Page 36 of Nightshade

“Never mind,” Tash said. “I know you can’t say what you’re doing. I’ll leave you to it. It’s so slow around here post–holiday weekend that I actually have some time to work on that list for you.”

“Thanks, Tash.”

She discreetly touched his hand as she turned away. Heidi Allen was at a desk nearby, and the shy move was a vestige of the time they’d kept their relationship secret.

Stilwell went to work. The screen showed live feeds from the eight camera locations. By moving the cursor to any square, he could click and enlarge the image to full-screen. He could also drop the squares showing camera angles he was not interested in. He cut his search down to four cameras, three of which had a range that included at least part of the Black Marlin Club’s wraparound dock and eight mooring balls.

A search window allowed Stilwell to enter a specific date and go back to the weekend Leigh-Anne Moss had been fired from the club. He started the playback of the four camera angles at eight a.m. on that Saturday.

He set the playback at quadruple speed but then did the math and realized it would still take him several hours to review the entire weekend. He bumped it up to twelve times normal speed. The review process would still be lengthy, and he knew he might have to do it piecemeal when he had time. He watched as a variety of boats and ferries charged in and out of the harbor. Whenever a boat docked at the Black Marlin or moored at one of its buoys, he slowed the playback to real time to carefully study the activity on the boat and dock.

Stilwell saw nothing suspicious during the daylight hours on the Saturday that Charles Crane said he had fired Moss. Stilwellkept the playback on high speed through the dark hours and watched the reflection of the moon move quickly across the harbor waters.

Then he stopped the playback because he thought he saw an unusual movement on the water. He clicked on the camera angle that gave the fullest view of the Black Marlin Club and rewound the video. He watched again in real time and saw a small workboat come out from the covered dock on the north side of the building. A figure at the back of the boat was controlling the tiller connected to the outboard engine. The boat moved across the water to the first line of moorings and disappeared between a large ocean yacht and a two-masted sailboat.

Stilwell noted the time at the bottom of the screen. It was 3:13 Sunday morning. He closed out that camera feed and went back to the full screen showing the four camera views he had started with. He checked each for a better angle on the space between the two vessels where the workboat had disappeared but found none.

He went back to the first angle and expanded it again. He hit the playback at quadruple speed and watched and waited for the workboat to show. Twenty-five minutes on the time counter went by before it emerged from between the two larger boats and headed back to the club. Stilwell zoomed in on the workboat, but the image lost clarity, and the figure holding the outboard’s tiller remained unidentifiable.

Stilwell called to Tash and asked her to come look at something.

“What’s up?” she said.

Stilwell pointed to the screen. “These two boats,” he said. “How do I identify them?”

“Well, the ketch is easy,” Tash said. “That’s theEmerald Sea. The other one I’ll have to look up in the registry. This is the weekend before last?”

“Yes, three thirteen Sunday morning, the eighteenth.”

“Give me a few minutes and I’ll get it for you.”

“How do you know it’s theEmerald Sea?”

“Because it’s here a lot. The owner likes to leave it and comes back and forth by ferry.”

“So it sits out there empty when he’s gone?”

“A lot of the time, yes.”

Stilwell got up and looked out the tower window in the direction of the Black Marlin Club. TheEmerald Seawas gone.

“When did it leave the harbor?” he asked.

“Yesterday.”

“You called it a ketch. What exactly does that mean?”

“A two-masted sailboat is a ketch.”

“I’m not much of a sailboat guy. Who owns it? And where does it come from?”

“It’s out of MDR, and the owner is Mason Colbrink. He’s supposedly a big-time overtown lawyer.”

Stilwell nodded. He knew she was referring to Marina del Rey in Los Angeles.

“He must do corporate law,” he said. “I’ve never heard of him.”

“He’s supposedly retired,” Tash said. “But I don’t think you get a membership to the Black Marlin and a forty-foot ketch like that by doing criminal defense.”

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