The Perfect Prey

by James Andrus

  Instinctively Stallings yelled out, “Police, don’t move!” He took a second to assess the man and realized it was Larry Kinard. Then he shouted, “Drop the knife, Larry.”

  Kinard dropped the knife onto the hard floor, held out his hands in front of him to show he was unarmed, and slowly started to back toward the next room.

  “Hold it right there, Larry. It’s all over.” He crept toward the retreating man and froze when he saw a little boy behind him.

  Kinard took advantage of the surprised hesitation and darted with incredible speed into the room.

  Stallings raced forward to see Kinard disappear through a sliding glass door into the backyard. As he started to give chase he glanced to his left and saw a woman’s body on the floor of the kitchen, blood spreading in a wide, dark pool. He couldn’t just leave the body. Not with a little kid in the next room. It took all of his will, but he turned into the kitchen to check the body for a pulse and let Kinard run. There was nothing else he could do.

  He also had to keep the boy from coming in and seeing the blood on the floor. He holstered his gun and grabbed his phone as he turned toward the terrified boy. “It’s okay, buddy.” Before he could get Patty on the line she burst through the opening he’d made in the glass. She didn’t hesitate to come right to her partner’s aid.

  Stallings immediately stood and started toward a sliding glass door. He pointed into the kitchen but held his finger up to his mouth so she wouldn’t say anything. As he ran out the door he said, “It’s definitely him. Call in the cavalry.”

  Fifty-nine

  Larry Kinard didn’t bother to look behind him. This cop had proved how sharp he was, and he appeared to be in pretty good shape. He ran as hard as he could, leaping over the low wall and hedge that led to the back of the strip mall on Cleveland Street. He glanced both ways down the parking lot and didn’t see anyone. He turned left and broke into an all-out sprint, but as he approached the next block he could hear a distant siren and wondered if Stallings had been able to call in other cops so quickly. He skidded to a stop, scanned the area, and decided a tall industrial Dumpster might be his best bet.

  He opened the plastic lid, then hesitated. The smell of filth and thought of bacteria kept him in place for a moment. He wasn’t sure he could do it until he heard the siren clearly coming closer. He scaled the Dumpster easily, tumbling onto plastic bags of garbage and soggy cardboard boxes. He worked his way into the bags and boxes, covering himself as he settled lower in the Dumpster. A shiver ran through him at the thought of this much contact with other people’s discarded waste. The odors that attacked him were monstrous. Old coffee grounds, ashtrays, half-eaten sandwiches, and really disgusting stuff tumbled down on top of him. Something alive squirmed past his foot as a cockroach ran up the sleeve of his T-shirt. But now the lid was closed and he slammed his eyes shut in the dark, smelly Dumpster.

  Patty Levine had glanced in the kitchen and knew there was a bloody body on the floor. She also knew she was a lot less intimidating to the scared little boy trembling in the family room than Stallings had been. She had quietly set him up on the couch and sat next to him, trying to coax a name from him.

  She had already raised dispatch on her phone, saying she needed immediate help at this address and they had a suspect with a weapon. That would get every cop in the district rolling to her in a few minutes.

  The fact that Stallings had raced off after Kinard had not thrown her at all. She knew they couldn’t leave the young boy in the house with the body and she was better suited to keeping him calm. But there was still part of her that wished she could be looking for the killer as well. That’s where duty and responsibility took over from adrenaline and desire. She’d break free as soon as she could and help her partner search for Larry Kinard.

  Stallings had left the yard and run behind the other houses to the end of the street, but he saw no sign of Larry Kinard. The adrenaline dump and discharging of his weapon had sapped him of energy, so he took a second to breathe and slow his heart rate. The pistol felt like it weighed twenty pounds in his hand. He started to jog behind the houses in the other direction, passing the house Kinard had run from and then clumsily sliding over a low wall and hedge into the rear nasty parking lot of the strip mall.

