The Perfect Scream (4 page)

J
ohn Stallings sat in the living room of his former house, in his traditional spot on their long, leather couch. He’d already spent more than an hour kicking the soccer ball back and forth with his seven-year-old son, Charlie. He spent an additional thirty to fifty seconds conversing with his fourteen-year-old daughter, Lauren. Now both the kids were upstairs. He wondered why Lauren wasn’t going out on Friday night. On the other hand, neither was he.

He sat in awkward silence with his wife, Maria. More and more of his friends at work referred to her as his “ex-wife,” but, in fact, they were merely separated. He still held out hope they could patch up their nineteen-year marriage. He had done much of what she asked about putting family first and not working long hours at the sheriff’s office. The only problem was he had not been working as many hours because there had not been nearly as many cases. It was just a slow time, like all police units experience. It seemed like it was either feast or famine. He didn’t mind the lack of missing persons or the apparent absence of homicidal morons, but he had not found the satisfaction he’d been hoping for in his marriage either.

Now he sat, agonizing about showing Maria the photograph he had found of Jeanie with Zach Halston. On one hand he’d like to get her to verify this was a photograph of their missing daughter. On the other hand, with no information to support his discovery, the photograph would do nothing but rip open old wounds. So he just stared across the couch at her beautiful face. The daughter of Cuban immigrants, raised in Miami, she still had the exotic and fresh face of a twenty-year-old.

Maria said, “I’m glad you had so much fun with Charlie this evening.”

“What else am I gonna do on a Friday night?”

“You could come with me to one of Brother Ellis’s services.”

Stallings had been to one of the long Baptist services. It was a small price to pay to be around Maria for a couple of hours. But he considered himself a Catholic and thought she did too until she had fallen under the spell of the dynamic evangelical preacher. So far, the kids had not warmed up to their mother’s newfound fervor for religion sparked by the revivalist named Frank Ellis.

Maria said, “Brother Ellis is the one that says we must all forgive. It’s a message worth hearing. I talk to him a lot about my problems.”

“I’m just not one for the Holy Rollers.”

“Don’t try to denigrate what he does. He had fifty thousand people watch at the football stadium and he fills the giant church out near Blanding Boulevard every Sunday. Tonight is just a fellowship.”

Stallings raised his hands in surrender, having no interest in starting a fight. But her dark look told him this was not the time to show her the photograph of Jeanie.

“Sure, I’ll go.”

 

 

 

Connor Tate played it cool as he drove slowly so the chick he’d met at the Wildside bar could keep up with him in his slick new Chevy Camaro. The throwback car was shit on mileage and slightly uncomfortable, but it looked really, really good. He was glad this girl had her own car so he wouldn’t have to worry about giving her a ride home or calling a cab later. She’d claimed they didn’t know each other and had never met, but this girl, Lynn, seemed awfully familiar to him. Even though he was trying to concentrate on the road with a blood alcohol content that had to be at least twice the legal limit, Connor was still pulling up bits and pieces about this girl from his memory. He just couldn’t place exactly where he knew her from or who she was.

He was hoping none of the brothers were hanging around outside the clubhouse so he and Lynn could slip quietly into his apartment. The nice thing about not having Zach around was the privacy. This spunky chick was a prize and he wasn’t interested in sharing just yet.

The fraternity had a game all of the brothers participated called
Score a Skank,
or
SAS
for short. It was an elaborate point system for scoring with women. The most points were awarded for simply bringing a chick home and banging her. There were a number of ways to verify this, but the most common was a cell phone camera photo. More points were awarded in special categories like older women and really good-looking women. The extra points were on a sliding scale from one to ten, and if you got the right photo of a girl, she might be worth as much as eight extra points. There had only been one instance of a brother winning an extra ten points—when one of the guys in the house banged a drunken cheerleader from the University of Florida. In uniform. He deserved the points. And the herpes he got from her too.

