by James Andrus
Mazzetti couldn’t believe his partner was so far ahead of him, but he resisted saying something like no shit. Instead, he nodded calmly and said, “That’s great. You come up with something?”
Sparky had a light Southern accent that Mazzetti assumed he had developed growing up in the Jacksonville area and honed during his four years at Georgia Tech. It was Sparky’s engineering background and mind-set that gave him new ways of looking at the same old problems.
Sparky said, “I’ve taken the liberty of running a statistical analysis and boiled it down to its most basic components. I’ve come up with this formula. If you take into account the two-year span in education of the victims and you assume that the fraternity has an average of forty-two members plus or minus three each year with a turnover of ten to twelve members each year, you would have to assume that the fraternity had approximately sixty to seventy members from the time the shooting victim graduated until now. Three deaths among that number of young, relatively wealthy white men is out of the ordinary. That being said, there are always statistical anomalies.”
Mazzetti looked at his partner and said, “Come on, Sparky, what the fuck does all that mean?”
As usual, Sparky didn’t change his expression in any way. He simply said, “It means we have a problem that needs investigating and I suggest we jump on it with both feet.”
Lisa Kurtz enjoyed being an assistant medical examiner and had aspirations to become the chief medical examiner of some jurisdiction, preferably in Florida. She liked the weather and the people. Although she found that most Floridians took college football far too seriously. She didn’t worry about factoring her relationship with Tony Mazzetti into her career decisions. Those choices were at least two years down the road and she didn’t get the sense that she and Tony would be together for too long. She enjoyed his company and his cute, simple tactics in the bedroom, but they didn’t share many interests. What really fascinated her about Tony was his job. Although she had gone to medical school and considered herself part of the law enforcement community, she was not a detective and that’s what really interested her. She read novels about detectives, she watched Law and Order almost every night, and she had read virtually every true crime book ever published. If it weren’t for the hassle of the police academy she would consider becoming a cop herself.
The natural curiosity that made her think she’d be a great cop had led her to seek out the shirt that the overdose victim, Connor Tate, had worn the night he died. She knew she should take the shirt over to the sheriff’s office crime lab or at least tell Tony what she was doing. Instead, she and one of the coroner techs, a former evidence custodian for Dade County, did their own forensic analysis of the shirt. They had scraped the residue from a stain that ran almost the length of the front of the filthy shirt. Now she would have to include the crime lab. She decided to deliver the tiny sample of scrapings herself and say it was part of an ongoing medical examiner’s probe, which was true. They were always interested in overdose deaths and the prevalence of certain drugs in the community.
If anything came of it, she’d let Tony know. Until then she just would enjoy being a detective.
Stallings had been born and raised in North Florida, yet he had not spent much time on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was glad Patty had been with him and able to guide them both around campus as well as using her status as a graduate to assist them in finding the fraternity house with little or no trouble. They wanted to branch out from the Jacksonville chapter of Tau Upsilon, which served several of the smaller universities in the area. Stallings had had a theory that perhaps other fraternities had suffered a recent spate of bad luck as well. Although he considered three deaths among such a small number of young men unusual, Stallings still wasn’t convinced it was the work of some mastermind.
Now they were inside the house talking to a very nervous UF student who had been a member of the fraternity for his entire four-year career at the sprawling university. Stallings could tell by the look in this kid’s eye that he was very uncomfortable talking to any law enforcement officer. Stallings let Patty start off the conversation smoothly and in her own style. There was no reason for this young man to be as shaky as he was acting.
Patty sat next to him on a long sofa and patted his knee in an effort to calm the young man down. She said, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. We’re just curious if you know of any members of your fraternity who have died accidentally or otherwise in the past two years?”
The thin young man turned his pale eyes to Stallings, then back to Patty. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fast elevator. “There’s no one in the chapter that died for as long as we’ve existed. At least as far as I know.”
Patty nodded like she was thinking, but Stallings knew she was trying to figure out what this boy’s story was too. Finally she said, “What about any alumni?”
The boy physically winced and slowly nodded his head. “One of our brothers, Paul Smiley, died in some kind of fire in Atlanta last year.”
Patty waited, thinking the boy might expand on his answer. When he didn’t say anything else she said, “You sure that’s it?”
“That’s the only person who died that I know of.”
There was something in his tone and delivery that made Patty say, “What about anyone seriously injured?”
The boy bit his lower lip and finally said, “Another one of our alumni, Alan Cole, is in the hospital in Daytona after he was hit by a car.”
“Do you know any details about either incident?”
The boy shook his head. “I think whoever hit Alan drove away and hasn’t been found.”
Stallings scribbled down some notes but still had a sense the boy was hiding something. He cleared his throat until the young man looked up at him; then Stallings said, “Did either of these guys spend much time at the chapter house in Jacksonville?”
Slowly the boy nodded his head. “They both had friends and other things that took them to Jacksonville. I think they usually stayed at the chapter house.”
