The Perfect Death

by James Andrus

  Her face lit up and she reached across and placed her hand on top of his. He could tell she liked questions like this. She liked to explain how industrious and intelligent she was. “I work three twelve-hour shifts in a row from eight p.m. to eight a.m., then I’m off for days. My mom comes over and spends the night for the three nights I have to work and I get to spend the rest of the time with Tyler. We have a great time.”

  “Where’s his father?”

  She hesitated, then said, “He works as a security agent for Blackwater. He’s off in Iraq or some other place like that protecting executives and Halliburton contract workers. He’s listed his official residence as Switzerland and gets away without paying any child support whatsoever.”

  Buddy said, “It’s his loss to miss out on his son and someone as bright as you.”

  Katie smiled and it was dazzling.

  John Stallings found his father working in the community center across the street from the house where he lived. He hung back to watch with an unmistakable pride as his father patiently supervised three younger homeless men while they worked on out-of-date computers with huge, green-screen CRTs. When it looked like he was done with his lesson, Stallings started across the floor.

  The old man’s face brightened, and he said, “Johnny, what are you doing here?”

  “Came by to check on you, Dad.”

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Your landlady told me.”

  James Stallings sighed and looked off into the distance. “She is a fine woman. Almost as great as your mom.”

  Stallings smiled.

  His father looked at him and said, “Everything all right?

  “Why wouldn’t it be?”

  “I’m a drunk and a shitty father, but I know when someone’s preoccupied. Spill it and tell me what’s going on.”

  “I worry about you, Dad.”

  “What are you worried about me for?”

  “Your memory problem, for one thing.”

  “What memory problem?”

  Stallings stared at his father and was about to explain some of the problems he’d been having when the old man grinned.

  James Stallings said, “You can’t even take a joke anymore. Oh wait, I forgot, you never had a sense of humor.”

  Stallings had to give his father a chuckle for that one. He led the older man over to a set of chairs and they sat, facing each other. “There’s something I’d like to talk to you about, Dad.”

  “Fire away.”

  “I think Jeanie did know where you were living and would’ve been able to find you. What I need you to do is think real hard about your visit with her. Try and remember if she said anything that might give you a clue as to where she was going or if she was in real trouble.”

  The old man looked off in space and seemed to concentrate as his face clouded and his eyes began to water. Finally James Stallings said, “I’m sorry, son. I’m not even sure I know what you’re talking about. I remember enough to know that I’m causing a lot of pain when I didn’t mean to.”

  Stallings put his hand on his father’s shoulder. “Don’t worry about it, Dad. I want you to think about it and maybe write some notes.” He knew he wouldn’t get anywhere with the old man today, but he wasn’t going to give up either.

  Then his phone beeped into the text message from Sergeant Zuni: COME BACK TO THE OFFICE RIGHT NOW—YZ.

  Tony Mazzetti heard the sergeant’s voice when she called out for Stallings. It had an edge similar to the voice of his second-grade teacher, Sister Teresa, when she’d yell at him for not paying attention in geography class. Mazzetti had a similar reaction to the sergeant’s call for Stallings. He almost giggled out loud thinking of all the things Stallings could have done to rate the sergeant’s ire. Knowing Stallings, he probably punched a city commissioner or roughed up a doctor who didn’t tell him everything he knew right that second. Whatever it was, aside from providing temporary amusement, it was not Mazzetti’s business.

  Then Mazzetti heard his name in the same tone. He looked around and saw Stallings hustling in from the hallway and realized she must’ve already sent him a summons over his cell phone. The two detectives slipped into the small office and stood silently for a moment until Yvonne the Terrible stared up at them and said in a brusque voice, “Shut the door.”

  Both detectives were so big that Mazzetti had to step to one side while Stallings carefully shut the door.

  Then the sergeant said, “Sit.” Both detectives complied immediately. Then she did what all good sergeants did when they wanted to make a point: she let them stew in silence for a few seconds. Finally she cut her dark eyes back to them and said, “What the hell were you two thinking?”

  Neither detective answered. Mazzetti didn’t want to be the one who had to ask what she was talking about.

  Then the sergeant said, “It’s bad enough you’re out searching for a suspect no one even told me about, but you broke into an apartment with no warrant or authorization. Shit, you didn’t even have any probable cause.” She kept her green eyes on them like they were bright lights and she was giving them the old third degree.

  Mazzetti stuttered as he began to answer. Nothing he said seemed to make any sense with the long pauses and clearing his throat. Finally he said, “I’m not sure how to answer that, boss.”

  Stallings got right to the point. “Sparky ratted us out, right?”

  “Sparky followed policy. He could’ve gone to IA. He could’ve done a lot of things. Instead, he came to me to handle it as quietly as possible because he didn’t want to go to jail if things went bad. I don’t call that ratting someone out. I call that showing some good common sense. Something neither of you have shown.”

  Mazzetti was amazed how calm Stallings appeared. Stallings looked at the sergeant and said, “Let me ask you one question?”

  “What?”

  Stallings took a moment and then said in an even voice, “Do you want us to start acting like Sparky, strictly by the book, or do you want us to catch this goddamn killer?” He kept his eyes solid on the sergeant.

