Chapter 3
AS SOON AS the homicide team took control of the crime scene, Stilwell was brought down to the substation and sequestered in the interview room until one of the detectives could get away and begin the first of what would be several debriefings.
Stilwell spent the time reviewing as many details of the surveillance operation as he could remember and writing them down on a legal pad.
Because a deputy had died and another had been seriously wounded, Stilwell knew he would be on the hook for every decision, good and bad, made at the airstrip.
Though still reeling from the loss of life that had occurred, he had to consider his own situation.
He had the option to request a representative from the union to advise him and sit in on any interviews, but he’d decided not to go that route and told Captain Corum upon his arrival that he would fully cooperate with the investigation.
After he had written down every salient fact of the past six hours on the yellow pages, he got up and started stacking the boxes that cluttered the interview room.
Because the space was so infrequently used for interviews, it had become the unofficial lost-and-found area for the island.
There were boxes of lost cell phones, backpacks, purses, and cameras, three full suitcases, fishing rods and reels, camping and diving equipment, and other detritus left behind by tourists.
Every three months Stilwell ordered a deputy to sort through the accumulation and either find the owners of the left-behinds or donate the items to St. Catherine’s, which held a quarterly rummage sale to raise money for the island’s struggling families.
Organizing things in the room helped Stilwell burn off nervous energy.
He had the room neat and orderly by the time the first investigator came from the crime scene.
His name was Ernie Simon. Stilwell knew him from his previous posting in the homicide squad.
He knew that Simon was a capable and fair investigator who was methodical in his approach to his work and thus was known as a tortoise—as opposed to a hare—among his colleagues.
“What’s the status on Ramirez?” Stilwell asked as soon as Simon entered.
“Still kicking, at last report,” Simon said. “What’s all this?”
He gestured at the boxes stacked against the wall.
“Lost-and-found stuff,” Stilwell said. “I turned the storage room we used to use for that into a bunk room. It’s made the rest of the sub kind of cramped, but we needed a place for people to sleep.”
Simon took a seat at the table across from Stilwell. He had shaggy white hair and a paunch that came from too much fast food and a fondness for vodka after work. He held a clipboard with a blank sheet of paper on it.
“The captain says you’re okay talking to me,” he said. “That right?”
“Right,” Stilwell said. “Whatever you need.”
“What I like to do is have you tell your story and then we’ll turn on the recorder and you tell it again, the same thing. Seems to work best that way.”
“You can record the whole thing as far as I’m concerned. The story’s not going to change.”
“Let’s do it my way, see how we go.”
“Sure.”
Simon pulled a mini-recorder out of his pocket and put it on the table but did not turn it on.
“The room’s wired too,” Stilwell said. “I can turn that on if you want.”
Simon ignored the suggestion and dove into the interview.
“Let’s start at the start,” he said. “How did tonight’s operation begin?”
“It began with Quigley getting a tip from one of his mainland CIs,” Stilwell said.
“The guy knew Quigley was working out here now and he said that there was a plane coming in tonight. Coming up from Mexicali. They make the drop out here where nobody’s watching and in the morning it’s on the first ferry to overtown. ”
“Overtown?”
“What they call the mainland over here.”
“This confidential informant, did Quigley give you a name?”
“Wouldn’t be confidential if he did. He did say the guy was a one-hundred-percenter. All his tips were money.”
“And this was a guy he knew when he worked the narco unit?”
“That’s what he said. You guys make the notification to his family yet?”
“They’re handling that from… overtown.”
“He had a wife and kids.”
“So I hear. When did Deputy Quigley get the transfer out here?”
“A little over two months ago.”
“And this CI calls him out of the blue and says a plane’s coming in and it happens to be landing on the island where Quigley now works. That sound a little convenient to you?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you know why Quigley was transferred out here?”
“I only know what he told me. I’m allowed access to basic personnel records on the people they move out here, but I don’t see the disciplinary files.”
What Stilwell knew but didn’t need to say was that the Catalina substation was a transfer destination for deputies who had somehow run afoul of the department’s command staff.
This could be due to anything from a political misstep to an improper show of force to accepting a free meal to getting your shirts pressed for free.
It was a form of punishment and everyone in the LASD knew it.
If you were transferred to Catalina, you had fucked up. That was how Stilwell got here.
“What did he tell you?” Simon asked.
“He said it was because he was working a nightclub in West Hollywood and busted a guy selling coke in the restroom who turned out to be the sheriff’s nephew. Whether that was a true story or not, I don’t know.”
“The story might be true but it wasn’t the reason he was transferred out of narcotics.”
Stilwell didn’t respond. He hoped his silence would lead Simon to reveal more, but it didn’t.
“So, you get this tip,” Simon said. “It’s short notice and not enough time to get anybody from narcotics out to handle it, so that leaves you, Quigley, and Ramirez.”
“Correct,” Stilwell said. “Quigley said his CI was a hundred-percenter but what’s that mean to me? Nothing. So I also left a deputy in the sub to handle calls in case this whole thing was a decoy op.”
“You mean to draw you up the mountain to the airstrip while they hit a target down here?”
“Exactly.”
“Very smart.”
“SOP.”
“Maybe, but still a good move. When did this tip come in?”
“Deputies out here work twelves, changing on the sixes. Quigley worked three days on, four off. He stayed in the bunk room because he thought he’d be a short-timer out here and his family was embedded with schools and a house and all of that in Gardena.
He had clocked out but was hanging around the sub because I guess he had nowhere else to go.
His CI called him and he came to me at seven twenty with it—I wrote it down.
His guy didn’t have an ETA but said the plane was already in the air. ”
“From Mexicali, that’s, what, about three hours?”
“Depends on the plane and the flight path, I guess. I don’t know planes but it was a single prop with an overhead wing and a blue stripe down its side. No tail number. And judging by the sound, it came in from the west, probably flying outside the twelve-mile limit till it got up here.”
“Did you call the narco unit after this tip came in?”
“I did. They were running an op in Compton last night. They said they couldn’t get anybody out here but they’d follow up on it in the morning. But by then it would be too late, so I told Quigley to suit up and I took Ramirez off the second shift to make three of us.”
“What happened up there?”
Referring to his legal pad, Stilwell began to give a detailed account of the events up at the airstrip.