Page 111 of Nightshade

“Yes, that’s where we would meet on the island. We’d stay there so she could work. And I would wait for her there. I used to stand on our room’s balcony and look down at the club, hoping to see her when she left.”

More tears came, and this time he did not try to stop or hide them.

“Do you know anyone who would have wanted to harm her?” Stilwell asked. “Did she talk about anybody who threatened her or anything like that? On the island or the mainland? Or at the club, even?”

“No, nothing like that,” Easterbrook said. “That’s what I don’t understand. How could this happen? We were in love. I was in love for what seemed like the first time in my life. We had a plan. We were going to take the boat to Tahiti. And now there’s nothing. I have nothing.”

Stilwell asked a few more questions about the club and the plans Easterbrook had made with Leigh-Anne Moss. He decided he would tell Sampedro and Ahearn that they should conduct a follow-up interview with Easterbrook under formal and recorded conditions, then run down his alibi. They would also need to take a DNA swab from him. But Stilwell believed he had gotten all he could get for the moment. Easterbrook had given him his next move. Either Easterbrook or Charles Crane had lied about Leigh-Anne’s last visit to the Black Marlin Club, and Stilwell was going to find out which one.

38

TASH WAS INbed asleep when Stilwell returned to the suite. He saw her suitcase standing upright near the door. He grabbed the handle and lifted it—it was heavy and full. She was ready to go back in the morning and he knew there would be no further debate. He entered the bedroom, quietly undressed, and slipped beneath the covers next to her. If he had woken her, she didn’t show it. As he tried to get to sleep, his mind crowded with thoughts about the future of their relationship and whether the very best thing he had found on Catalina was going to go away.

He knew thoughts like these would keep him awake through the night, so he shifted gears and began to review cases. This often did the trick and led him to sleep. He first went over his interview with Easterbrook and the follow-up work that was needed. Ahearn and Sampedro would be tasked with that. Though Stilwell was not overly impressed with their skills, he believed they would see what he had seen. They would perhaps put more pressure on Easterbrook and even ask him to take a polygraph test, but Stilwell believed that Easterbrook would ultimately be cleared. The semen recovered during autopsy would likely match to him,but there had been no indication of anything physical other than consensual intimacy.

From there Stilwell was drawn back to the Oscar Terranova case. Thinking about the Merris Spivak shooting and the investigation that followed, he remembered a question for which he’d had no answer. Why did Spivak—and Terranova, for that matter—think that the saw handle was still on the island and not already at the lab? As he ruminated on the question at the edges of sleep, he came to an answer that he didn’t like but that he knew fit. He opened his eyes, realizing there would be no chance for sleep tonight.

Just after dawn, while Tash was still sleeping, he drove downtown. He’d left a note on the bed table telling her he’d be back by noon, and they could head down to the ferry dock then. On the freeway, he called the behavioral science unit and was told that the two therapists scheduled that day were not in yet but were booked solid and no walk-ins were being accepted. He gave his name and cell number and asked to be notified if there was a cancellation.

He kept driving. It was early enough that the traffic on the 110 was moving at a slow but steady pace, at least until downtown, where it bottlenecked as it did at any time of day. Once he was past the convention center, the freeway cleared, since he was going against the tide of commuters into downtown. He sailed on a southwest diagonal across the county to Long Beach.

The Long Beach Superior Court building on Magnolia was one of the newest courthouses in the county. The design was modern, with a mirrored-glass exterior and concrete columns. The Long Beach division of the district attorney’s office was on the third floor. Stilwell identified himself at reception and asked to see Monika Juarez. He was told that she was handling the morning calendar in Judge Kyle Hawthorne’s courtroom on the second floor.

Stilwell went down and found the courtroom crowded with representatives of every realm of the justice system, from prosecutors to cops to defense attorneys to defendants, and there were also family members there showing support for either the accused or their alleged victims. He slipped into an open spot on a bench at the rear of the room.

In a flat tone that reflected the routineness of the session, the judge methodically called cases to hear status reports on their slow creep through the overburdened system. Juarez sat at a table with three other prosecutors opposite a table crowded with even more defense attorneys. Stilwell watched as she stood for her own cases and sat and waited during the others. Each time she stood, she informed the judge that she was prepared to set a date for trial but that the defense was stalling through protracted plea negotiations, discovery-compliance issues, or other pretexts. The defense attorney then rose and protested the prosecutor’s insinuations, and the judge refereed and made a call on how and when to proceed. It was as predictable as weekly trash pickup by the sanitation department and in some ways just as messy.

An hour into the session, Stilwell got a call from the BSU. He hustled out of the courtroom and took it in the hallway.

“We have a cancellation at one,” the caller told him.

“I’ll take it,” Stilwell said.

“Don’t be late.”

“I’ll be early. Who’s it with?”

“Dr. Perez.”

“Got it.”

Over his eighteen years with the department, Stilwell had been sent to the shrinks four separate times for various reasons. He had never had a session with Perez and didn’t know if the therapist was a man or a woman. Previously, he had found it easier to talk to a woman.

As he opened the courtroom door to reenter, he was met by Juarez, who was coming out. She was surprised to see him.

“Stil, what are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you. Are you finished in there or is it just a break?”

“Finished for the day, yes.”

“Do you have a few minutes?”

“Sure. Do you want to go up to my office?”

Stilwell had met with her at her office before and knew that she shared the space with three other prosecutors.

“No, I need to talk to you privately,” he said. “Is there somewhere else we can go?”

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