a cat in the poster and there was an undeniable smell of litter box to the apartment.

The living room connected to a kitchenette that had a half-size refrigerator and a two-burner stove. There was an adjoining bedroom, a single bathroom, and a small porch off the living room that had been enclosed with louvered windows. There was no door to the porch, but a curtain had been hung across the entrance for privacy. Sneed pulled the curtain back and held out her hand to signal Stilwell in.

“Sorry about the cat litter,” she said. “I have to close up when I go to work.”

She walked onto the porch and started cranking open the windows. The litter box was in the corner, and a black cat was sleeping on a daybed on the other side of the porch.

“So this was Leigh-Anne’s room?” Stilwell asked.

“Yep,” Sneed said.

“Is the cat hers or yours?”

“He’s mine. I just moved the litter box in here when she stopped coming.”

There was no closet, but there was an old wooden cabinet against the wall next to the bed.

“Do I have your permission to open the cabinet and look through this room?” Stilwell asked.

“Have at it,” Sneed said. “If you find drugs, they were hers, not mine. I’ve been sober since I moved out here.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not looking for drugs. Where’d you move out from?”

“I grew up in the San Fernando Valley.”

“What part?”

“Panorama City.”

Stilwell nodded. He didn’t know much about Panorama City except that it had drive-through drug markets. Moving to an island to get away from it was probably a smart idea.

Stilwell pulled a set of disposable gloves from his pocket and snapped them on. He opened the cabinet’s two doors. The left side had shelves, and the right side had a hanging bar for clothes. There were a few blouses and pairs of black chinos on hangers. He searched the pockets of the pants first but found them empty. He checked the labels on the blouses and saw nothing recognizably expensive.

“How long have you lived on the island?” he asked.

“Four years in July,” Sneed said.

“And you’ve been in this apartment the whole time?”

“Not at first. You have to live on the island for ninety days to qualify to live here. So I sort of stayed on couches until I could get in. Sort of like what Leigh-Anne was doing.”

As she talked, Stilwell noted the folded clothes on the cabinet shelves as well as a few cardboard boxes with the Amazon logo. One shelf held a small collection of books stacked on their sides.

“How did you connect with Leigh-Anne about renting out this room?” he asked.

“I had a friend who worked at the Black Marlin and he connected us,” Sneed said.

“Who was he?”

“Just a guy who worked at the Trap but then got a job there for a while.”

“He’s not there anymore?”

“No, he went back to the mainland. A friend of his opened a bar in Studio City and he went to work there.”

“What’s his name? I might want to talk to him about Leigh-Anne.”

“Todd Whitmore. I can’t remember the name of the place he works at now.”

Stilwell took one of the Amazon boxes off the shelf and opened it on the bed next to the sleeping cat. It contained various unopened hair products, including two tubes of Colors hair dye. Both had purple screw-on caps and were labeled NIGHTSHADE . Stilwell thought of the purple wildflowers that grew on some of the island’s hillsides.

“Nightshade,” Sneed said. “She loved that color. Like the flower. I said to her once, ‘Don’t you know that nightshade is poisonous?’ But she didn’t care.”

Stilwell closed the box and moved on to the next one.

“So you said she wanted to get her stuff but you wouldn’t let her in,” he said.

“That’s right,” Sneed said. “She owed me two fifty for the last month she did stay here—that was March—and then I told her it was another two fifty for the month she stopped staying but didn’t tell me. I could have tried to find somebody else if I had known.”

The second box was more personal-care products. After looking through it, Stilwell put it back on the shelf.

“Was there something in particular she said she wanted to get?”

“No, she just said she wanted her things.”

“Did she say she’d pay you the money?”

“She said she would, that she had a boyfriend who would cough it up, but that never happened.”

Stilwell remembered Peter Galloway and didn’t think it was likely that he was the boyfriend who could cough up five hundred dollars.

He moved on to the stack of books. The first one he recognized because Tash had read it when they’d gone on a camping trip to Little Harbor on the back side of the island. It was called If I’d Known Then. Tash told him it was a collection of letters women in their twenties and thirties had written to their younger selves with words of advice they wished they had received back then. The edge of a business card used as a bookmark stuck out from the middle of the book. Stilwell flipped it open to find that it was a card from Charles Crane, the general manager of the Black Marlin Club.

The next book was called Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and its bookmark was near the end of the book. It was a business card from a Los Angeles attorney named Daniel Easterbrook. The last book was called Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan. It too had a business-card bookmark, this one from a Century City oncologist named Leonard Koval.

Stilwell laid the business cards out on the bed and took individual photos of them before returning them to the pages where he found them. He wasn’t sure why he was re-marking the pages when he knew Leigh-Anne Moss would never finish the books.

“Looks like she was a reader,” he said, more to himself than to Sneed.

“I don’t have a TV,” Sneed said, “so she did a lot of reading.”

“Did she keep any of her property anywhere else in the apartment?”

“No, just in here.”

“Can we move the cat? I want to check the bed.”

Sneed went to the bed and picked up the cat, who mildly protested at being woken, and held him while Stilwell checked under the pillows and then lifted the mattress off the box spring to look between them. He found nothing.

Stilwell next got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He saw a shoebox and nothing else. He slid the box out and opened it. It contained a pair of black high-heeled pumps.

“Prada—nice,” Sneed said.

Stilwell saw the brand mark on the insole.

“Yours or hers?” he asked.

“Hers, definitely,” Sneed said. “Too small for me.” She giggled.

“What?” Stilwell asked.

“It’s just funny,” she said. “I never saw her wear those and I can’t think of a place on this island where you would. Except up at the Ada, maybe.”

The Mount Ada was the island’s only four-star hotel. It was once the Wrigley mansion and sat high up on the hill overlooking the harbor and Santa Monica Bay. It had a formal dining room, but Stilwell knew that Sneed was right—the island wasn’t a place for high-end high-heeled shoes. So the question was, why did Leigh-Anne Moss have these shoes on the island? He doubted she would have brought them from the mainland. They had to have been a gift from someone here.

“She didn’t wear these for work, right?” he asked.

“No, no way,” Sneed said. “You can’t work with those spikes. Not when you’re on your feet all day.”

“Probably a gift, then. Any idea who from?”

“None. She never even mentioned those to me. I’d never seen them before you pulled them out.”

“You think they’re the reason she wanted to get back into the apartment? Prada stuff is expensive, right?”

“Very. Those probably cost somebody a grand, at least. Probably one of the guys she was playing.”

Stilwell looked up at her for a long moment.

“Let’s go down to the station,” he said. “I want to talk to you about that.”

“Fine with me,” Sneed said.

“I’m going to take these, see if we can figure out where they came from.”

“Take ’em. They wouldn’t fit me.”

Stilwell closed the shoebox and got up off the floor.