“What can I get you today?” she asked.
“I’ll go with a BLT on wheat toast,” Stilwell said.
“Anything to drink?”
“Iced tea.”
“You got it.”
“Are you the Leslie who called our office this morning about Leigh-Anne?”
She raised her eyes from her order pad and seemed to notice the embroidered badge on Stilwell’s shirt for the first time.
“How did you know that?” she asked.
“The woman you talked to is a regular customer here,” Stilwell said. “I know you’re in the middle of work now, but I need to ask you about Leigh-Anne.”
“Uh, okay. Was she the girl they found in the water?”
“I can’t really answer that at the moment. But why did you call about her?”
“Because she owes me money and I sort of heard that there was going to be a reward for, you know, information that helps with the case.”
“How did you hear about the reward? That was just approved.”
“Oh, you hear a lot of things at the tables. City Hall people have breakfast here almost every day. I heard them talking about the reward this morning.”
Stilwell nodded. “You said Leigh-Anne owed you money. For what?”
“She rented a room from me and stopped paying.”
“When was this?”
“She started renting it in January but she stopped staying there a couple months ago and she didn’t pay me for the month before she left.”
Stilwell sat forward, fully focused on the piece of luck he had just been served.
“What’s your full name, Leslie?”
“Leslie Sneed.”
“So Leigh-Anne stayed with you while she was working at the Black Marlin Club?”
“Usually she was here on the weekends. Sometimes on Thursdays if she got a shift. And then she stopped staying and decided she didn’t have to pay me for the last month.”
Stilwell nodded sympathetically.
“Listen, I need to talk to you more about this, but this is not really the right place to do it,” he said. “Can you come down to the sheriff’s station with me?”
“You mean, like, now?”
“Yes, now.”
“I... uh, I don’t think the manager will let me leave. It’s about to get busy here and I also need the tip money.”
“I understand. When will the lunch rush be over?”
“Probably around two.”
“Okay, let’s do two. After I finish eating, I’ll leave, but then I’ll come back at two to give you a ride down to the station.”
“So it was her.”
“We’ll talk about that.”
“I knew she was going to get into trouble.”
Stilwell felt the whisper on the back of his neck again. He was beginning to think that finding Leslie Sneed might significantly advance the case.
“Well, we’ll talk about that too,” he said.
She left to put in his food order. Stilwell took a pen out of his pocket and started to read and edit the search warrant. But he soon stopped. He couldn’t concentrate because of his excitement over finding Leslie Sneed and because he knew she might provide information that would have to go into the request to search the Black Marlin Club.
He put the document aside and started thinking about how he would handle things at two.
26
After finishing his BLT, Stilwell had an hour to kill while Leslie Sneed worked the lunch rush at the Sandtrap. He drove the Gator down to Crescent and posted up on the side of the road where he had a view of the Black Marlin Club’s front door and the embarcadero dock on the side. He pulled out his phone and called the cell number Frank Sampedro had given him.
“Just checking in,” he said. “You guys at the boat yet?”
“Well into it,” Sampedro said. “And we got blood.”
“Really? Where?”
“The bottom of the helm. It was cleaned up, but forensics found it in a hinge on one of the floor hatches. We got enough for DNA matching. We’re just hoping it’s not fish blood.”
“It’s gotta be the victim’s. Colbrink told me he doesn’t fish.”
“Good to know.”
“Anything else from the boat?”
“We’re still working it. Forensics is down in the cabin now.”
“What about the cleaner? The Three-Oh-Three.”
“Nothing there. We checked the trash cans on the dock and even the dumpster where everything gets emptied. It all was picked up yesterday by county sanitation.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, but we got the blood in the helm.”
Getting fingerprints would have been better, Stilwell thought.
“Is Colbrink there?” he asked.
“He was,” Sampedro said. “Rex took him downtown for a formal interview.”
Stilwell didn’t say anything to that. He was thinking about what he remembered of Ahearn’s interview techniques. They were generally heavy-handed, and he hoped Ahearn wasn’t going to offend a cooperating witness and lose the access they currently had to both Colbrink and what was likely a floating crime scene.
“When you talked to Colbrink, did he tell you about Yacht Lock?” Sampedro asked.
“No. What’s Yacht Lock?” Stilwell replied.
“It’s like LoJack for boats. A lot of these big boats get stolen and it’s like a hidden GPS so the boat can be tracked. Colbrink said he has it on this thing because it’s a custom-made one-of-a-kind boat. We’re thinking we might be able to pinpoint where the boat stopped when it went out into the bay and the body was dumped.”
Stilwell became fully alert.
“It’s that precise?” he asked.
“Supposedly it’s precise to a fifty-foot radius,” Sampedro said. “That’s a lot better than phone GPS.”
“How do we get the location?”
“I called the company down in San Diego. They need a search warrant. I’ll get going on it when I get back in.”
“Good deal. We get the spot and we probably get the murder weapon.”
“And maybe the phone.”
Stilwell was silent for a moment. He knew that search warrants took forever with cell service providers, and their data revealed only numbers called or texted. The texts themselves were stored on the actual phone.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Sampedro said. “Salt water. I already talked to tech services. Fresh water, not a problem. But two weeks in salt water is going to make it a long shot.”
“Well, I guess we have to find it first.”
Stilwell was hopeful about Yacht Lock. It might cut a needle-in-a-haystack search down to a contained and viable target location.
“What’s going on out there?” Sampedro asked.
“I’ve got the search warrant for the club almost ready to go,” Stilwell said. “The judge comes over in the morning. And in an hour I’m interviewing a waitress who rented a room out here to Leigh-Anne Moss earlier this year. Until she apparently started staying with somebody else.”
“Do we know who?”
“That’s what I’m going to try to find out. I’ll keep you posted.”
“Let us know what you get.”
“You too. And one last thing. If the judge signs off on the warrant tomorrow, I could use some help out here with the search. There will be a lot of ground to cover in the club. Are you guys going to come out, or should I use some of my people here? I don’t think they have much investigative experience or have even served search warrants before. I could also use somebody from forensics in case we find biological evidence.”