The Perfect Prey

Ten

Stallings had used his contacts at one of the local cell phone companies to get the records for Allie Marsh’s phone. There’d been no calls made since 8:20 P.M. the night before when she called Susan’s phone. Susan had confirmed that she called just after they entered the Wildside because they’d gotten separated. The lack of activity made it difficult to see if there was a pattern of calls going through cell towers in different areas.

Now, as he sat in his Impala and Patty grabbed a sandwich, he tried to think of whom he could harass about Ecstasy and maybe see if Allie fell in with one of the local dealers or if a dealer knew someone passing some X around.

Patty hopped back into the car and offered him half her tuna sandwich. He waved her off as he stared at the sheet of phone records.

Patty shook her head. “It would’ve taken most of us three days to get records like that.”

“It was an emergency. This girl still hasn’t shown up, and the idea that she had a source of X makes me nervous.”

“What about the rednecks in the truck from this morning?”

“You said it was registered to someone in Sanderson.”

“Leonard Walsh.”

“I’d like to talk to him about Jason Ferrell, but this is more urgent.”

“When’s the last time anyone tried to call Allie?”

He shrugged, looked at the number on the top of the page, and dialed. What did he have to lose? The phone rang once, twice, a third time; then, to his surprise someone answered.

“Hello.” It was a man’s gravelly voice.

Stallings hesitated a moment and said, “Is Allie close by?”

“No. No one here but me.” Then the line went dead.

Stallings turned to Patty and said, “This ain’t good.”

John Stallings felt his face flush red as he approached Yvonne the Terrible in the detective bureau. They’d been called back to the SO just after the strange man had answered Allie Marsh’s phone and he had the cell company scrambling to see which cell tower it pinged off of. It was a long shot, but it was a lead. A lead he couldn’t follow up if he was wasting time in the office.

Even Patty noticed his anger and said, “Take a minute to calm down, John.”

“We don’t have a minute now. This went from a missing party girl to a suspicious disappearance in a matter of minutes. We need to get out there and look for her.”

As they approached the sergeant’s office, which had been vacant for many months, Yvonne Zuni stepped out and turned casually toward them. She smiled and nodded.

Stallings fought the urge to yell. He respected the chain of command even when command staff was wrong. He said evenly, “We have a hot lead. Do you really need us here right now?”

Sergeant Zuni matched his even tone. “I wouldn’t have called you if I didn’t.”

“Then what’s the emergency?”

“I didn’t say it was an emergency. I just said come back to the office. If you’re gonna be outraged know why you’re outraged.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means you should consider who you’re barking at and if it will do any good.”

Stallings realized she had just told him to shut up in a decent, boss kind of way.

Then the sergeant said, “I want you two to meet someone.” She turned and started walking toward the conference room, pulling Patty and Stallings along silently.

In the room, at the far end of the long table, sat a pretty blond woman who appeared to be in her late thirties. She sat straight with a manner that, coupled with her clothes, suggested she had money. The woman looked up at them with bright blue eyes that seemed familiar to him.

The sergeant said, “Detectives Stallings and Levine, this is Diane Marsh, Allison’s mom.”

Now Stallings felt like an ass.

Daytime had never been his best time to function. He was a creature of the night. But the thrill of his little adventure with Allie Marsh had kept him from sleeping, and now he hustled around the small cottage he rented, cleaning out any dust and wiping down the kitchen with Clorox. His refrigerator was nearly bare, not because he hadn’t been shopping but because he hated garbage. Most things he ate were self-contained and easy to wrap up and dispose of in his kitchen can with two heavy-duty plastic bags. He took his bags to his landlord’s large outdoor cans because he hated to be around any kind of decomposing garbage. There were no remnants of meat or other food on his kitchen counters and few odors in the small house other than cleaners.

That was why he took his prey anywhere but in his own lair. Not only did it keep him safe from any possible suspicion, if there ever was any, but it kept potentially disgusting remnants away from his house.

He found himself smiling at the thought of Allie’s tight body under his, the thick, sticky film of perspiration between them. Those screams of hers right near the end echoed in his ears and gave him a feeling of euphoria. This was his idea of a vacation. Just dreaming about his past exploits.

He knew he’d have to get back on the prowl tonight to keep the feeling going.

Twenty minutes into the interview of Diane Marsh, Stallings started to realize how this case had gotten spun up so quickly. Diane Marsh was a strong woman with a husband who had a lot of cash from a small fishing-boat-manufacturing business in Laurel, Mississippi. Mrs. Marsh, who had asked to be called Diane, said that they’d never worried about their children in their quiet hometown and that this was Allie’s first trip to a big city.

Stallings almost snickered at the idea of Jacksonville being a big city. Although it was the biggest city in square miles in the United States, that was more of an administrative move than a growth issue. The county and city had combined governments in the sixties. But the city and its management still had a chip on its shoulder for not being a big city. Despite its slogan, “Bold new city of the south,” J-Ville was eclipsed by Atlanta a few hours northwest and Miami due south. Aside from the stray Super Bowl or decent college game, no one took much notice of the bold new city of the south.

Overall, Diane Marsh offered little help in the case. She had not been able to reach Allie for a couple of days and panicked. When she talked to Susan and learned Allie had not come home she contacted the Mississippi attorney general, who was a personal friend, and he contacted someone in JSO command, who had apparently lit Yvonne Zuni’s ass on fire.

When Diane Marsh started to cry, Stallings reached across the table to take her hand. “I know it’s hard, but we’re doing all we can.” He’d heard the same words and they hadn’t made him feel any better three years ago.

