The Perfect Prey

by James Andrus

  His sister said, “Mom worries because you live with me. I have no idea why. What happened with you two?”

  “Same stuff that happens in all families. She doesn’t approve of some things I do, and I don’t give a shit.”

  “She said she had a psychiatrist she wanted me to take him to"–she lowered her voice and nodded toward his nephew watching TV in the next room–"to see about expanding his vocabulary.”

  He looked over at the boy and nodded his head. He didn’t talk much either when he was a kid.

  His sister continued. “Of course she doesn’t have any money to help with the evaluation.”

  “I got some cash if you need it.”

  “You already do too much for us now. Let’s see what happens with him in the next few months, and then I’ll decide if we need to be more proactive.” She patted his hand, stood from the stool, and turned to finish making their lunch.

  He sat on his stool at the kitchen counter and gazed at his nephew. The sound on the cartoon his nephew was watching was turned down to almost nothing as usual. The boy didn’t like to crowd his senses with unnecessary sights and sounds. It was quiet enough to hear the heavy trucks behind the commercial buildings on Cleveland Street. He saw a movement through the sliding glass door in the backyard. The neighbor’s cat was strolling through as if he owned the place.

  He caught his nephew’s eyes tracking the cat. He didn’t move his head or show any interest other than his sharp eyes assessing the cat and the terrain.

  The boy was a predator himself.

  Forty-three

  Yvonne Zuni was utterly exhausted. She’d been called out from her home shortly after Stallings had been involved in a fight outside a club in southeast Jacksonville. At least that’s how she was phrasing it to anyone she talked to today. She grabbed a few hours of sleep in her office because she wanted to head off the inevitable Internal Affairs investigation into the incident. Now, still at the PMB, she sat across from the senior IA investigator, Ronald Bell, in the small snack bar near the main entrance.

  The sergeant wanted to stress the point one more time that Stallings had observed what he believed to be a serious crime and acted in the safety of himself and the female with Chad Palmer. She knew Stallings and Bell had a history and realized it had something to do with the disappearance of Stallings’s daughter a few years ago. Personally, she liked the handsome, older detective because he’d never filed an official report when she had to crack Gary Lauer in the head with an ASP. It’d been a stressful time and a stressful night. When Lauer started to scream at his pregnant girlfriend, Yvonne Zuni had snapped. Although she liked to think she’d given him a warning, in reality she popped the ASP and swung it before she or Lauer knew it was coming.

  If it hadn’t been for the nine stitches and the hospital visit, she doubted anyone at the sheriff’s office would have ever heard about the incident. Lauer was embarrassed he’d lost control, and he was embarrassed a woman half his size had knocked him off his feet and sent him to the hospital. But cops being cops, stories were told, and rumors ran rampant through the department. Finally Ronald Bell had knocked on her door and asked a few simple questions. He could’ve made it into a big deal but instead wrote it off as a personal conflict and had Lauer moved from his temporary duty assignment in narcotics back to the motor unit where he figured everyone would forget about it and Lauer would have no chance to bother anyone else while he wrote tickets on the expressways headed east from the city or any other direction to somewhere nicer.

  Bell looked over his coffee at Yvonne Zuni and said, “We can probably write this whole thing off. Mr. Palmer is not interested in losing his job over distributing samples of a narcotic. We searched his house pretty carefully and all we found were other manufactured pharmaceutical samples. We found no homemade Ecstasy or any signs he ever tried to make it. This incident could be a notch in my belt, but I’m willing to let the whole thing slide for the sake of that crazy son of a bitch you call a detective.”

  Yvonne knew not to say anything, but a smile crept over her face.

  Bell continued, “I strongly recommend you send that unstable moron home for a few days to cool off. We can’t have him think he can get away with this kind of shit all the time.” He rubbed his eyes and looked at Sergeant Zuni. “Even though he’s been doing it for years.”

  She casually reached across and placed her small hand on Bell’s, and said, “You know he’s a hell of a cop and has done a lot of good. He just has some issues.”

  “We all have issues.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  Stallings was restless as he contemplated his life at the small, quiet house he’d rented in Lakewood. It was odd being home in the middle of the day. The fact there was no one here gave him a sense of emptiness almost as deep as he felt after Jeanie disappeared. But there was nothing for him to do at this little house. No yard to cut. No dishes to do. He barely lived here except to use the bed every night.

  He jumped in his car, not sure what his status was as a police officer, but since no one had told him not to, he decided to use the county car as he always did. He cruised by his mother’s house to make sure she didn’t have any chores he needed to do. He found her as he usually did, sitting on her back porch reading a novel.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  As usual he had to wait a second until she finished the paragraph she was reading. Finally she looked up and smiled. “What are you doing here in the middle of the day?”

  “I, um, took a day off.”

  His mother chuckled. “Sometimes you remind me of your father. For all his faults he was a poor liar too.” She closed the hardbound book on her lap and smiled at her son. “I heard you ran into him on Sunday.”

  “I figured one of the kids would blab it or Helen would hear about it and tell you.”

  “Actually, I heard it from your father.”

