The Perfect Prey (7 page)

He found himself smiling at the thought of Allie’s tight body under his, the thick, sticky film of perspiration between them. Those screams of hers right near the end echoed in his ears and gave him a feeling of euphoria. This was his idea of a vacation. Just dreaming about his past exploits.

He knew he’d have to get back on the prowl tonight to keep the feeling going.

Twenty minutes into the interview of Diane Marsh, Stallings started to realize how this case had gotten spun up so quickly. Diane Marsh was a strong woman with a husband who had a lot of cash from a small fishing-boat-manufacturing business in Laurel, Mississippi. Mrs. Marsh, who had asked to be called Diane, said that they’d never worried about their children in their quiet hometown and that this was Allie’s first trip to a big city.

Stallings almost snickered at the idea of Jacksonville being a big city. Although it was the biggest city in
square miles in the United States, that was more of an administrative move than a growth issue. The county and city had combined governments in the sixties. But the city and its management still had a chip on its shoulder for not being a big city. Despite its slogan, “Bold new city of the south,” J-Ville was eclipsed by Atlanta a few hours northwest and Miami due south. Aside from the stray Super Bowl or decent college game, no one took much notice of the bold new city of the south.

Overall, Diane Marsh offered little help in the case. She had not been able to reach Allie for a couple of days and panicked. When she talked to Susan and learned Allie had not come home she contacted the Mississippi attorney general, who was a personal friend, and he contacted someone in JSO command, who had apparently lit Yvonne Zuni’s ass on fire.

When Diane Marsh started to cry, Stallings reached across the table to take her hand. “I know it’s hard, but we’re doing all we can.” He’d heard the same words and they hadn’t made him feel any better three years ago.

The three years seemed like a lifetime to him. Sometimes all he could think about was how he’d wasted precious hours trying to figure out what Maria was using, where she got it, and how long it had been going on without his knowledge. In hindsight they were all useless questions. By the time he’d brought in JSO on what he thought was his own personal problem, his world and especially the house was in chaos. He was still dizzy from just how fucked up things could get so quickly. Dizzy was the only way to explain it. He physically felt as if the room were spinning and he was going to be sick. The realization that Jeanie was missing had left a hole
that nothing could fill. He fended off questions from his mother and his sister and his friends that meant nothing. They weren’t contributing; they were only distracting. He had to focus. He had to do something. Anything.

Then the first cop showed up. A nice kid in uniform who gave him the fucking company line. Same bullshit he was laying down for Diane Marsh right now. God forgive him, but he didn’t have enough sense to find something new to say.

Diane said, “You can’t know what this feels like.”

“Yes, I can.”

She looked up at him, and he instantly saw the recognition shared by parents who had lost children. Diane Marsh started to weep uncontrollably.

Tony Mazzetti held Patty tight to his chest as she drifted off to sleep. He knew her routine after sex; she got up, took some kind of vitamin, brushed her teeth, and came right back to bed. Once she was out, she was out. It took him longer to fall asleep because he ran through the problems of the day and what he had to accomplish the next day. He’d done the same thing for the entire fourteen years he’d been with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. In the long years without a girlfriend, while he lay in bed alone, he’d rough out some of the history articles he liked to write. Sometimes he read. Now he liked just holding Patty’s small, perfect body as she drifted off. Even if it was early.

She expended a lot of energy. Especially in bed. He wouldn’t admit it, but he had to adjust his gym workouts around their dates because he couldn’t perform
adequately at both in one day. But with their schedules and Patty’s independence, they rarely spent more than two nights a week together and sometimes they went two weeks with only a dinner or two shared. She seemed happy with this arrangement, but after years of almost no relationships he wanted more. He just didn’t know how to express that to her and not scare her away.

He worried about things he never used to care about. He wondered if his years without sex because of his massive use of muscle supplements had screwed up his technique. If he was completely honest, he’d have to admit that no woman ever really complimented his ability even before his quest to gain huge muscle mass.

