The Perfect Prey (36 page)

A noise distracted him. At first it was a creak on the small porch; then it sounded like an explosion.

For a moment she couldn’t breathe; when she started to suck in oxygen, it didn’t feel like enough as her heart raced like she’d never felt before. She was afraid even to try it, but she forced herself to lift her fingers to touch the warm sticky blood on the side of her face. She’d stopped screaming and started to sob instead.

She looked up, and Larry still had the weapon in his hand. The idea that her own blood was splashed along the side made her stomach turn. Just out of instinct she backed away, shuffling her feet slowly on the wooden floor. She murmured apologies, but she wasn’t sure who they were to. She kept saying, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” Somehow she thought it was more an apology to God or her parents or anyone but this guy who kept advancing toward her with the knife still in his hand. But he wasn’t closing the distance between them. Maybe he was just trying to scare her. Her mind raced as she realized that everyone who had ever been in a situation like this tried to rationalize it. She tried to make it seem like it wasn’t really happening. But she knew right now that her life was in danger and if she didn’t do something, this man in front of her, whom she had seen naked, whom she had had sex with, who had supplied her with drugs, was going to stab her to death.

Somehow she felt as if she was coming to grips with it until she bumped into the back wall of his apartment. Now she had nowhere to go. And he kept coming toward her.

Stallings had his big Glock duty pistol in his hand as he crashed through the door. Patty was on the porch covering the inside of the small detached apartment with her Glock through the window. The door wasn’t thick, but it was well made and was harder to get through than he’d thought. He took a moment to let his eyes adjust inside and get over the shock of crashing through the pressboard door.

Patty came in directly behind him as he scanned the hallway in front of him. It was empty. As he stepped forward and turned toward what had to be a bedroom, there was a flash of movement in the dim light and a loud noise. He jumped to the side of the door, scanned it with his gun out in front of him as Patty took a position on the other side of the door. Immediately he noticed a nude woman standing perfectly still against the rear wall. He held his position.

“Where did he go?”

The woman dropped straight forward onto her knees, sobbing uncontrollably.

He entered the room followed by Patty. They scanned each corner, and Patty ducked into the attached bathroom.

Stallings went down on one knee to hold the woman by her arm, giving her a gentle shake. “We’re the police. Are you okay?” But when she looked up he saw for the first time the wound on her face and upper chest.

From inside the bathroom Patty yelled, “Clear,” and stepped back out into the bedroom, joining Stallings with the hysterical young woman.

The girl sniffled. “He was going to kill me.”

“Who?” asked Stallings.

“Larry.”

Stallings scanned the room quickly and noticed the
screen out of the main bedroom window. As he stood and stepped toward it he said, “Did he go this way?”

She just nodded.

He stared out into the pitch-black backyard and realized it would be useless to chase after him. He didn’t know what direction he went. But Stallings knew he could call in a lot of cops real quick and get this whole area sealed off. He looked out the back window as he opened his phone. There was no trail or trace of where Larry Kinard had fled. As soon as the dispatcher came on the line Stallings started feeding her information for the arriving units to set up a perimeter.

Larry Kinard acted on instinct when he saw his front door disintegrate. Before he even knew how many cops had busted in, he twisted and dove out the window in his bedroom. Landing on his feet, he kept his balance and ran directly into the bushes behind his house and kept running onto the main highway. He knew he had to get back into Jacksonville, where there were crowds and places he could disappear. His biggest stroke of luck was a bus stopping outside the convenience store about a mile west of the beach.

He was fully clothed and still had his wallet in his pocket. Thank God he hadn’t had sex with Ann and found himself running naked once again. Instead, he calmly stepped onto the bus, dug in his pocket for his wallet, and gave the driver five dollars. Change automatically dropped out of the dispenser, and he walked past two derelicts to sit in the seat opposite the rear door as the bus picked up speed.

There was only one more stop before they hit the
wide swampy area and then the St. Johns River. No one got on at the second stop, and he noticed two police cruisers racing east.

