Chapter 43
THE BUFFALO NICKEL was on Pebbly Beach Road by the freight docks, through which much of the island was supplied. Behind it was the heliport, where the better-heeled visitors arrived from the mainland. A helicopter got you to the island fifty minutes faster than the Express.
The Nickel didn’t open until lunchtime but Stilwell wanted to get to Gwen Bassett before the news from the press conference overtown came ashore in Catalina.
He walked around behind the bar and knocked on the door of the crew room, where he had left Bassett the previous night.
It was nine a.m., which he believed was a reasonable time to knock.
The first knock got no response. The second and louder effort got a rebuke from inside.
“Go fuck yourself!”
“Gwen, it’s Sergeant Stilwell. I need to speak with you.”
There was silence. He knocked again, more gently this time, a reminder that he was waiting.
“All right, all right, I’m coming,” he heard through the door. “Hold your fricking horses.”
The door finally opened and Bassett peered out from darkness, squinting against the exterior light as she finished pulling a polo shirt with the bar’s buffalo-head logo down over her hips.
“What?” she said.
“I’m here to tell you that you can return to your apartment,” Stilwell said. “I said last night it was being sealed and then searched today. That won’t be happening now.”
“Why, because you realized how wrong you all are about Kent?”
“Uh, Gwen, I have some bad news about that. I’m very sorry to tell you this. Last night at the jail Kent Middleton took his own—”
“No! Don’t say that. You’re wrong. You’re so fucking wrong.”
“I’m sorry, Gwen. He’s gone.”
She held a hand over her eyes.
“He wouldn’t have done that. Never.”
“I’m afraid he did. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Don’t you dare say that! If he’s dead, it’s because of you. He couldn’t take the lies you told about him.”
“They weren’t lies, Gwen.”
She dropped her hand and looked at him through tearful eyes.
“Yes, they were,” she said. “Kent wouldn’t do the things you say he did.”
“I’ll tell you what,” Stilwell said. “Whenever you’re up to it, come over to the substation and I’ll sit down with you and we can go over the investigation and the evidence the police gathered. I think if you do that, you will realize that you probably dodged a bullet with him.”
“Fuck… you.”
“Would you like me to give you a ride up to Bird Park?”
She slammed the door. It sounded like a shot.
“I guess not,” Stilwell said.
He stood there for a moment. He heard a door open behind him and turned to see that the slamming had drawn Mack Fanning out of the kitchen to see what was going on.
“Aw, shit,” he said. “You gotta leave her alone, man. I need her today or I’m fucked.”
“Good luck with that,” Stilwell said. “Her boyfriend died.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
Stilwell started walking back to his ATV. Fanning called after him, “You’re not helping much around here, bud,” he said.
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Stilwell said.
Back at the sub, Stilwell grabbed the radio he had forgotten to take to the Nickel and used it to tell De Giorgio to go up to Bird Park and remove the crime scene tape from the door of Gwen Bassett’s apartment.
He then scooped the stack of crime reports out of the box on Mercy’s desk and took them back to his office to review.
It was almost two days of reports, but it took Stilwell only fifteen minutes to go through them and determine that there was no need for investigative follow-up from him on any of them.
It was the usual fare. There had been several calls to the bars the night before to handle drunk-and-disorderly patrons, some noise complaints from residents in the bar district of Avalon, and two DUIs—golf carts and automobiles fell under the same drunk-driving laws.
Most of the reports in the first two categories had been handled or resolved on the scene and involved written citations requiring the accused to either pay a fine or appear in court to dispute the charge.
Since most offenders were visitors to the island, they paid the fines to avoid having to come back for a court appearance.
The DUIs were a bit more complicated. The offenders were brought to the sub, fingerprinted, photographed, and booked, then RORed—released on their own recognizance—on the promise that they would not drive to their home or hotel.
Once these cases were forwarded to the district attorney’s office, offenders were offered a choice: They could enter a diversion program or go to court, which in Avalon was held only on Fridays and presided over by a traveling judge.
There were also a handful of reports of golf-cart thefts in the stack. All these had been resolved quickly on the scene as unintentional, since many of the carts looked identical, especially to someone inebriated or close to it. It was rare that locals took their keys out of the carts.
To Stilwell’s relief, no reports in the stack had to do with graffiti on historic structures or vandalism up at the ABC vineyard.
Stilwell was now clear to work on other active cases, and he began by using his phone to sign into the county’s intranet system.
By using his cell, he avoided leaving a digital trail on his department-issued desktop computer.
He navigated to the page for the sheriff’s department and from there went to the personnel page.
As a unit supervisor, he had low-level access to basic information about department employees.
Since he had little to no involvement in choosing who was transferred to Catalina, he usually used his access only after the fact to see what he could learn about those who were coming in.
But now he had a different purpose. He typed Gavin Lambert into the search bar. Soon he was viewing the résumé Lambert had submitted to the department eighteen years earlier as part of his application.
The birth date on the résumé put Lambert currently at forty-eight years old.
It said he was born and raised in Riverside in the next county east. He attended classes at UC Riverside for one year before joining the US Marine Corps.
In 2003 he was deployed with a regimental combat team that took part in the invasion of Iraq.
He was deployed a second time the following year with his RCT and fought in Fallujah.
He retired from the Marines in 2006 to pursue a career in law enforcement.
According to the résumé, Lambert received a chestful of commendations while serving, including a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star for valor, and a Combat Action Ribbon, and he had been awarded a Hog’s Tooth.
Stilwell was unfamiliar with the Hog’s Tooth and typed it into his search engine on the desktop.
What he got back sent an ice-cold finger down his spine.
A Hog’s Tooth is a round presented to a US Marine upon graduating from the Marine Corps Scout Sniper school. It is traditionally a 7.62mm NATO round, the cartridge fired by an M40A3, the primary rifle used by Marine sharpshooters.
Stilwell now knew that Lambert was a sniper.