Page 19 of Nightshade

“Hmm, too bad.”

She was already dressed for the day in khaki cargo pants and a black polo with the harbormaster badge embroidered on it. Tash was a beauty in Stilwell’s opinion. She was a lean and tanned island girl with dark hair and dark eyes, and she didn’t need anything in the world beyond the twenty-two-mile-long island where she’d been born. Their relationship had started soon after Stilwell’s arrival and their first lunch meeting. Stilwell had been coming out of a divorce at the time, and she’d just broken up with another island native.

She was also eight years younger than Stilwell, and that at first gave him pause. He was worried they would not be on the same page when it came to things like music and movies and politics. But soon that didn’t seem to matter. Tash loved the outdoors—boating, fishing, and camping—and so did he. That was where they connected and where they could leave the world behind. They had initially decided to keep the relationship under wraps, until they saw how it went, but now they were no longer as protective of the secret.

“You want me to run you down to the pier in the cart?” Stilwell asked.

“No, it’s downhill,” Tash said. “An easy walk.”

“Okay. Be good.”

“And you be safe.”

They kissed goodbye and Stilwell watched her walk down Eucalyptus toward the harbor. He thought about where they were in the relationship and where they were going. It had started out as a casual, no-demands sort of thing. They both were on the rebound from their previous relationships and moving cautiously. But as the months went by, their connection deepened, and then Tash started staying over most nights of the week. Stilwell stopped going to the mainland on his days off. He put the condo he’d bought after his divorce up for sale. Tash kept her apartment but mostly because a storage unit for her furniture would cost almost as much as her rent. Keeping the place also offered a refuge if things with Stilwell didn’t work out. But they both knew that was the next move—if she gave up her place, they were in it for the long haul.

Stilwell felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. It was Mercy.

“Sergeant, we have a situation with a visitor from overtown.”

“What’s going on?”

“Looks like an alcohol poisoning at the Crescent Hotel. Paramedics on scene and they’re calling a medevac.”

Stilwell checked his phone screen. It was only 7:10 a.m., but the busy times were starting.

“Okay, Mercy, I’m on my way.”

8

STILWELL WAS INearly at the sub on Tuesday so he could get a jump on the crime and arrest reports that had accumulated over the holiday weekend. He had to prepare case summaries that would be submitted to Monika Juarez on the mainland for decisions on whether charges would be filed. There had been twenty-six arrests over the three-day weekend. The vast majority were drunk-and-disorderly cases, though three of these had escalated to assaults when the sheriff’s deputies showed up. There was also a scattering of arrests for property crimes and driving while impaired. Under California law, driving while intoxicated—with a blood-alcohol concentration over 0.08 percent—carried the same penalties whether you were in an automobile or a golf cart.

The sub’s jail was holding four men, three of them on assault and one for grand theft—he had walked out of a bar on Saturday night, hopped into a golf cart that belonged to somebody else, and driven away. The cart was located the next day up at the Hermit Gulch Lookout with the man who had taken it passed out in the driver’s seat.

Stilwell knew that Monika Juarez would reject most of the cases. Some would be filed but dismissed before they reachedcourt. Juarez’s job was to weed out the inconsequential cases that were not worth the time and money to adjudicate. The county jail system was already crowded and under federal oversight. Prosecutors had to be selective about whom they tried to put in prison.

From an island twenty-two miles from the coast, Stilwell viewed the system as not yet broken but getting close to it. His opinion was that when you installed a revolving door at the entrance to the jailhouse, you were inviting the system’s downfall.

Knowing what awaited the weekend’s cases at the next stop, Stilwell put most of his efforts into writing up the summary of charges against Merris Spivak. He’d been arrested Saturday night for assaulting a law enforcement officer. He had broken a bottle over Deputy Tom Dunne’s head in a bar on Crescent. Dunne was backing up Deputy Eduardo Esquivel, who had entered the bar after a call regarding a fight between two patrons over whose song was next up on the karaoke stage. Spivak came up behind Dunne and bashed him on the head with an empty wine bottle he had grabbed off another patron’s table. Dunne got a concussion, nine stitches, and a night in a medical clinic before being transferred to a mainland hospital. And Stilwell was down one deputy for the rest of the busy holiday weekend.

The assault on Dunne was captured by the bar’s security camera, and the video would be the key evidence against Spivak.

Stilwell attached the link to his report, then decided to watch it again. It had made him so angry the first time he had watched it that he realized he should add some of the details to the summary report to ensure that Juarez didn’t defer charges.

The video link provided by the bar started thirty seconds prior to the assault on Dunne. It clearly showed that the attack was unprovoked. Spivak came quickly into the frame behind Dunne and hit him with the bottle with an overhead swing. Dunne went down, knocked out cold by the impact. Esquivel had his hands fulland didn’t see his backup deputy go down. Spivak, apparently not knowing he was on camera, turned, went back to the bar, took a seat on a stool, and acted like he’d had no part in the melee. That part of the video was bizarre. Stilwell watched it two more times, and, while it continued to make him angry, the oddness of Spivak’s actions began to poke through the emotion. Stilwell got up from his desk and left his office. He walked through the dayroom to the jail.

There were two four-bunk holding cells in the sub’s jail. They were side by side and divided by a concrete-block wall. Guests in one cell could not see into the other. Stilwell had put Spivak in cell one by himself, and the other three detainees were in two.

Stilwell had separated Spivak because his assault on a law enforcement officer was more serious than the others’ alleged crimes.

Stilwell walked to the bars that fronted cell one and saw Spivak asleep on one of the lower bunks. He had been in the cell for two days.

“Spivak,” he said. “Wake up.”

Spivak didn’t move. Stilwell put his right foot between the bars and kicked the frame of the bunk, and Spivak jerked awake.

“What the fuck?” he said.

“Spivak, I’ve got a question for you,” Stilwell said.

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