A smile crept over his face when he realized he’d have another season to hunt.

Stallings and Patty wrapped the girl in a blanket and kept talking to her until paramedics took her away. One of them had told Stallings the wound was superficial and would require stitches. He said the same thing every fireman had ever said about a facial injury: “All head wounds bleed a lot worse than they really are.”

Sergeant Zuni had arrived and taken over control of the perimeter, sending patrol cars a mile or more in each direction to block any route of escape. It was a slow night, and every cop in the city seemed to have come out to help. Even though Larry Kinard was obviously the man they sought and was a lot more than an everyday Ecstasy dealer, Stallings couldn’t help but think about Gary Lauer and what had happened. Stallings’s instincts might have been right about a cop not killing young college girls, but Lauer had other issues. Maybe he couldn’t work out how he felt about his girlfriend. Stallings didn’t want to think how responsible Lauer felt for the girl’s suicide, because right now he knew how responsible he felt for Lauer’s.

Stallings and Patty were waiting for Crime Scene to come and process the apartment as well as for Mazzetti to run a search warrant past the judge. But it hadn’t taken long for them to notice the collage of blond girls in the hallway. And Allie Marsh’s photo was in the corner of the corkboard.

Patty stared at the framed collage and said, “Do you think these could all be victims?” Her voice was hushed, and it showed the dread she had at asking the question

“God, I hope not.” It was all Stallings had for the moment.

To John Stallings this is what police work really meant. They might’ve missed the killer, and Larry Kinard was loose on the street, but with the right people in the detective bureau they had accomplished a lot in a couple of hours. He listened to a patrol sergeant’s radio as they sat on the porch of Larry Kinard’s house. He could visualize the wide perimeter that had been set up to catch the fleeing suspect. A patrolman had been smart enough to question a bus driver coming back from downtown, and he said he’d picked up a man matching Kinard’s description an hour before and dropped him off downtown. It hadn’t been enough verifiable information to cancel the perimeter, but it had caused another dozen patrolman to flood downtown looking for the fugitive.

Stallings had roughed out a probable-cause affidavit on someone’s laptop computer, and Sergeant Zuni had assigned another detective to run it through the duty judge so they could search the house. The days of just tossing someone’s house were long over, and the procedures and details of search warrants and subpoenas had
taken a firm hold in most large police departments in the country. Although Stallings was anxious to search the house, he was actually more concerned with the capture of Larry Kinard.

The girl the paramedics had taken said Kinard had given her Ecstasy and he was acting weird. Everyone seemed weird when they tried to stab you. She admitted to having sex with him at Neptune Beach and that they got involved in rough horseplay in the water. The horseplay had upset her, so she had left him at a park near Neptune Beach without clothes or keys. She’d really thought that’s why he had gotten upset and attacked her with a knife. Patty had done an outstanding job of keeping her calm and getting the pertinent information out of her. But now Stallings thought about the photo collage of blond girls and felt sick to his stomach at the idea that these girls could be murder victims.

He’d been very impressed with Yvonne Zuni’s grasp of command and how she’d organized the search for Kinard as well as getting a search warrant and pulling in Crime Scene. Now she was on her phone. She quickly looked at the porch where Stallings, Patty, and a uniformed sergeant sat on a wide bench and said, “Warrant signed. Stall, you direct Crime Scene and get this show on the road.”

After the preliminaries, which included a videotape of the premises, sketches of how the searches took place, and an evidence tech on a computer near the front door, Stallings and Patty went immediately to the collage. He pulled it off the wall and set it on the desk. He found Allie Marsh’s and Kathleen Harding’s photos. Stallings identified the two girls from Daytona. That left twenty more photos.

The crime scene techs found a box of Durex condoms,
which they took into evidence. Patty discovered the small box of odd pieces of jewelry. While Stallings looked over her shoulder, she turned and said, “Trophies.”

“What’s that?”

“These are trophies. Something from each of his victims.”

“How do you know?”

