Page 27 of Nightshade

STILWELL PUT THE shoebox in a large plastic evidence bag from the storage chest on the Gator. At the sub, he left it on Mercy’s desk as he walked Leslie Sneed to the interview room. He pointed her to the witness chair.

“Have a seat and I’ll be right with you,” he said. “Can I get you anything? Coffee, a Coke?”

“A Diet Coke would be nice,” Sneed said.

He left her there, closed the door, and went back to Mercy’s desk.

“Mercy, there are numbers on the side of that shoebox. Can you take a shot at tracing them back to a purchase point?”

He knew it was the kind of request she loved because she didn’t have to leave the office and it interrupted the thankless task of answering the phone and radio all day. He also knew she was a tenacious keyboard warrior. She owned the internet when it came to researching.

“It was probably bought on Amazon,” Stilwell said. “But worth a try.”

“Was this a gift to our victim?” she asked.

“Most likely. They’re expensive. Why?”

“Because I doubt you can get Prada from Amazon’s warehouses. You’d have to go through a third-party seller, and then there’s always the possibility of counterfeits. You can buy them used through resale sites, but you’re saying they were a gift, and no man’s going to give a girl used heels. He’d probably get them at a store.”

Stilwell nodded. It made sense.

“Well, see what you can find,” he said. “How’s our prisoner? One more day to go.”

“He’s been quiet since breakfast,” Mercy said.

Stilwell went back to the jail and looked into the cell where Spivak was held. The prisoner was on the floor, shirtless, doing sit-ups with his feet hooked under the metal frame of the bed.

“Spivak, your first appearance is tomorrow morning,” Stilwell said. “Your lawyer going to be here?”

Spivak stopped the exercise and just lay there, back on the floor, chest heaving from exertion.

“Fuck off,” he said.

“Been hearing that a lot lately,” Stilwell said. “You know what a TBI is, Spivak?”

Spivak said nothing. He got up off the floor and came to the bars—an attempt to intimidate Stilwell with his heavy breathing and pumped-up pecs. Stilwell saw the many tattoos covering his torso, all of them fading, all of them made with what looked like dull blue prison ink. He wondered if he had done time in Mexico or another country, since no prison record had come up on Stilwell’s search of the National Crime Information Center database other than the three hundred days at Pitchess, which hardly seemed like enough time to complete the interlocking images that covered almost every inch of his upper body.

“A TBI’s a traumatic brain injury,” Stilwell said. “It’s looking like Dunne might have a TBI, which will probably cost him his career. We’ll be sure the judge knows that tomorrow.”

He saw no reaction from Spivak other than a vessel pulsing in his left temple.

“Why’d you do it, Spivak?” he asked. “Somebody put you up to it, didn’t they?”

That was a flier. Stilwell was convinced the attack on Dunne hadn’t been random. Spivak smiled slightly.

“Like I said, fuck off,” he said.

“Right,” Stilwell said.

He left the jail, went to the break room, and grabbed two cans of Diet Coke from the refrigerator. On his way back to the interview room, he turned on the camera that would record the session with Sneed.

He put the two cans down on the table and sat across from her. On the way to the station from Sneed’s apartment, Stilwell had confirmed her suspicion that Leigh-Anne Moss was dead and had been identified as the woman found at the bottom of the harbor. Sneed had remained quiet the rest of the way in.

“First of all, thanks for your time,” he said. “You’ve already been very helpful.”

“You think I could get some of the reward if I’m helping?” Sneed asked.

“Well, I’ll be sure to tell them you’ve been a help. Usually those things pay out only if there’s an arrest. Sometimes it’s not till they get a conviction. But it was just announced, so I’m not sure how it will work.”

Sneed nodded. “It’s so weird,” she said.

“What is?” Stilwell asked.

“Her being dead now. I kind of feel guilty because we ended up not being friends and I said some things I probably shouldn’t have.”

“You said them to her or somebody else?”

“To her. I mean, not directly to her face. But when she stopped taking my calls and I changed the lock, things got heated. I’m sure you heard the messages I left on her phone. And she left some mean ones for me.”

“We haven’t found her phone and we’re working on a search warrant for her records. Do you still have any messages from her?”

“I kept the last one. Just in case.”

“In case of what?”

“I don’t know. Like in case something happened to me. She was pretty mad.”

“Can I hear it?”

“I guess so.”

She pulled her cell phone out of the back pocket of her khakis and played the message over the speaker. Stilwell knew he was recording it on the room’s camera and sound system:

“Bitch, you don’t want to fuck with me. You can’t keep my stuff. Your ass will be sorry as fuck. And if you think changing the damn lock is going to stop me, you are dead wrong, honey. Don’t fucking play games with me. You will lose.”

Stilwell was silent for a few moments after listening to the victim’s angry voice.

“She didn’t mince words, did she?” he finally said.

“No,” Sneed said. “That’s why I kept it.”

“What’s the date and time on that message?”

Sneed looked down at her phone screen.

“May seventeenth at nine forty-one a.m.,” she said. “I was working the breakfast shift.”

“Did you purposely not take the call?”

“No, my manager doesn’t let us have our phones on when we’re working, so I missed the call and she left the message.”