  Again he checked each direction. He saw no sign of the fleeing killer, but he did hear the approaching sirens of help. He made sure his badge was clearly visible on his belt and pulled out his wallet ID as well. He didn’t want some excitable rookie shooting him by mistake.

  There was no one in the lot, and the only movement he could see was a garbage truck on the next block, the same one that had nearly drowned out the screams that led him to the house in the first place.

  The cruiser raced past the lot and screeched to a stop, and roared in reverse until he was level with the lot again. A round-faced young man shouted out an open window at Stallings. “Where do you need me?”

  “Set up a perimeter of a few blocks in each direction and maybe we’ll bottle this guy up. He’s a white male, about thirty, with dark hair and a blue T-shirt. He left a homicide scene two houses away. Be careful.”

  The young man nodded, jumping on his radio as he sped away in the new cruiser.

  Stallings still wanted to be the one who caught this guy.

  Larry Kinard heard a car’s engine and some shouting, but no one checked the Dumpster. He settled even lower and could see a beam of light from the rusted-out lower corner of the square garbage container. He even adapted to some of the smells, but the thought of bacteria kept him near panic. Now he needed a weapon. He wished he hadn’t dropped the knife, but he could tell by the look in the cop’s eyes he would’ve been shot if he didn’t.

  He felt around with his free right hand, gripping the rubber handle of a broken golf club. It rose about two feet to a sharp metal end. All it was good for was jabbing, but that might be all he needed if someone checked the Dumpster. Just enough of a diversion so he could run away. That was his only goal now. It still hadn’t sunk in he’d killed his sister and left his nephew with no one in the whole world but his unstable grandmother. There was no way he could take the boy with him, not at the speed he had to travel. He saw himself in Seattle, where the street population was welcomed and no one asked many questions. After a few months under the radar he could find another identity and set up shop somewhere else. There were always spring break vacationers. And predators like him always found a place to hunt.

  Stallings held his position as more cruisers sped past, following the instructions of the first officer on the scene. As soon as someone pulled into the parking lot, Stallings would team up with a uniform and monitor a radio. He checked in with Patty to make sure she was all right. She said the boy was not responsive and she expected the paramedics at any moment.

  Stallings saw the garbage truck cross the street into the lot and walked toward it, his badge in his hand, ready to direct the man out of the area. But the driver was intent on his job and lined up the battered steel arms of his giant truck with the sides of the Dumpster. He moved in quickly without hesitation, sliding the arms into the sturdy metal sleeves quickly and pulling the Dumpster into the air smoothly and steadily. The swinging Dumpster and moving arms made an outrageous racket, and the driver couldn’t hear Stallings shouting to him.

  He watched as the arms twisted and the Dumpster flipped upside down. The load of garbage tumbled out into the rear of the truck and Stallings clearly saw Larry Kinard’s arms flail as he fell in the back of the full dump truck.

  Stallings picked up his pace toward the truck, his gun in his hand. He thought about calling in the patrol cars for backup. He froze as he heard the truck’s compactor engage. His first instinct was to race to the driver and have him shut off the compactor. But then he thought about the collage of victims. Of Allie Marsh’s bright face and her mother’s anguish. He even thought of the silent little boy and the dead woman in the house a few hundred feet away. He considered the endless legal proceedings and me
dia coverage. He made a conscious decision to wait while the compactor finished its job.

  The crushing and snapping sounds made him flinch as he wondered if any of the noises could be Larry Kinard’s bones. He thought, for just a moment, he heard a muffled scream from inside the solid metal truck.

  The giant arms slapped the empty Dumpster back into the same spot on the scarred asphalt while the compactor retracted. Now the driver looked over and saw Stallings. He raised his hand with his badge, and the driver waved, pushing the truck into neutral and then swinging down out of the high cab.

  The middle-aged black man smiled as he wiped his brow with a dirty bandana. “What’s up?” he shouted from the perpetual noise of his truck in his ears.