Connor parked directly in front of his apartment building and was relieved to see the walkway to his apartment was clear. He paused while she pulled her spiffy Toyota into the slot next to his. She seemed even happier than he was that no one was around. In fact, she was so nervous he wondered if she wasn’t stepping out on her husband or boyfriend. That was a question better left unasked. He slipped an arm around her shoulder and gave her a friendly squeeze as they wobbled to his apartment. They’d been drinking a lot and he felt himself swerving on the sidewalk, but for a petite chick she seemed pretty sober and helped steady him until they got inside.

The world really started to spin once he was through the front door. All he could focus on was his soft couch, where he had spent most nights stoned and watching Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon. But he wanted to show this girl he wasn’t too drunk and took a second, staring into her eyes, then leaned down and gave her a deep kiss. He loved those innocent eyes and the expression on her face. It might have been fear because he was so much taller than her and she probably figured he was anatomically correct. In fact, most women were disappointed in his size once they were alone and naked. The last woman he’d banged here in the apartment had even asked him when he was gonna get completely hard. He’d had to admit it was as long as it got. He intended to make this girl happy that it was long as it was. He was going to go all out.

She didn’t respond to the kiss quite the way he thought she would, but she did help him to the couch, then let him plop down and stretch out.

The girl—her name was getting hazy, but he thought it was Lynn—said, “Where do you keep your alcohol, big boy?”

He couldn’t believe she was ready for more. Connor mumbled, “Cabinet next to the fridge.” He was wasted and needed to clear his head if he wanted to score any legitimate points for the contest. That’s why sometimes Zach was good to have around because he could surreptitiously film an encounter that might earn him extra points.

Connor could hear the girl rustling around in his kitchen, so he took the time to struggle with his shoes and slip off his jeans.

This was going to be one great night.

 

 

 

Tony Mazzetti had enjoyed his dinner with the cute assistant medical examiner, Lisa Kurtz. He’d known she was interested in him for some time when she’d invited him to work out with her at the JSO gym. She always took extra time with him, explaining anything she found during his investigations and slipping in obvious hints about the lack of datable men in the Jacksonville area. She’d moved down from upstate New York, where she had gone to Syracuse. Somehow she felt like that was a connection between them. He didn’t mention to her his opinion of upstate New Yorkers was no better than it was of Southerners. Basically, if they weren’t from one of the five boroughs or maybe Long Island, they were just a bunch of rednecks who were lucky if they knew how to read. It wasn’t that bad, but sometimes he really did feel like it was. He knew a lot of the native Floridians resented this attitude that many New Yorkers held. He couldn’t have given a shit. These backwoods morons never failed to remind him that he was living in a state that used to be a swamp. He didn’t care about his partner Sparky Taylor’s assertion that the average Floridian had a higher level of education than the average New Yorker who moved to the state. He didn’t care about the embarrassing things that went on in New York City because he could explain it away as an anomaly. He didn’t care what people down here said about New York. His role as the top homicide investigator in the entire sheriff’s office, maybe the whole state, backed him up on his attitude about Southerners.

He had sat quietly and listened while Lisa prattled on about her numerous romances and challenges in medical school and how she had become interested in being a coroner or medical examiner after a class on the subject. Her career decision had horrified her gynecologist father and psychiatrist mother, but she loved her work and apparently loved talking about herself too.

Mazzetti didn’t mind as he stretched and leaned back in his chair at the chain seafood restaurant on the second floor of Jacksonville Landing. Even though he enjoyed being with this pretty girl, he’d seen too much crazy shit in this tourist trap to not keep his eyes moving over the restaurant and the people walking along the river. Not too long ago the body of a woman stabbed through the heart had been found in her car parked in the parking garage. They never figured out who killed her and there was a second set of blood drops in the car that were never identified. Jacksonville, not the place to let your guard down.

The whole time Lisa talked about her brothers and sisters and experiences in college, Mazzetti couldn’t help but think about Patty Levine and feel a pang of guilt. Even though it was she who had broken off the romance, he felt like he should’ve given her a heads-up he was going on a date. The first one since they had broken up. He decided maybe he’d just have a nice sit-down with her Monday morning.

As Lisa droned on about some class she’d taken, Mazzetti caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for another Jack and Coke. Then he held up two fingers to make sure he got a double.

