The Night Stalker_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [10]
“Loud and clear.”
Cheeks stood up, and put his shades back on. We’d been friends once, or so I’d thought. The man standing in front of me now was not my friend.
“You and I go back a long way, so I’m going to give you some advice,” Cheeks said. “Drop this case, or it will be your last.”
I had been threatened before, but never by a cop. The words carried a lot more menace coming out of Cheeks’s mouth than I would have liked.
“Sure I can’t buy you a burger?” I asked.
“I’ll ruin you,” he said.
“They’re really good. I’ll even throw in a beer.”
“You’re not funny, Jack.”
“How about some dessert? The chocolate cake is to die for.”
Cheeks went to the door and jerked it open.
“Think it over,” he said.
“I’ll definitely do that,” I said.
He gave me a parting look, then shook his head. I listened to his feet pound the stairs on the way down.
CHAPTER SIX
I sat at my desk and stared into space. Music from downstairs was making the whole building shake. I tuned it out and tried to think.
Before I’d left the police department, I’d written a turnover report. No one had asked me to, and it wasn’t part of my job description, but I’d written one up anyway. It had been a hundred and fifteen pages long.
This turnover report contained every open missing persons case in Broward County, some dating back to my first day on the job. It included the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who’d gone into a department store and disappeared, and another about an elderly man suffering from dementia walking out of a nursing home, and never being seen again. If Cheeks had bothered to read any of what I’d written, he would have known that I had continued chasing leads on those cases long after they’d gone cold. Call it an obsession, but I’d refused to file them away.
I never quit a case.
My unwillingness to give up had defined my career as a detective, and later on, it had cost me my job and ruined my marriage. It was both my good side and my bad side, and I was past apologizing for it. Cheeks should have known better than to ask me to drop Sampson Grimes’s case.
I booted up my computer. I had read about the Sampson Grimes case in the newspaper, but the news reports on the Internet tended to have more information than the paper did, and I now pored through them.
There were six different stories posted about Sampson’s kidnapping. Each had been filed within twenty-four hours of the boy having gone missing. Reading them, I saw an unusual similarity. From the start of the case, the police had considered Jed Grimes their primary suspect, and had focused their investigation on him. Cheeks was quoted in two of the articles as saying that a break in the case was imminent.
I do my best thinking on my feet. I went to the window and parted the blinds. A conga line of drunken revelers had spilled from the bar and was winding its way down to the marina. I thought I knew what was going on. Cheeks didn’t like Jed Grimes and had decided that he was guilty. As a result, Cheeks had not conducted a thorough investigation. Cops called this personalizing a case. It was the surest way to screw up an investigation that I knew of.
I needed to look at the crime scene. Unlike Cheeks, I wasn’t wearing blinders, and I had a suspicion I might see things that Cheeks had missed. Cheeks had warned me not to go there, but I was going to ignore him.
I pulled the phone book out of my desk, and found Jed Grimes’s address. He lived in Davie, about a twenty-minute drive. I clapped my hands, and Buster lifted his head.
“Let’s go for a car ride,” I said.
I got on 595 and headed west. Tourist season was in full swing, and the line of cars’ headlights stretched in both directions as far as my eyes could see.
Fifteen minutes later, I exited into a middle-class