The Perfect Scream (14 page)

But at this moment, playing a simple game of catch in the backyard with Charlie and Lauren, Stallings didn’t want to focus on anything but the two kids laughing and telling him about their day. This was how he’d dreamed life would be when he was a child. But he’d never had a relationship with his father. Now, as the old man’s memory faded, Stallings had the relationship he had always wanted. He was determined not to make the same mistakes with his own children. They seemed to enjoy having him around and looked forward to his daily visits. It had not surprised him that Maria had stayed hidden during his entire visit. He didn’t know if she was still angry or if she was embarrassed by her allegation that he had traveled through Ocala to see his partner, Patty.

He had not even bothered to refute the ridiculous claim and hoped that the time and distance of the weekend might have caused Maria see how silly she’d acted and that was why she was avoiding him.

Looking at Lauren with her perfect smile and long, brown hair blowing in the late afternoon breeze, Stallings couldn’t help but compare her to Jeanie. It was about this age, fourteen, that he’d felt his relationship with his missing daughter start to change. She’d become more distant and disappeared with her friends more often. He had assumed she and her mother were still communicating closely like they always had. It wasn’t until later, after she disappeared, that he’d realized Maria had completely lost her grip on all aspects of family life. Apparently he had too. He had been so absorbed in homicide investigations he had lost sight of what was really important.

It was different with Lauren. He was involved in every aspect of her life and knew her habits and hobbies as well as she did. Lately, she’d been on a reading kick so he had bought her an Amazon Kindle and was gratified whenever he saw her curled up on the downstairs couch, reading the latest teen angst book. But she still liked to get outside and exercise. His fears about his middle child had eased somewhat since he’d caught her in a downtown bar with older girls less than a year ago. She had told Stallings she was going to study and it had broken his heart to realize his little girl had lied to him.

He didn’t know why Lauren had backed away from her older group of friends but suspected it had something to do with her need to keep a closer eye on her mother. Since his sister, Helen, had transitioned out of the house, Lauren seemed to accept more and more responsibility.

After the game of catch was done and he made sure they had a reasonable dinner prepared, Stallings got ready to leave for his house over in Lakewood. He ached to tell Maria about the photograph he’d found of Jeanie, but he didn’t know if he wanted to tell her because it was good news or because he thought it might get him out of the doghouse. He didn’t want to do it for the wrong reasons and raise her hopes only for them to be crushed. He decided to wait.

Just as he had said good-bye to the kids and was about to open the front door he heard Maria clear her throat behind him and turned to see his wife standing halfway up the stairs. She wore a simple sundress and looked like she had either been sleeping or crying.

Maria opened her mouth, but all that came out was a very quiet, “Hey.”

Stallings nodded and swallowed hard, trying not to say anything stupid. For some reason Grace Jackson’s pretty face flashed in his head. Finally Stallings said, “You okay?”

Maria just kept looking at him with moist eyes.

Stallings said, “I didn’t see Patty over Thanksgiving.”

The statement was met by silence.

Stallings threw in, “But it looks like you have an issue with her.”

Maria stepped down two more steps, then came all the way, opened the front door and pulled Stallings out onto the porch. She said, “Patty gets more of you than I ever did.”

“That’s not true. Patty and I have never been anything more than partners and good friends.”

“I would’ve liked to be your friend. I didn’t mind seeing you have coffee with the pretty woman downtown at the cafe. I knew there wasn’t anything real between you. I could tell with one look. But Patty is different. She’s important to you.”

Stallings thought about it, nodded his head, and said, “I guess she is. But like a sister.” Stallings looked at his wife’s beautiful face and said, “How do you feel about Frank Ellis? Do you think about him as a brother?” He had to laugh at his own, unintentional Brother Frank Ellis pun. Maria’s expression told him she didn’t think it was that funny.

I
t was awfully early in the morning, but Tony Mazzetti gritted his teeth and marched toward his partner’s desk. The lull in homicides had kept him from having to spend too much time with the eccentric Sparky Taylor. Thank God for small favors. Now Mazzetti needed that giant brain of Sparky’s to process some of the information they had and see if his odd perspective on life could tell him if the deaths related to Tau Upsilon fraternity were an accident or something much more sinister. As he approached the immaculate desk, his partner finished his last piece of wheat toast that he ate every morning, wiping his mouth after every bite with a new, clean napkin. Mazzetti cleared his throat.

“Hey, Spark. What’s new?”

The rotund black man looked up at Mazzetti with those soft brown eyes and pleasant face—unlike almost any cop Mazzetti had ever met—and said, “I’ve been reading the files on the robbery victim, the overdose, and the accident victim from the marina to see if there was anything we might have to do on this case.”

Mazzetti couldn’t believe his partner was so far ahead of him, but he resisted saying something like
no shit
. Instead, he nodded calmly and said, “That’s great. You come up with something?”

