The Perfect Woman Page 5

  He knew that if his wife wasn’t out here in the living room, she was on the computer or phone, and he found her in the bedroom, where she tapped away at a black Dell keyboard.

  He took a deep breath and felt able to face Maria.

  “Hey, dear.” He always stayed upbeat until it was clear he couldn’t anymore.

  She glanced up from an instant message she was composing. “Just finishing up. This poor woman from St. Joe, Missouri, has a daughter who’s been missing eight months. I’m just giving her a few ideas for support.”

  He leaned down to kiss her forehead. It was also a way to sniff her breath.

  She hit Send and looked up. Her dark oval eyes and high cheekbones made her look as fresh as she did on their wedding day in Las Vegas on her twentieth birthday. They had eloped without fanfare to hide the fact that she was pregnant from her Orthodox Cuban parents. By the time Jeanie came along the goodwill of the baby had distracted Maria’s father from the math.

  After Stallings’s failed baseball and academic career at USF, Maria had seemed like the only thing in his life that was worthwhile. He searched everyday for that old feeling.

  Maria said, “How was your day?”

  “Not so good.”

  She glanced back at the screen. “I have to answer this e-mail. Hold on.” She plunked back in the swivel chair.

  Stallings didn’t mind. It looked like another night of peace, and he could go back out to work without distraction for a couple of hours. But he wanted to see the kids before they went to bed. That would keep him going.

  Rita Hester pressed the unlock button on her key chain and heard the familiar double beep of her blue Crown Vic parked in the detective bureau lieutenant’s spot outside the main sheriff’s building on East Bay Street. Everyone knew the three-story building as the Police Memorial Building or PMB for short. The wind was just right for her to smell the coffee from the Maxwell House plant a few blocks away. That beat the shit out of the breeze carrying the acrid, rancid odor of the paper mills as it had for years. Even though the community and industry had worked hard to ease the effects of the paper mills, and the locals quickly got used to the stench, the wrong breeze would smack you in the face and make tourists gag. No one missed the mill’s departure as part of the city’s identity. Unfortunately that was just about the only thing visitors remembered from trips to the “bold new city of the south” when the mill poured out the foul-smelling byproducts of paper production. She knew that the sulfur used in the process was part of the odor equation, but later learned it was also the cooking out of the lignins and sugars in the wood. She was just glad it was gone.

  From her car she could look up onto the second floor and see “The Land That Time Forgot,” as the detectives called it. The detective bureau, with its mismatched carpets, scuffed walls, and ancient equipment, was always the last unit to get upgrades. The public saw the patrol cars and marveled at the computers to get information to the patrolmen but never dealt with detectives. No one seemed to care if there was money in the budget for them. Rita never really cared until the detective bureau fell under her command. She hadn’t bothered to actually move into the bureau, deciding instead to keep her office next to the clean lab facilities, but she fought to get any scrap she could for the detectives. Just outfitting them with laptops was a monumental task but she had accomplished it. Sure, they were leftover computers from the training division, but they worked, and it was better than nothing.

  As she slid the key into the lock, she sensed someone approaching her. Even in the safety of the Sheriff’s Office lot, her twenty years of police work made her reach for her purse and the small Glock model 27 inside. The nine years she spent on patrol taught her to automatically reach to her right hip, where she carried her duty weapon, but as she worked her way through the D-Bureau and up the command structure she had made it a point to retrain herself to reach for her purse.

  Then she heard someone say, “Rita, got a minute?”

  She relaxed as she realized it was her old road patrol zone partner John Stallings.

  “Stall, what chu doin’ out so late? Mazzetti keep you on that scene all this time?”

  He hesitated.

  Normally, in her rushed existence, Rita would bark out a command to “get to the point,” but she let Stallings have a moment. Not just for the sake of their time on the road together, but because of the way his daughter’s disappearance had affected him. Everyone at the S.O. whispered about the way it was reported, his slow recovery, and speculation his assignment to missing persons was a way to protect him. They didn’t realize he wanted to be there and was doing a bang-up job in the unit.

