“ C all the police,” I said.
Crippen was visibly shaken. He picked up the phone on Stone’s desk, and mechanically dialed 911. Taking the transcript and police reports, I went into the hall and copied the pages that Stone had highlighted, then returned the originals to the office. I clicked my fingers, and Buster rose from the floor.
“Where are you going?” Crippen asked.
I stopped in the doorway. I was going to Memorial Hospital to visit Ron Cheeks, and talk to him before the police did. I wanted to know why Cheeks hadn’t leveled with me about his involvement with Abb Grimes’s case. Only Crippen didn’t need to hear that.
“I’m going to look for Stone,” I said.
“Please call me immediately if you learn anything.”
“I will. I’d appreciate it if you did the same.”
Crippen nodded absently and I left.
The hospital lot was full. I parked on a residential side street and rolled down the windows. Buster got the hint, and curled up on the passenger seat. I went inside.
The lobby was filled with pregnant women and half-dead retirees. I got Cheeks’s room number from the receptionist, and took a stairwell to the fourth floor. Cheeks was in a single at the end of the hall. I peeked into his room to make sure he had no visitors. Cheeks sat upright in bed watching Divorce Court with the volume jacked up and a big smile on his face. The room was devoid of flowers or balloons or even a single Get Well card. As I entered, he jumped.
“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.