The Perfect Death

EIGHT

John Stallings picked Patty Levine up at her condo in his Impala so they could cruise along North Davis and talk to the managers for some of the hotels where runaways hung out.

Patty said, “What’d you do last night?”

“Hit the hay early.” It wasn’t an exact lie. He had gone to bed early, giving up trying to sleep, and come down here for a look around, but Stallings didn’t want to hear Patty tell him how he needed time for himself or needed more rest.

Patty said, “I bet Tony five bucks you’d go out on your own time and see what you could discover. I guess I’ll pay up this evening.”

Stallings turned and frowned at her. She knew him too well. He mumbled, “Don’t pay up.”

“I knew it. You gotta stop going out on your own. You coulda been hurt and no one would’ve known where you were.”

He hadn’t considered that argument.

Patty added, “You need your rest. I told you to get seven or eight hours of sleep a night.”

He nodded and listened for the next fifteen minutes as he cut in and out of Jacksonville traffic, taking surface streets and alleys like any good cop would.

Stallings pulled the Impala to the curb in front of a four-story, brick apartment building. Each unit had one window and about twenty percent of those were boarded. Stallings figured there were maybe a hundred tenants in the whole place. He’d heard this was the new runaway central and under new management. Different buildings popped up in the city as mainstays of runaways. Sometimes it was cheap rent that attracted them. Sometimes it was a manager who looked after the runaways. Either way the new manager here might have seen Leah and maybe even if she met with anyone.

They entered the neat lobby with new, cheap carpet and a plain set of Rooms-To-Go furniture in the corner, where people could gather on a couch and three matching chairs around a coffee table.

Stallings stepped to the clean counter and knocked on the countertop. “Hello?”

Like a good partner, Patty wandered to the hallway and casually stood, but in reality it was an instinct that couldn’t be taught at the police academy. She was in position in case something surprising happened and she had to cover Stallings, or if someone rushed them from the hallway, Stallings could do the same for her.

He shifted to expose his gun and badge on his hip so they would be seen by anyone coming out of the office behind the counter. He didn’t want to waste a lot of time explaining who he was. He had plenty of his own questions that needed answers.

He was about to call out again when he heard a woman’s voice say, “I’ll be right out.”

He stared as she stepped out of the office and behind the counter.

Her dark eyes met his and she gave him a cursory smile.

The woman said, “Hello, Officer.”

It was the woman who had scolded him last night.

A stack of small notebooks were spread across the wide conference room table. Tony Mazzetti looked over the mess at his partner, Sparky Taylor. The fact that it looked as if there were two victims had already pushed everyone to the edge. New information was coming at him from three different sets of detectives and everything was piling up fast.

Mazzetti said, “What’d you think, Sparky? It would help to have some kind of viable theory to filter through some of the shit.”

Sparky slowly raised his face from the open file he’d been studying intently and focused his brown eyes on his new partner. “We’ve already checked former boyfriends and possible stalkers. Those would be the most likely suspects in a case like this. But if we look at the circumstances of the body being dumped it leads us in another direction.”

Mazzetti slowly sat down in the seat at the opposite end of the table, staring at Sparky. “Go on.”

“First, I don’t think the killer, which I’ll assume is a ‘he’ based on the nature of the crime and location of the body, lived close to the construction site. I believe he was driving, so why stay in an area that could help identify you if you’ve already made the risk of transferring a body to the vehicle? He’s pretty strong, yet not necessarily tall because he was able to get the body into the Dumpster, but there were two cinder blocks stacked next to the Dumpster where the body was found. With the number of canals and rivers all over Duval County, a construction site is a poor choice to dump a body.”

“All right, Columbo, where does that leave us?”

“It leaves us with a lot of suspects if we considered all the construction workers in the city. I wonder what percentage of construction workers are felons?”

Mazzetti let out a snort of laughter and said, “That’s like saying ‘What’s the bad part of Jacksonville?’ I have to say, Jacksonville.” He laughed at the old joke every cop in the city liked to tell.

Sparky didn’t change his expression and said, “I like Jacksonville. I’m raising two boys here.”

“Have you ever seen the NBC special on runaways in Jacksonville?”

“We don’t really watch TV around our house.”

“Really? None at all?”

“We watch one hour a night as a family. Usually half is the national news and the other half is The History Channel.”

“What’d you guys do for fun at night?”

“We play games.”

“Like Monopoly?”

“Monopoly leaves too much to luck and has too simplistic a view of world economic pressures to be of any value to the children. We like to play a game which combines Trivial Pursuit with Jenga. You have to answer a question that challenges your intellect, then use your spatial abilities to dismantle the wooden tower pieces. The boys enjoy it very much.”

Mazzetti couldn’t come up with anything to say and continued to stare in silence. After he gathered his thoughts, he decided his only hope was to refocus their attention on the case. He said, “So where does that leave us? We need a jumping-off point. We have all the usual bases covered. I’d like to hear what you think might be a new way of looking at this homicide.”

Sparky said, “The logical place to start looking would be at construction sites. If we have no specific leads on a suspect and the other detectives are looking at the victims, you and I can focus on other things. Whoever dumped Kathy Mizell’s body specifically picked a construction site with a full Dumpster. It may not have been a coincidence he realized the Dumpster was going to be hauled away and dumped soon. It’s just an idea, but one I’ve been formulating all day.”

Mazzetti took a moment to assess his enigmatic new partner. The guy may have been a techno-freak who had spent most of his career in the tech squad, but he had some good insight. Even with a light Southern accent and relatively soft voice, the guy’s comments had impact. He was right. Stallings and Patty were busy working the Leah Tischler aspect of the case. Another set of detectives was looking into Kathy Mizell’s background and associations. A third set was running leads and interviewing people at UNF and the health center. So far, Mazzetti and Sparky had been out at the health center talking to Kathy Mizell’s instructors and classmates. They had also looked through all the available forensic information. Sitting on the table were security-camera shots from ten different cameras at the health center. That was the last place anyone had seen Kathy Mizell alive and it might provide a clue. But this idea of considering a construction worker wasn’t half bad.

Sparky Taylor turned in his seat and started to tap on the keyboard of the Dell laptop he took everywhere with him. He typed at a speed Mazzetti could not comprehend.

Mazzetti thought about what his partner had said and looked down at his legal pad with a list of tasks to accomplish filling most of two pages. But years of experience had taught him to follow his instincts and right now his instincts said Sparky Taylor was more than just a puffy Georgia Tech engineering graduate with odd habits.

Mazzetti said, “I wish there was an easy way to figure out exactly how many large construction sites there are in the city.”

Sparky looked from the computer screen and said, “There are thirty-nine sites requiring one or more debris Dumpsters in the downtown area and surrounding residential neighborhoods. There are an additional eighty-two three-yard Dumpsters spread out at smaller sites across the county.”

“How in the hell do you know something like that?”

“I accessed Waste Management’s website and went to a page designed for city employees. It’s supposed to help code enforcement people when they have issues with debris.”

Mazzetti sat, openmouthed, and finally said, “How did you know that site was even available?”

“It was in a memo sent out by the Intel squad about six months ago. Don’t you read the memos sent out by the other divisions?”

“Why would I do something like that? It’s all I can do keep up with my cases as it is.”

Sparky calmly looked across at Mazzetti and said, “Because it’s in our policy manual we should read memos distributed from other divisions. It also makes sense on a practical level by increasing the number of people looking at any one problem.”

“You’d have to prove to me the value of reading memos from other divisions.”

“I thought I just did.”