“It seems clear to me. Right here under the photographs, I can picture him digging through this box, recalling each of his victims.

“How many pieces are there?”

Patty counted slowly and said, “Thirteen pieces.”

They were single earrings, belly-button rings, and a nose stud, as well as rings and bracelets. Stallings leaned in closer, feeling as if he might vomit, praying to God he didn’t find any of Jeanie’s jewelry in the box. He thought hard about his daughter’s choices in jewelry, and nothing in the box seemed familiar, but it didn’t make him rest easy. This guy was a monster and would have no defense other than insanity. And he might pull it off. He could convince a jury he’d been abused as a kid or neglected or had some seen traumatic event that pushed him to this unthinkable violence. There’d be legal motions, which would drag on for years. Maybe he’d even end up at Raiford with the last serial killer Stallings had caught, William Dremmel. He’d acted so crazy that the case barely even made it to court. Stallings had shown great restraint and captured the man who’d drugged girls until they slipped into death. He had wanted to kill the bastard, but in deference to Patty’s efforts to reform him he’d risked his own life to capture the killer alive. But that effort had been mooted by the lenient treatment Dremmel had received in the media and court.
Much of it was based on Dremmel’s childhood abuse by his mother. But the result had still been Dremmel skating on the most serious punishment after taking the lives of several girls and shattering the lives of their families. Stallings had known one of the girls and her family.

Stallings thought of something even more disturbing. What if Kinard cooperated and traded information about the victims to avoid the death penalty? It was a common enough tactic, and sometimes parents of missing children welcomed the closure. The media fed on it, and often that media attention only bolstered the killers. The whole concept made Stallings ill.

Of course all of that nonsense was contingent on catching him.

Patty Levine stretched in her bed, turned, and checked her alarm clock. It was ten o’clock in the morning. She’d slept five hours after being awake almost forty. But she had slept without the aid of any pharmaceutical drug even if it was on the edge of extreme exhaustion. She checked in at the office, and nothing was new on the search for Larry Kinard. She took a few minutes to clean her condo, grab a decent breakfast, and reconnect with her cat, Cornelia.

An eleven o’clock news teaser for the noon broadcast said, “Jacksonville police search for possible killer.” Patty knew things were not going well if the sheriff’s office had gone to the media for help. Then a photo of Larry Kinard provided by the Wildside popped on the screen.

Patty noted they didn’t use a name. She and Stallings had learned during their investigation, which had lasted
much of the night, that Larry Kinard was a fictitious name, and everything he’d given the bar except his address and cell phone number were from various other people both living and dead. Somehow Stallings had even gotten a security rep at the cell phone company to go through some records, but there were more than two hundred different numbers called from Kinard’s phone, and it would take some time to figure out where he was hiding and whom he’d contacted. Kinard had left the cell phone in his haste to escape, so they couldn’t try and triangulate where he was from the cell phone or see whom he called after he fled. All the easiest ways to find fugitives were out.

As Patty got into her county car, Stallings called her and said to meet him at the Wildside. They had a lead.

It didn’t take long for her to shoot across the river and rumble into the empty lot of the Wildside dance club. Stallings was out front with the manager who’d helped them before and a young man with long greasy hair, whom she didn’t know.

As she approached she heard the young man say to Stallings, “No lie, man. I helped him push a Mazda into the water at a park east of the river. Then I gave him a ride.”

Stallings gave the young man a hard look and said, “Where’d you give him a ride to?”

“Over west of the river. On Cleveland Street past Edgewood. You know, where there’s a mix of houses and crappy strip malls.”

“You didn’t know this guy at all?”

The kid shook his head and said, “I saw him working here the other night. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known anything about him. I wasn’t sure what to do–that’s why I came by here. I swear I would’ve called the cops.”

The manager laughed. “He tried to shake me down for cash to keep the club’s name out of the news.”

Stallings had a half grin when he said to the kid, “And you helped this guy push a car into the river and gave him a ride for no reason?”

The kid said, “Just a good Samaritan.”