The Night Stalker_ A Novel of Suspense - James Swain [42]
“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.