  “We might have a problem,” was all Stallings said.

  Sixty

  Patty Levine stood in the skanky parking lot behind the strip mall where Stallings had seen their suspect, Larry Kinard, get dumped into the back of a garbage truck. That had been over an hour before. Fire Rescue and Crime Scene had been searching the compactor trash for more than forty minutes now.

  A social worker and psychologist were on the scene, taking custody of the boy found in the house. A tentative identification had his name as Justin Small and the dead woman was his mother. Right now they didn’t know anything else about her or why Larry Kinard would be in her house, but based on the statement from the stoner kid who had led them here they had some sort of longer-term connection. She prayed to God the little boy was not that monster’s son.

  Tony Mazzetti and Yvonne Zuni had joined them in a grim vigil. Occasionally a fireman would look up with excitement on his face, but so far they had not found the killer’s body. Then one of the firemen turned and vomited over the side of the garbage truck. All four of the detectives jumped back as the vomit made a resounding splat on the asphalt.

  The young crime scene tech looked over at the sergeant and said, “We only found part of him.”

  Mazzetti clapped his hands together and smiled. “Two big cases closed in two days. Not bad at all.” He looked over at Stallings, who showed no emotion, and said, “The compactor works quick. You didn’t even get a chance to say anything to the driver.”

  Patty glared at her boyfriend. No one wanted to ask how long the interval was between when Stallings saw the suspect fall into the garbage truck and when he stopped the driver. But in a sick way Mazzetti was right. At least this creep couldn’t kill any more girls.

  Patty draped her arm over her partner’s shoulder. “It is good to be lucky sometimes, but you were always prepared when we got a lucky break.” She patted him on the back and noticed her boyfriend’s look.

  Patty didn’t know why, but just the little glance from Mazzetti pissed her off. She’d been on edge for several days and knew that part of it was a form of withdrawal from the prescription drugs she’d been using for so long. She also knew things would get worse. When she didn’t have a big case like this staring her right in the face, drawing her away from her life and problems, she’d probably start to think about the relief the drugs had given her. She knew she was in for a fight. She just hoped she didn’t screw anything else up while she concentrated on it. Mainly she didn’t want to screw anything up with Tony Mazzetti. But somehow she had a cold feeling in the pit of her stomach that said she was in for a lot more trouble than she thought from just taking a few pills.

  It’d been almost two days since she’d used any prescription drugs at all. It may not be much, but it was more of a step than she’d taken in almost five years. Right now the question was did she feel like shit because she wasn’t using her meds or did she feel like shit because she just did more in three days than most people did in a year? She looked around at the other cops on the scene, people she respected, people she admired. It didn’t matter what her parents thought or how they viewed her occupation; she liked being a cop.

  She was tired, sore, and hungry and had a headache, but a satisfied feeling reached much deeper. Patty would enjoy it for now because she knew harder times were on their way.

  Yvonne Zuni settled into her desk in the Land That Time Forgot at about six. The two evening detectives in the office didn’t report to her and so barely acknowledged her. This had probably been the busiest two weeks of her career, and if it was any indication of life in the detective bureau she might not last. She had briefed the sheriff and command staff on both cases and proudly stood on the sideline while the sheriff explained the details of the investigation to a crowded news conference at about four that afternoon. Tony Mazzetti and Christina Hogrebe stood next to her, but Patty Levine and John Stallings said they had better things to do.

  There was still a lot to do in the Larry Kinard case. It was clear now that Allie Marsh and Kathleen Harding had been murdered, and that he had used Ecstasy as a way of covering his crimes. They also confirmed some of the photographs were of dead girls from Daytona and Panama City. Neither department was overjoyed at the aspect of reopening cases that had been closed as either suicides or accidents. It didn’t look good for the detectives and did nothing for the tourism industry. But Sergeant Zuni didn’t care as long as all the girls in the collage were identified and their parents notified. It would be a long, brutal job to track down each girl’s identity. It was one of the few things they could’ve used Larry Kinard for, had he lived, but even then he would’ve used it as a bargaining chip in court. Florida’s most famous serial killer, Ted Bundy, had tried to use the same kind of information to delay his execution years before.