  Yvonne Zuni had to admit to herself she enjoyed Ronald Bell’s company, and for the second time he’d proven he was a stand-up guy. She realized she was looking for reasons to keep talking to the dapper detective. The red tinge to his face, coupled with his casual but expensive sport coat, made it seem as if he was wind-burned from sailing, but she realized that in fact, as it was with most cops, it probably had a lot more to do with alcohol. Finally she said, “What about your people’s surveillance of Lauer? I haven’t shared with my detectives that we had split the case. I did tell them we’d given Lauer an overtime detail at a soup kitchen near the stadium.”

  “Well, it’s partially true he is working the detail at the kitchen, but I’ve had two people keeping tabs on him until we think he’s down for the night. The problem is he knows the roads and the traffic enforcement better than anyone else and drives like a NASCAR champion. The only time he obeys any traffic laws and signals is when he’s in uniform, on that big bike of his. He went by his girlfriend’s apartment, the one where you had the incident last year, but was only inside about ten minutes. It seems like all the guy does is lift weights and eat giant subs. Last night he went straight home from the overtime detail at eleven o’clock and had not left his condo by two when my detectives shut down their surveillance.”

  “Seems like you guys have it covered pretty well. Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Bell took a moment to consider it, then said, “I’d be happy if you could just keep the muzzle on Stallings. I have no problem with letting the whole thing drop, but he needs to go at least a day without clocking someone.”

  “Some of it has to do with stress. And he’s been under a tremendous strain for a long time now.”

  Bell said, “I’ve heard that before, but it doesn’t excuse his behavior.”

  The sergeant said, “To me it does. I have a good idea what he’s been going through.”

  Bell didn’t say anything, but she knew he expected an explanation. For the first time in two years she decided to talk about it.

  Yvonne started slowly, finally working up to the source of h
er own stress and frustration. “You know I’m divorced now?”

  “Every male cop at the SO knows when someone like you is no longer married.” He laid that charming smile on her.

  “It’s hard to keep secrets in a place like this, but the reason we broke up was the stress on our relationship when our one-year-old son died of leukemia.”

  Bell said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that.”

  “The first day I started to feel alive again, the day I felt like I had a purpose and a connection to the world after months and months of breathing was the day I popped that asshole, Gary Lauer, in the head. So I really feel like I have an idea of what Stallings is going through.”

  “You talked to Dad?” He tried to keep it under a shout, but this was about the most astounding thing he had ever heard his mother say.

  “Yes, dear, I speak to your father. I even meet him occasionally. You can’t spend so much of your life with someone and not feel something for them.”

  “But he was such a …” Stallings search for the right word.

  His mother said, “Asshole?”

  He nodded, still trying to absorb this information. “The way he treated Helen and me growing up. Her running away and you throwing him out. I always assumed he’d ruined your life and you were bitter toward him.”

  “No, dear, I got over it a long time ago. Life’s far too short to hold a grudge. Once he stopped drinking, he reverted to something like the man I married forty-five years ago.”

  “Was our encounter an accident?”

  “You would have to ask your father. I might’ve mentioned you were taking the kids out for pizza on Sunday.”

  “Were you ever going to tell me Dad was back in the picture or that he was looking for me?”

  His mother shook her head and said, “It wouldn’t have done any good. You’re as stubborn as he is, and you would’ve avoided him no matter what he said.”

  “So what do you expect me to do now, go look for him?”

  His mother smiled. “I could never tell you what to do or how to do it. Just like your father.”

  Forty-four

  It had taken John Stallings longer than he’d anticipated to track down his father later in the afternoon. He’d been hoping he could walk into the rooming house and his father would be in the lobby with some of the other old drunks, playing cards or backgammon or watching the ancient TV in the ornate walnut cabinet. Instead, the nice lady who ran the place had explained James Stallings had gone to get something to eat. She gave him three possibilities: a bar near the stadium that had cheap hamburgers on Wednesday nights, a hot dog stand that had one-dollar hot dogs, or a soup kitchen off Market Street where his father often worked and ate what was left over.

  Now it was seven o’clock, and as soon as Stallings walked through the doors of the “community restaurant” he could see the main body of diners had already cleared out and in the corner, where young men were stacking chairs, there was one table filled with an older crowd and a few plates of food. At the head of the table he saw his father. It was as if he was holding court, and it reminded Stallings of his childhood, when his father would entertain many of the other fathers in the neighborhood with stories of the Korean War, the changing Navy, and how the goddamned Democrats would turn the country to socialism. It took Stallings a moment to realize this was the first time he had ever seen his father entertaining a group like this without a beer in his hand.

  He hesitated near the door and even thought about turning around and going back another time, but he caught his father’s eye and the old man did something he’d never done before in Stallings’s life. He excused himself from the table to come talk to his son.

  It’d been an awkward twenty minutes while they sat across from each other over the long table. He didn’t know what to say after all the years of hating this guy. But he quickly discovered the hate had faded but not disappeared altogether. He held him responsible for his sister, Helen, running away from home, and in some odd way for Jeanie disappearing as well. He could never explain it. He’d never talk to anyone about it, and he certainly wasn’t about to discuss it with his father. Not after all these years.

