The Perfect Scream djs-4 Read online

  Stallings let out a snort of laughter, but that was it. This was not a good use of his time. A shiftless pothead who hasn’t checked in with his parents. Fucking great.

  Patty said, “Jackpot,” as she pulled a Toshiba laptop from under a pile of Playboy magazines.

  Stallings recognized the key to many missing young people’s whereabouts lay in their personal computers. The odd email or Facebook entry had led them to more runaways than all the phone tips to a hotline combined. Technically, at twenty-one, Zach Halston wasn’t a runaway. He was classified as a missing person, and if his parents hadn’t been educated and influential, Stallings doubted anyone at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office would have told him to look for the kid. In fact, Stallings was thinking about turning the laptop over to narcotics when Patty had gotten everything she needed, since he figured it held the names of the kids’ customers. But that undermined the whole concept of a warrantless search to find a missing person.

  Patty started to rustle through the kitchen drawers as Stallings glanced up at a long hallway filled with cheaply framed photographs on the wall. He flicked on the overhead light and slowly started strolling down the hallway. Most of the photos were of Zach with his drunken frat brothers at wild parties and in bars. They were more than a few bongs and other drug paraphernalia prominently displayed. Stallings started understanding the concept of a second, secret apartment more clearly.

  There were a number of photographs with young women posing in different states of drunkenness. He briefly thought about trying to talk to some of the girls but figured it would take more time to identify them than it would to actually locate the missing frat brother.

  Near the end of the hallway, Stallings was about to turn and join Patty when one photo of Zach Halston with his arm around a young woman caught his eye. He stepped to one side so the light would fall on it. He reached into his breast pocket and quickly yanked out his cheap, cheater reading glasses he’d been forced to use over the past year. He stared at the photo and every detail, slowly reaching up with a trembling hand and pulling the four-by-six photograph off the wall. He fumbled with the frame, roughly pulling the back off it so he could look at the photograph without any distortion from cheap glass.

  He stared until he realized he was certain of what he was looking at.

  The girl in the photo was his missing daughter, Jeanie.

  FOUR

  Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide detective Tony Mazzetti was in a miserable mood. A mood that had lasted for months. That was one of the reasons he was looking at the case file of an open homicide with such contempt. A simple shooting in Arlington. Some poor schmuck manager of an auto parts store. No robbery, no known enemies, no motive. Just a nice middle-class kid shot for no apparent reason. And Mazzetti had been unable to solve it. He felt like shit.

  But it wasn’t just a blot on his immaculate homicide clearance rate. Three articles of his had been rejected by various history magazines in the past three weeks. That had never happened before either. He’d pulled a hamstring at the gym and now wobbled around like an arthritic old man. Mazzetti thought he could trace back the string of bad luck and sustained bad mood to breaking up with Patty Levine.

  No matter how he spun it in his head or talked about it with his mom or sister, Patty was the only one who’d done any breaking up. He’d just sat there like a mute dolt and let the best thing that ever happened to him walk right out of his life. While she had been polite and professional in the office, he had no indication she was remotely interested in hooking back up with him romantically. Now the problem had to do with him needing a girlfriend. He had gone years without a steady girlfriend and thought he was getting by just fine. But Patty had shown him the wonders of a committed relationship and now he found himself chatting with women more and interested in starting a new relationship. It was exhausting.

  His immediate concern was finding who had pumped three.38 rounds into Kirk Topps, manager of the Independent Auto Parts store in Arlington. This was a real puzzler. The young man was a graduate of the University of North Florida, came from a nice, middle-class family. Both of his parents were teachers. He’d had the same steady girlfriend for three years and no history of drugs, alcohol, or gambling. Those were usually the big three culprits in an unexplained shooting.

  Mazzetti’s partner, Sparky Taylor, had used that enormous brain of his to find unbelievable video of the street coming and going to the auto parts store. Sparky was a technical genius who knew how to talk to other tech geeks. He’d found security cameras at different businesses that covered the street from a number of angles. Then Sparky spoiled some of his efforts by finding JSO policy regarding the use of unrelated videotape. It made him fill out way too many forms and permissions.

  Sparky had been driving Mazzetti batty with his constant citation of policy and investigative ideas. Mazzetti didn’t care what the former tech agent made him do as long as it helped solve a goddamn homicide.

  His cell phone rang and he snatched it up absently, barking into the receiver, “Mazzetti.”

  A flirty female voice said, “Hey there. You think you could find a reason to run over to my office sometime today?”

  Mazzetti immediately recognized the voice belonging to Assistant Medical Examiner Lisa Kurtz. The cute, redheaded graduate of Syracuse Medical School had been playing a game of catch me if you can with Mazzetti for weeks. Now Mazzetti was ready to catch her.

  “I’ll be over in a little while.”

  Sergeant Yvonne Zuni felt like she was up to speed on the squad after only a few months in the position. The biggest factor in her getting a handle on everything was the slowdown in homicides during the last part of summer. She wasn’t going to argue with how she’d found herself in the very favorable position of being the sergeant in charge of the crimes/persons unit; she was just going to enjoy it.

