Esquivel started to groan.
“Eddie, you’re all right,” Stilwell said. “I’m going to get you help. Just hang in there.”
He grabbed the two-way off Esquivel’s belt, called Porter on it, and ordered him back to the sub. He then put the radio down on the floor and gently started to pat Esquivel’s cheek. This produced another groan.
“Eddie, wake up. What happened here? How did—”
“Oh my God!”
Stilwell turned. Juarez had come into the jail section.
“Monika, check the other cell,” Stilwell ordered. “Gaston is in there. Go!”
Juarez stepped over to the other cell and immediately brought a hand up to her mouth to stifle a scream. There was a cinder-block wall between the two cells, and Stilwell couldn’t see what she saw.
“What?” he said.
“He’s... he’s dead,” she said. “I think.”
Stilwell leaped to his feet and left the first cell to join her. He looked through the bars into the second cell. Henry Gaston was no doubt dead. He was sitting on the cell’s steel toilet, his head back, exposing a gaping neck wound and a cascade of blood down the front of his shirt. He had nearly been decapitated.
“What is happening?” Juarez shouted in a panicked voice.
“Listen to me,” Stilwell said calmly. “I need you to leave the sub and go to the fire station next door. Tell them you have an officer down and he needs medical attention.”
Juarez didn’t move.
“Monika!” Stilwell shouted. “Go next door and get the EMTs. Now!”
Juarez seemed to snap out of it. Her eyes focused on Stilwell’s and she nodded.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “I’m going.”
She left, and Stilwell pulled his phone. He called the sheriff’s comms center on the mainland to report a homicide and an officer down. He requested that Captain Corum and the homicide unit be alerted and dispatched to Catalina.
As soon as Stilwell ended the call he heard another groan from the first cell. He went back to Esquivel and found him trying to get up off the floor.
“Hold on, Eddie,” he said. “Stay down. We have help coming. Let the EMTs look at you before you try to get up.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Esquivel said.
“That’s okay, that’s okay. It probably means you’re in shock. Stay down and stay calm, and turn your head to the side. Help is on the way.”
“Okay. All right.”
“Do you remember what happened, Eddie?”
“Uh, I got hit.”
“Who hit you? Was it Spivak?”
“Yeah, Spivak. He hit me. He was screaming about something, so I came to see what was happening, and I got too close. He grabbed my shirt. He pulled me into the bars and I hit my head. And then... that’s all I remember.”
“Okay. It will come back. Just take it easy. Help’s coming.”
“Did he get away? I think he took my keys.”
“Yeah, he’s gone.”
Stilwell thought about Spivak’s escape. He checked his watch. The last ferry to the mainland had left forty-five minutes before. Esquivel was actively bleeding from fresh wounds, so Stilwell guessed that the attack and escape had occurred recently, after the ferry’s departure. That meant Spivak was still on the island — or he’d left on a boat he’d had stashed away somewhere. Stilwell assumed it was the latter. His instincts told him that this had been a setup from the start. That Spivak had engineered his placement in the jail so he could take out Gaston should he surrender or be arrested.
His phone buzzed. It was Captain Corum calling.
“Stil, what the hell’s going on over there?”
“It’s a mess, Captain. We’ve got a deputy down but alive, a prisoner dead, and another prisoner who escaped.”
“Can you lock down the island?”
“I think it’s too late. This was a planned assassination and most likely the escape was part of the plan.”
“Who’s the victim?”
“The dead man was a guy who said he could take down a local gangster and the mayor if we made him a deal.”
“And you believed him?”
“I did, and I think so did somebody else.”
“I’m coming out with a team. Be ready to brief us.”
“I’ll be here and I’ll be ready.”
32
Once the mainland team had assembled in Avalon, the investigation moved through the night. Stilwell was questioned repeatedly by two different pairs of detectives under Captain Corum’s command. Even Monika Juarez was questioned extensively. Eduardo Esquivel was brought to the island’s only twenty-four-hour clinic and diagnosed with a concussion to go with the deep laceration a metal bar had left across his forehead. His telling of what had happened in the jail would come later.
Corum’s investigators reviewed the video of Merris Spivak’s attack on Deputy Dunne the Saturday before, saw the intention in the assault, and understood what Stilwell had come to understand too late: that the violent attack was planned and that Spivak had wanted to be arrested and held in the substation so he would be in place should Henry Gaston come out of hiding and be jailed by Stilwell.
“I delivered him right to Spivak,” Stilwell said.
“There was no way you could have known,” Corum said. He quickly added, “At least that’s my opinion.”
Meaning that if a fall guy was needed in the case, Stilwell would still be the leading candidate.
The investigation stretched into Friday’s daylight hours, preventing Stilwell from picking up Judge Harrell at the harbor and getting him to sign the search warrant for the Black Marlin Club. Stilwell knew it was just as well. The rule of law required search warrants to be executed within forty-eight hours of a judge’s signature. That was most likely impossible now with the Gaston case dominating his time and attention. He decided he would wait until the new week, then go over to Harrell’s home court in Long Beach, get the warrant signed, and come back with Sampedro and Ahearn to conduct the search.
It was not ideal to delay one homicide investigation because of another, but the circumstances were dictating his moves. He explained this to Corum and then to Ahearn, who called after getting wind of what had happened at the sub. Stilwell wasn’t sure if he was calling to poke him about the situation he was in or simply to assure him that the Leigh-Anne Moss investigation was continuing on the mainland.
“We’ll keep it moving,” Ahearn said. “You fall in when you’re clear of that shit out there, and then we’ll search the club.”
Stilwell and the investigators hadn’t slept all night, and it was unlikely the town’s residents had gotten much sleep either. Two sheriff’s helicopters had been dispatched to the island to circle the town, beaches, and coastal waters in a cover-your-ass search for the wanted man. It was not surprising that Spivak was not located. He was either hiding or long gone.
What was also long gone was the external hard drive from the tech closet, and with it the recording of Stilwell’s interview of Gaston. With Gaston dead and the recording gone, any case against Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova would be in jeopardy. Stilwell had taken no notes during the interview because he knew he had a recording. A reconstruction of what Gaston said now, hours later, would invite a legitimate challenge if offered in court as evidence.
“We’re completely fucked,” Corum said when this problem was explained to him.
“Maybe not completely,” Stilwell responded.