Page 22 of Nightshade
“Monty, long time,” Stilwell said.
“Sure is. What’s happening, my brother?”
“Same old, same old, except now I’m out on an island doing it. How are you?”
“As long as the bodies keep dropping, I keep hopping.”
“Speaking of, I’m wondering if you could check your computer for a case.”
“You got a case?”
“Technically, no. But it happened on my turf and I’m just checking to see if there’s been COD established.”
“Lucky man. I’m at my desk and can put it into the box as we speak. Name?”
“No name. Actually, a Jane Doe. She was a sinker out here in the Avalon harbor. Coroner would have gotten the body Friday night.”
“Right, I heard about that one. Stand by, let me find it.”
Stilwell heard West’s keyboard clacking, then silence as West read whatever had come up on the screen.
“No cause of death yet,” West finally said. “Autopsy’s later on today—scheduled at three.”
“Got it. Any ID yet?”
“Uh, looks like a no on ID. Preliminary report is that skin slippage made prints unavailable. Waiting on detectives to make an ID through other means.”
“Don’t hold your breath.”
“Yeah, this says it’s A-Hole that’s got it. I bet he’s working his ass off.”
Stilwell noted the sarcasm. Ahearn’s reputation was known far and wide. “You have photos there?” he asked.
“Yeah, the preliminary examination was done this morning,” West said. “What are you looking for?”
“I saw her in the water, so her hair was kind of all over the place. I’m thinking about the purple streak I saw. Is that in the pictures?”
“Yup, I got it here.”
“Can you shoot that to me?”
“I can as long as you never say where you got it.”
“It will never come up. Can you text it?”
“I can.”
“Thanks, Monty. I owe you one.”
“I might come out there to collect it. You can show me where all the aliens I’ve been reading about are hiding.”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
They disconnected and Stilwell waited for the text to come through. It took his phone a minute to download the file, and then he saw a photo of the woman from the water, her face almost unrecognizable as human and unmatchable to the DMV photo. But someone at the coroner’s office had brushed her hair back from her face. Stilwell could see the purple streak in her hair. It started at the front scalp line on the left side of a middle part and looped down the length of her hair. Stilwell felt sure that he was looking at a death photo of Leigh-Anne Moss.
He also noted an abrasion on the right side of the forehead that disappeared under the thickness of the hair. There was no blood evident. Stilwell knew that the abrasion could have been a postmortem injury sustained as the body was dragged by underwater currents. Or it could have been from the blow that killed her.
He put the photo into an email and sent it to himself. He then reviewed everything he knew about Moss. Neither he nor the general manager at the Black Marlin had an address on Catalina for her. The address on her driver’s license and applicationto the BMC was a street in the Belmont Shore neighborhood in Long Beach. Stilwell knew the area well, having owned a condominium there. He wondered if he had ever passed Leigh-Anne on the street, on the beach, or in Joe Jost’s or another restaurant. He wondered if the nexus of what ultimately put her in the water with an anchor chain wrapped around her body was over there on the mainland or here on the island.