“Did you respond to it? Call her back?”

“Yeah, I called her back after the lunch shift but she didn’t answer. I left a message. I told her again that as soon as she paid me the five hundred dollars she owed me, she’d get all her shit back. I didn’t know about the shoes under the bed. That’s probably what she really wanted. Her other stuff was basic crap.”

Stilwell considered the timing of the calls. Moss had likely left the message before going into the Black Marlin Club on Saturday the seventeenth, and Sneed had probably called Moss back after she was dead.

“Now, when we were up at your apartment, you said something about the guys she was playing,” he said. “Can you tell me more about that?”

Sneed opened her can of Diet Coke and took a sip before answering.

“I feel a little weird saying something bad about the dead,” she said.

“Leslie, I need to know everything there is to know about Leigh-Anne,” Stilwell said. “No matter what kind of person she was, she didn’t deserve what happened to her. I’m trying to find who did it, and to do that, I need every piece of information about her I can get. I don’t want it cleaned up and pretty. I’m looking for the truth, and I think you can help me.”

Sneed nodded and looked down at the can she held on the table in front of her. She kept her eyes on it as she spoke.

“She… wasn’t a good person. She talked about all of these guys. Guys who would give her stuff, you know, if she fucked them. But the thing is, she didn’t like any of them, I don’t think. She’d come back to the apartment and sort of brag about how she was just using them. Like how she had an old boyfriend on the mainland who had a place where she could stay and how he was hopelessly in love with her.”

“But she didn’t love him back.”

“No. No way. She called him ‘the schmuck.’ She didn’t love anybody, you ask me.”

“What about over here on the island? Was she doing the same thing?”

“Oh, yeah, she talked about a couple guys she was seeing on and off.”

“From where?”

“From the club, I’m sure. I mean, she didn’t say so specifically, but she said she was through dealing with guys who didn’t have any money.”

“And we’re talking about the Black Marlin, right?”

“Definitely. That’s why she got the job there. She said it was like shooting fish in a barrel. All these old guys over there stepping out on their wives. She’d go with them if there was something in it for her.”

“Did she ever mention any names?”

“No—she was smart enough not to do that. Girls like that know the rules of the game, I think.”

It appeared that Leigh-Anne might have broken the rules or at least threatened to, Stilwell thought.

“Do you remember anything else she said about these men she was seeing?” he asked.

“She just said it was hard sometimes to keep everything separate,” Sneed said.

“What did you take that to mean?”

“Well, like that she was going with different men and had to keep them all separate so one didn’t know about the others.”

“Did she ever mention that there was a problem with any of them?”

“Not really. I think the guy on the mainland knew what was going on over here and was jealous. She said something about that, but she also called him a puppy dog that she had on a leash.”

“You’re talking about the guy she called the schmuck?”

“I’m pretty sure it was the same guy.”

Stilwell would pass that piece of intel on to Sampedro and Ahearn, since they were now handling the mainland aspects of the case.

He tried to get more information out of Sneed.

“But she never mentioned having any problems with anybody over here?” he asked. “Nobody from the club?”

“Not really,” Sneed said. “With her, it was like a balancing act.”

“Do you know if she dated anyone over here who was not from the club?”

“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I remember she once called that club a target-rich environment.”

“Her words? ‘Target-rich environment’?”

“Yeah, that’s what she said.”

Stilwell was about to end the interview but thought of something else.

“Those heels from Prada, they were probably a gift,” he said. “Do you remember if there were other gifts from these men?”

“She got some stuff,” Sneed said. “Most of the time she just sold it for the money. That’s how she paid me, until she didn’t.”

“How did she do that? Sell the stuff, I mean.”

“Online. Fashionphile and the RealReal. A lot of sites resell good stuff like that.”

Stilwell nodded. He knew he had to add some of this information to the probable cause statement in his search warrant application. It would support the need to get inside the club.

“Okay, I think that’s good for now, Leslie,” he said. “Thank you for your help. I’ll get you back up to the Sandtrap or your apartment or wherever you want to go. Just give me a minute.”

“And you’ll put me in for the reward money?” Sneed asked.

“If we make an arrest, I think you will be very eligible for at least part of it.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Stilwell stood up and left the interview room, hoping to find one of the day-shift deputies in the sub who could run Sneed back up the hill.

Only Mercy was there.

“Everybody’s out?” he asked.

He noticed that she was wearing disposable gloves and that the shoebox was out of the evidence bag and open on her desk. The pumps and the tissue paper they had been wrapped in were next to the box.

“Everybody’s out,” Mercy replied. “I found this at the bottom of the shoebox. Did you see it before?”

She held up a card with a drawing of a smiling kitten on the front. Stilwell had no gloves on, so he didn’t touch it. “No, I didn’t see it before,” he said. “What’s it say inside?”

Carefully holding the card at the edges, she opened it. There was a handwritten note: For you, Nightshade—Dan .

Stilwell pulled out his phone and looked at the photos he had taken of the business cards used as bookmarks. He focused on the card with the name Daniel Easterbrook—the attorney from L.A.

“We need to bag that separately and send it to the lab for fingerprinting and touch DNA,” he said.

“I’ll send it over on the Express tonight,” Mercy said.