  Mazzetti was impressed by Stallings.

  Yvonne Zuni said, “Catch the goddamn killer, but use common sense when others are around.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  After the meeting with the Yvonne the Terrible, things had happened so quickly John Stallings’s head was spinning by the time he arrived at the crime scene west of U.S. 1, in a northern industrial section of Jacksonville. When a veterinary tech named Lexie Hanover had not shown up for work and her employer was unable to reach her, he got worried. After he contacted her parents, they got worried too and their first stop was her tiny apartment wedged between industrial buildings. They found their little girl lying so peacefully on the couch with the TV on that at first, they thought she’d died of some natural cause like a stroke or an embolism. It was the paramedics who realized she’d been the victim of violent crime and had the patrolman at the scene call in the body to JSO homicide.

  Stallings wasn’t even sure why he’d come all the way here. The crime scene investigators were doing their job efficiently and didn’t need an old-time detective interfering. Mazzetti, as the lead investigator, was running things along with Sergeant Zuni. Sparky Taylor was right on top of the crime scene investigators, watching their every move. Stallings wondered if Sparky felt differently about how they handled Daniel Byrd’s apartment the night before now that he was looking at another victim.

  Mazzetti stepped out of the apartment and chatted with Stallings at the end of the hallway. He said, “Gotta be the same shithead. She was strangled with a ligature that left very similar marks to the girl we found over at Pine Forest Park. This shit is getting way out of hand.”

  “What d’you want to do?”

  “We’re gonna be stuck here for a long time. They’ve already started the canvass of the neighborhood, but so far no one saw anyone or anything suspicious. We’ve gotta either shit or get off the pot with Daniel Byrd. You go out ther
e and beat the bushes. I guarantee you no one will care how you find him or what you have to do.”

  Stallings said, “You thought about putting it out to road patrol?”

  Mazzetti shook his head. “We can’t risk it getting to the media and causing him to flee to another city where they’d have to start an investigation all over again. We gotta find him.” Mazzetti flipped several pages of notes and said, “I looked up some old reports in narcotics. Narcotics boys say Byrd used to be a mid-level meth dealer in the city. He always kept more than one residence. That place we checked out last night might not be his only pad. Keep that in mind.”

  “Got any ideas?”

  “Construction sites. Even if the asshole is dealing dope again, he’s dealing to construction workers. I got a couple of snitches in the construction sites and I’ll see what they say.

  “You got a lot to do here, Tony. Don’t sweat Daniel Byrd. I’ll find him.”

  Stallings was surprised by Mazzetti’s response.

  “I know you will. That’s why I’ll keep Sparky Taylor busy here with me.”

  Buddy enjoyed his afternoon. He had a couple of jobs around town but nothing big. He had messages on his phone he hadn’t bothered to check. It was always someone with a cracked bay window or foggy entranceway etching. That was not how he wanted to spend the rest of his life. There was art to create. More important, there was art to finish.

  He didn’t want to make the same mistakes, so instead of taking the pretty nurse, Katie Massa, at her word, he was doing a little checking on Facebook and other Internet sites. If he had done the same with the dental hygienist, he would’ve saved a lot of time and she might even be alive today. It made him think about how he hadn’t heard anything about her body being found. He’d searched the online newspapers across the Southeast and had seen no mention of a body found in the trailer of a big rig. He supposed it was possible that the driver had dumped the load and she ended up buried at the bottom of it. Of course telling everyone she was going on a cruise for a week didn’t help her chances of being missed.

  Now he concentrated on Katie Massa, searching through Duval County court records as well as the county tax assessor. He saw that she’d been divorced for three years and bought a small house east of the hospital five years ago. There were a few images of her from Facebook and all of them showed what a fun-loving and vivacious girl she was, but nothing too risqué. He liked that.

  Maybe he’d pay Katie Massa a visit tomorrow night. That was the next time she worked.

  Tony Mazzetti was getting impatient with the crime scene team. He knew it was vital that they got any information they could from Lexie Hanover’s apartment, but there was too much going on for him to wait at the apartment any longer. As he had gotten everyone moving and cleaning up their equipment, Sparky Taylor spoke.

  The rotund black detective said, “Tony, you and I need to do a final sweep of the apartment.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says policy. The lead detective, the de facto supervisor on the scene, must do a final inspection of all crime scenes to ensure nothing of value was overlooked.”

  Mazzetti looked at his partner and said in a much quieter tone, “Did you just read that or did you know it off the top of your head?”

  Sparky was apparently starting to catch on to sarcasm and opted not to answer.

  Mazzetti said, “Sparky, these are professionals. Their entire fucking job is crime scene investigation. I think we can depend on them to do a good job. Haven’t you seen the TV show?”

  With a straight face Sparky said, “Yes, I have and I don’t care for it much. I think it’s very unrealistic.”

  Mazzetti had plenty to do himself so he growled at Sparky, “Do the check and let me know how it goes.” Mazzetti went about his business, ensuring all the neighbors were interviewed and sending someone out to check if there were any commercial surveillance cameras in the area that might pick up a car or someone walking into the building. About twenty minutes later he noticed several of the crime scene people gathered around Sparky Taylor at the main window in the small living room.

