Nightshade: A Novel (Catalina Book 1)

by Michael Connelly

Mercy Chapa was at the clerk’s desk for her one-morning-a-week gig. The rest of the time she was manager, dispatcher, and general overseer of the sheriff’s substation, and Stilwell’s right hand.

As the detective sergeant assigned to the Avalon substation, Stilwell was the commanding officer on the island.

Oscar “Baby Head” Terranova, the owner-manager of the franchise, jumped out and approached him.

Stilwell headed back to town, stopping briefly atop Mount Ada to take in the beauty of the mountains and the crescent-shaped harbor below.

“It’s Tash. We need you over here on the skiff dock right away.”

Tash Dano was the assistant harbormaster. Stilwell had met her on his rounds when he was first assigned to the island.

The island was known as a way station for the department’s freaks and fuckups

and therefore it was not worth the residents’ investment of time to get to know any of its personnel. Tash was different.

Stilwell immediately liked her.

called and said there’s a body down there under the

Aurora. He said it’s got an anchor chain wrapped around it. A human body. He couldn’t tell male or female.”

Tash, when’s the Aurora staying till?” “Today. They’re leaving today.” “What time?” “Anytime.

He followed Denzel Abbott down, both tethered by the hookahs connected to the compressor up on the hull scraper’s skiff. The air piped through the hose was foul, stale, and oily in Stilwell’s mouth and lungs. He fought back nausea as he sank with the help of the weight belt borrowed from Abbott.

The body—if it was a body—was thirty feet down. It was as Abbott had described: A human figure bloated and bursting from an opening in what looked like a large black bag that was wrapped in braided anchor

line and a heavy galvanized chain.

almost unrecognizable as human, but he knew from his experiences in the blue world that it was indeed a person.

a streak of purple dye in the dark hair and guessed he was looking at the remains of a woman.

He could tell that this one had been in the water a while. Four days, at least. His eyes left

of the dead woman and moved down the chain to the anchor that had kept the body from floating to the surface. It was a plow anchor

anchor wasn’t from a large boat like the Aurora. He guessed its weight at twelve pounds.

The anchor hadn’t come from a working boat. It was from a pleasure boat, maybe a sailboat. The kinds of vessels that filled the harbor every weekend.

Stilwell turned to look back at the skiff dock and saw Tash Dano standing next to Lionel McKey. With them was Doug Allen, the four-term mayor of Avalon.

“News travels fast,”

“Here we go,” he whispered ...

Sometimes the place you don’t want to be turns out to be the place you should be.”

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 place where residents wanted as little as possible to do with tourism and civilization, including law enforcement.

sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking

for until you’ve found it.

THE CALIFORNIA YACHT Club was a vast complex of docks where the wealthiest of the wealthy kept their water toys. It was one of several private marinas that shared the inlet that was Marina del Rey. There were thousands of boats of all sizes and shapes.

The circles he was making around the case were growing tighter, and the Black Marlin was still at the center. He recalled Leslie Sneed telling him Leigh-Anne had said that targeting men at the club was like shooting fish in a barrel. He was beginning to believe that one of those fish was a shark.

Stilwell that he was relieved of duty with pay until the investigation was finished and submitted to the district attorney’s office for review. There would then be a final determination of whether the shooting was within policy and the law.

set up an appointment with the behavioral science unit and complete a psychological evaluation before receiving a return-to-duty order.

routine after an officer-involv...

his future was in the hands of people and political forces in the department that he couldn’t control.

Stilwell had been relieved of duty, but he was not planning to stop forward momentum on his investigations. There were leads to follow on the mainland and he was going to make good use of his time.