Maybe a walk along the river would quiet her down.

 

 

 

Lynn stood on her tiptoes to make Connor believe she was interested in kissing him. He tended to ignore the way she swiped his hand away from her breast and broke the kiss off early. She had a burning desire, but it wasn’t the same as his. This loathsome, drunken creep was a stereotype of what she had expected. He was tall and handsome and his parents no doubt had money, and because of all that he expected women to do everything he wanted. Just like he’d expected Lynn to drink with him at the bar. But he had not noticed how she would slide her nearly full glasses down the bar. He hadn’t noticed her encouraging and cheering him when he threw down shot after shot of tequila. It was a fine line to get this moron plastered but not so plastered he called attention to them at the bar. She had been careful to allow him to walk out to the car, excusing herself to the ladies’ room, then meeting him in the parking lot. There was no way she would be identified as leaving the bar with him.

The only guilt she felt so far was letting him drive while still hammered. Her fear was he would plow into a car of innocent people. Shattering their lives like her family had been shattered. It was still early and she wondered if Connor and his friends did this kind of drinking every night. If he did, she hardly needed to intervene. But she had a plan and knew it would work.

In his small kitchen she took the cleanest-looking glass and grabbed a half-empty plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator. She filled the glass halfway, dug in her purse and recovered the Baggie filled with mixed and matched pills, and started the final phase of tonight’s mission. She pulled out two homemade ecstasy tablets one of her neighbors had stashed in his apartment. They had a logo that said J2A. She didn’t know what it meant, but she had been assured they were powerful. She crushed them both up and slipped them into the drink. Then she took three sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed her mother several years ago. She did the same with them. She poured some red Gatorade from the refrigerator into the glass and stirred it. The half-and-half mixture was a light red.

As she walked back to the living room, Lynn forced a smile.

Connor sat up on the couch, his jeans tossed on the floor, tighty-whities visible under his shirt. He grinned and said, “Whatcha got there, cutie?”

She avoided a shudder. “You need to drink this to stay up with me and to keep from getting a hangover.”

“Right on” was all he said as he eagerly reached for the glass. He gulped it down, spilling a few drops on his shirt. He patted the couch next to him.

Lynn’s eyes darted around the room until they fell on a long bong in the corner. She pointed to it and said, “Fire one up while I use the ladies’ room.” She made a show of wiggling her butt to motivate him before the drugs all hit him at once.

Inside the tiny, disgusting bathroom she waited until she smelled the unmistakable aroma of pot. She’d tried it a couple of times in college and never saw the appeal. She heard him call out to her twice, the second time nearly incomprehensible.

This was too easy.

P
atty Levine couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled so much in the evening. After a moment of reflection she realized it was her last real date with Tony Mazzetti. She had been supposed to meet him at a swanky Italian place named Gi-Gi’s. Instead, she’d thought she’d surprise him by stopping by a construction site where he was conducting interviews. She’d walked into the middle of a fight Tony was losing badly against several burly construction workers. It had been her quick work with her ASP, cracking some of the construction workers in the leg, that had saved Tony at least a few punches and certainly some embarrassment. By then she’d known there was something wrong with the relationship anyway. She realized it was mostly her fault, but the fact that they were both cops and there was always some work issue breaking into their personal life had been what really broke them apart.

Tonight she had eaten sushi, drank a really big twenty-two-ounce Ichiban beer, and even tried some sake with Ken, the runner she’d met in the park. It was their first date, which was always special, unless the guy was a dud. Ken was no dud. He was a podiatrist who specialized in sports injuries and was a consultant to the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was laid-back and funny, with interests other than police work. He was exactly what Patty needed tonight.

She often worried that Tony Mazzetti would scurry back into his cave of isolation when they broke up. It was her biggest concern about the relationship. Tony was a great guy and deserved more credit than he gave himself when dealing with women. If she believed everything he’d told her, Tony had not had a date in years before they hooked up. But she couldn’t understand why. He was handsome and intelligent, and once you got past his façade of arrogance, he was actually a very sweet and pleasant guy. He lived to impress his mom and sister in New York and felt the only way he could do that was to either publish the ultimate book on history—a passion of his—or maintain the best clearance rate for homicides in the country. Patty knew he had written a lot of articles on history and maybe his goal was to write a book, but there was no doubt Tony Mazzetti took his clearance rate for homicides seriously.