Sparky had a light Southern accent that Mazzetti assumed he had developed growing up in the Jacksonville area and honed during his four years at Georgia Tech. It was Sparky’s engineering background and mind-set that gave him new ways of looking at the same old problems.

Sparky said, “I’ve taken the liberty of running a statistical analysis and boiled it down to its most basic components. I’ve come up with this formula. If you take into account the two-year span in education of the victims and you assume that the fraternity has an average of forty-two members plus or minus three each year with a turnover of ten to twelve members each year, you would have to assume that the fraternity had approximately sixty to seventy members from the time the shooting victim graduated until now. Three deaths among that number of young, relatively wealthy white men is out of the ordinary. That being said, there are always statistical anomalies.”

Mazzetti looked at his partner and said, “Come on, Sparky, what the fuck does all that mean?”

As usual, Sparky didn’t change his expression in any way. He simply said, “It means we have a problem that needs investigating and I suggest we jump on it with both feet.”

Lisa Kurtz enjoyed being an assistant medical examiner and had aspirations to become the chief medical examiner of some jurisdiction, preferably in Florida. She liked the weather and the people. Although she found that most Floridians took college football far too seriously. She didn’t worry about factoring her relationship with Tony Mazzetti into her career decisions. Those choices were at least two years down the road and she didn’t get the sense that she and Tony would be together for too long. She enjoyed his company and his cute, simple tactics in the bedroom, but they didn’t share many interests. What really fascinated her about Tony was his job. Although she had gone to medical school and considered herself part of the law enforcement community, she was not a detective and that’s what really interested her. She read novels about detectives, she watched
Law and Order
almost every night, and she had read virtually every true crime book ever published. If it weren’t for the hassle of the police academy she would consider becoming a cop herself.

The natural curiosity that made her think she’d be a great cop had led her to seek out the shirt that the overdose victim, Connor Tate, had worn the night he died. She knew she should take the shirt over to the sheriff’s office crime lab or at least tell Tony what she was doing. Instead, she and one of the coroner techs, a former evidence custodian for Dade County, did their own forensic analysis of the shirt. They had scraped the residue from a stain that ran almost the length of the front of the filthy shirt. Now she would have to include the crime lab. She decided to deliver the tiny sample of scrapings herself and say it was part of an ongoing medical examiner’s probe, which was true. They were always interested in overdose deaths and the prevalence of certain drugs in the community.

If anything came of it, she’d let Tony know. Until then she just would enjoy being a detective.

 

 

 

Stallings had been born and raised in North Florida, yet he had not spent much time on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was glad Patty had been with him and able to guide them both around campus as well as using her status as a graduate to assist them in finding the fraternity house with little or no trouble. They wanted to branch out from the Jacksonville chapter of Tau Upsilon, which served several of the smaller universities in the area. Stallings had had a theory that perhaps other fraternities had suffered a recent spate of bad luck as well. Although he considered three deaths among such a small number of young men unusual, Stallings still wasn’t convinced it was the work of some mastermind.

Now they were inside the house talking to a very nervous UF student who had been a member of the fraternity for his entire four-year career at the sprawling university. Stallings could tell by the look in this kid’s eye that he was very uncomfortable talking to any law enforcement officer. Stallings let Patty start off the conversation smoothly and in her own style. There was no reason for this young man to be as shaky as he was acting.

Patty sat next to him on a long sofa and patted his knee in an effort to calm the young man down. She said, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. We’re just curious if you know of any members of your fraternity who have died accidentally or otherwise in the past two years?”

The thin young man turned his pale eyes to Stallings, then back to Patty. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fast elevator. “There’s no one in the chapter that died for as long as we’ve existed. At least as far as I know.”

Patty nodded like she was thinking, but Stallings knew she was trying to figure out what this boy’s story was too. Finally she said, “What about any alumni?”

The boy physically winced and slowly nodded his head. “One of our brothers, Paul Smiley, died in some kind of fire in Atlanta last year.”

Patty waited, thinking the boy might expand on his answer. When he didn’t say anything else she said, “You sure that’s it?”

“That’s the only person who died that I know of.”

There was something in his tone and delivery that made Patty say, “What about anyone seriously injured?”

The boy bit his lower lip and finally said, “Another one of our alumni, Alan Cole, is in the hospital in Daytona after he was hit by a car.”

“Do you know any details about either incident?”

The boy shook his head. “I think whoever hit Alan drove away and hasn’t been found.”

Stallings scribbled down some notes but still had a sense the boy was hiding something. He cleared his throat until the young man looked up at him; then Stallings said, “Did either of these guys spend much time at the chapter house in Jacksonville?”

Slowly the boy nodded his head. “They both had friends and other things that took them to Jacksonville. I think they usually stayed at the chapter house.”

“Did they ever go together to Jacksonville?”

“I guess they did around Halloween.”

