Page 116 of Nightshade

“Wait, hold on. My partner wants to talk to you.”

Stilwell almost groaned. He knew where this would go. Sampedro passed the phone to Ahearn.

“Hey, shooter, what are you doing working this?” he said. “I hear you’re ROD for your latest shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later escapade.”

Stilwell waited until he was sure Ahearn was finished laying on the sarcasm. Nothing more came.

“For once, Ahearn, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “I’m relieved of duty, and that’s exactly why I was giving your partner the name of a witness to be interviewed. You two can follow up on it or not. Doesn’t matter to me.”

“You know what I’m relieved of?” Ahearn said. “I’m relieved I don’t have to work on this with you anymore.”

He disconnected the call. Stilwell felt his cheeks start to burn. He looked at himself in the rearview mirror and saw that his face had reddened. He tried to let it go. He had not discussed with Sampedro his realization that if Daniel Easterbrook was telling the truth about Leigh-Anne Moss, then Charles Crane had lied. Stilwell had kept that to himself because it threw the investigation back over to the island, and that was his part of the case, whether he was on duty or not. He felt guilty about withholding salient information from fellow investigators—it was never the best way to run an investigation. But to Stilwell, it was the only way with Ahearn in the picture.

He picked up the phone again and called Tash. He told her that he’d been on a waiting list and finally had an appointment at one with a BSU therapist. He said that after the session he wouldcome back to the Huntington to pick her up and that they should be able to make the three-thirty Express back to Avalon. Tash seemed calmer than she was yesterday and sounded pleased with the plan.

“I’ll be ready,” she said.

“If you want to speed things up, throw my stuff into my suitcase,” Stilwell said. “Call the bell stand and have them take the bags out to the front drive. I’ll give you a thirty-minute heads-up, and you should be ready for a swoop-and-scoop. It’ll save a lot of time.”

“Like I said, I’ll be ready.”

“Good. See you then.”

After disconnecting the call, Stilwell thought about the tone of Tash’s words and her short answers and he had to admit to himself that he had no idea where the relationship was going. Seventy-two hours earlier, it had felt to him like something that could go the distance. Now he was not sure. Tash was too difficult to read at the moment.

The BSU was located on the ninth floor of the county transportation tower, which sat above Union Station, several blocks from the offices and prying eyes of the sheriff’s headquarters on Temple. At first, the session with Dr. Olga Perez went as he’d expected it would go. She asked stock questions about how he felt about taking a life, and Stilwell gave stock answers, explaining that he had had no choice, that it was a kill-or-be-killed situation and that the safety of an innocent individual had also been at stake. But then the therapist zeroed in on his relationship with that individual and his state of mind in the frantic minutes leading up to the shooting.

“You used the phrase ‘kill or be killed,’” Perez said. “In a situation like that, the body floods with a chemical called epinephrine. It’s a stress hormone that increases clarity, reactions, and brainspeed. Decisions that might normally take minutes to make are made in microseconds. Sometimes bad decisions.”

“Are you saying shooting Spivak was a bad decision?” Stilwell asked.

“No, I’m not. As you know, that’s not my call or my purpose today. I’m asking you ifyouthink it was a bad decision. Are you having second thoughts or any trouble with it?”

“None. In the same situation, I’d do it again.”

“Okay. My purpose is also to understand whether you have any residual stress or regret relating to the incident and to make sure you wouldn’t hesitate should such a situation arise again. Hesitation in a deadly confrontation could lead to your own injury or death.”

“I have no regrets about shooting and killing Spivak, okay? My only regret is that I didn’t see him sooner for what he was and realize that everything he did was part of a plan. I knew there was something odd about the assault on the deputy, but I didn’t put it together. That’s on me, but everything that came afterward is on him and I don’t feel bad about how it ended.”

Stilwell and Perez continued the verbal dance around the subject for a half hour longer, and the session ended with Perez saying she would sign off on his return to duty, though she would wait forty-eight hours before doing so. She said she wanted him to take at least that much time off before returning to his job should he clear the other parts of the official investigation without issue.

Back on the road to Pasadena, Stilwell called Tash to tell her that he would pick her up in a half hour.

“How did it go with the shrink?” she asked.

“Good,” Stilwell said. “She’ll take a couple days to write it up, but she said she’ll sign my RTD.”

“What’s an RTD?”

“Return to duty. It means she thinks I’m ready to go back to work.”

“On Catalina?”

“Yeah, of course. You want me to come back there, don’t you?”

“Yes. I was just wondering because you said the mayor told your captain he wants you gone.”

“Yeah, well, the mayor doesn’t get to say. But you’re sure you want me back on the island?”

---