  Mazzetti headed over to the group and said, “Anything important?”

  Sparky said, “There’s a substance here on the windowsill we should take a sample of.”

  A belligerent, middle-aged crime scene investigator said, “It’s nothing. It’s just sugar or something off a drinking glass.”

  Mazzetti said, “Take it.” As he turned away he had to add, “Asshole.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  John Stallings had worked almost nonstop after leaving the crime scene at Lexie Hanover’s apartment the day before. He’d taken a few hours to go home and grab something to eat and sleep. He called Maria, hoping she might invite him to spend the night back at the family’s house, but when he reached her she was back to being aloof. When he called the house earlier in the day, Lauren answered and said her mom was “out.” His daughter didn’t elaborate on the statement and didn’t sound happy to be delivering the message. Stallings didn’t have time right now to dissect his wife’s emotions.

  Right now Stallings had to focus on finding Daniel Byrd. The rest of the squad was busy with the standard post-homicide tasks. Sergeant Zuni had a knack for using everyone according to their strengths. Patty was trying to find any link among the victims on the Internet or through employment. Other detectives were conducting wide canvasses of the neighborhoods around the homicides. Tony Mazzetti was dealing with the medical examiner and coordinating the tremendous amount of information that came in from a group effort like this. And Sparky Taylor did the things that required cold, objective analysis or anything that kept him away from Tony Mazzetti.

  Stallings had already gotten over Sparky’s visit to the sergeant. These were the times and not every cop thought like him. Now Sparky was basking in the glow of finding a chemical on the windowsill of Lexie Hanover’s apartment that an entire crime scene team had missed. Stallings understood how something like that could happen. This was not some clean Hollywood soundstage; this was real life. Police and crime scene investigators were human beings subject to all the failings of any human being.

  When he thought of things like this, Stallings wondered if he had attended one too many Narcotics Anonymous meetings with Maria. But it was true. Cops made mistakes. The thing no one ever considered was just how few mistakes they made in the big scheme of things. Every time a convicted criminal was exonerated through DNA or some other means, it made headlines across the country. But those headlines failed to mention anything about the millions upon millions of arrests that helped protect the community and keep criminals off the streets. In this case, Sparky’s hyperattention to policy had proved to be extremely beneficial.

  Sergeant Zuni had given Stallings the quiet okay to do what he had to do in order to find Daniel Byrd. She wasn’t like some supervisors who wanted plausible deniability. If he screwed up in some incredible way she was the kind of supervisor who wouldn’t leave him out to dry. The last thing he wanted to do was jeopardize someone’s career.

  So Stallings had spent last evening and all day today checking construction sites and using his veritable army of informants to scour the streets of Jacksonville for one scrawny ex-con. Somehow he knew it’d be his secret weapon, super snitch Peep Moran, who would come through with the information. He had responded to a text message from the diminutive, slightly creepy street hustler asking to meet him near the spot they had first met three years ago.

  He found one of the secret holes Peep had created in the hedges to view women urinating. It was amazing how often it happened and more amazing someone wanted to see it. Stallings could put up with almost anything if he could stop this killer.

  Stallings leaned against the low wall where Peep was sitting quietly. Neither of them looked at the other, preferring to speak straight ahead in case someone noticed Jacksonville’s most feared cop talking to one of Jacksonville’s most detested perverts.

  “You still staying off yo
ur own product?”

  “Well, see, it’s like this ...”

  “You just told me everything I need to know. When’d you start using again?”

  Peep scratched his head and wiped his nose with his fingers. “I think I started using Saturday and never laid off. Monday morning had to go back to work. Things have gotten really hazy for a couple of days. But I’ve been out asking about your man Daniel Byrd.”

  “What do you got?”

  “He’s not real well liked on the street. No one gets very specific. No one has any clue where he stays. Looks like he has cribs all over the city.”

  Stallings nodded slowly, looking straight ahead. “That’s all stuff I know already, Peep. You have to work a lot harder if you want to earn a living like this.”

  “Who says I want to earn a living being a snitch? I just want you to leave me alone if I do you a favor now and then.”

  “You haven’t even provided me with enough information to leave you alone.”

  For the first time he turned and looked at Stallings. A crooked smile crept across his face. “Maybe I haven’t told you everything.”

  Now Stallings faced his informant. “Maybe I left you alone for too long.” To make his point Stallings cracked his knuckles so loudly a woman walking by on the sidewalk stopped and stared at him.

  Peep said, “Seriously, I have some real information on Daniel Byrd. But it’s gonna cost you.”

  Stallings was not opposed to fair and equitable trade. “It depends on good how the information is, but I’m sure I can come up with something.”

  “A hundred bucks and a free pass the next time I get caught.”

  “Get caught doing what?”

  “That’s the idea of a free pass. You got enough juice at JSO to get me out of almost any trouble I can get into. I’m saying this information is good enough for you to give me out of the jam and pay me a hundred dollars right now.”