  They were still working on Larry Kinard’s real identity. They also wanted to find out his association with the dead woman from Cleveland Street. The young boy had not spoken and was in the care of County Welfare. Every time Yvonne Zuni saw a young boy like him she thought of her own son and what he might look like now.

  As much she hated to admit it, Tony Mazzetti had done a bang-up job identifying the sister of one of the shooting victims as the killer in his case. She’d reviewed one of the videotapes that showed the young girl sobbing one minute, then coolly explaining how she had put the gun to her brother’s head first, before shooting his two friends quickly so they couldn’t react. She’d also admitted to planning the killing weeks before it occurred. That meant the crime was premeditated and she was eligible for the death penalty. It wouldn’t come to that because of the extenuating circumstances of the sexual abuse and the fact that the three men were actively involved in the drug trade. Regardless, the girl’s life was shattered.

  There was a tap on her door, and she looked up as Lieutenant Rita Hester leaned into the office. “Good job all around. It’s funny your concern before taking the job was that there wouldn’t be enough excitement. That still bother you?”

  The sergeant smiled. “I promise I’ll never say anything like that again.”

  Now, in a more serious tone, the lieutenant said, “I don’t want anyone going after Stall for any of his foolishness this week. You can see he always has a purpose.”

  The sergeant shook her head. “You were right. He’s got a way of doing things he shouldn’t and not getting in trouble.”

  Rita Hester smiled. “It’s about the best skill a cop could have. He’s always a good ace in the hole.”

  After the lieutenant left, Yvonne Zuni finished the last of her briefing sheets for the night. She was satisfied command staff would have no more questions about either case. With any luck she could get a feel for how the unit worked on a regular basis next week. She left her office door open as she slipped a light coat over her shoulders and took her purse. Nodding good-bye to the detectives, she went to the main elevator and down to the lobby instead of going to the parking lot as she usually did.

  She heard a male voice say, “There you are. Right on time.”

  A smile spread across her face as she turned and saw Ronald Bell in a spectacular suit and tie leaning on a column. He casually straightened up, adjusted his silk tie, and stepped toward her.

  He reached for her hand and
said, “Any thought as to where we might have dinner?”

  Yvonne Zuni shook her head and couldn’t keep from smiling as she realized she’d turned a corner in her life.

  It was the first Saturday John Stallings had hosted a dinner at his little rental house in Lakewood since he’d moved in.

  He’d spent the morning in his regular Saturday routine. Perhaps it was more of a ritual. He sat at his desk and wrote more than thirty e-mails to different detectives across the country. He never sent a mass e-mail; he made each one personal. But each essentially said one of two things: it either introduced him and his situation with Jeanie, or it was a follow-up to someone he’d already introduced himself to. There was virtually no department too small for him to ignore. And he’d use his skills in organization that the sheriff’s office had spent a small fortune teaching him through classes and conferences to make his nationwide search for Jeanie as efficient and systematic as possible. He had a spreadsheet, which he updated weekly with who he’d contacted, what he’d said, what response he’d gotten back, and a date when he should contact them again.

  Although he concentrated more of his efforts in the Southeast because he believed the greatest chance of finding Jeanie, if she was still alive, was in the Southeast, he also made a point to reach out to the other regions of the country. In the spring he focused more effort on the Pacific Northwest. In the winter he wrote to detectives in the Northeast and upper Midwest. Part of that was the theory he used based on his own work. He felt that detectives who were possibly snowed in or avoiding bad weather outside would spend a little more time with his e-mail and checking their records. That was also why he always sent extra e-mails on Saturday mornings. That way detectives saw the e-mails first thing Monday morning when they came into the office. It gave them a full week to think of ways to help him.