Nightshade: A Novel (Catalina Book 1)

by Michael Connelly

The Adjourned was a forty-year-old Viking 35. Judge Harrell kept it clean and well maintained.

“Anyway, sorry to be late,” Harrell said. “I called Mercy and she’s cued everything up.” Harrell took a seat in the cart on the towel Stilwell had spread. “Yes, sir,” Stilwell said. “Just a few D-and-Ds and a wobbler.” “Tell me about the wobbler,” the judge said.

“Well, technically, it’s a burglary of an occupied dwelling with a firearm enhancement,” Stilwell said. “But the dwelling is occupied by the suspect’s ex-girlfriend, and he claims he was stealing back his Glock because he was afraid of leaving it with her, like she might harm herself with it.” “How noble,” Harrell said. “You know this man?” “Kermit Henderson, born and raised here. Works up at the golf course running mowers and doing general maintenance. The girlfriend is Becki Trower, another local. I was thinking maybe you work a deal like you did with Sean Quinlan and we get some maintenance done around the sub. Especially since Sean is coming off his time.”

“There’s also this.” Stilwell leaned forward, reached into his back pocket, and pulled out the document he had printed earlier that morning and folded lengthwise to fit. He handed it to the judge, who unfolded it and started to read. “Search warrant,” Harrell said. He got quiet as he read the summary and probable cause statement. Then he shook his head, not because he disagreed with anything he had read but because it made him angry. “You got a pen?” he said.

“I gave up a long time ago trying to understand why people do what they do to each other,” Harrell said. “But cruelty to animals still gets to me. If this guy did what you suspect, then he better find a good lawyer and hope I don’t get the case.” “I hear you,” Stilwell said. “I’m the same.”

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.

Juarez was a small woman with brown skin. Her hair was in black ringlets that framed her thin face but did not fully hide the whitish scar that ran along the left side of her jaw. Stilwell had never asked her about it but thought that however she got it, it probably had something to do with why she’d become a prosecutor.

Lampley had the longest-running assignment to the Catalina substation.

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 threw him a mock salute and pulled his cart into its assigned parking space. Before he got to the door of the substation, he took a call from the harbormaster’s office. “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. She had invited Stilwell to lunch and even gave him her own tour of the island. She had lived there her entire life and had no plans to leave. Stilwell immediately liked her.

“You know Abbott, the scraper?” she asked. “I know who he is. First name is Denzel, right?” “Right. He just 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.”

He remembered that the Aurora was a seagoing yacht registered out of Venezuela. It had entered the harbor two days earlier and moored on the fourth line of buoys, where the big boats were staged.

“And Tash, when’s the Aurora staying till?” “Today. They’re leaving today.” “What time?” “Anytime. They have the ball till sixteen hundred but can shove off whenever they want.” “We might have to do something about that. I’ll probably want to hold them in port if what Abbott says he saw is true.” “You want me to call the Coast Guard in? They could stop them.” “I want to confirm the body before we start calling in the troops.”

“I’m going to have Abbott take me down.” “Oh.” “Problem?” “No. Just be careful.” “Copy that. I will.” Stilwell went into the sub to get his wet suit.

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.

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

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.

Leigh-Anne Moss had dark, shoulder-length hair with a purple streak along the left side.

sometimes you don’t know what you’re looking for until you’ve found it.

He scrolled through his photos for almost thirty seconds before he stopped. “This is all I’ve got,” he said. “But they’re old.” He handed the phone across the coffee table to Stilwell. The shot on the screen was a close-up of Leigh-Anne, smiling, no purple streak in her hair. It was dated May 5, 2022. Stilwell thumbed through three more shots, all taken within seconds of the first photo, all showing the same unposed smile.

She was a looker. Stilwell saw what all men, young and old, saw. But what mattered to him was something else. He saw a woman with light in her eyes, a true smile on her lips. A future that shouldn’t have been taken from her.

The call was disconnected. Stilwell sat at the desk unmoving for nearly a minute. He was apprehensive about the setup. He didn’t expect Ahearn to change his attitude toward him, but he was pleased to be officially on the case. He thought of the woman with the purple streak in her hair and how someone had taken away her hopes and dreams of a better life. Stilwell knew he could put up with Ahearn and Sampedro as long as together they brought her killer to justice.

Stilwell took one of the Amazon boxes off the shelf and opened it on the bed next to the sleeping cat. It contained various unopened hair products, including two tubes of Colors hair dye. Both had purple screw-on caps and were labeled NIGHTSHADE. Stilwell thought of the purple wildflowers that grew on some of the island’s hillsides. “Nightshade,” Sneed said. “She loved that color. Like the flower. I said to her once, ‘Don’t you know that nightshade is poisonous?’ But she didn’t care.”

He slid the box out and opened it. It contained a pair of black high-heeled pumps. “Prada—nice,” Sneed said. Stilwell saw the brand mark on the insole. “Yours or hers?” he asked. “Hers, definitely,” Sneed said. “Too small for me.”

“It’s just funny,” she said. “I never saw her wear those and I can’t think of a place on this island where you would. Except up at the Ada, maybe.” The Mount Ada was the island’s only four-star hotel. It was once the Wrigley mansion and sat high up on the hill overlooking the harbor and Santa Monica Bay.

He agreed with Sneed that in a golf-cart town, only the Mount Ada was formal enough for Prada pumps, and he decided to check it out. The small but upscale two-story bed-and-breakfast catered to the wealthiest visitors to the island. The rooms were easily a grand a night on weekends in season. The opulence of the setting was accentuated by the man behind the front desk, who wore something seldom seen on Catalina: a suit and tie.

Stilwell took the stairs up to a short hallway with doors on both sides. Suite 4 was at the end on the left. Inside was a small sitting room with a fireplace and an open door to a bedroom on the left. Stilwell imagined that it had at one time been the master bedroom of William Wrigley, the Chicago magnate who had once owned the island and built the mansion as a winter getaway. The Ada was named after his wife, and for a time, Wrigley brought his baseball team, the Chicago Cubs, out to Catalina for spring training.

Nineteen Hall of Famers in all had trained on the island. Stilwell had learned all of this from Tash, who wasn’t so much a baseball fan as a fan of the island’s history.

Built by William Wrigley Jr. in 1929, City Hall was a sprawling one-story structure that featured the same mix of Art Deco and Mediterranean Revival design elements that the town’s signature Casino had.