  Finally Stallings said, “I gotta ask a favor.”

  “What’s that, Stall? I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “I gotta get assigned to the homicide of the dead girl I found over on Jax Beach.”

  “Why, Stall? That just doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s a feeling I have. If we don’t find the guy who did that to her, he’ll strike again.”

  That comment froze her. Did he know already? Was he that smart? She gathered her thoughts and said, “What would Maria and the kids do if you started on a case like this? You could be on it for weeks with barely enough time to eat and sleep.”

  “They’d understand. Especially because Maria knew Lee Ann Moffit.”

  “That’s another problem, Stall. You knew the victim.”

  “That’s not a problem, it’s a benefit. I never really talked to her or the family when she played lacrosse. Mainly, I knew her professionally, no conflict there. I also know who she hung out with and the circles where she traveled. Those kids would never talk to an asshole like Mazzetti.” He paused and added. “I’m on my way over to make notification to the family now. Mazzetti needed a hand and I already knew them.” He looked at her with those blue eyes and added, “Rita, something is telling me I need to be in this case. Maybe I’m still fucked up over Jeanie, maybe it’s something else, but I have to be involved.”

  Rita thought about telling him the whole story, but decided to wait until they could all sit down together. She considered the veteran detective’s request. Stallings was a passionate cop who sometimes did things she didn’t approve of. Well, didn’t approve of now, as an administrator. When they were on patrol together she supported his offbeat, sometimes unlawful actions to solve a crime by any means available. Some guys could operate like that, knowing how far to take a particular situation and then how to smooth it out afterward. Stallings was the best at that. At least he used to be.

  She nodded and said, “Okay, Stall. I may regret this, but I’ll have you assigned. We could use a guy like you on this case. But Mazzetti is still the lead.”

  He smiled. “Thanks, Rita.” Then he paused, looked up at her again, and said, “Any way we could bring my partner, Patty, in on this too? She wants the experience.”

  “She can’t go around with you on this. I got plans for that girl, and getting a beef for being with you when you crack someone’s head won’t help her on the sergeant’s board.”

  “You’re still the best.”

  She wanted to hug him, but it wasn’t appropriate in her current position. She liked him. Everyone did. More importantly, she could use him. It never hurt to have a scapegoat if everything went to hell on a case that was already screwed up.

  Tony Mazzetti sat in his car for a few minutes to get away from the constant noise and activity of the crime scene. He needed to make some notes and start his “book” that would document every activity related to the case. The so-called murder book was necessary, because even a simple homicide like one gang member shooting another in front of seventeen witnesses typically didn’t go to trial until two years after the incident. Even Mazzetti’s razor-sharp mind couldn’t keep facts straight that long. Not with dozens of homicides in the interim.

  He’d have help on this one. The only question was how much help. Right now he and the lieutenant were the only ones familiar w
ith the bigger picture connected to this girl’s death. By this time tomorrow or maybe the day after everyone in the department would know, and he was pretty sure he’d be blamed for the fuck-up. The fact that that asshole John Stallings found the body wouldn’t help anything. It would only remind everyone of the jerk’s lucky grab a few years ago.

  Mazzetti shook his head in the silence of his brand-new Crown Vic, the royal carriage of police vehicles. No one had any idea how busy a homicide detective was on a big case like this one. Not only would he be investigating leads, but he’d have to manage other detectives, keep the Book, update command staff, be the spokesman for the media (which he actually liked quite a bit), and deal with all the crazies who would wander in with tips that he’d have to follow up so some smart-ass defense attorney couldn’t bring it up in court as a possible defense.

  This was a lonely and thankless job. Thank God he’d make a fortune in overtime.

