Chapter 29
AT THE AIRSTRIP Stilwell parked the SUV and climbed the steps to the tower.
It was an old two-story wooden structure with an outdoor staircase that creaked under his weight and should have announced his arrival.
It had been built when William Wrigley owned Catalina, and back then there was more air traffic, especially when the Chicago Cubs, also owned by the chewing-gum magnate, held spring training on the island.
Stilwell knocked once and opened the tower door, rousing Rich Burkhardt from a desk nap.
“Hey, Stil, what’s up?” he quickly said, trying to cover that he had dozed off. “Just shut my eyes for a few seconds there.”
Burkhardt was manager, maintenance man, and sole full-time employee of the airport. He’d been so for nearly forty years. He had thinning gray hair and a paunch that stretched his red polo shirt, which had AIRPORT IN THE SKY stitched over the breast pocket and RICH on the other side.
“I was wondering if you had your eyes open when my two colleagues were up here this morning,” Stilwell said.
Stilwell pointed out the window and down toward the airstrip.
“Sure did,” Burkhardt said. “Those guys didn’t even check in with me. I’m sitting here and I look down and see them walking across the tarmac like they own the place. A plane could’ve come in and cut ’em to ribbons.”
That seemed an unlikely possibility, but Stilwell didn’t challenge Burkhardt on it.
“I got caught up on a call in Avalon and didn’t make it up with them,” Stilwell said. “I was wondering if you could point me to the spot on the side of the strip where they did the search. If you remember.”
“I can do you one better than that,” Burkhardt said. “I took pictures. I wanted to document those guys just waltzing across my airstrip without permission.”
“Can I see them?”
Burkhardt dug his cell out of his pocket, opened the photo app, and handed the phone to Stilwell.
“There’s a few,” he said.
Stilwell swiped quickly back through the photos so he could view them in sequence. He came to a photo of a plane in the hangar next to the tower. Burkhardt was looking over his shoulder at the screen.
“Oh, that’s Hacker Caldwell’s Cessna,” he said. “I took that a couple days ago for him. He needed it for insurance.”
Stilwell knew Caldwell. He was the patriarch of one of the island’s old families. He started swiping forward through the photos.
The first showed Simon and Trestle standing at the edge of the landing strip looking into the brush.
There was an ironwood tree about ten yards down the slope.
Stilwell swiped to the next photo. In this one they had stepped farther down the slope.
This was where Stabile had lost sight of them, but the tower had a steeper angle of view.
In the photo, the two investigators were looking down at the ground as if searching for something.
He swiped to the next photo, and they were now looking up at the branches of the ironwood, which appeared to be standing alone, not part of a grove.
“Did you watch what they were doing?” he asked. “With the tree, I mean.”
“Not really,” Burkhardt said. “They were just checking it out, I guess.”
“Did they climb it?”
“Not that I saw. But you could ask your girl who drove ’em up here.”
“I did.”
“Yeah, what’d she say?”
“She was down in the SUV and didn’t have the angle on them.”
“Well, couldn’t you just ask your two buddies what they were doing?”
“I could, yeah. But they’re already on the boat back to Pedro.”
He returned the phone and looked out the window at the ironwood tree.
“Okay, I’m heading down there, Rich,” he said. “Any planes coming in that I should watch out for so I don’t get cut to ribbons?”
“Not till four o’clock,” Burkhardt said.
“Perfect. Thanks for shooting the photos.”
“When you talk to those guys, tell them, next time, check in up here so we know who’s on the property and we can keep everybody safe.”
“I’ll do that.”
Stilwell went down the steps, careful to hold the wooden handrail and hoping he didn’t pick up a splinter.
He crossed the landing strip to the edge in front of the ironwood tree.
He slowly stepped into the brush, eyes down on the chapparal, looking for any evidence that Simon and Trestle had missed.
There was nothing. He got down to the ironwood and quickly determined that it was two trees sharing the same root system, one trunk eclipsed by the other when viewed from the tower.
Each had branches splitting off from the trunks at intervals that would make climbing difficult.
He guessed that this was the reason Simon and Trestle, both men in their fifties and overweight, had not climbed them.
Stilwell reached up to a thick limb and tested it with his weight. It seemed solid. He grasped it with both hands and swung his legs up until he got one foot on a lower, thinner branch. He started climbing, finding that by bracing his back against one of the trunks, he could scale the other.
When he was twelve feet up, he stopped and got his bearings.
He looked in the direction of where the plane had stopped on the night of the shooting.
There was an opening in the branches that allowed him to see that end of the runway, a hundred yards off.
He realized that other branches hid him from the tower and the shed next to where he had parked while waiting for the airdrop.
Holding a higher branch, Stilwell slowly stepped out on a limb below and found the reason there was an opening in the tree’s canopy.
Several small branches had been snapped off or cut to clear the space.
He studied these breaks and saw that the interior pulp of the tree was reddish. The breaks had been recently made.
Carefully taking one of his hands off the limb he was clinging to, he reached into his pocket for his phone and took several photos of the branch breaks and the opening they created in the canopy. He put the phone back in his pocket and began the climb down.
Once on the ground, Stilwell looked in the brush for the broken branches and found them in a heap in the chapparal fifteen feet from the ironwood.
The pile was too far from the tree’s base to have naturally fallen there.
The branches had been discarded there. He pulled out his phone and took more photos.
Stilwell climbed up out of the brush and onto the tarmac. He checked both ways for incoming planes before rushing across the runway to his ATV. As he did so, Rich Burkhardt stepped onto the tower’s catwalk and called down to him.
“You find something?”
Stilwell waved up to him but kept going, adrenaline pulsing in his blood.
“I did,” he called back.