The Night Stalker

by James Swain

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Cheeks asked.

  “Bedpan check,” I said.

  “I’m recuperating. Get out.”

  “Not before we have a little chat.”

  “I don’t have anything to say to you.”

  I tossed the copied pages onto his lap and pulled up a chair, the metal legs scraping harshly across the floor. Cheeks grabbed the phone from the nightstand.

  “I’m calling security,” he said.

  “I’m working with the police,” I said. “Call Chief Moody if you don’t believe me.”

  “I don’t care who you’re working for. I’m having you tossed.”

  “Do that, and I’ll tell Moody about you and Piper Stone.”

  Cheeks’s face twisted in a frown. “The bitchy little lawyer? What about her?”

  “She disappeared this morning. Left her office and came over here to talk to you about Abb Grimes’s trial. That was the last anyone saw of her. She left a message on the voice mail at her office. You can hear her screaming. Where did you put her, Ron?”

  Cheeks dropped the phone into the receiver with a horrified expression on his face. “Are you accusing me of abducting her? You’re flipping nuts. I’m sick.”

  A clipboard hung on the edge of his bed. I picked it up, and read through Cheeks’s medical condition as recorded by his doctor at nine o’clock this morning.

  “According to this, you’re perfectly normal,” I said, dropping the clipboard. “My guess is, you faked that heart attack, giving you a convenient way to get taken off the case. But Stone figured out you’ve been hiding something, and she confronted you.”

  “Crazy talk,” Cheeks said.

  “Did you speak with Stone this morning?”

  His face reddened. “What if I did?”

  “What time?”

  “You don’t have any right to grill me.”

  “I’m on the case, dickhead. What time did she come in?”

  “Around eight. It was cordial. I got the orderly to get her coffee. We talked for about twenty minutes, then she split.”

  Cheeks was softening up, trying to placate me. I pointed at the copied pages lying in his lap. “You were actively involved in Abb Grimes’s murder investigation. Is that what you and Stone talked about?”

  Cheeks hesitated. He blinked several times.

  “She wanted to go over some things,” he muttered.

  “What things?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “She was only here a few hours ago.”

  “I took a nap after she left.”

  I picked up the pages and found the evidence log. I showed Cheeks the word slippers and saw him squint to read what Stone had written beside it. His face got even redder and I pounced. “There were a pair of slippers in the evidence log that somehow disappeared. Were they Abb’s slippers?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  Cheeks pulled himself up and killed the TV with the remote at the same time. I could feel him retrenching, readying for a fight. He cleared his throat. “We took over a hundred pieces of evidence out of Abb’s house, cataloged them, and stored them in the police warehouse. We separated the clothes and took them to a forensics lab, where they were checked for DNA, hairs, and fibers. We were hoping to use the evidence to identify the victims we found at the landfill.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No. The clothes were clean, and we didn’t turn up anything. During the transfer from the lab back to the warehouse, the box containing the slippers got misplaced. I don’t know what happened to them, and I’m never going to know. If you tell me that never happened to you during an investigation, you’re a fucking liar.”

  “It never happened to me,” I said.

  Cheeks shook his fist a few inches beneath my chin. The strange look in his eyes that I’d seen in the orange grove returned. I touched the automatic control on the side of his bed, and sent him backwards.

  “Cut it out,” he said angrily.

  “I don’t like being threatened.”

  “I’m not threatening you, for Christ’s sake.”

  I decided to take him at his word, and returned the bed to its original position.

  “Why did Stone think the slippers were significant?” I asked.

  “She didn’t say.”

  “Then what did she want?”

  “She wanted to know what had happened to them. I told her exactly what I just told you. The slippers got lost.”

  “Did she buy it?”

  Cheeks shot me a hard look. “There was nothing to buy. The slippers never came up during the trial. They were meaningless. End of story.”

  I took the pages from him, stuck them beneath my arm, and got to my feet. Cheeks was lying through his teeth. He hadn’t taken a nap earlier; he’d rehearsed this little speech, knowing that his encounter with Stone was going to come back to haunt him. I needed to hunt Stone down, and get to the truth.

  “Did Stone say where she was going?” I asked.

  Cheeks rubbed his chin thoughtfully, then folded his hands on his chest, and shook his head. I was getting nothing more out of him. He had won this round, but he hadn’t won the fight.

  “When are they letting you out?” I asked.

  “Soon,” he replied.

  “I may have a few more questions. Where’s the best place to reach you?”

  “I’ll be at home getting my strength back.”

  “You still live in Plantation?”

  “Yeah. I got the house in the divorce.”

  “How did you pull that off?”

  “My wife decided to leave the state.”

  “Where did she go? Antarctica?”

  Cheeks smiled at my joke, then realized it was aimed at him. He looked for something to throw at me, but by then I was out the door.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Tucked beneath the windshield wiper of my car was a parking ticket. I had parked in a fifteen-minute zone, and owed the county a hundred and eighty bucks. I’d pay it after I won the lottery. Buster feigned sleep as I started the ignition.

  “Some watchdog you are,” I said.

