The Perfect Death djs-3

by James Andrus

  Mazzetti’s voice crackled over the radio. “Let’s trap him inside.”

  “There’s lot of kids jammed inside.”

  “We’ll be very low-key.”

  As Stallings drove into the lot he saw a JSO patrol vehicle with a young, burly officer talking sternly to three young men. He squeezed in right next the patrol car and badged the officer as he got out. The young cop immediately ignored the boys he was scolding and walked over to Stallings.

  Stallings said, “Can you give us a hand real quick?”

  “Absolutely. I’m working a contract here and they wouldn’t let me leave to go to the scene of the shooting. I’ve been pissed off about it all night. What do you got?”

  “Just a little jerk-off we need to question. He pulled up in the truck over there a minute ago and walked inside. I got two other detectives with me.”

  The burly patrolman scratched his short brown hair said, “I work here every Wednesday night because for some reason this place is a Wednesday-night gathering spot. There’s only this door and the door on the opposite side and you can see both doors from both sides. I’d say we got this guy covered.”

  Stallings saw Patty and Mazzetti automatically walk to the opposite door. This time Mazzetti didn’t draw his pistol. Daniel Byrd stood a couple of people back in the line to the counter. Stallings heard the patrolman muttering about missing out on the perimeter at the scene of the SWAT shootout. Thank God no JSO personnel had been hit. The jumbled reports coming in over the radio made it sound like there were two dead drug dealers and two that had run into the neighborhood.

  As Stallings entered the door, the kids moved out of his way. He thought it was the big uniformed patrolman behind him who was making a path and he was glad he’d asked for the help. Then he realized his mistake.

  Daniel Byrd looked over his shoulder and immediately noticed the patrolman. Like any good career criminal he picked up on Stallings and checked the rest of the room, making Mazzetti for another detective. Stallings prepared for a fight. But the wily parole violator was one step ahead of him.

  Byrd shoved a young man standing next to him. Then he pushed another boy from behind. Within seconds a brawl had started at the counter and quickly spread through the McDonald’s like a virus.

  Stallings struggled to reach Byrd at the front of the counter and caught a glimpse of the smaller man as he leaped over the counter and bolted through the kitchen.

  Stallings tried to get Mazzetti’s attention, frantically pointing to the back of the restaurant. He turned around, worked his way to the door, and saw that he could cut off Byrd before he reached his truck. He could hear the patrolman inside shouting for everyone to calm down.

  Byrd came from the corner of the building, saw Stallings, and instantly reversed direction. Stallings gave chase, and as he cleared the corner of the McDonald’s he saw Byrd forcing a young man off a Honda motorcycle. The man had been in the drive-through lane. Before Stallings could reach him Byrd jumped on the bike again and screamed out of the lot.

  All Stallings could do was get back to his car. Now it was a chase whether anyone had authorized it or not.

  FORTY-ONE

  Patty saw Stallings and Mazzetti jump in their cars and race north on the New Kings Road but she couldn’t, in good conscience, leave a single patrolman to handle all the fights erupting inside the McDonald’s. She drew her expandable baton from her pocket and popped it open, catching the attention of all kids closest to her. They took one look at the extended metal pipe and the woman wielding it and scattered.

  The uniformed cop worked his way across the room to Patty and the kids slowly calmed down. The patrolman used a good, military voice to shout, “This restaurant is closed. Anyone I put my hands on after the count of thirty goes to jail.”

  Patty liked this guy and the way he got things done. The kids scurried like cockroaches when he shouted.

  Patty chuckled with the patrolman, who had to listen to the McDonald’s manager complain about losing all of his business for the night. The heavyset manager said, “I pay JSO to send an extra deputy here every Wednesday and Saturday night to keep things calm so I can make money, not to chase away all my customers.”