“Did they ever go together to Jacksonville?”
“I guess they did around Halloween.”
“Why Halloween?”
“Because the North Florida chapter always hosts a kick-ass Halloween party.”
Stallings exchanged a quick glance with Patty.
Yvonne Zuni prided herself on always being on top of homicides, drug cases, and missing children. But this latest wrinkle in the crimes/persons squad was different from anything she had ever had to deal with in her short career as a supervisor. She wasn’t even sure a crime had occurred. They needed more proof than just a crazy theory about bad luck at a fraternity. She’d been told by Lieutenant Hester to keep things low key. But John Stallings and Tony Mazzetti were never low-key for long. Between the two of them something was going to be put on command staff’s radar. Sergeant Zuni didn’t mind; part of her job was running interference for her detectives. She just wished she understood the issue a little more clearly.
She wandered through the squad bay back toward her office, keeping a subtle eye on who was working at their desk and who was running their mouth at someone else’s desk. There was usually too much work to allow much time for watercooler talk. But as effective as the squad had been the last few months she wasn’t going to come down on anyone taking advantage of the lull in homicides or the precipitous drop in robberies over the past two months.
She noticed Tony Mazzetti at Sparky Taylor’s desk working with the peculiar detective on something. She knew the two detectives weren’t friends but had noted how they complemented each other so well. She had heard through the grapevine that Mazzetti’s regular partner, Christina Hogrebe, was going to be promoted to sergeant before she finished her temporary assignment at the police academy. Zuni hadn’t broken the news to Mazzetti yet but was gratified to see that he was working with Sparky on investigations instead of just treating him like an assistant.
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She paused at John Stallings’s cluttered desk and noticed a small stack of photographs. She moved aside a sheet of paper on top of them and pulled the first photograph off the desk. She noticed the other ten photographs were copies of this one showing a young man and a young woman smiling next to each other in a long hallway with festive lights strung behind them. It took her a moment to recognize the missing fraternity brother Zach Halston. She didn’t know who the very pretty blond girl was. The sergeant assumed Stallings was using the photos to show different witnesses who might’ve come into contact with the missing fraternity brother.
She kept a photograph in her hand and set the piece of paper back over the remaining photographs on Stallings’s desk. As she neared her office she heard her desk phone ring and hustled to catch it.
Sergeant Zuni absently set the photograph of Zach Halston and the girl down at the side of her desk as she picked up the receiver and simply said, “Sergeant Zuni, crimes/persons.”
Dale squeezed into the tiny chair next to Lynn’s desk. Since she had agreed to have a drink with him Saturday night he’d taken it to mean she wanted to see him more often during the workweek at Thomas Brothers Supply. Until she had a better idea of what he knew and what he planned to do with the information, she decided to stay on the large, smelly man’s good side.
At the moment he was wolfing down a tuna salad sandwich, then gulping a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. He repeatedly offered Lynn a bite of the sandwich or a drink from the bottle, which she politely refused.
Dale said, “What time do you want me to pick you up Saturday?”
Lynn said, “I’m going to meet you. I thought we might go over to Jacksonville Landing to sit at a bar along the river.”
“Lady’s choice. I’ll take you wherever you to like to go. Maybe you could even bring some of your party pills if you want to have a real wild time.”
“What are you talking about, Dale?”
“I’m talking about the Baggie of pills I found the other day in your purse.” Now he cut his eyes slightly to the side and said, “Were you high the day you wrecked the Suburban?”
Lynn suddenly had a sickening feeling that Dale was not the big dumb redneck he pretended to be. She wondered if she might not have a real problem sitting right in front of her.
Tony Mazzetti had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided he fervently hoped that the deaths associated with the Tau Upsilon fraternity were a statistical anomaly. He could deal with one random robbery that resulted in homicide. Ultimately, perhaps after some luck and time, some street thug would be arrested for an unrelated crime and give up who shot the auto parts store manager. But three unsolved homicides meant that he had a severe blemish on his clearance rate. Two accidents were much easier to explain. Hell, half the kids in college today used pharmaceutical drugs recreationally. Mazzetti was surprised there weren’t more overdoses. And the kid who had fallen into the river and been chewed to pieces by the fishing boat could have been anyone. He just happened to be a member of the fraternity.
The events that had attracted the attention of the sheriff’s office had led Mazzetti to review the evidence on the auto parts manager’s shooting. He went through a stack of DVDs from various security cameras, including one located inside the store. That was the only one with any faces that could be recognized. If the killer had walked into the store the night of the shooting, Mazzetti couldn’t tell who pulled the trigger. In the four hours before the store closed there had been only a handful of customers. The man with three children, an older trucker, a guy in the yard service shirt who Mazzetti and Sparky had tracked down and cleared of any suspicion, a middle-aged woman holding a broken windshield wiper, a young, cute woman who ended up not buying anything, and three young black males.