  Streetlights came on and TV sets glowed in most windows of the upscale neighborhood off St. John’s Bluff Road, in the eastern patrol zone of JSO, as John Stallings took a few minutes to gather his thoughts. Patrol zone 2 covered Arlington Road all the way to the beach, and even though it had a lot of miles, it wasn’t the busiest zone in the Sheriff’s Office. The acres of slash pines and scrub brush differed from the tall, sturdier looking Southern pines along the interstate. When he’d offered to notify Lee Ann Moffit’s family of her death it was a way to weasel onto the case. Now, with the job at hand, he didn’t like the idea of using the poor dead girl’s family as an excuse to get something he wanted. It bothered him so much that he had sent Patty home for the night, telling her he’d be more comfortable talking to the family alone. Patty had resisted, but he put on his sad puppy face and she relented with a minimum of fuss.

  Stallings eased out of his Impala, smoothing his shirt to his chest. This sucked.

  On his way up the long driveway he passed a Mercedes convertible with the top down and a Range Rover with a huge gash in the side. The lights inside the house cast a glow onto the entrance that allowed him to dodge a bicycle on its side with a tricycle positioned like a bull over a fallen matador. He hoped the accident wasn’t as bad as it looked. He knew the younger kids belonged to the stepfather who had entered Lee Ann’s life about the time she started running away.

  He mashed a lighted doorbell button, then followed it with a double rap on the door. Out of habit he stepped back and to the side, away from the door or anything that could potentially be shot through it.

  After a few seconds he could hear a woman’s voice, and the door opened inward. Lee Ann Moffit’s mother, Jackie, swayed as she tried to focus her vision enough to see who the hell was knocking on her door at this hour.

  Seeing Stallings, her harsh expression eased, revealing the attractive woman he’d met when Lee Ann ran away. She still had on the dressy blazer that identified her as a major dealer in the real estate market. A cigarette was wedged between her fingers. “Detective John Stallings. What are you doing so far east?” She stepped aside and waved him inside in a long drunken curtsy.

  He nodded and said, “How are you, Jackie?”

  “I’m here. What about you? How’s your wife holding up?”

  Stallings paused, uncertain how to answer the question. He knew he’d disclosed too much of his private life to this pretty woman. The shared circumstances had caused him to let go with Jackie Moffit. Jeanie had not been gone too long, he was new to the missing persons unit, and he’d known the Moffitt family slightly through lacrosse. Now he realized he might have shared too much with Jackie when Lee Ann had run away the first time, explaining how his wife was having a hard time coping with their own situation. At the time, he thought he was helping her. But it was to help him too. Sharing an experience like a missing child helped people feel they weren’t alone and was a major source of comfort for most people. But most people didn’t have a profession like his. Now he knew he had no frame of reference to help this poor woman whom he was about to tell her oldest daughter was dead. All he could do was promise himself he’d do whatever it took to catch the person who killed her.

  Suddenly the migraine made him squeeze his eyes shut as flashes of pain shot through his brain. The distracted Jackie didn’t notice as she searched for a place to lay down her cigarette.

  When she turned to face him Stallings said, “You better sit down, Jackie. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”

  Five

  Patty Levine picked at a Lean Cuisine lasagna as she watched the late local news. The first story was, of course, the body Stallings had found earlier in the day. Tony Mazzetti stood in front of cameras to explain that the Sheriff’s Office had taken the homicide investigation and managed to talk about very few actual facts of the case. Jacksonville Beach was the official jurisdiction where the body was found, and Patty wondered why the Sheriff’s Office had decided to take on more work, but in the end it wasn’t her concern. Her job was finding missing persons, usually kids, and it was important. And she got to wear a detective’s shield. But two years at the same thing was getting old. It wasn’t like there were a bunch of volunteers to come into the missing persons unit. Pretty much it was her and John Stallings, and it looked like that’s how it was going to stay.

