The Night Stalker (23 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

I
gathered up Buster in my arms, and carried him down the street. He was out cold, his breathing faint. Burrell made a call on her cell, and a police cruiser appeared. I loaded Buster into the backseat.

“Where do you want me to take him?” the driver asked.

As a cop, I’d taken injured animals to different clinics around the county, and one clinic had stood out above the others for the care it had shown.

“Hollywood Animal Clinic on Hollywood Boulevard,” I said.

“Will do,” the driver said.

I watched the cruiser drive away. I’d always ridiculed people who were overly attached to their pets, but now that I was close to losing mine, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Burrell edged up beside me.

“I won’t be offended if you leave,” she said.

I loved Buster, but I also had a job to do, and it wasn’t finished.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I said.

Bowing my head to the rain, I followed Burrell back to Jed’s hideout.

We took our time, and searched the hideout thoroughly. Every piece of furniture and accessory felt like something a nineteen-year-old boy would own. Nothing we found indicated that Heather or Sampson had recently been there. Nor was there any evidence of Jed having killed anyone. Serial killers were notorious for keeping trophies of their victims, and we didn’t find a single item that looked suspicious.

“Jack, look at this,” Burrell said.

I stopped what I was doing. Burrell sat on the couch with an old book in her lap.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Take a look.”

She handed me the book. It was falling apart, and I carefully opened it. It was a Bible, and on the first page I saw the names of every member of the Grimes family who had owned it over the past hundred years. At the bottom of the page was Jed’s name.

“Not the kind of thing you expect to find in a serial killer’s hideout, is it?” I said.

“No, it isn’t,” Burrell said.

I noticed something stuck in the Bible’s pages, and pulled it out. It was a photograph of Jed standing next to a priest with a turned collar. The priest was bowed over from age, with wisps of silver hair that danced on his head. The priest had his hand on Jed’s shoulder, and they were both smiling.

I flipped the photo over. There was a date written on the back. It had been taken a year ago. I showed it to Burrell.

“Jed’s priest,” I said.

Burrell studied the photograph, and shook her head. “Have you ever heard of a serial killer having a priest?”

“No,” I said.

“Whitley needs to see this, and the Bible.”

“Yes, he does.”

Burrell’s cell phone rang. She answered it, then looked at me.

“Buster’s going to live,” she said.

I pulled out my keys. My job was done here.

“Let me know how it goes,” I said.

I drove to the Hollywood Animal Clinic in the pouring rain. A receptionist with silver thunderbolts painted on her fingernails greeted me from behind a Plexiglas panel.

“Can I help you?” the receptionist asked.

“I own a dog that was brought in earlier,” I said.

“The Australian Shepherd that was involved in the manhunt?”

“That’s right.”

She led me to an examination room, and told me the vet would be in shortly. While I waited, I looked at the horse photographs hanging on the walls. They showed a pretty woman with short spiked hair sitting on a chestnut stallion with ribbons hanging around its neck. The horse’s name was Charley Horse, which brought a smile to my face.

The vet came in wearing a white lab coat. It was the same woman from the photos. Her name tag said Dr. Chris Owens.

“The police tell me your dog’s a hero,” Dr. Owens said.

No one had ever called Buster that before, much less anything nice.

“How’s he doing?” I asked.

“He regained consciousness a short while ago, but is still groggy,” Dr. Owens said. “He seems to be all right, but I’m concerned about his skull. I don’t think it’s cracked, but I won’t know for certain until I run a series of X-rays.”

I’d been to enough emergency clinics to know how they operated.

“How much are we talking about?” I asked.

Dr. Owens worked up the cost on a pocket calculator, and showed me the figure. Three hundred and twenty bucks for a lousy pound mutt.

“Run the X-rays,” I said.

“I’ll need you to sign a form agreeing to the procedure,” Dr. Owens said.

I removed the money from my wallet, and stuffed it into her hand.

“Right now,” I said.

“He’s a special dog, isn’t he?” she asked.

No one had ever called Buster that before, either.

Dr. Owens returned to the examination room holding a handful of X-rays, which she held up to the overhead light for me to see. “Your dog has suffered a mild concussion. It could have been worse, but he’s got a thick skull.”

“Can I take him home?” I asked.

“I don’t see why not.”

I followed her down the hall to the X-ray room, where Buster lay on a table. His eyes were at half-mast, and I saw his tiny tail wag.