  My cell phone chimed. I pulled it off the dash and retrieved a voice message that had come in. It was Charles Crippen, and he had a lead on Piper Stone. I called his number and he picked up.

  “Have you talked with the police?” I asked.

  “They just left my office,” Crippen replied. “They’re driving to Memorial to interview Cheeks. I wanted to warn you.”

  I didn’t like lawyers, just the way they thought. “I just left Cheeks. Stone visited him this morning, and they discussed the missing slippers.”

  “Is Cheeks hiding something?”

  That was a good question. I’d fallen pretty low since losing my job, but I wasn’t going to rag on another cop unless I could prove that he’d broken the law.

  “I don’t know,” I answered.

  “I’ve been doing some digging of my own,” Crippen said. “I don’t mean to sound egotistical, but I carry some weight in this town. Piper’s credit cards and cell phone are both paid for by the firm. I called the credit card companies and the cell phone company, and put them to work.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Piper made two cell phone calls this morning. The first was to a cell phone owned by Jed Grimes. The second was the message you and I heard. The cell company tracked her phone’s location using tower pings. Piper’s somewhere in Davie.”

  “You mean her cell phone’s in Davie,” I said.

  “Trust me. Piper and her phone rarely part.”

  Cell towers worked in grids. Crippen gave me the names of four streets in Davie that defined the portion of the grid where Stone’s cell phone was sending its signal from. I took a map from the glove compartment, spread it on my lap, and located the four streets. Then I froze. Stone’s cell phone was in LeAnn Grimes’s neighborhood.

  “Did you share this information with the poli
ce?” I asked.

  “I wanted you to have it first,” Crippen said. “Not being a cop, I figured you’d know what to do with it.”

  I understood what Crippen was saying. Not being a policeman allowed me to do a variety of questionable things without fear of jeopardizing the police’s case. It was why people hired me, but the cop in me still had a hard time accepting it.

  “I’ll call you when I learn something,” I said.

  There was no quick way to Davie, and I wove in and out of traffic on 595 with my hand on the horn. Piper had called Jed Grimes after leaving Memorial, and now her cell phone was emitting a signal from the area where Jed’s mother lived. I needed to talk to Jed, and find out what he and Stone had talked about. There was a chance that Stone had told him where she was going, and that I’d be able to track her down.

  My tires rubbed the curb as I parked in front of LeAnn Grimes’s place. A new gang of tourists was standing on the lawn, using their cell phones to snap digital photographs of the house. I was getting a sense of what life had been like for LeAnn and Jed for the past twelve years, and it was turning my stomach. They didn’t deserve to be punished for the heinous things Abb had done.

  With Buster on a leash, I walked up to the tourists, and told them they were trespassing. There were six of them, and they didn’t move. One was posing for his friends while holding a photo of Abb taken at his trial. Abb was sitting at the defense table with a stony expression on his face that made him look like a zombie.

  I unleashed my dog. Buster circled the tourists, barking viciously. They scurried into a minibus and drove away. My dog pressed up against my leg.

  “That’s more like it,” I told him.

  I walked up the front path and pressed the buzzer. Heather Rinker opened the door with a towel wrapped around her wet head. Seeing me, her face brightened.

  “Mr. Carpenter. We were just talking about you.”

  “I don’t have any news about your son,” I said. “Is Jed here? I need to speak with him.”

  “He’s in the living room with his mom.”

  Heather led me into the house. Jed and LeAnn shared the living room couch, their faces illuminated by an old Burt Reynolds movie playing on the TV. Jed had his shirt off, and the movie’s images were interacting with the swirling tattoos of dragons and demons inked on his upper torso. His expression was filled with hope, as was his mother’s.

  “Any news about Sampson?” he asked.

  I shook my head. “I need to ask you some more questions.”

  “About what?”

  “Piper Stone, your father’s defense attorney. She’s disappeared.”

  Jed hesitated, and I swore his lips seemed to quiver.

  “Didn’t you just see Ms. Stone this morning?” LeAnn asked her son.

  “Yes, Mama,” Jed said quietly.

  Jed muted the TV with the remote. I wanted to get him outside the house so we could talk in private, but he was glued to his mother’s side. I pulled up a chair and sat across from him. Buster dropped by my feet and stared at Jed.

  “Would you like something to drink, Mr. Carpenter?” Heather asked.

  “Water would be fine,” I said.

  Heather disappeared into the kitchen. Jed took a shirt off the back of the couch, and put it on. He buttoned the shirt up to his neck so that his tattoos were hidden. I sensed that he was uncomfortable with how he looked, at least around me.

  “Tell me about your meeting with Piper Stone,” I said.

  “She came over here around eight-thirty, and we went for a drive in her car. We talked about my father’s execution. She told me she wanted to file another appeal.”

  “Did she mention your father’s missing slippers?”

  Jed hesitated. I sensed he was holding back.

  “Who told you about the slippers?” he asked.

  “I’m an investigator, remember?”