  The patrolman had taken it because this was a special situation. Most sheriff’s offices offered a contract position whereby restaurants and other businesses could hire a deputy off-duty. It was more expensive than a regular rent-a-cop but much more effective because the deputy had a gun, was trained to use it, and could make arrests.

  The uniformed patrolman looked at the manager and said, “Some of your customers are hanging around, getting tire irons and knives to make the fights more interesting. You want me to call them back in?”

  The manager turned around and started shouting at the staff instead.

  Patty hustled out to her Freestyle and headed north, picking up the radio. “Where are you guys?”

  Stallings came on the radio and said, “The son of a bitch has led us all over Jacksonville and now we’re coming south on U.S. one back by you. He’s calmed way down and I don’t think he realizes we’re still after him. Tony stays one street east and I stay one street west, and somehow we’ve kept him roughly in sight.”

  Within five minutes Patty had pulled behind the motorcycle. Daniel Byrd had not seen any of their vehicles at the McDonald’s and had no reason to think the mundane family SUV was a police vehicle. When he took a ramp onto I-95 southbound, Patty let Stallings take over and follow him onto the interstate. She hit the gas and raced along the surface streets to keep pace with the motorcycle. Most people on the streets had no concept of all the surveillances that went on with unmarked police cars. Patty’s father always said he could pick out the unmarked police cars, but he meant the ones that looked like police cars. The Ford Crown Victorias or Dodge Chargers. He had no idea about all the other cars that were thrown into a modern police department’s fleet, specifically for these types of operations. To the average person on the street she looked like a frantic housewife rushing home at 11:30 at night.

  Stallings came on the radio and said, “He’s getting off the interstate and we’re close to his apartment. I bet that’s where he’s headed.”

  Patty had the address on an information sheet and knew the area well. Mazzetti came on the radio, “I’m on my way over there now.”

  By the time Patty pulled past the apartment building, Byrd was walking in the front door and the motorcycle was parked on the sidewalk a few feet away. Stallings had called it right.

  You couldn’t buy that kind of experience.

  John Stallings didn’t use the radio. Instead he pulled alongside Tony Mazzetti’s Crown Vic a block away from the apartment building. They had things to discuss that didn’t need to be put out over the radio no matter how rarely the frequency was monitored.

  Stallings rolled down his window so they were almost face-to-face, saying, “You think we need help on this?”

  Mazzetti shook his head. “Fuck no.”

  “Sounds like the SWAT thing is resolved and there’ll be a lot of cops on the street.”

  “And what do we say? We really need to talk to this guy? Or maybe we have the SWAT team hit his apartment for stealing a motorcycle.”

  “Then the question is: do you want to wait or go in?”

  Mazzetti said, “We gotta wait. He could barricade himself inside and then we would really need to call the SWAT team. If Patty stays where she is and we stay on this end we can cover that front door easy. That’s the only way in or out of the building and the way he parked the bike means he’s not staying too long.”

  Stallings nodded and pulled his car to the other side of the street. He settled in to watch the motorcycle. He glanced at his watch; nearly midnight and he was exhausted.

  This could be the big break in the case. He couldn’t think of another reason why this guy would run from them so hard. They had to get him in custody and interviewed as quickly as possible. There was no way Stallings was leaving this neighbor
hood without Daniel Byrd.

  FORTY-TWO

  John Stallings rubbed his eyes hard and shook his head, trying to wake himself up. It was after 2 A.M. and he was wondering when Daniel Byrd would be out of the apartment and back on the bike. Mazzetti had been stealthy and walked along the sidewalk to yank the spark plug wire loose on the Honda. It would only take Byrd a second to figure out what the problem was, but that would give them enough time to grab him.

  Stallings had used all the veteran police tricks to stay awake over the years. He ate sunflower seeds one at a time, knowing that the activity of pulling them apart and eating them would occupy his mind enough to stay awake. He had gone the caffeine route, first with coffee then the various energy drinks, but he never cared for them much. He tried the old trick of drinking water constantly so he had to pee relentlessly and therefore couldn’t doze off. The downside of that was he kept filling and emptying a Gatorade bottle he kept in the car. Tonight he was using an old standard. He would hold his breath for as long as he possibly could, sometimes as much as a minute and thirty seconds. That kept him awake and supercharged his heart rate; it took ten minutes to recover completely before he’d do it again.