  The sergeant had never seen herself as a career woman. Growing up in a warm and loving family from Trinidad, she’d thought about following in her father’s footsteps as a veterinarian. But mainly she’d dreamed about having kids. Her sisters both had families. Her cousins all had children. And for a brief period she’d thought she had it all. She was married and had a baby boy at home. But a rare blood disease had taken her son before his first birthday, and then everything else went to hell.

  But she hadn’t given up on life. She’d recently started to date again, even if her taste in men had turned out to be poorer than her ability to command police officers. She enjoyed her job and the people she worked with, and most of all, Yvonne Zuni had not given up hope. There was no reason she couldn’t have it all again.

  In a way she felt like she was the mother on the squad. She worried about the detectives in her command as well as the cases they worked on. Maybe it was a way to make up for the fact that she’d only gotten to act like a real mom for a short time.

  Sergeant Zuni looked through her glass-enclosed office at the far end of the squad bay and saw the intimidating form of Lieutenant Rita Hester strolling toward her. The lieutenant made a daily appearance but had little to do with the operational control of cases since Yvonne had become the permanent sergeant. The lieutenant now focused on some of her other duties, which seemed to include climbing the command ladder. Sergeant Zuni had seen the lieutenant take more credit for cases and be harsher on detectives as a way of getting recognized by the sheriff and command staff. It didn’t bother the sergeant as long as the lieutenant continued to get the detective bureau the resources it needed to solve cases.

  Lieutenant Hester stopped at the office door and said, “What’s new, Yvonne?”

  “Nothing really. Tony is still working the robbery of the auto parts manager, Luis Martinez is looking into a reported gang robbery, Stall and Patty are looking for the missing fraternity boy. You know, the usual.”

  The lieutenant shook her head and said, “Wouldn’t mind breaking something big and catching some news coverage.”

  “Sorry we haven’t had a decen
t murder to solve.”

  “Funny. You know what I mean. Patrol gets all the attention because people see them out there in uniform. We have to fight for anything we need.” The lieutenant looked across the squad bay and said, “That’s the nature of police work. Feast or famine. It’s hard to tell the bosses things are slow but you need more resources. Know what I mean?”

  Sergeant Zuni nodded her head. She could imagine how tricky politics were at the upper ends of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Rita Hester was a legend in the agency for her toughness and intelligence. She was a role model for women like Sergeant Zuni even when she talked politics and not police work.

  The lieutenant turned her head and gave a rare, warm smile as John Stallings entered the squad bay and waved to her. Sergeant Zuni knew that two had been partners on the road many years earlier. Stallings could say and do things that would get most cops fired and the lieutenant would just find them amusing. Right now the veteran detective looked worried as he slipped something into an envelope and left it on his desk before he approached the lieutenant

  The lieutenant said, “What’s wrong, Stall?”

  “Nothing, just tired,” mumbled Stallings.

  “The family doing okay?”

  Stallings nodded.

  “How are things with Maria?”

  Stallings just shrugged and said, “Same.”

  Sergeant Zuni and the rest of the squad rarely asked Stallings about his shaky relationship with his estranged wife. She realized now it was a two-way street between Stallings and the lieutenant. He may be able to say things to her, but she could say things to him no one else could.

  Sergeant Zuni still thought Stallings was acting strangely.

  Lynn had worked out all the permutations and probabilities of being caught by the police. That’s what she did. She was a numbers girl. And she wanted to see numbers and information on paper. Her days at Florida State had taught her the value of research and understanding a subject from all angles. Her bachelor’s degree was in general business but her minor was in statistics. She thought the possibility of her being stopped before she completed her grim task was statistically unlikely. That was if she stayed on the same cautious, prepared, and determined path. She had once heard that soldiers with those three traits are the most effective fighting units. In a way she felt like she was in a war. There was a clear enemy and a clear goal, and she had already killed for her cause.

  But she didn’t want to lose herself in this mission. Lynn knew for a fact that she was different. Different from other people. Different from other bookkeepers. And different from other killers. Because, if she had to be honest with herself, that was what she was: a killer.

  The first time she had done it she’d been shaky. It was too elaborate and unpredictable. But it worked. It worked like nothing she’d ever expected. The flames. The screams. The satisfaction.

  The second time seemed harder. More personal. She recalled every detail. Holding her father’s blue metal Smith amp; Wesson Model 36 revolver in both hands. Her dad had so many guns she knew he’d never notice one was missing from his safe for a few days. She’d been shocked he could tell the gun had been fired just by the smell of it. He knew it been fired and not cleaned. Luckily, with all that had happened, he just wrote it off as a lapse in memory. He never thought his baby girl had used it to pump three bullets into Kirk behind the auto parts store he managed.

  The act of killing someone, of taking his life, no matter who it was or how much he deserved it, had changed her. The shooting had been tough. Lynn had trembled almost as badly as Kirk did when he started to plead for his life. Lynn had made it a point to look him in the eyes and let him know what she was doing. She wanted him to realize the consequences for his actions just as she understood the consequences for hers.

  In the final moment he recognized her and just as he said, “Aren’t you. .” she pulled the trigger. The initial shock of the gunshot and the blood had stunned her into silence; then she stepped up and pumped two more rounds into his chest to make certain he was dead.