The frustration of the day caused him to sigh and shift his body. A lump in his throat had not dissipated since the afternoon.

Patty reached across his chest and mumbled, “What’s wrong, Tony?”

He groaned. “Nothing.”

Patty propped herself up and looked at him in the dim light. “We’ll waive the ‘not talking about work’ rule. Now what’s wrong?”

“You shoulda heard how she talked to me today.”

“Who? The sarge?”

“Yeah, the goddamn new sergeant.”

“What did big bad, one-hundred-and-five-pound Yvonne the Terrible say to my meek, little, two-hundred-pound boyfriend?”

He could see her perfect smile even in this light. “She talked to me like a kid.”

“Tony, sometimes you act like a kid.”

“She said my clearance rates are too good and wants more care taken with each death investigation. She
wants a new analysis of each of the last ten deaths.” He waited for a comment, but the silence said it all. “You think I miss things?”

More silence.

Mazzetti said, “You’re going back to the OD case. I admit I screwed up on that one. How was I supposed to know that was the Bag Man’s first victim?”

“You said it, not me.”

Mazzetti groaned. “Now the new sarge thinks the same thing. What a waste of time to go back through the cases.”

Patty’s continued silence told him she didn’t necessarily think it was a waste of time.

It was after ten, and John Stallings was still driving around the area where the cell tower for Allie Marsh’s phone last pinged, thinking of all the terrible things that could’ve happened. Meeting Diane Marsh had ratcheted up his concern, and now he found himself trapped too deep into a case again. The fact that he hadn’t visited the kids today was a sign of the obsession he developed on certain cases.

It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out what drew him to these cases. He always hoped that some detective in some city might piece together what had happened to his own daughter after she disappeared. By working these kinds of cases hard he was somehow helping and nurturing that hope. The hollow spot inside him had never healed. The thought of Diane Marsh suffering the same pain pushed him to keep thinking up scenarios of how the phone was taken from Allie.

On one hand he liked when he was busy, but it was
only a temporary fix to his restlessness and hurt him in other areas, like family. But he knew himself well and resolved to go with it for now.

Stallings cruised east on the Arlington Expressway near a residential area that also held some apartments and homeless people; then he pulled his Impala into a nearby gas station and got out on foot. He knew everyone would make him for a cop, but that’s how he had gotten by on this job: honestly. Sometimes that meant he had beaten someone or at least scared them, but no one seemed to resent him for any of his actions. He was occasionally reminded of that when the lieutenant asked him to do her a special favor and use his “own methods” to find out something. She knew he could be rough, but that he always said or did something that smoothed it over afterward. He’d never had an official complaint filed against him. At least not for violence.

He headed into the park, keeping his head moving so he wouldn’t be surprised. He nodded to a pair of old men, tattoos covering their forearms, sharing a bottle. At the far end of the park were low-rent apartments. Every officer with JSO had been there at some point to break up a fight or check on a sexual predator. It held a lot of recovering addicts and more than a few released prisoners.

He kept walking around to the front of the apartments, keeping his eyes open for one person in particular. It only took a moment before he almost bumped into him.

Stallings froze and looked into the old man’s cloudy brown eyes. Gray stubble covered his cheeks. The man held a basket of clean laundry. Old military habits died hard.

The old man said, “Look what the tide washed in.”

Stallings said, “Hey, Stan.”

“What brings you by the drunks’ ghetto?”

“I need some info.”

“You think that just because I’m sober now I’ll cooperate with the cops?”

“I think you’ll help out because I took a knife in the side for you.”

John Stallings sat on a dryer in the dank laundry room of the old apartment building while Stan finished another load. The old man didn’t want to be seen in public with any form of law enforcement officer. It was an unwritten code at this refuge for derelicts that anyone from a lowly probation officer to a JSO detective was only here to mess with the residents. Stan was making an exception because, whether he liked to admit it or not, Stallings had shown him compassion and tracked down his attackers when no one else seemed to care.

