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. Stilwell kept 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 the Emerald 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 the Emerald 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. The Emerald Sea was 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.”
“Probably not. How do you know when he’s here on the boat?”
“Because Mr. Colbrink always checks in with us. The harbor doesn’t allow storage mooring. It’s for active boating only. He’s pushing it by leaving his ketch here for weeks at a time, so he always wants us to know when he’s here and using it. He thinks that makes it okay.”
“Got it. Do you keep that on the registry? His comings and goings?”
“We do to a point. Mr. Colbrink is sort of cagey about that.”
Stilwell sat back down in front of the screen and pointed to the Emerald Sea.
“Can you tell me whether Colbrink was here on the weekend of the seventeenth?” he asked.
“I’ll check on that and get you the name and owner of the other boat,” Tash said. “This is fun.”
“What is?”
“Being part of an investigation.”
Stilwell watched her go back to her desk. He felt uncomfortable involving her in any part of his work. The last thing he needed was his girlfriend thinking this work was fun and wanting to join in. The reality was that you never knew when a phone call, door knock, or keystroke could bring mortal danger. Just the year before, there had been a story out of Los Angeles about a so-called amateur sleuth who ended up shot to death in her home office’s closet.
14
While Tash went to work at her desk, Stilwell returned to the playback, continuing it at twenty-four times normal speed and keeping his eyes on the two boats that the skiff had disappeared between. He was well into daylight Sunday and hadn’t seen any movement of the vessels by the time Tash came back.
“Okay, as far as I can tell, Mr. Colbrink was not here that weekend,” she said. “He was here over Memorial Day weekend and took the boat back to MDR or some other destination on Monday.”
“Okay,” Stilwell said. “What about the other boat?”
“That’s the Aventura out of Mission Bay. It’s registered to a corporation of the same name so it can be rented for charters. The captain’s name is Bernie Contrares.”
“Mission Bay?”
“Between San Diego and La Jolla.”
“Does it come up here a lot?”
“A few times a year at least.”
“You know the captain?”
“A bit, from working out moorings. Bernie’s an old navy guy. He’s always nice.”
“Was the boat occupied that weekend?”
“I show it arriving Friday and leaving the following Monday morning, the nineteenth. I assume there were people aboard.”
“You have something I can write all of this down on?”
“Here.”
She gave him a slip of notebook paper where she had already written everything down. Stilwell saw that the information on the Aventura also included the owning corporation’s address in La Jolla. Under her notes on the Emerald Sea, Tash had put down an address and phone number for Mason Colbrink in Malibu.
“This is great, Tash. Thanks.”
“I’m also making a list of the Black Marlin members we deal with on the moorings. Everybody who’s come in this year.”
“That’ll be helpful. Thank you, but then you can stop there.”
“What do you mean? I said it was fun. I want to help.”
“I know, and you are helping, but I want to be careful about it.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning it’s not all fun and games. I don’t want you to go down a path that, you know, could become dangerous.”
“I’m just sharing records and video.”
“Okay, that’s great, and let’s leave it there.”
“Well, you’re the one who asked me.”
“I know. I did. And now I’m saying we should stay in our lanes. You mean the world to me and I don’t want—”
She bent down over his shoulder and kissed him on the cheek, apparently not caring that Heidi was nearby, then went back to the control desk. Stilwell watched her go, then glanced over at Heidi. She was oblivious, or at least acting like she was. He went back to the screen and continued the high-speed playback, hoping to see something that might explain what the midnight mission of the man on the workboat had been about.