  As he was about to measure another breath on his Timex Ironman watch, the radio crackled and he heard Patty Levine say, “Someone is at the front door.”

  A few seconds later Mazzetti said, “Gotta be him. As soon as he goes to the bike let’s grab him.”

  Stallings was close to the bike. All he had to do was pop out of his car, and with a sprint, be on top of Byrd before the shithead ran. Stallings mumbled, “Is today the day that changes my life?”

  Patty came on the radio again. “I don’t think it’s him. It looks like a female. She stepped outside for a moment and then stepped back into the lobby. It’s a white female in a yellow dress with the flower pattern on it.”

  Stallings was one step ahead and slipped out of his car with the radio in his hand. He crept along the sidewalk, sticking close to the scraggly bushes and occasional garbage can. Then he heard Patty say the woman was out of the building. A moment later he saw the yellow dress and was surprised to see the woman walk directly to the motorcycle.

  Stallings paused a few feet away looking through an untrimmed ficus hedge. After a moment he realized what was happening. Daniel Byrd had slipped on one of the dresses they’d seen in his closet. He had a small satchel slung over his shoulder and was wearing a baseball cap. From a distance he would look like a woman.

  Patty realized it at the same time and said over the radio, “That’s him, that’s him. Byrd is wearing the yellow dress.”

  Stallings had the radio low and close to his ear so Byrd wouldn’t hear. But he couldn’t help but notice Mazzetti’s car roar to life as he mashed the gas and raced down the street toward him.

  Byrd’s head snapped as he held on to the satchel tight and started to sprint like only lean ex-cons could sprint. He was like a rocket as he started down the sidewalk. He was smart enough to wear tennis shoes instead of high heels with the dress, which barely slowed him at all.

  Luckily for Stallings all he had to do was step out from behind a hedge and swing his arm in a classic clothesline move. He caught the fleeing felon at the top of his chest and the momentum carried Stallings’s arm into his chin, not only upending Byrd, but damn near knocking him unconscious as well.

  Stallings looked down at the moaning man, and all he could say was, “Sweet.”

  FORTY-THREE

  An hour after capturing Daniel Byrd, Stallings sat across from him in an interview room in the Land That Time Forgot. Stallings liked the way Mazzetti was playing this slow and cool. He had purposely left the room to allow Byrd to stew in his own paranoia. He was letting the wily suspect imagine the worst. Stallings knew to just sit there and look mean.

  Mazzetti hated calling so late to advise Sergeant Zuni that they were interviewing someone. He told her not to rush down to the PMB and he’d let her know if something came of it.

  For Byrd’s part, once he was caught he’d offered no more resistance. He was still in the patterned yellow dress and had a red mark across his cheek where Stallings’s arm had ridden up his chest during the clothesline. Byrd was putting on a cocky act, but Stallings knew jerks like this started to crumble as soon as they realized they were going back to jail. The key was finding what Byrd wanted. If they had a carrot, they didn’t need to use the stick.

  Mazzetti came back in, settled into the empty chair, and stared hard at Daniel Byrd. Byrd leaned back in his chair, but there was only so much coolness you could have with your hands cuffed behind your back while you were wearing a dress.

  Mazzetti said, “Anything you want to talk to us about, Daniel?”

  “Not a thing.”

  Stallings could hear the North Florida twang in those few words. He had known several families named Byrd in the Jacksonville area. One of them over in Baker County. These Byrds had a similar accent but a different outlook on life. The Byrds he knew worked hard and valued education above anything else. It made him want to smack this Byrd right in the face.

  Byrd said, “What charges are you holding me on?”

