Page 83 of Nightshade

Stilwell closed the shoebox and got up off the floor.

27

STILWELL PUT THEshoebox 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.”