“You need to keep him quiet for a few days,” Dr. Owens said. “I know that’s hard with an Aussie, but you don’t want him running around. I’m giving you some pain pills. Give him two every four hours until they run out.”

I carried out Buster with his cold nose pressed against my neck. The waiting area was filled with people with ailing pets, and a woman stroking a Siamese cat spoke to me.

“Is it true what the receptionist said about your dog?” the woman asked.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“That he helped the police catch that horrible serial killer Jed Grimes?”

I hadn’t mentioned Jed’s name to the receptionist, and I wondered how the woman had made the connection. Then I spied a TV in the corner of the room. Whitley was on, and was wearing fresh clothes, and had slicked back his hair. He was holding a press conference for the local media, and talking about Jed’s apprehension. People accused of crimes were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, only Whitley was calling Jed a killer, and giving himself and his agents the credit for apprehending him.

I walked out of the clinic without replying.

CHAPTER FIFTY

I
found Burrell standing in the clinic parking lot. She asked after my heroic dog.

“He’s going to be okay.”

“I’m glad. We need to talk,” she said.

Burrell offered to drive me home in my pickup, with a police cruiser following us. I agreed, and climbed into the passenger seat with Buster in my arms. He was coming around, and seemed to be enjoying all the attention I was giving him.

It was still raining like it was the end of the world. Burrell crawled through a tricky roundabout in the center of town, then turned her head to look at me. “You told me something the first day I came to work for you,” she said. “You said, ‘Listen to your brain, but follow your heart.’ I’ve never forgotten that.”

“Is your heart telling you something now?” I asked.

“Yes. I think we arrested the wrong person.”

“Did you talk to Whitley?”

“I called him, and told him about finding the Bible and photo of the priest in Jed’s hideout. Whitley said it was meaningless. He blew me off.”

Burrell didn’t try to hide the anger in her voice.

“What’s the deal between you two?” I asked.

“I thought we were in love,” she said.

“Thought?”

“Whitley and I have been seeing each other for about a year. He told me he was leaving his wife. The story changed a few hours ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

We crossed the Hollywood Bridge, and took A1A north to the Sunset. The streets were deserted, the bars and restaurants empty. I had Burrell pull into the Sunset’s parking lot, and park by the entrance. The cruiser did the same.

“Earlier you told me that you thought someone who worked in a restaurant was our killer,” Burrell said. “Do you have a profile?”

Buster was whining to get out of the car. Opening my door, I laid him onto the pavement, and watched him teeter down to the shoreline and relieve himself.

“Our killer works in a restaurant,” I said, closing my door. “He might be the night manager, or maybe even the owner. He’s a loner, and has lived in LeAnn’s neighborhood for many years. He also has a connection to Abb Grimes, although I haven’t figured out what it is. He’s smart, but impulsive.”

“A classic serial killer,” Burrell said.

“That’s right.”

“If I run a background check on every restaurant employee in the area, would you take a look at them, and see if you could pick him out?”

I stared at the waves crashing on the beach. My nose was throbbing, and I was exhausted to the point that I could hardly keep my eyes open.

“Sure,” I said.

Burrell leaned across the seat, and kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks, Jack.”

Buster froze at the bottom of the stairwell leading to my room. I carried him upstairs, and laid him on the bed. Then I examined myself in the bathroom. My nose was turning purple, and had a nasty bump over the bridge. No more
GQ
covers for me.

I went downstairs to the bar. Two teenage girls were dancing in front of the jukebox while the Dwarfs ogled them from their bar stools. The girls were both slurping Diet Cokes, and I spoke to Sonny.

“They legal?” I asked.

“Naw. Tried to pass off some fake IDs, but I made them,” Sonny said.

“Why didn’t you throw them out?”

“Because I’m horny.”

I went upstairs and found my detective’s badge. The department had let me keep my badge after I’d quit. You could say it was one of the few decent things they’d done. I went downstairs and pulled the girls off the floor. Going outside, I made them stand in the pouring rain while I read them the riot act. By the time I was done, the makeup had washed off their faces, and they’d promised to stay out of bars until they were legal.

“Spoilsport,” Sonny said when I returned.

“You have any pain pills?” I asked.

Sonny fed me some Advil. I drank coffee, and waited for them to kick in. It took awhile, but I finally started to feel normal.

The local news came on. The lead story was about Jed’s capture, and showed him doing a perp walk outside the police station. The images faded into a blaring headline.
WHAT WENT WRONG
?

