Page 84 of Nightshade

“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 stoppedtaking 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 methe 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.”