Page 109 of Nightshade

“Yes, of course.”

Easterbrook stepped back and let Stilwell enter. He led him to a small living room where none of the furniture matched. It lookedas though everything had been taken from a variety of other living rooms reflecting different fads and tastes. Easterbrook pointed him to a black leather couch while he took a chair with puffy arms and a floral pattern. Stilwell began by identifying himself and telling Easterbrook that he was assigned to the Catalina substation. Easterbrook nodded.

“I knew it was her,” Easterbrook said. “When I stopped hearing from her and she didn’t return my calls, I just knew it.”

“You were in a relationship with her,” Stilwell said. He stated it as a fact, not a question.

“I was head over heels,” Easterbrook said. “I just can’t bring myself to believe she’s gone. Who would have done this?”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Stilwell said. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“Well, now it’s been over two weeks.”

“Was that on Catalina?”

“No, here. She stayed here with me, then she went back over to tell them she was through.”

“Can you be more specific about the date and time you last saw her?”

“Yes, it would have been Saturday morning, the… seventeenth. I drove her down to the Express dock in Long Beach. She took the eight-fifteen ferry.”

Stilwell showed no reaction, but he knew this was likely the day Leigh-Anne had been murdered. The 8:15 ferry would have gotten her to Avalon a little after nine. It matched up with what he knew about her activities that morning before her arrival at the Black Marlin.

“You said she was going to tell them she was through,” he said. “Who was she going to tell?”

“The GM at the club—a man named Crane,” Easterbrook said. “She was going to pick up her last paycheck and quit. I toldher to forget about the money, I’d give her the money. But she’d left some of her things at an apartment over there and she wanted to get that stuff too.”

“She wasn’t terminated from the club, as far as you know?”

“Terminated? You mean fired? No. Not that I know of. She was going to move in here with me. I… gave up everything for her. I destroyed my marriage; my kids hate me. I didn’t care. I mean, I cared, but I wanted her. I needed her. Now what am I going to do?”

Stilwell didn’t think Easterbrook was looking for an answer from him.

“Mr. Easterbrook, when did your relationship with Leigh-Anne—Leigh—start?” he asked.

“It would have been… three months ago,” Easterbrook said. “I’d seen her there at the club before that, of course, but one night she was behind the bar and I was there alone and we started talking. You know, very casual, just banter, really, like you do with younger women, and then something… just happened. She showed an interest in me and I felt something I’d never felt before. And I know what you’re thinking:Older man, younger woman.But it was real. For both of us. She was funny, and she was well-read. She was a… wildflower. She put a streak of purple in her hair. She said that was for me. It was our secret—like a signal to me when we were in the club but had to keep our relationship, you know, on the down-low.”

“Nightshade.”

“Exactly. I first thought the color was Catalina sage, like they have up on the hillside behind the Mount Ada. But she said it was called Nightshade. I started calling her that—it was my pet name for her. I felt this passion come to the surface in me, a passion I never knew I had. It made me rethink things—everything about my life.”

He brought a thumb and finger up and pinched the bridge of his nose in what looked like an effort to stop tears. Stilwell wondered if Easterbrook had ever looked up nightshade on the internet and learned that the beautiful flower was also a deadly poison.

“What am I going to do?” Easterbrook asked again. “I know I’ll never be able to fill this empty space. I can’t go back to what I had before. I can’t go forward.”

Stilwell believed his pain was as real as his passion for the woman he called Nightshade. But just because he loved her didn’t clear him as a possible suspect. From past experience, Stilwell knew that women were often killed by men who professed to love them. Easterbrook would need further scrutiny before Stilwell could sign off on his gut instinct that he was not the killer of Leigh-Anne Moss.

He let a few moments go by so Easterbrook could pull himself together. Stilwell had to tick boxes, collating what the known facts of the case were with Easterbrook’s experiences and memories.

“I’m sorry I have to ask you this,” he said. “But when was the last time you and Leigh were intimate?”

“The night before she went back to the island,” Easterbrook said.

“And did you use a condom?”

Easterbrook paused.

“I hate to think about why you need this information,” he finally said. “But the answer is no. She took care of that.”

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