Chapter 20
STILWELL PULLED OUT his phone and quickly called Ballard, dispensing with any small talk when she answered.
“I think I owe Harry Bosch a beer,” he said. “Maybe a whole case.”
“Oh yeah?” Ballard said. “Tell me.”
Stilwell told her to pull up the Griffith Park news videos on her computer and then directed her to the KCAL report.
“Okay, freeze it at the twelve-second mark,” he instructed.
“Got it,” Ballard said. “What am I looking at?”
“In the background. Is that the tree where Candace Neary’s bones were found?”
“Uh, hard to… is it?”
“It’s got a split from what was probably a recent lightning strike at the time she was buried. When the bones were found years later, you can see the split has grown together, but it’s scarred. Look at the excavation photos. It’s the same tree.”
“Okay. So what does that mean?”
“Well, two things. First, I’m thinking maybe the guy picked that tree so he could easily find it again.”
“So he could come back and visit his kill.”
“Exactly.”
“That’s good, Stil. I get that. What’s the other thing?”
“The interview going on in the background. That’s Donna Driscoll from Channel Five interviewing a park ranger. You see the uniform?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, take the video to the sixteen-second mark and freeze it when he turns to point at the searchers going up the hill.”
There was a long silence. Stilwell waited for Ballard to make the connection.
“Holy shit,” she finally said. “Is that…”
“Kent Middleton—our ranger out on Catalina.”
“So what are you saying?”
“That I don’t believe in coincidences, not like this.”
“You sound like Harry Bosch. So he was a volunteer on the Neary search but worked on Catalina?”
“No, he didn’t start working on Catalina until two years ago.
He was a city ranger during the Neary search and helped lead it.
It’s what we were just saying—he buries Neary under the lightning-strike tree so he can always find the spot and visit and relive his fantasy.
But then what happens? About two years ago, the grave is supposedly disturbed by animals and the bones are found. They’re removed and—”
“And there’s no more grave for him to visit.”
“Exactly. So he applies to the CIC for a job because he’s got another victim up there under the ironwood. He’s got one he can visit anytime he wants.”
“It’s a leap.”
“Yeah, but I made it across. So can you.”
Ballard didn’t reply. Stilwell thought she was probably running it through her filters looking for a flaw in the logic.
While he waited her out, he pulled up the still photo of the man leaving the backpack on the bench at Avalon Harbor.
He compared it to the image on the screen.
It was impossible to make a solid connection.
“What is the CIC?” Ballard finally said.
“Catalina Island Conservancy. It’s a nonprofit. Fifty years ago, the Wrigley family gave most of the island to the CIC to preserve and protect it.”
“And why did you just say supposedly about the bones being disturbed by animals?”
Stilwell was surprised she had noticed that, but he had been impressed by Ballard every time he talked to her.
“Okay, hear me out,” he said. “He instigated this whole investigation when he left the backpack on the bench for us. He was inviting us to find Angela, and we did.”
“That’s a contradiction between the cases,” Ballard said. “Neary’s remains were found because animals got into the grave, but the killer intentionally led us to Metier.”
“That’s why I said supposedly. How sure are you about animals digging four feet down and pulling up the bones?”
“It’s a bit of a stretch, I know. But I sent photos to a wildlife biologist at Cal State L.A. and he said coyotes can dig dens as deep as six feet.”
“Is that what this was? A den?”
“It could have been. But the Cal State guy said the animal—most likely a coyote—was probably just foraging, which would be a shallower dig. But when it got down a foot or so, it picked up the scent of the remains and just kept going. But it sounds like you’re thinking the bones were intentionally unearthed? ”
“It’s a possibility. It would fit with Metier and there would be no contradiction.”
“That’s good. Do we have the video of the Donna Driscoll interview?”
“I didn’t see it in what you sent me.”
“Okay, I’ll get somebody on that first thing tomorrow.”
“What do you want me to do out here?”
“I need to think about next moves. We don’t want to spook this guy.”
“When we were up at the excavation, I asked him if there were any records at his office from the search for Angela. He said he’d check but I haven’t heard from him. I could follow up on that.”
“That might be good. Kind of take the measure of the guy.”
“Okay, I’ll go see him tomorrow. Very casual, just following up on that request.”
“Perfect.”
After the call, Stilwell decided to wrap things up for the day.
He texted Tash and said he was heading home and suggested that he pick up dinner at Steve’s, the island’s venerable steak house.
She responded with a thumbs-up but told him she was still in the harbormaster’s tower waiting for the last two boats to leave their moorings and head out to the open water.
Sunday was an exodus day on the island. The hotels emptied out, the nonresident moorings ended, the ferries leaving Avalon were full, and the boats coming back were almost vacant.
Stilwell and Tash often ended the weekend with a steak-and-red-wine dinner on the deck of the house they shared on Descanso Avenue.
