The Perfect Prey

Forty-one

Tony Mazzetti sat in the dark office alone, wishing he’d become a fireman instead of a cop. No one expected anything of firemen except the obvious: spray water on a fire. The rest of the time they could work out, train, and sleep. Three things he liked to do anyway.

Instead he hunched at his desk, puzzling over the cryptic comment Pudge, the street prophet, had made. When the odd fat man said to look closer rather than farther, did he mean the neighborhood? The drug trade? The fucking Hess Party? He hated riddles like this. Good investigations were logical, direct, and straightforward. That’s why he was in homicide and not narcotics. Shit, he’d rather be in fraud than narcotics. At least he could still identify scumbags and know exactly what the crime was with fraud. In narcotics, victims were other scumbags and the targets were more scumbags trying to make a buck off dope. Usually in his homicide investigations he had forensic information to corroborate witness testimony. It was simple: Someone saw Joe Blow shoot Sam Citizen and the medical examiner pulls a thirty-eight slug out of Sam Citizen. Case fucking closed. But all he had in this triple shooting were nine-millimeter slugs inside bodies and a lot of holes outside the small house. Sure, the forensic weenies could tell that the killers used at least two guns and one of them had to be some kind of automatic weapon. They had fired from the front door and hit all three victims immediately. The only wounds in common were a single nine-millimeter shot to the head. They’d all been riddled with body shots, but each had a bullet in the head. Probably after this occurred, the outside of the house and a Lincoln Navigator parked in the driveway were hit a total of nineteen times. The crime scene guys counted thirty-four shots fired. None by the victims.

Now, for some reason, Mazzetti was concerned about something some crazy street guy had to say. The rumors on the street had all been conflicting. Some people saw a Camaro before the shooting; others saw a Cadillac Escalade with dark windows. Once the rumor about white men started, everyone jumped on board.

Mazzetti stared at his desk hoping some kind of answer would pop into his head. It wasn’t as if he had anything to do other than work right now anyway. Patty was stuck on some kind of bullshit surveillance with Stallings. He didn’t count on seeing her again until late. They said they would eat a very late dinner at her condo. It was kind of nice to look forward to spending time with someone for a change.

Mazzetti muttered a few curse words as he fixed his eyes on the file and thought, I hate open cases.

As soon as Patty told him their subject was on the move, Stallings sat tall in his seat to get a good view of the front door to the club. The parking lot had some cars in it but was by no means packed. He’d already identified Palmer’s BMW and could see both the front door and the car. There was no way the pharmaceutical rep would spot him sitting a couple of rows away in his nondescript Impala.

The door opened, and Palmer, dressed in jeans and an untucked oxford button-down long-sleeved shirt, strolled out arm in arm with a cute, and possibly drunk, young woman. Stallings was good at estimating ages and he put this girl at nineteen, twenty at the most. About right for the college students in this area of town and the clientele of this little club. Now he was faced with the real question of what these surveillances were trying to accomplish. The girl was over eighteen and obviously walking with Palmer voluntarily.

Stallings considered the situation. Had he let the crime against a young woman affect his judgment? What was his plan? Wait for her to turn up dead tomorrow and then try and pin it on the pharmaceutical rep?

Stallings watched as the couple paused on the passenger side of the BMW. He had a clear view straight down the row of cars. Somehow the image of this girl reaching to kiss Palmer made him think of his own daughters. He hated the idea that they would ever have to deal with a slimy, manipulative prick like this. The idea of a man who was nearly thirty trolling for teenagers at bars made his stomach turn.

Then the movement caught his eye. It was the experience of sixteen years of police work in every unit from road patrol to homicide. The handoff. It happened every day in every city in America. Something changed hands, someone passes something off to someone else-whether it was a package, money, or drugs, it always had a certain look to it. In this case Palmer turned his head in each direction, reached in his pocket, pulled out a small plastic bag, then placed it in the palm of the girl’s hand. She smiled, plucked something from the baggie, then popped it in her mouth. Had he really seen something so overt, or was he looking for a reason to intervene?

As he watched, he saw the girl hesitate as she swallowed, then look up and kiss Palmer again on the lips. The pharmaceutical rep’s hand slid down her body and rested on her butt. Something inside Stallings snapped.

He was out of the car and moving without conscious thought. Palmer’s head jerked up in surprise, recognition hitting his face an instant before Stallings’s closed fist. The girl squealed as Palmer made an odd sound and dropped straight back onto the hard parking lot with a thud.

Palmer shook his head and started to scoot to a sitting position, but Stallings kicked him hard in the chest, knocking him flat again.

Palmer moaned, “What the hell is going on?”

Stallings saw how frightened the girl was. All he could say was, “What did he give you?”

The young girl stared at him with her mouth open.

He raised his voice to a shout. “What did you just swallow? I saw you-don’t try and hide it.” He shoved Palmer back flat on the ground, only this time left his foot on the man’s chest.

The girl started to cry.

Stallings crouched down next to the bloody pharmaceutical rep and started to pat his front pockets, reaching in the last one and pulling out a baggie. He opened it and spilled the five pills into his open hand. Each of them appeared professionally made, and they were all a solid color.

Now the girl started to sob loudly. She was able to moan, “Who are you, and why are you doing this?”

Stallings realized his shirt covered his badge and gun. Still squatting next to Palmer, he reached in his pocket, and pulled out his ID so the girl could see the badge. All he said was, “JSO.”

The girl clutched her stomach and said, “Oh my God, are you going to arrest me?

Now Stallings took a moment. Palmer was quiet, lying flat on the ground trying to keep the blood flowing from his lip and nose to the minimum. Stallings said calmly to the girl, “I saw him give you something and you put it in your mouth. What was it?”

The girl pointed at the pills in the palm of his hand and said, “Just one of those Percocets. I’m sorry-I won’t do it again. Please don’t tell my parents.”

He looked down at the five commercially produced painkillers in his hand and then at the bloodied, whimpering pharmaceutical rep and quietly said to himself, “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”

Patty raced up. “John, what are you doing?”

Stallings took a moment to look at the bloody man, then at the very young girl, and decided he didn’t regret anything he’d done.