The three years seemed like a lifetime to him. Sometimes all he could think about was how he’d wasted precious hours trying to figure out what Maria was using, where she got it, and how long it had been going on without his knowledge. In hindsight they were all useless questions. By the time he’d brought in JSO on what he thought was his own personal problem, his world and especially the house was in chaos. He was still dizzy from just how fucked up things could get so quickly. Dizzy was the only way to explain it. He physically felt as if the room were spinning and he was going to be sick. The realization that Jeanie was missing had left a hole that nothing could fill. He fended off questions from his mother and his sister and his friends that meant nothing. They weren’t contributing; they were only distracting. He had to focus. He had to do something. Anything.

Then the first cop showed up. A nice kid in uniform who gave him the fucking company line. Same bullshit he was laying down for Diane Marsh right now. God forgive him, but he didn’t have enough sense to find something new to say.

Diane said, “You can’t know what this feels like.”

“Yes, I can.”

She looked up at him, and he instantly saw the recognition shared by parents who had lost children. Diane Marsh started to weep uncontrollably.

Tony Mazzetti held Patty tight to his chest as she drifted off to sleep. He knew her routine after sex; she got up, took some kind of vitamin, brushed her teeth, and came right back to bed. Once she was out, she was out. It took him longer to fall asleep because he ran through the problems of the day and what he had to accomplish the next day. He’d done the same thing for the entire fourteen years he’d been with the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. In the long years without a girlfriend, while he lay in bed alone, he’d rough out some of the history articles he liked to write. Sometimes he read. Now he liked just holding Patty’s small, perfect body as she drifted off. Even if it was early.

She expended a lot of energy. Especially in bed. He wouldn’t admit it, but he had to adjust his gym workouts around their dates because he couldn’t perform adequately at both in one day. But with their schedules and Patty’s independence, they rarely spent more than two nights a week together and sometimes they went two weeks with only a dinner or two shared. She seemed happy with this arrangement, but after years of almost no relationships he wanted more. He just didn’t know how to express that to her and not scare her away.

He worried about things he never used to care about. He wondered if his years without sex because of his massive use of muscle supplements had screwed up his technique. If he was completely honest, he’d have to admit that no woman ever really complimented his ability even before his quest to gain huge muscle mass.

The frustration of the day caused him to sigh and shift his body. A lump in his throat had not dissipated since the afternoon.

Patty reached across his chest and mumbled, “What’s wrong, Tony?”

He groaned. “Nothing.”

Patty propped herself up and looked at him in the dim light. “We’ll waive the ‘not talking about work’ rule. Now what’s wrong?”

“You shoulda heard how she talked to me today.”

“Who? The sarge?”

“Yeah, the goddamn new sergeant.”

“What did big bad, one-hundred-and-five-pound Yvonne the Terrible say to my meek, little, two-hundred-pound boyfriend?”

He could see her perfect smile even in this light. “She talked to me like a kid.”

“Tony, sometimes you act like a kid.”

“She said my clearance rates are too good and wants more care taken with each death investigation. She wants a new analysis of each of the last ten deaths.” He waited for a comment, but the silence said it all. “You think I miss things?”

More silence.

Mazzetti said, “You’re going back to the OD case. I admit I screwed up on that one. How was I supposed to know that was the Bag Man’s first victim?”

“You said it, not me.”

Mazzetti groaned. “Now the new sarge thinks the same thing. What a waste of time to go back through the cases.”

Patty’s continued silence told him she didn’t necessarily think it was a waste of time.

It was after ten, and John Stallings was still driving around the area where the cell tower for Allie Marsh’s phone last pinged, thinking of all the terrible things that could’ve happened. Meeting Diane Marsh had ratcheted up his concern, and now he found himself trapped too deep into a case again. The fact that he hadn’t visited the kids today was a sign of the obsession he developed on certain cases.

It didn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out what drew him to these cases. He always hoped that some detective in some city might piece together what had happened to his own daughter after she disappeared. By working these kinds of cases hard he was somehow helping and nurturing that hope. The hollow spot inside him had never healed. The thought of Diane Marsh suffering the same pain pushed him to keep thinking up scenarios of how the phone was taken from Allie.

On one hand he liked when he was busy, but it was only a temporary fix to his restlessness and hurt him in other areas, like family. But he knew himself well and resolved to go with it for now.

Stallings cruised east on the Arlington Expressway near a residential area that also held some apartments and homeless people; then he pulled his Impala into a nearby gas station and got out on foot. He knew everyone would make him for a cop, but that’s how he had gotten by on this job: honestly. Sometimes that meant he had beaten someone or at least scared them, but no one seemed to resent him for any of his actions. He was occasionally reminded of that when the lieutenant asked him to do her a special favor and use his “own methods” to find out something. She knew he could be rough, but that he always said or did something that smoothed it over afterward. He’d never had an official complaint filed against him. At least not for violence.

He headed into the park, keeping his head moving so he wouldn’t be surprised. He nodded to a pair of old men, tattoos covering their forearms, sharing a bottle. At the far end of the park were low-rent apartments. Every officer with JSO had been there at some point to break up a fight or check on a sexual predator. It held a lot of recovering addicts and more than a few released prisoners.

He kept walking around to the front of the apartments, keeping his eyes open for one person in particular. It only took a moment before he almost bumped into him.

Stallings froze and looked into the old man’s cloudy brown eyes. Gray stubble covered his cheeks. The man held a basket of clean laundry. Old military habits died hard.

The old man said, “Look what the tide washed in.”

Stallings said, “Hey, Stan.”

“What brings you by the drunks’ ghetto?”

“I need some info.”

“You think that just because I’m sober now I’ll cooperate with the cops?”

“I think you’ll help out because I took a knife in the side for you.”