“Why Halloween?”

“Because the North Florida chapter always hosts a kick-ass Halloween party.”

Stallings exchanged a quick glance with Patty.

 

 

 

Yvonne Zuni prided herself on always being on top of homicides, drug cases, and missing children. But this latest wrinkle in the crimes/persons squad was different from anything she had ever had to deal with in her short career as a supervisor. She wasn’t even sure a crime had occurred. They needed more proof than just a crazy theory about bad luck at a fraternity. She’d been told by Lieutenant Hester to keep things low key. But John Stallings and Tony Mazzetti were never low-key for long. Between the two of them something was going to be put on command staff’s radar. Sergeant Zuni didn’t mind; part of her job was running interference for her detectives. She just wished she understood the issue a little more clearly.

She wandered through the squad bay back toward her office, keeping a subtle eye on who was working at their desk and who was running their mouth at someone else’s desk. There was usually too much work to allow much time for watercooler talk. But as effective as the squad had been the last few months she wasn’t going to come down on anyone taking advantage of the lull in homicides or the precipitous drop in robberies over the past two months.

She noticed Tony Mazzetti at Sparky Taylor’s desk working with the peculiar detective on something. She knew the two detectives weren’t friends but had noted how they complemented each other so well. She had heard through the grapevine that Mazzetti’s regular partner, Christina Hogrebe, was going to be promoted to sergeant before she finished her temporary assignment at the police academy. Zuni hadn’t broken the news to Mazzetti yet but was gratified to see that he was working with Sparky on investigations instead of just treating him like an assistant.

She paused at John Stallings’s cluttered desk and noticed a small stack of photographs. She moved aside a sheet of paper on top of them and pulled the first photograph off the desk. She noticed the other ten photographs were copies of this one showing a young man and a young woman smiling next to each other in a long hallway with festive lights strung behind them. It took her a moment to recognize the missing fraternity brother Zach Halston. She didn’t know who the very pretty blond girl was. The sergeant assumed Stallings was using the photos to show different witnesses who might’ve come into contact with the missing fraternity brother.

She kept a photograph in her hand and set the piece of paper back over the remaining photographs on Stallings’s desk. As she neared her office she heard her desk phone ring and hustled to catch it.

Sergeant Zuni absently set the photograph of Zach Halston and the girl down at the side of her desk as she picked up the receiver and simply said, “Sergeant Zuni, crimes/persons.”

 

 

 

Dale squeezed into the tiny chair next to Lynn’s desk. Since she had agreed to have a drink with him Saturday night he’d taken it to mean she wanted to see him more often during the workweek at Thomas Brothers Supply. Until she had a better idea of what he knew and what he planned to do with the information, she decided to stay on the large, smelly man’s good side.

At the moment he was wolfing down a tuna salad sandwich, then gulping a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. He repeatedly offered Lynn a bite of the sandwich or a drink from the bottle, which she politely refused.

Dale said, “What time do you want me to pick you up Saturday?”

Lynn said, “I’m going to meet you. I thought we might go over to Jacksonville Landing to sit at a bar along the river.”

“Lady’s choice. I’ll take you wherever you to like to go. Maybe you could even bring some of your party pills if you want to have a real wild time.”

“What are you talking about, Dale?”

“I’m talking about the Baggie of pills I found the other day in your purse.” Now he cut his eyes slightly to the side and said, “Were you high the day you wrecked the Suburban?”

Lynn suddenly had a sickening feeling that Dale was not the big dumb redneck he pretended to be. She wondered if she might not have a real problem sitting right in front of her.

 

 

 

Tony Mazzetti had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided he fervently hoped that the deaths associated with the Tau Upsilon fraternity were a statistical anomaly. He could deal with one random robbery that resulted in homicide. Ultimately, perhaps after some luck and time, some street thug would be arrested for an unrelated crime and give up who shot the auto parts store manager. But three unsolved homicides meant that he had a severe blemish on his clearance rate. Two accidents were much easier to explain. Hell, half the kids in college today used pharmaceutical drugs recreationally. Mazzetti was surprised there weren’t more overdoses. And the kid who had fallen into the river and been chewed to pieces by the fishing boat could have been anyone. He just happened to be a member of the fraternity.

The events that had attracted the attention of the sheriff’s office had led Mazzetti to review the evidence on the auto parts manager’s shooting. He went through a stack of DVDs from various security cameras, including one located inside the store. That was the only one with any faces that could be recognized. If the killer had walked into the store the night of the shooting, Mazzetti couldn’t tell who pulled the trigger. In the four hours before the store closed there had been only a handful of customers. The man with three children, an older trucker, a guy in the yard service shirt who Mazzetti and Sparky had tracked down and cleared of any suspicion, a middle-aged woman holding a broken windshield wiper, a young, cute woman who ended up not buying anything, and three young black males.