  She had seen it on the news two days in a row but never heard another word about the incident. There were no witnesses, no clues and, as far as the city was concerned, no justice.

  She had spent almost a month assessing what she had done and how. She was careful to use different ways to kill her victims because she wanted to minimize the possibility of being caught because, unlike many killers, she still wanted to have a normal life.

  Once all this business was done.

  John Stallings drove directly to the tiny, lonely house he had rented while he and Maria worked out issues with their marriage. The stress of losing Jeanie, work, and life had been too much for Maria, who had hidden a serious drug problem from the world for years. Now that she had her head screwed on straight she’d decided he was the root of many of her and the family’s problems. His obsessive nature and dedication to the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office had left him distant and emotionally unapproachable. That was the phrase some shrink had fed into Maria’s head and she blurted it out whenever things got tough.

  All that seemed unimportant right now as he stared at the photo he’d taken from Zach Halston’s apartment. He had examined every detail again and knew it was his daughter after she’d disappeared. The photo, coupled with his father’s vague, Alzheimer’s-confused recollection that Jeanie had visited him after she disappeared, was proof she was still alive.

  But what to do with it now? That was the question that roared in his brain and threatened to tear his heart apart. He couldn’t risk mentioning this to anyone at JSO for fear of being removed from the case. It was too personal and he could not be objective. All the same reasons they’d used to keep them from looking for Jeanie when she disappeared. Sure, he had slipped back onto the case. But it took time and emotional capital to keep all of his activities secret from his coworkers. He didn’t care if it clouded his judgment. He just wanted to find his daughter-and to do that he had to find Zach Halston to learn more about this photo.

  Patty Levine felt her lungs burn as she picked up the speed of her nightly run. With a slower pace around the office she’d started to exercise much more regularly. Although she felt better aerobically and had lost weight, the pounding of running tended to aggravate her back pain and caused her to use more painkillers than she should. It all seemed to be a cycle. She’d work herself off the Ambien, then get so exhausted from no sleep she’d hit it twice as hard for a few days. She would cut out painkillers altogether, then double her dosage of Xanax. She just couldn’t get out from under the cloud of prescription drugs. She’d hoped the lull in cases, part of the common roller coaster of police work, would allow her some perspective. She thought it might be a chance to work on her drug use. She’d been wrong. It felt like she needed the pills just to make it through the day.

  Her biggest regret was breaking up with Tony Mazzetti because of her drug use and her concern that she’d always be second to homicide investigations with him. Anyone she met in the sheriff’s office would be tough to date. Police work did not lend itself to smooth relationship building.

  She glanced at her watch and realized she’d already gone forty-five minutes and needed a few minutes to cool down and stretch. She stopped at her favorite park bench, which overlooked a small pond and had shade from the late afternoon sun. This was where a lot of runners ended up because of the workout area with bars for pull-ups and grass for abdominal exercises.

  As Patty leaned forward with her foot on the back of the bench, she made a wide sweep of her arm like she was a ballerina stretching before a recital. It was a goofy ritual she’d done since her early days in gymnastics. It made her feel more graceful and feminine while fulfilling an important fitness requirement. She noticed the guy in the grass to her right finishing up a set of crunches. She’d seen him in the park before and smiled as he stood up and started to stretch his back. He was about her age and awfully cute. She’d seen his long strides and knew he was serious a
bout his afternoon runs.

  Patty took a moment to gather her courage and finally said, “How far today?”

  He smiled and said, “Four miles. You?”

  “I go by time. I did forty-five minutes.” She took her foot off the park bench and stepped toward the man. She held out her hand and said, “I’m Patty.”

  FIVE

  Stallings had agonized about what to do with the photograph of Jeanie. He wanted to rush over and show Maria, but the longer he considered it, the worse idea it appeared. He had no idea what the photograph meant or how it might affect Maria and her fragile recovery. As much as it hurt, he’d have to keep the photo from her for now.

  The one person he could show it to, the one person whose memory it might help, was his father. Stallings had been surprised how quickly he had gotten past twenty years of estrangement from the man who had bullied and terrified him in an alcoholic haze for most of his childhood. These days, James Stallings was a fixture in the Jacksonville homeless scene. Since going on the wagon he’d done all the things any twelve-step program could ask. And that included starting up and moderating a number of support groups for alcoholics and addicts.

  But in the past six months Stallings had reestablished contact with his father and found the old man was worth the effort. He had immediately dazzled Stallings’s children, who were thrilled to meet their long-lost grandpa. Without even trying, he’d helped Stallings with his own issues of anger and sorrow over his missing daughter. The biggest surprise by far was an off-the-cuff comment his father had made at lunch one Sunday afternoon in front of the entire family. This was about the time they realized he had a serious memory issue, which was diagnosed as Alzheimer’s disease. Over pizza, his father commented that Jeanie had visited him twice. Under questioning, the old man came up with enough details to make it sound plausible, and the next week Maria had found Jeanie’s old diary in which she’d written that she knew her grandfather lived in downtown Jacksonville based on comments she’d overheard between her mom and dad.