  “You got to be kidding me.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  Stallings had to cut in at this point. “You’re wearing a yellow dress. So I would have to say, yes, you do look like you’re kidding a little bit.”

  Byrd tried to give him a hard look, but he was an amateur trying to fight in the heavyweight division.

  Mazzetti said, “We got a lot of questions and in the long run it’d help you out to be our friend.”

  “You didn’t tell me what the charges are?”

  Mazzetti stood quickly, scooting the chair back with his legs. “First off, a violation of parole. There’s the grand theft with the motorcycle. Assault on the motorcycle rider. Fleeing and eluding the police. And resisting arrest.”

  “How did I resist arrest?”

  Stallings said, “Really? All those charges plus your past history and you’re worried about a misdemeanor resisting arrest? Son, have you got some kind of learning disability we should know about?”

  “The only thing I’m ashamed of is that I let an old geezer like you catch me.”

  Stallings gave a chuckle. “That’ll go over big at Raiford.”

  The comment hit home and caused Byrd to lose some of his cockiness. His brown eyes darted around the room and he fidgeted in his seat. But he didn’t ask for a lawyer and had told Stallings he was considering cooperating. He was in custody so they had already read him his Miranda rights. Stallings was a little surprised he hadn’t asked for an attorney then, but as the questioning had continued he was shocked the man was willing to sit there. He really didn’t want to go back to prison.

  Finally Byrd said, “What kind of questions do you have?”

  Stallings and Mazzetti had already worked out this little dance. Stallings would ask general questions about Leah Tischler; then Mazzetti would build up to the homicides.

  Stallings said, “I’d like to ask you about this girl.” He slid a photograph of Leah Tischler across the table, and Byrd seemed to take a good long look at it.

  Byrd said, “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “You run into her within the last two weeks?”

  Byrd shook his head. “No, no way. I’ve been working every shift I could the last month trying to get enough money together to pay off my traffic fines so I could get a job driving a cement truck.”

  Stallings studied the younger man’s face carefully and looked over at Mazzetti, who made a few notes but was also trying to get a fix. Stallings said, “So you don’t want to say anything about this girl?”

  “That’s not what I said. What I’m saying about her is that I never met her and have no information on her.”

  Now Mazzetti got involved and said, “What about Kathy Mizell over by the health education building? The girl at the bus stop.”

  Once again Byrd kept cal
m and looked Mazzetti directly in the eye. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. Why am I here really? Why were you guys chasing me? I’ve done a lot of shit, but I don’t know what you guys are asking about.”

  Mazzetti said, “Whose dresses were those in your apartment?”

  Byrd looked down at his dress and then gave a flat stare back to Mazzetti. “Really, dude, you can’t figure it out?”

  Stallings admired the young man’s attitude.

  Byrd said, “Take a wild guess why I can’t let the guys at work know I wear them. Construction workers aren’t known for their tolerance. This is the first time a dress ever really helped me out, other than to make me feel special and better than I really am.”

  That caught Stallings by surprise, but he had to admit the man was very cool and calm if he had really killed anyone.

  The door opened to the interview room and Patty Levine stepped in. This was a very unusual move among the detectives. Mazzetti and Stallings immediately knew something big had happened. Stallings looked at her, waiting to hear whatever vital news she had. The way Byrd looked at her, Stallings could tell he might’ve been a cross-dresser but he wasn’t gay.

  Patty said, “He’s not our man.”

  At the same time Mazzetti and Stallings said, “Why?”

  “Because they just found a body in the courtyard at Shands hospital. She’d been strangled with a ligature sometime between ten and midnight. We were on Byrd the whole time and he never came close to the hospital.”

  Stallings knew there was a lot of information to verify and forensics to ensure that this was a victim of the same killer, but somehow, in that moment and looking at the lack of response from Daniel Byrd, he knew there was still a serial killer loose on the streets of Jacksonville.