“Was there something in particular she said she wanted to get?”
“No, she just said she wanted her things.”
“Did she say she’d pay you the money?”
“She said she would, that she had a boyfriend who would cough it up, but that never happened.”
Stilwell remembered Peter Galloway and didn’t think it was likely that he was the boyfriend who could cough up five hundred dollars.
He moved on to the stack of books. The first one he recognized because Tash had read it when they’d gone on a camping trip to Little Harbor on the back side of the island. It was called If I’d Known Then. Tash told him it was a collection of letters women in their twenties and thirties had written to their younger selves with words of advice they wished they had received back then. The edge of a business card used as a bookmark stuck out from the middle of the book. Stilwell flipped it open to find that it was a card from Charles Crane, the general manager of the Black Marlin Club.
The next book was called Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton, and its bookmark was near the end of the book. It was a business card from a Los Angeles attorney named Daniel Easterbrook. The last book was called Fruiting Bodies by Kathryn Harlan. It too had a business-card bookmark, this one from a Century City oncologist named Leonard Koval.
Stilwell laid the business cards out on the bed and took individual photos of them before returning them to the pages where he found them. He wasn’t sure why he was re-marking the pages when he knew Leigh-Anne Moss would never finish the books.
“Looks like she was a reader,” he said, more to himself than to Sneed.
“I don’t have a TV,” Sneed said, “so she did a lot of reading.”
“Did she keep any of her property anywhere else in the apartment?”
“No, just in here.”
“Can we move the cat? I want to check the bed.”
Sneed went to the bed and picked up the cat, who mildly protested at being woken, and held him while Stilwell checked under the pillows and then lifted the mattress off the box spring to look between them. He found nothing.
Stilwell next got down on his hands and knees and looked under the bed. He saw a shoebox and nothing else. He slid the box out and opened it. It contained a pair of black high-heeled pumps.
“Prada — nice,” Sneed said.
Stilwell saw the brand mark on the insole.
“Yours or hers?” he asked.
“Hers, definitely,” Sneed said. “Too small for me.” She giggled.
“What?” Stilwell asked.
“It’s just funny,” she said. “I never saw her wear those and I can’t think of a place on this island where you would. Except up at the Ada, maybe.”
The Mount Ada was the island’s only four-star hotel. It was once the Wrigley mansion and sat high up on the hill overlooking the harbor and Santa Monica Bay. It had a formal dining room, but Stilwell knew that Sneed was right — the island wasn’t a place for high-end high-heeled shoes. So the question was, why did Leigh-Anne Moss have these shoes on the island? He doubted she would have brought them from the mainland. They had to have been a gift from someone here.
“She didn’t wear these for work, right?” he asked.
“No, no way,” Sneed said. “You can’t work with those spikes. Not when you’re on your feet all day.”
“Probably a gift, then. Any idea who from?”
“None. She never even mentioned those to me. I’d never seen them before you pulled them out.”
“You think they’re the reason she wanted to get back into the apartment? Prada stuff is expensive, right?”
“Very. Those probably cost somebody a grand, at least. Probably one of the guys she was playing.”
Stilwell looked up at her for a long moment.
“Let’s go down to the station,” he said. “I want to talk to you about that.”
“Fine with me,” Sneed said.
“I’m going to take these, see if we can figure out where they came from.”
“Take ’em. They wouldn’t fit me.”
Stilwell closed the shoebox and got up off the floor.
27
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.