Page 4 of Nightshade
“If by ‘new,’ you mean a year ago, then, yeah, that would be me.”
“You know I’m going to have to call Baby Head about this.”
Stilwell moved to the back of the Gator and unlocked the storage compartment. He took out a set of disposable gloves, a flashlight, and the bottle of Bluespray he kept in the kit he’d put together when he’d worked homicide on the mainland.
“You can call anybody you want,” he said to Gaston as he was gathering it all. “But I’m going to conduct the court-ordered search now.”
He closed the compartment and walked directly toward Gaston even though there was plenty of room in the garage entry to go around him. Intimidated by the move, Gaston stepped back and out of the way. He pulled a cell phone from his pocket and started making a call.
Stilwell entered the garage and saw that the left side was lined with empty charging bays. All the tour carts were presumably in use or at least down at the harbor ready for the arrival of tourists coming in off the boats. The right side of the garage was where carts were repaired or cannibalized for parts. There were two six-seaters in various stages of disassembly. One was on a lift because it had no wheels. The other was in need of bodywork, as its fiberglass front was splintered—it appeared to have been driven into something.
In the rear right corner of the garage was an L-shaped workbench with tools hanging on a pegboard behind it. This drew Stilwell’s attention and he walked around the two broken carts to take a look. Gaston had followed him into the barn and was standing in the center, talking to somebody on his phone.
“He’s got a warrant to search the place,” he said. “I couldn’t stop him.”
Stilwell scanned the pegboard until his eyes came to a handsaw with a long blade and a blue plastic handle.
“Uh, right now he’s in the back by the tools,” Gaston said. “You going to come over?”
Stilwell pulled out his phone and took a photo of the handsaw where it was hanging on the board. He then put on his gloves and took down the saw. Under the beam of the flashlight, he studied the blade carefully. It did not take him long to determine that it was new. There were no scratches on its stainless-steel surface and no corrosion from the salt air, and its teeth were pristine, showing no sign that they had ever cut even a stick of butter.
The saw’s plastic handle, however, was old and marked by time and use. It was only the blade that was new.
“That’s a pipe saw,” Gaston said. “We use it mostly on fiberglass and PVC.”
He had come up behind Stilwell. He was no longer on the phone.
“You cut anything else with it?” Stilwell asked.
“Just stuff with the carts,” Gaston said. “We customize. Sometimes we cut ’em clean in half and make two four-seaters into an eight-seater or a six-pack. Like that.”
“Doesn’t look like anybody’s been cutting with this one lately. Blade looks brand-new. You change it recently, Henry?”
“Uh, no.”
“You sure?”
“Course I’m sure.”
“Do me a favor and close the garage and turn off the overhead lights.”
“How come?”
“Because if you don’t, I will, and I might hit the wrong switch.”
“All right.”
Gaston went to do as he was told. Stilwell looked again at the saw. The blade was about eighteen inches long and had very small teeth—right for a smooth cut through fiberglass and PVC pipes. It was secured to the handle by two wing nuts. He used his thumb and forefinger to turn the nuts and detach the blade. Gaston pulled down on a chain attached to a pulley at the top of the garage door and it started to descend.
Once Stilwell had the blade separated, he put the handle on the workbench and studied one side and then the other in his flashlight’s beam. The overhead lights went out and the garage dropped into darkness save for Stilwell’s flashlight and some daylight that leaked in under the corrugated roof’s eaves.
Stilwell sprayed one side of the saw handle with the chemical in the bottle, a compound that emitted a whitish-blue glow in the presence of hemoglobin. He then turned off the flashlight and waited and watched.
“What’s going on?” Gaston called from the darkness.
“I’m conducting a presumptive test for blood,” Stilwell said.
That brought only silence from the space where Gaston stood.