Stilwell stepped out of his office into the squad room.
It was empty and he went to the wall monitor on which all law enforcement and emergency services vehicles were tracked by GPS on a digital map of the island.
The screen had been installed after the fires that devastated areas of the county the year before—emergency responses had been slowed by a lack of communication and poor allocation of equipment.
Now all vehicles operated by the fire department, sheriff’s office, county utilities, and CIC rangers were tracked on the map.
There were two deputies on duty and Stilwell saw that the location icons for their ATVs were stacked.
The deputies were supposed to be patrolling the harbor zone separately but they were apparently together and high up on Avalon Canyon Road.
This concerned Stilwell. It meant something had happened and both deputies had responded to it.
Either that or they were cooping—slang for parking, sleeping, or generally not on patrol.
Given the location of the two ATVs on the map, Stilwell thought something had happened.
He checked the deployment sheet on the bulletin board next to the screen and confirmed that Ross McGowan and Dawn Stabile were on duty. He stepped over to the charging rack, grabbed a two-way, and called McGowan, who was the ranking deputy of the two.
“Avalon One, come back,” he said.
He waited for a return. Nothing came.
“Avalon Two? Come back.”
“Go for One.” It was McGowan’s voice.
“What do you have up there, One?” Stilwell asked.
“Another five-ninety-four at ABC,” McGowan responded.
Stilwell stepped back over to the wall monitor and stared at the map as he cursed to himself.
ABC was the Avalon Beverage Company, the corporation that operated the island’s only vineyard, and 594 was the state penal code for felony vandalism.
In the past year, the vineyard had been the target of repeated acts of vandalism aimed at disrupting its production of grapes for a pinot noir sold under the label Avalon Crest.
The attackers had disabled vineyard equipment and irrigation lines, set fire to a toolshed, and destroyed vine trellises.
The campaign of vandalism appeared to have been spurred by the city council’s controversial approval of a major expansion of the vineyard.
Currently a small operation that made a few hundred cases of wine for local restaurants, the vineyard would more than quadruple production and start exporting its product to the mainland and beyond.
The controversy revolved around water and political influence.
Catalina had a Mediterranean climate but was constantly vulnerable to drought.
Water was precious and cost five times what it did on the mainland.
Avalon had once made its citizens use salt water in their toilets, but the pipes started rusting out and sewage leaked into the groundwater.
After that disaster, a desalination plant was built by the electric company and currently provided more than 40 percent of the drinking water on the island.
But still it was not enough. There were strict regulations on water use and steep fines for scofflaws.
Many of the hotels shipped their sheets and towels to overtown laundries at high expense to save water.
And the Catalina Call regularly exposed the top water users on the island in an attempt to embarrass them into cutting back.
Then came what was known as the water war.
Grapes take a significant amount of water to grow, and the “little” vineyard was already a top user.
Environmental groups and other businesses contested the approval of its expansion.
The Call published several opinion pieces, all objecting to the expansion.
But ABC was owned by one of the five so-called old families of Catalina.
They were well established and financially powerful people who for generations had dominated business and politics on the island.
Each of these families had descendants who had spread across the island and into all facets of its society, politics, and business.
The proposed expansion of the vineyard ultimately received unanimous approval from the council in an up-or-down vote.
Most of Stilwell’s knowledge of this had come through Tash, who had been born and raised on the island, and through the substation manager, Mercy Chapa, who was a third-generation member of one of the old families and therefore a vital link in the chain of local gossip and inside information.
Her mother had served as the city clerk since the turn of the twenty-first century, and Mercy freely acknowledged that she had gotten the job managing the sheriff’s station because her last name was Chapa.
The vineyard expansion had been approved two years ago, but protests at council meetings continued, as had the acts of vandalism at the vineyard.
Stilwell had investigated the prior reports but did not come close to identifying the individual or individuals responsible. That frustrated him, but not as much as it did ABC’s owner-operator, Oliver Marquez.
Stilwell keyed the mic and told McGowan he would call him back on his cell.
This was to keep the conversation off the radio, which he knew was monitored by several residents of Avalon as well as by Lionel McKey at the Call.
He phoned McGowan’s cell and asked him what kind of 594 had occurred this time.
“Looks like somebody took a machete to a couple rows of the new vines,” McGowan said. “Chopped them up pretty good. Mr. Marquez is super-mad. He screamed at us.”
Stilwell knew Marquez well from the previous incidents. He was a volatile man used to getting his own way. That no one had been arrested for vandalizing his property was galling to him.
“Okay, I’m on my way,” Stilwell responded. “You should have called me out on this.”
“Sorry, boss. I thought you were Oscar India.”
That was radio code for off island. McGowan had a habit of talking in code even when not on the radio.
“No, I’m here,” Stilwell said. “And I’m coming up.”
“Oscar Kilo,” McGowan said.