On the screen a familiar face appeared. It was Ron Cheeks, wearing his best suit and a smug look on his face. The pills churned in my stomach, and I grabbed the remote off the bar. Cheeks’s voice came booming out of the TV.

“Jed Grimes was our number one suspect from the start,” Cheeks said. “All the evidence pointed to him. He abducted his son, and we knew it.”

“Why didn’t the police arrest him before now?” a female reporter asked.

Cheeks did a slow burn. “I was going to. Unfortunately, a medical condition forced me off the case, and another detective took over.”

“Who was that?”

“Detective Candice Burrell.”

“Is she to blame?”

“Detective Burrell is a fine police officer, and in no way is responsible for what has happened with this investigation,” Cheeks replied.

“Then who is?”

“A consultant the police hired to work the case.”

“A consultant?” the reporter asked.

Cheeks raised his hands in mock surrender. “It wasn’t my idea.”

“Can you tell us who this consultant was?”

“It was a former detective named Jack Carpenter,” Cheeks said. “Carpenter was hired by the family to find the boy, then hired by the police department as well.”

“So there was a conflict of interest,” the reporter said.

“I would say so,” Cheeks said.

“Do you blame Jack Carpenter for what went wrong?”

“He let the case drag on, and now Sampson Grimes
and
his mother are missing. Yes, I blame him.”

I looked for something to throw at the screen.

“Temper, temper,” Sonny said.

The interview ended. Sonny took the remote out of my hand and killed the picture.

“How’s your nose?” he asked.

“It’s starting to hurt again,” I said.

Sonny fed me two more pills. I swallowed them while looking into the future. Cheeks was campaigning to get his old job back. Considering how badly the case had gone, it just might happen. I could not imagine a more cruel injustice, and punched the bar.

I went outside and stood by the shoreline. The lightning made it dangerous, but I didn’t care. My cell phone rang, and I answered it hoping it was Burrell.

“Carpenter here,” I said.

“Mr. Carpenter, my name is Father Tom Kelly,” the caller said. “I’m a priest at Starke prison.”

The wind was blowing in my face, and I moved inside the bar’s open doorway, and sat at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Let me explain why I’m calling,” Father Kelly said. “I counsel death row inmates at the prison. One of those inmates is Abb Grimes. I was watching the news, and saw that Abb’s son, Jed, had been arrested for murdering his father’s lawyer, along with many other crimes. I called LeAnn Grimes, and she told me to call you.”

“What can I do for you?” I said.

“I wanted to tell you that I think Jed is innocent.”

“You do?”

“Yes. I was there when Jed was saved.”

I thought back to the photograph of the elderly priest I’d seen in Jed’s album, and realized this was the same man.

“Saved how?” I asked.

“Let me tell you what happened. A year ago, Abb told me that he wanted to see Jed before he died. I called Jed, and arranged a meeting. Jed came to the prison, and the warden let us meet in a cell, and eat a meal. Abb had asked me to wear my prayer shawl, which was given to me when I became a priest.

“When our meal was over, Abb held my prayer shawl, and told Jed he was ready to meet his maker. Abb asked Jed to hold the shawl, and forgive him for his sins. It was hard, but Jed did it. He forgave his father. Then we prayed.

“God was with us that day. Abb invited God into that cell by accepting his sins, and Jed accepted God by holding the shawl, and telling Abb he forgave him. God was there. I felt his presence.

“Jed changed after that. He started giving his wife money, and got shared custody of his son. The transformation was real. Jed’s not a killer.”

The rain blew through the open doorway onto my face, and a crash of lightning shook the building.

“I know, Father,” I said.

“Then you must prove that Jed is innocent. Based upon what I saw on the news, the evidence against Jed is circumstantial. Yet, the police are making Jed out to be a criminal, and saying he was breaking laws before this happened. You need to set the record straight.”

“How am I going to do that?”

“There is a detective named Ron Cheeks. Start with him. Cheeks destroyed a piece of evidence in Abb’s case.”

“You mean the missing slippers,” I said.

“Yes, the slippers. Jed found out, and confronted Cheeks. Ever since, Cheeks has been on a mission to destroy Jed. He pulled Jed into the police station fifty times, and arrested him for crimes he never committed.”

“You think Cheeks is trying to frame Jed?”

“Yes,” the priest said.

I rose from the stairwell. Something had happened twelve years ago that had caused Cheeks to destroy evidence, and he’d been covering it up ever since. If I could find out why, perhaps it would lead me to the person behind these crimes.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said.