  His father’s voice was hoarse but lacked the harsh edge it had when he’d been younger. The old man said, “Your mom has kept me up to date on you and the kids over the years. Charlie looks like a real athlete. And Lauren is as pretty as her mother.”

  “You missed out completely on Jeanie. She was special.”

  The old man hesitated. “I followed the story and even tried to do my part, helping with some of the community searches and asking everyone I knew on the streets if they’d seen or heard anything. It was the same time I was coming out of my haze.”

  Stallings shook his head, looked at his father, and said, “Dad, why’re you like this now, after all these years?”

  His father smiled, rubbing his hand over his gray buzz cut, the wrinkles around his eyes filling out. “If I were to put it in one word it would have to be ‘sober.’ ”

  Stallings assessed the older man, trying to understand what he’d gone through. He’d never realized his father had been fighting with alcohol, not just guzzling it. This was a lot to process after a stressful day. He had five messages on his phone. Three from Yvonne the Terrible, one from Patty Levine, and one from Maria. He couldn’t imagine any of them was good news. Maybe his father could give him some good tips for living out on the street.

  As he was about to start asking his father important questions like how his health was or what he did for money, he heard someone step up directly behind him and say, “Well, well, well. I knew you’d end up in a shit-hole like this. I just didn’t expect it to happen so fast.”

  Stallings twisted in his seat and was shocked to see the strapping figure of Gary Lauer in full uniform.

  Patty knew the administrative officer at the medical examiner’s office was anxious to leave. He’d mentioned dinner, his wife, his kids, exhaustion, and anything else he could without saying, “you have to close your files and leave.” She’d been distracted by her concern for John Stallings. The new sergeant had worked a miracle and gotten Stallings off the hot seat, but she’d been unable to reach him. Sergeant Zuni told Patty all Stallings needed to do was lay low for a day or two and try not to smack anyone. Only Patty realized how hard it might be for her partner. The sergeant was also concerned she’d been unable to tell Stallings so she’d had Patty leave him a message too. That was one of the reasons it’d taken so long at the medical examiner’s office.

  She’d been studying photographs and all the reports from Allie Marsh and Kathleen Harding, the suicide from the University of South Carolina. It was no surprise they shared X in their system and the chemical residue of Durex condoms. Tony Mazzetti had already explained to her these were not uncommon traits for spring breakers to share. But she wanted more. She had studied both files and made copies of the entire written report. The medical examiner had been very thorough, and she knew he was as sharp as they came. There had to be something else.

  She noticed Kathleen Harding had been missing her left earring. A straight post diamond stud. No one made much of a fuss about it and there was no explanation for it in the report. Allie Marsh had both earrings and one in the cartilage of her left ear. But both in the photos and in the report Patty noticed she had been missing a belly-button ring. The report noted the discoloration in the shape of a small flower where the ring had sat a millimeter below her belly button. And on the autopsy photos, when she checked closely, she saw the same discoloration. It happened with a lot of jewelry when someone got a tan–whatever was underneath stayed pale. It was a curious and tenuous connection between the bodies.

  But it was a lead worth following.

  Stallings stood and faced the cocky young motorman. “What are you doing here, Lauer?”

  “I’m working off-duty. I’m supposed to be here. What are you doing?”

  “I’m not going waste my time talking to you.”

&n
bsp; “I heard you went crazy and hit some poor dude in the head. I figured you’d be out of a job.”

  That’s what Stallings figured too, and he didn’t want to give this dick any reason to hassle him.

  Lauer’s eyes cut over to Stallings’s father. “Who’s your friend here, Stall?”

  He saw the rage in Lauer’s face and didn’t want to drag his father into any personal feud he had with the big, uniformed cop. He knew how hard life was for older men on the street. Stallings’s father, no matter what had happened in the past, didn’t deserve this bully following him around.

  Stallings forced his voice to be even and calm and said, “Let’s discuss this outside, Gary.”

  “Love to.” Lauer turned quickly on his polished boot and banged out the rear door with Stallings close on his heels.

  As Stallings glanced over Lauer’s broad shoulders and a uniform with the big Glock forty on his right hip and an ASP in a holster on his left hip, the idea of this guy mingling with college kids or bullying old street people started to eat at him. Suddenly Lauer stopped in the gravel lot outside the ratty white building. He turned without warning and immediately poked Stallings in the chest with his index finger.

  “I’d like to know why you have a hard-on for me.”

  Stallings poked him back in the chest and said, “I’d like to know why you have such issues with women.”

  “You need to mind your own business, old man. If you don’t shut your mouth, I’m gonna have to shut it for you.

  Stallings couldn’t help himself and said, “I’d like to see you try.” He knew it was too late. He was too far gone to control himself, so he waited for the right opportunity.

  Lauer balled his right fist, and Stallings, with years of street experience, simply twisted his body hard to the left and brought his right elbow across Lauer’s thick chin, knocking the young man virtually unconscious on his feet. He didn’t bother trying to catch Lauer when he fell backward.