Using a still photo from the video Mazzetti had checked with all of his informants downtown and eventually found one of the three men. He had explained that they were looking for parts to restore a 1967 Mustang. Sparky and Mazzetti had visited the young man’s apartment and seen the car, but more important, Mazzetti could tell the young man was not a thug.
He watched the soundless video once more over his desktop computer. The grainy images produced decent shots of each customer’s face as long as they happened to glance up towards the camera. Right now he looked at the young woman he had never identified and noticed her look across the aisle at the manager, though she never appeared to speak to him. If it had been a male in the same circumstances Mazzetti would be killing himself to identify the man as a suspect.
Stallings had been anxious to get back to his canvass of businesses on University Boulevard. Patty was following up on information they got from the nerd at the University of Florida fraternity. Stallings had tried to hide his interest in returning to the seemingly mundane job of canvassing businesses for a missing person, but the trip to Gainesville had frustrated him greatly. He had lost an entire day. The drive over and back, as well as Patty’s interest in showing him around the campus where she had spent four years on the gymnastics team, had killed any chance he had to talk to business owners the day before.
His mood yesterday had not been helped by the way Maria systematically ignored him when he’d come over to visit the kids. But today he had managed to squeeze in nine stores; unfortunately all of them but one were under new management and had no idea about who had worked there previously.
In the midafternoon Stallings found a vintage clothing store just on the south side of the river close to the University of North Florida. He took a moment to look in the windows noticing the expensive price tags on what he considered used clothing. When he was a kid they’d called them hand-me-downs. A bell tinkled as he stepped through the front door and a large woman with what appeared to be a tent covering her form glanced up from a copy of In Touch magazine.
Without looking up at Stallings, she said, “I already gave to the police athletic league and I don’t give two shits about the Police Benevolent Association.”
Stallings said, “I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?”
Stallings laid down the photograph he’d taken from Zach Halston’s apartment.
The woman glanced down at it, then said, “You’re looking for Kelly?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Sparky Taylor had used his connections in Atlanta to get the details on the death of UF student and Tau Upsilon member Paul Smiley, which had occurred in the city a little over a year ago. It was death by fire, which in Sparky’s mind was the worst way to go. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked this assignment in homicide. They didn’t seem to be as interested in following policy as he was. All his partner, Tony Mazzetti, ever thought about was ensuring his clearance rate on homicides was the best in the state. Mazzetti was a good detective, but he didn’t always dig deep enough into the circumstances of a death. Sparky didn’t think that was how the public expected a police department to work.
That was one of the reasons he had volunteered to track down any possible information on the death of a Tau Upsilon fraternity member who had graduated from the University of Florida the year before.
Sparky’s call had been taken by one of his buddies who had attended Georgia Tech with him, and he was now speaking to a sergeant in narcotics. Sparky said, “Why aren’t I speaking to someone in homicide?”
The gruff sergeant, who obviously wasn’t happy about wasting time talking to some detective in a hick town like Jacksonville, said, “Homicide doesn’t necessarily believe that death was anything but an accident. You know how they are about their clearance rates.”
“I do know that.”
“Anyway, the victim had two kilos of marijuana in his apartment and toxicology shows that he was stoned and had ketamine in his system. He was asphyxiated before he even realized there was a fire.”
“Do you have a big ketamine problem in Atlanta?”
“Kids use it if they can get it. A few veterinarians have been burglarized and lost some, but it’s not too
bad.”
“Is there any evidence or anything left to go through on the death?”
“There are few things in boxes in evidence, but it’s just the bricks of marijuana and maybe some ID. I’m pretty sure the landlord never rented the apartment and there may be something over there. If you need more details or to come up here to look at the case I’ll have to hand you off to one of the homicide guys.”
Sparky scribbled a few notes while the sergeant read off the address and any other information he had on the case. Then the sergeant said, “Why would you guys be interested in something like this?”
“Because, like your police department, our homicide unit is more interested in clearance than in finding murderers. It’s my job to make sure we do both.”
The sergeant said, “You sound like a guy who could work for me any day of the week.”
Yvonne Zuni sat in her office signing off to close cases regarding accidental or justifiable homicides. She had been very impressed with the work of several of the new detectives who had been brought on board in the last year. The one case she pulled out of the pile was Connor Tate, the overdose victim from the University of North Florida. In an effort to keep the inquiry into the Tau Upsilon fraternity quiet, the sergeant had opted not to tell the detective on the Tate case what was going on. As a result, Detective Luis Martinez had done his usual thorough job and turned in the case file with everything necessary to close it out permanently.
Right now the only ones who knew the cases could be related were the four detectives working the case and her lieutenant, Rita Hester. She expected the lieutenant at any time and had been cleaning up the files to get her signature on the closings. The lieutenant had not spent much time with the crimes/persons squad in the last six months while she helped convert the evidence computer system as well as work on the re-accreditation of the sheriff’s office. On one hand it was a compliment to Sergeant Zuni and her abilities that no one interfered with how she ran the squad. On the other hand, it was a lot more work.