Page 45 of Nightshade

“Peter, I have to ask you one more thing,” Stilwell said. “And then I’ll leave you alone.”

Galloway turned back to him.

“Jesus,” he said. “What?”

“You must still have photos of her,” Stilwell said. “I need to see them.”

“Why do you need to see photos?”

“Because all we’ve got is a driver’s license. It would help to have some candid shots.”

“For what, like a wanted poster or something? What the hell did she do?”

“I can’t tell you about an active investigation, Peter. Do you have photos?”

Galloway reached into a pocket and pulled out his phone. He tapped in a password, then opened the photo app. He scrolled through his photos for almost thirty seconds before he stopped.

“This is all I’ve got,” he said. “But they’re old.”

He handed the phone across the coffee table to Stilwell. The shot on the screen was a close-up of Leigh-Anne, smiling, no purple streak in her hair. It was dated May 5, 2022. Stilwell thumbed through three more shots, all taken within seconds of the first photo, all showing the same unposed smile.

Callahan the bar manager had been right. She was a looker. Stilwell saw what all men, young and old, saw. But what mattered to him was something else. He saw a woman with light in her eyes, a true smile on her lips. A future that shouldn’t have been taken from her.

16

THE PICKLED EGGSwere served on a bed of salted pretzel sticks and came in a plastic basket that balanced nicely on the rail of the pool table where Stilwell and Gary Saunders played straight-up eight ball while discussing floaters and sinkers from years gone by. Joe Jost’s was crowded and loud. The venerable bar was celebrating one hundred years of existence with ongoing beer specials to fuel the celebrants.

Stilwell and Saunders went way back. Saunders had mentored Stilwell when the younger man had been assigned to the sheriff’s dive team. Saunders had never left the unit and now ran it. There had been times when Stilwell regretted transferring out. The dive team was a bubble in the department with a very specific task. As grim as the assignments were at times, it was a safe harbor from the politics and bureaucracy that seemed to crop up everywhere else in the agency.

Saunders won the first two games easily. This was new. They used to be more evenly matched, but Saunders was no longer married and Stilwell got the idea that he spent a good deal of his time off in bars with pool tables. Eventually, Stilwell casually steered the conversation to the body recovery in Avalon Harbor, askingquestions as if he had only a passing interest in the case. He started with a question he already knew the answer to.

“How long you think she was under?” he asked.

“Oh, boy, I’d say four to six days, based on the wax,” Saunders said, using the shorthand foradipocere,the soapy substance that forms on a body during decomposition in water.

“Yeah, I was thinking the same,” Stilwell said. “Was there anything else in the bag that was useful?”

“No, not really. Except the bag itself, I guess.”

“Why? It was just a trash bag, wasn’t it?”

“No, it was a sail bag.”

“What’s that?”

“They said it was for a jib—the front sail of a boat.”

“Like on a ketch? The front sail of a ketch?”

“I don’t speak sailboat, dude. I’m a ski-boat guy. But if a ketch has a front sail, then yeah. It was for storing a jib sail.”

“Who identified it as that?”

“I think it was the coroner’s investigator who was on the boat with us. He’s more of a sailboat guy.”

Stilwell was silent while he lined up a shot on the seven ball. He missed badly and scratched the cue ball. His mind was not on pool. It was now racing with this new piece of information. It meant that the woman in the water had likely been dropped into the sea from a sailboat. He thought about theEmerald Seaand the midnight visit by someone from the Black Marlin Club and then the strange outing made out and back into the harbor the next day—all of that within the time frame consistent with the decomposition of the body.

With the cue ball in hand, Saunders easily lined up the eight ball and finished the game.

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