  She looked across the room at her kitchen counter, where she had six prescription bottles lined up in a row, then glanced at the clock in her DVR to see if it was time to throw down a few Ambien. She’d taken the last Xanax about four in the afternoon and didn’t like the drug effects to overlap too strongly. Luckily, she hadn’t needed any Percocet this evening for her chronic hip pain. The years of gymnastics had taken their toll on her young body. When someone commented that she’d been a cheerleader, Patty dropped into her speech about the rigors of gymnastics, one of the toughest sports in the world and recognized by the Olympic committee. She only gave the speech to someone one time; the second time they faced physical confrontation. Cheerleading was fun and games, gymnastics was a sport, which was why she needed the drugs to mask any physical problems. Everyone knew she was as tough as any male cop, and she didn’t intend to let a little hip pain slow her down. No one at the office realized she often had a throbbing ache in her hip or that she was a serious insomniac or that she felt anxious for no reason. And no one ever would. She liked her image.

  Right now she needed sleep, and Ambien was the only thing that gave her any chance at that. She exceeded the dosage because the twelve milligrams just didn’t cut it anymore.

  Her cat, Cornelia, butted a hard, furry head against her leg, then jumped up onto the low couch. Patty, still looking at the TV, said to Cornelia, “That Tony Mazzetti is a sharp dresser. He looks good on the tube.”

  She tossed the plastic container of her dinner and rinsed off the fork; this routine had kept her from using her dishwasher for the last three months. Ready to watch something lighter with Cornelia, she paused at the counter and threw down two Ambien, way more than the usual dosage, knowing the onset would be more than twenty minutes, if at all. Her cell phone, next to the parade of pills, started to ring. She recognized the number as one from the sheriff’s main office.

  She flipped it open. “Patty Levine.”

  A sharp, fast male’s voice said, “Report to homicide at oh eight hundred. Got it?”

  “Yeah, I got it. Who’s this?” But the phone went dead before she got an answer. A wave of excitement swept through her. She had just gotten called to the major leagues.

  William Dremmel felt the familiar rush as he learned more about the lovely young waitress, Stacey Hines. He had casually strolled behind the restaurant where she worked and found a beat-up Ford Escort with Ohio tags. From there it was an easy step to access a hacker’s Web site he knew and run the tag through the Ohio motor vehicles bureau and come up with Stacey’s full name and date of birth. Now he’d find out everything about her before he visited her again next week. It made him feel like an all-knowing god.

  The hacker’s site he was o
n was set up by one of his former students who appreciated his Natural Science professor’s ability to see things other than academics. He’d bonded with the little group of social misfits who felt out of place at the community college. They had the grades to go to any state school, but not the drive or, in some cases, the money. They reminded him of himself at that age: lonely, smart, awkward. He enjoyed showing them ways to beat the system. Dremmel had used his knowledge of computers to show the young man how to tap into a number of different computer data banks and then the hacker took it the rest of the way. Now Dremmel used this site as a way to search things quickly and quietly. No one could trace any of his queries back to him.

  The Toshiba notebook computer sat on the small oak desk that had been in his bedroom as a child, in this same one-story redbrick house in Grove Park. The quiet neighborhood on the west side of the city was the perfect place for his experiments. The houses had a little space between them, most of the residents were too old to be nosy, and he could be on the interstate or heading east in a matter of minutes.

  One-third of the house had been constructed as a “mother-in-law” suite with a large bedroom, sitting room, and its own bathroom. A small, covered courtyard separated the two sections of the house. His grandmother had lived in that side of the house until he was seven, about the time of the accident. That part of the house had level floors, even with the kitchen both sides shared. His father had never bothered to change the odd, multilevel floor of this part of the house, and now Dremmel was glad he didn’t. Those little five-inch steps made it almost impossible for anyone in a wheelchair to get around. Thank God.

  In the last few years the oak desk sat in his “darkroom,” which he had quickly converted to a normal room since his last girlfriend had moved out. The small mattress was back in the garage on the top shelf of a storage rack. The eyebolts from the reinforced wall sat on his workbench. Matching end tables perfectly covered the holes where the sturdy eyebolts screwed into the wall and held his girlfriends securely. The photographic equipment and developing chemicals were out of the closet and set up again so if someone were to wander in the room they wouldn’t think it was anything other than an amateur photography studio. That explained the bricked-up windows.