Years ago, when Stallings was assigned to crime/persons, he responded to Shands Hospital to interview Stan, who was homeless and had been beaten and left for dead by a gang of thugs in Arlington. Stan, as well as everyone else, thought the cops would just take a cursory report and dismiss it as they did almost every crime against the voiceless homeless. Stallings, following his usual obsessive pattern, had found the four men responsible and while talking to one of them was attacked with a knife by another. Even with the wound in his side
from a three-inch Buck knife blade he managed to wound two of them with his duty pistol, knock one of them unconscious with a solid elbow to his chin, and then chase down the last one with his police car and break both of his legs with a not entirely unintentional late stop with the car. The impact had sent the man twenty feet through the air off Stallings’s bumper.

Stan couldn’t believe it at the time and used the incident to clean up his life, sober up, get a job at the VA as a maintenance man, and reestablish contact with his estranged family. Stallings knew all that because he kept up with many of the people he had helped over the years. He hated to ask him for help, but when a young girl was missing there were no rules or etiquette. Stan understood that.

The old man shook his head at Allie Marsh’s photo. “I don’t get out much anymore, Stall. I lead a prayer group over at the pavilion in the park behind the building here and see those guys most everyday, but I’d remember a pretty woman around here.”

“Her phone was used by a man, and it pinged off a cell tower near by.”

“What kind of phone?”

“A cell phone, small …”

Before Stallings could say it, Stan added, “Red?”

Stallings perked up. “How’d you know?”

“Because I know who had a phone like that.”

Ten minutes later, John Stallings was on the move. He didn’t like marching through the brush on the far side of the apartment building at night without backup, but he liked the idea of leaving a lead like this hanging
until morning even less. The path was pretty obvious even in the ambient light from the street and a quarter moon rising over the Atlantic.

He had seen no one since he started walking into the thick scrub, but knew that this was a popular homeless hangout. Not the younger runaways who tended to hang out near downtown and had a chance to turn it around, but the older, burned-out, alcoholic homeless that tended to be men in their fifties, some of them veterans of the Vietnam War who were never able to fully integrate back into society. Some were convicted felons who couldn’t find a job and decided to turn their backs on the rest of the world, and some were just mentally unbalanced and were turned out into the world by a system that often couldn’t afford to care for them.

There was no real bond among most of the men. They talked a good game about looking out for one another, but Stallings knew they constantly stole from one another, beat each other, and sold each other out when it was convenient. Stallings knew Stan wasn’t selling anyone out. He was concerned about the missing girl and had told Stallings that the man he saw with the phone was not the violent predatory type. But he knew the violent predatory types were usually not too obvious; that’s how so many were able to operate without detection.

Stallings had seen several different studies on serial killers. The newest ones had revised the number of murders committed by serial killers in the United States from about 200 a year to as many as 2,000 a year. That was an astonishing number to a cop. Yet the threat from a serial killer was never mentioned until the media got ahold of a story and played it up.

He continued on his slow trek through the scrub and pine. Up ahead he heard voices, and the flickering
light of a campfire bled through the trees. He eased up and tried to figure how many men were in the small camp. He could hear two voices, but could see at least four bodies through the bushes.

Stallings cleared his throat loudly, then made sure he didn’t surprise anyone as he crashed through branches into the clearing. He’d misjudged. There were ten men in the clearing, and they all jumped at the sight of him. He hoped this wasn’t going to be a problem. But that hope faded as he ducked a board swung at his head.

He tapped his heel to the beat of the “You Found Me” by The Fray. Heel tapping was more alluring than toe tapping. Not that it made a difference with him. He peered out over the dance floor, disappointed in tonight’s offering. It was a little soon since his last capture, but he’d found that he waited less and less time after every kill. His memory of Allie was fresh and so was her scent on him. He didn’t shower, because he loved the musty smell of sex mixed with a woman’s perfume.