Page 92 of Nightshade

“All right, give me twenty minutes.”

“Perfect.”

She went to the front desk and Stilwell went back to his phone. He sent the text to Tash telling her he would probably be working later than usual. A few moments later he got a return from her.

So who is she?

She did this often, a humorous way to hide her insecurity about their relationship. He played along.

A tough-as-nails prosecutor named Monika.

In response to this he received a green-faced emoji symbolizing jealousy, and then:

Invite her to dinner?

At least once a month they invited Juarez out to dinner. She was one of the first people they had revealed their relationship to.

I’ll ask.

He put the phone away and opened his laptop, which he had brought with him in case the wait for Juarez went long. He connected to the hotel’s Wi-Fi, went to the California Secretary of State website, and searched for Wheelmen LLC, the company mentioned in theCatalina Callstory on the proposal to build the giant Ferris wheel on the Avalon harbor.

A listing of incorporation documents filed on behalf of the company appeared on-screen. He opened Wheelmen’s application to incorporate, filed on February 7 of that year. This showed that the company had initially formed as a Delaware corporation two months earlier and then applied to California. The corporate address listed was on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles, with a registered corporate agent named Ellen Sparks. Stilwell opened a Word document and typed in both pieces of information. The application listed the company as a public-entertainment enterprise.

Stilwell started going through the other documents on the state site, identifying the company officers. He typed these into the Word document as well.

President and CEO: Marcus Rifkin

Vice president: Stanley Banks

Secretary: Nathan Cabot

Chief operating officer: Susan St. Jacques

The attorney who filed the documents was named Bryson Long. Stilwell recognized none of the names except Marcus Rifkin, who had been mentioned in theCallstory. It was Rifkin who had submitted, with Mayor Allen’s endorsement, the design and other documents pertaining to the Big Wheel project to the Avalon planning board for initial review.

After closing out of the California Secretary of State site, Stilwell started googling the names one by one to see if anything else came up. Several references to Rifkin appeared, most concerning other cities where his company had proposed building either giant Ferris wheels or zip line systems. Some had been turned down, but most were still in play or had been initially approved and were in the designing stages. As far as Stilwell could tell, none had become operational yet. These projects were in towns in Florida, Texas, and Louisiana that depended heavily on tourism.

He plugged the Wheelmen corporate address in Los Angeles into the search engine and soon was looking at a photo of an office building in Koreatown.

“What’s that?”

Stilwell looked up from the screen to see Juarez, who had changed out of her DA clothes into blue jeans and a white blouse.

“What I want to talk to you about,” he answered. “You okay to talk here? Or we could go to the sub, if that’s better.”

Juarez glanced around. There was no one else in the small lobby, and the clerk who had checked her in had left the desk.

“We can talk here,” she said. “What’s up?”

“What’s up is that I have a guy in my jail who admits he cut up the buffalo on the preserve a couple weeks ago,” Stilwell said. “Hewants to make a deal where he skates on the buffalo but gives us the man who put him up to it, and for good measure, he’ll throw in what he knows about the mayor being a silent partner with that same guy in a multimillion-dollar project that he’s pushing through the public-approval process.”

Juarez nodded eagerly, as any prosecutor with a public-corruption case dropped in her lap would do.

“Well, tell me more,” she said.

“You want to start with the buffalo or the city project?” Stilwell asked.

“Let’s go with the buffalo.”

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