Stilwell picked up his phone, found Dunne among his contacts, and called him. It went to message.
“Tom, it’s Stil. Just checking on you to see how you’re doing. Give me a call when you get this. All right, man, talk to you.”
He disconnected and thought about Dunne. He had been transferred to the Catalina sub seven months earlier. Stilwell had been told he was coming from the jail division but wasn’t sure where he’d worked in the massive multifacility system. He was also not told what transgression had resulted in Dunne’s transfer.
Stilwell went back to work and an hour later emailed the whole package of cases to Juarez. He didn’t expect to hear from her until late in the day. She had a calendar to cover at the Long Beach courthouse and that would be her priority. Catalina was not high on any mainlander’s to-do list.
Stilwell next started to review the crime reports that had come in over the long weekend and that he’d been too busy doing extra patrol or booking bodies to look at. There were sixteen, all crimes that did not involve arrests and that he, as the island’s lone detective, would need to follow up on.
Catalina was shaped like a lopsided eight — or an infinity symbol, as many inhabitants of the island preferred to view it. Avalon was built on a natural harbor on the south side of the island and was far and away its biggest population center. Two Harbors was a small town at the isthmus between the two halves of the eight. A slow twenty-mile drive or a faster boat ride from Avalon, it was a place where residents wanted as little as possible to do with tourism and civilization, including law enforcement. The rest of the island was largely undeveloped except for small nomadic settlements of people who were all running from something or somebody.
Three of the crime reports had come from Two Harbors: a stolen outboard motor, a vandalized golf cart, and a crab-trap poaching. These were not major crimes, although the poaching was the third such occurrence in a month, and Stilwell put these aside to review later. He made irregular visits to Two Harbors to follow cases or simply to show the flag, but he usually waited until several reports had accumulated. He planned to get out there by the end of the week.
The remaining cases were a mixed bag of vandalism, petty thefts, and fraud involving visitors who had made online reservations that turned out to be phony for hotels, fishing charters, or island services. Their deposits had disappeared into the digital ether, and there had been no hotel, tour, or fishing boat awaiting them. Most of the reports were walk-ins and were handled by Mercy, who consoled the victims and then called around to see if she could find a hotel room or at least a seat on a ferry going back to the mainland.
Stilwell shuffled through the reports until one grabbed his attention. It was a felony theft report filed by the general manager of the Black Marlin Club. The BMC was a private club that was over a century old. It had an invite-only membership of moneyed families from the mainland who brought their yachts in from Newport Beach, Santa Barbara, Marina del Rey, and other wealthy enclaves along the California coast. The club was named after what had once been the sport fisherman’s prize catch, and its members were much like the black marlin: sleek, fast, and rare in California waters. They were also dangerous — the members, that is — in terms of their reach into the corridors of power and wealth. Stilwell had been cautioned when he was transferred to Catalina to give Black Marlin members a very wide berth.
The report from general manager Charles Crane was on the theft of a small black-jade sculpture of a marlin rising from the ocean’s surface. The sculpture had been on display on a pedestal in the entry hall of the clubhouse for nearly a hundred years. The pedestal stood next to a glass case containing other historical items from the club’s past.
Deputy Tom Dunne had taken the theft report on Saturday just hours before he was attacked. According to Dunne’s crime summary, it was unknown when the sculpture had been stolen, because the pedestal was in the front hallway, which was not routinely used by members or employees. Members usually arrived by boat and entered or left the premises through doorways connecting to the docks at the side and rear of the building. Employees were not allowed to use the front entrance and used a side door.
The sculpture was reported missing on Saturday when a housekeeper charged with dusting it once a week found the pedestal empty. Crane described the sculpture as ten inches tall and weighing three or four pounds. He gave its value as priceless because of its age, the quality of the jade, and its connection to one of the club’s founders. What Stilwell zeroed in on was not the stolen object or its value but the suspect Crane had identified.
He’d told Dunne that the week before the sculpture was noticed missing, he had fired an employee named Leigh-Anne Moss for inappropriate behavior. The report said that Moss was a part-time waitress in the club’s private restaurant and bar and that she had broken the rule forbidding socializing with members. Crane told Dunne that he suspected that Moss took the jade marlin on her way out of the club following the acrimonious meeting that had resulted in her dismissal.
From Moss’s employment application, Crane gave the deputy her age and address. He also offered a description. He said that Leigh-Anne Moss had dark, shoulder-length hair with a purple streak along the left side.
9
Stilwell pulled Leigh-Anne Moss’s DMV records up on his computer. He studied the photo that was on her driver’s license. There was no purple streak in her hair, but the license had been issued two years earlier. Because of the decomposition of the body recovered from the harbor, it was impossible for Stilwell to make a visual identification. Still, his gut told him he was looking at the woman from the water. He picked up the desk phone and called the general number for the sheriff’s homicide squad. He asked the clerk who answered to connect him with Frank Sampedro. He waited a half minute before the call was connected.
“Detective Ahearn, how can I help?”
Stilwell almost hung up but decided he should not delay sharing the new information.
“I asked for Sampedro.”
“He’s not avail — wait, Stillborn, is that you?”
“Have you made an ID on the woman from the water?”
“It’s not your case, man, why do you care?”
“Because if you haven’t ID’d her, I’ve got a solid lead for you.”
“Stillborn, I told you to stand down on this. Am I going to have to go to—”
“It came across my desk in an unrelated case, Ahearn. Do you want what I’ve got or do you want to keep fighting your little war? I can wait till Sampedro calls me back. You decide.”
There was silence until Ahearn came back in a falsely cheery voice.
“Okay, give it to me. Let’s see what you came up with.”
“Check out Leigh-Anne Moss. I think she’s your victim.”
He spelled the first and last names and then gave Ahearn the birth date and address from the DMV records, which matched what was on her work application for the BMC.
“Her name came up Saturday in a report about a theft from the Black Marlin Club,” Stilwell said. “She was named as a suspect and described as having a dyed purple streak in her hair.”
“I got news for you, bright guy. Our vic was dead by Saturday.”