  He laughed, but it was a hollow sound. “Yeah, she mentioned the slippers. She wanted to file an appeal because evidence was lost in the case that might have been destroyed. I told her it was a waste of time.”

  “Why is filing an appeal a waste of time?”

  “Because my father’s ready to die. He told me so the last time I went to Starke and saw him. He said he was ready to pay for the things he’d done. Those were his exact words.”

  “What did the missing slippers prove?”

  Jed shut his eyes, and I thought he might break into tears. LeAnn placed a consoling hand on her son’s knee. He took a deep breath and composed himself.

  “My father wasn’t sane when he killed those women,” he said quietly.

  Heather brought my glass of water, and I drank it while studying the young man sitting in front of me. He looked tortured, but I had to ask him.

  “Was your father wearing the slippers when he killed his victims?” I asked.

  Jed’s eyes snapped open, and for a moment I thought he was going to come over the coffee table and pummel me. Instead, he slammed his fist onto the arm of the couch.

  “I don’t want to fucking talk about this anymore,” he said angrily.

  “Jed!” his mother said.

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  “Did Stone tell you where she was going after she left?” I asked.

  Jed hit the couch again. “You don’t listen, do you?”

  “Did she?”

  “She said she had some more digging to do. Now can we stop talking about this?”

  I had a habit of pushing people to the breaking point when I was working a case. I’d reached that point with Jed, and I saw no reason to ask him any more questions.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You’ve upset my son,” LeAnn said. “I think it would be best if you left.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll see myself out.”

  Buster followed me into the kitchen, where I placed my empty glass in the sink. The faint sound of music floated through the air, Sheryl Crow’s “All I Wanna Do (Is Have Some Fun).” The music was tinny, and I realized it was the ring tone to a cell phone.

  The window above the sink was cracked a few inches. I stuck my ear to the opening, and heard the music coming from outside the house.

  I hurried down the hallway toward the back door that Jed had used earlier to take me to the garage. As I passed the doorway to the living room, Jed looked up from the couch.

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “I heard something in your backyard,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know, but I’m going to find out.”

  Jed came into the hallway with Heather right behind him. His body language wasn’t friendly, and he put himself between me and the door. I nudged my dog, and Buster curled back his upper lip and emitted a menacing growl.

  “Hey. Get him away from me,” Jed said.

  “Back off,” I said.

  “This is my house. You can’t order me around like that.”

  “It’s your mother’s house. Now move.”

  Jed got out of my way. I threw back the deadbolt on the back door, and went outside. The ringing grew louder. The garbage pail by the back door seemed the likely culprit, and I pulled off the lid. Lying on a bag of garbage was a bright red cell phone. Caller ID said OFFICE. I flipped the phone open.

  “Hello?” I said.

  “Who is this?” a man’s voice said.

  “This is Jack Carpenter,” I said.

  “Jack, this is Charles Crippen. Did you find Piper?”

  “Not yet. Is this her cell phone you called?”

  “Yes. I was hoping she’d pick up.”

  “I’ll call you right back.”

  I folded Piper Stone’s cell phone. Jed and Heather had come outside, and were standing on the stoop behind me. When I showed Stone’s phone to Jed, his face did not register any emotion.

  “Recognize this?” I asked.

  Jed shook his head.

  “It’s Piper Stone’s cell phone,” I said.

 
; Jed’s mouth dropped open. If he was acting, he was doing a hell of a job. Lying on the bag of garbage inside the pail was a piece of clothing. It was frilly and feminine, and I held it up by a single finger. It was a pair of women’s black lace underwear.

  “How about these?” I asked.

  Jed said “Shit” under his breath. Heather clasped her hands over her mouth, and stared at her ex-husband.

  “Oh, my God, Jed. Oh, my God,” she said.

  Jed looked at the underwear, then at me. His breathing had gone shallow, and for the first time, I saw how strongly he resembled his father.

  “I don’t know how those got there, either,” he said.

  “You need to tell that to the police,” I said.

  “I’m not talking to the police.”

  I started to tell him that was a bad idea, but before I could, Jed jumped off the stoop and ran around the side of the house.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Coming around the front of the house, I yelled for Jed to stop. He was halfway across the front lawn, and he glanced at me over his shoulder, his face wild with fear.

  “Fucking cop!” he screamed.

  LeAnn Grimes stood just around the corner, holding a broom. Moments later, my legs were tripped out from beneath me, and I was lying on my back in the grass, staring at a formation of clouds. Buster began barking, and I heard fabric being torn.

  “Get away from me!” LeAnn screamed.

  I lifted my head. Buster had grabbed the hem of her dress and was shredding it.

  “Make him stop!” LeAnn yelled to me.

  I pulled myself to my feet, my head spinning. Jed sat in a beat-up Firebird parked at the curb in front of my Legend. He was desperately trying to get the car started, only the engine refused to turn over. Each time he twisted the key, he jerked his head in my direction and shot me a crazed look.

  I walked toward the Firebird with my palms out in a neutral pose. Jed didn’t appear to be armed, nor did I see any guns lying on the passenger seat. The tourists had returned, watching now with mouths agape.