Her concerns for Tony skipped to the back of her head as she listened to Ken tell her about growing up in Brownsville, Texas, and going to Temple University for the school of podiatric medicine. She liked the laugh lines that filled out on his face when he talked about being a fish out of water.

“It took a while to get used to a big city like Philadelphia. I must’ve run up twenty different flights of stairs to imitate Rocky before I finally got the right set. I swear every building looks like an architectural work of art even if it just houses the public works department.” He smiled and gazed across the table directly into her eyes.

Patty took the final swig of her Ichiban, then reached over and took hold of his right hand. “Which do you like better, Jacksonville or Philadelphia?”

“If you would’ve asked me two weeks ago, I would’ve said Philadelphia, but now definitely Jacksonville.”

She beamed and thought about leaning across the small table and laying a kiss on him. This was a great first date.

A walk along the river would be the perfect piece of the puzzle.

 

 

 

John Stallings tried to hide how uncomfortable he was in the brightly lit fellowship hall next to the giant Baptist church. The preacher with a giant, cartoon head gave a quick opening prayer; then everyone started to chat over nonalcoholic punch and tables full of homemade cookies. Maria seemed to know a lot of people, which surprised Stallings. She was generally on the shy and reserved side, but this place had brought her out of her shell.

She introduced Stallings by name, never saying he was her husband. She seemed perfectly at ease among these people. There was no music, but it still felt like a party.

The preacher, Frank Ellis, approached them, greeting couples on the way.

He gave Maria a hug and looked at Stallings, saying, “Don’t tell me this is John.”

Stallings shook his offered hand, shocked Maria had talked about him to the preacher. He made his cop’s quick assessment. The guy was about his age, on the soft side, but wore expensive shoes and had a manicure. Could be harmless or on the make. Immediately Stallings didn’t trust him.

Brother Ellis said, “I feel like I know you. I’m so glad you came to our friendly gathering.”

“Maria can be quite persuasive.”

Brother Ellis shared a quick glance with Maria and said, “That’s not what she tells me. I hear she can’t persuade you to leave police work and spend more time with the family.”

He was about to snap back with an answer when he saw this guy’s game. He was trying to bait him. Stallings took a breath and said, “We do the best we can, don’t we, Father?”

“I’m a reverend, not a father.”

“Sorry.”

Brother Ellis held his smile, but probably knew his cover was blown. “What is it about your work that’s so compelling?”

Stallings gave it some thought. “Helping people.”

“What about your coworkers? Do you like them?”

“Most.”

“How about your partner, Patty? I hear she’s quite the looker.”

That caught Stallings by surprise. What the fuck? If the preacher thought that, he must have gotten it from Maria. Stallings steadied himself and said, “She’s a great cop.” He felt the urge to punch this prick rise in him. A shot to his giant noggin would knock him off his perch.

The preacher’s instincts told him it was time to move on to another couple. All Stallings could do was turn and stare at Maria.

 

 

 

Patty Levine reached down and took Ken’s hand as they strolled west along the St. Johns River in front of Jacksonville Landing. It seemed natural the way he interlocked his fingers in hers. Neither said anything as they passed other couples out on a walk. It was still relatively early and the dinner crowd was pouring out of all the restaurants in the big tourist mall.

After a few minutes Ken asked, “What are you thinking about?”

She didn’t know. For the first time she could remember she wasn’t thinking about some horrible crime from work or worried about a personal problem. She blurted out, “How nice this is.”

He stopped, took her arms in his hands, and was about to lean down when Patty noticed a couple approaching from the right. Her eyes darted that way out of instinct and it stopped Ken in his tracks. Then Patty saw who it was and stepped away from Ken as she turned. What were the chances?

Patty threw on a forced smile and said, “What are you guys doing down here?”