CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
T ucked 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 police?” 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.
