The Perfect Prey

Fifty

It was dawn, and Patty Levine felt herself dozing in a comfortable chair in the corner of the hotel room where they’d stashed Jason Ferrell for the night. It was Sergeant Zuni’s idea to keep track of the wily chemical engineer without booking him in case narcotics could use him as a snitch. It was her background in narcotics that gave her the idea, and it seemed reasonable last night. Patty had volunteered to take the first shift of watching him because she knew she wouldn’t sleep much anyway.

Listening to the lovesick chemical engineer talk about how he changed his whole life to help Marie Brison, including making his own Ecstasy with decreasing potency, had brought Patty’s own drug use into the light. She always had some excuse to keep using her regular regimen of Xanax, painkillers, and Ambien. For several years she’d used the excuse of being a female in a male-dominated profession as a way to keep taking the anxiety drug. But she knew she was more capable than most cops and more physical than most cops. Now she had to analyze why she should keep taking the Xanax.

The Ambien was a more obvious issue. She couldn’t sleep at night. The fact that she stayed awake the entire night while Jason Ferrell snored on the bed across the room showed that her insomnia was still going strong. Sure, she nodded off, but it was only for a few minutes.

The final leg of her pharmaceutical trinity was the various painkillers she’d been prescribed for numerous injuries and strains she had received while involved in competitive gymnastics. Now she wasn’t sure the scholarship to the University of Florida had been worth the years of discomfort. This seemed to be the easiest habit to kick of the three kinds of drugs she took. Today would be her test. She would tough out any pain she felt. It didn’t matter if her hip throbbed like a bass speaker at a rap concert or her back radiated pain all day. She would not pop a Vicodin or Percocet no matter how badly the pain affected her.

Her experience in police work taught her not to try to kick all three drugs at once. She’d focus on the pain pills first. Then deal with her anxiety and insomnia as her life started to adjust.

As close as Patty was to John Stallings and as serious as she was getting about Tony Mazzetti, she’d never told either of them anything about her drug use. She was pretty sure neither of them had any idea.

Jason stirred and sat up quickly in the bed. He was still in the clothes he’d been wearing when they found him. He stared at Patty for a moment, shook his head, and blinked his eyes. “Where am I, jail?”

Patty had to smile. “Do you remember anything about last night?”

“I know you’re a cop named Patty, even if you don’t look like it. And you work with a scary guy named Stallings. I may do X at night, but it clears out pretty quick.”

“You ever wonder if you’re wasting your talent as a chemical engineer?”

“You mean by finding ways of getting rid of the Maxwell House waste products? Because I think I helped at least one person by making the Ecstasy.”

Patty shook her head. “We’ve got two dead girls with Ecstasy in their systems. One of them overdosed on it, and her heart exploded in her chest.”

The color drained out of Jason’s face. He clutched his stomach and scooted to the edge of the bed, looking over at Patty in the chair. “You think it was my Ecstasy that killed her? I never meant for anything like that to happen. That’s why I was making such weak tablets.” He paused, gathered his thoughts, and took several deep breaths. “What can I do to help? I have the recipe on my computer.”

“I don’t know what good the recipe will do. What we really needed was who you sold it to. And not just first names and job descriptions. Besides, you could only remember three or four clients last night.”

“But I have a full list on my computer.”

That caught Patty’s attention. “You really are more lucid this morning. Where’s your computer?”

“I don’t have any idea.”

The phone startled John Stallings first thing in the morning. He’d already tossed and turned most of the night, worried about Patty at the hotel room with Jason Ferrell. Not that he didn’t think his partner could handle herself-she was tougher than any cop he knew. He just hated when someone got stuck on a shitty detail.

He fumbled with his cell phone as he glanced at the clock and saw that it was seven in the morning. He popped it open and mumbled, “Stallings.”

Yvonne Zuni said, “John, there’s a possible break in the case. Meet me down at the PMB as quick as you can. Come up to the third floor.”

Stallings sat up in bed trying to clear his mind. “The third floor? Where on the third floor?”

“Internal Affairs. Gary Lauer is being questioned there right now, and we might have an opportunity to break him on the Allie Marsh case.”

“What’s he at IA for?”

“Apparently he got drunk last night, said it was all the pressure he was under, then got into a big fight with his girlfriend. The neighbors called the cops, but he’d already left her apartment.” There was silence on the line for a moment. Sergeant Zuni added, “A neighbor found the girlfriend this morning with her wrists slashed. She’s at the medical examiner’s now.”

“You think Gary Lauer tried to hide her death as a suicide?”

“Whether he did or didn’t, this might be the time to question him. Because with the two dead spring break girls someone could’ve tried to hide a murder behind a suicide and an overdose.”

Instantly Stallings thought of the string of girls from Daytona and Panama City.

Tony Mazzetti knocked on the hotel room door three times, balancing Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a mixed dozen donuts in one hand. He was a little earlier than his scheduled eight o’clock arrival, but he didn’t know how well Patty was doing. On the few occasions he spent the whole night at her house she either tossed and turned or slept like a log. No one considered Jason Ferrell any kind of a threat, and Patty really knew how to take care of herself, so that wasn’t a concern. They’d already broken all kinds of official rules by holding the chemical engineer in a hotel overnight, but if he really was going to be of any use as a drug informant it’d be hard to keep it quiet that he’d spent the night in jail. This was an old trick, not officially sanctioned by the sheriff’s office or especially the state attorney’s office, but it was used on occasion not only to give someone a break but to take a shot at the big case cops always wanted to make. The guy had been too screwed up on God knows what for Mazzetti to get any straight answers out of him. Today he planned to ask him about his own case, the triple shooting near Market Street.

Patty had a bright smile on her face when she opened the door, and Mazzetti was surprised to see Jason Ferrell sitting at the cheap table in the corner of the hotel room. His eyes seemed clearer this morning, but he still had the disheveled appearance of an absent-minded professor or street person.

He resisted giving Patty a kiss on the cheek as he entered the hotel room but did make a show out of presenting her with the donuts and coffee. She accepted them with a nod that sent her pretty hair across her face.

Mazzetti said, “Anything new with your car thief here?”

Jason said, “I’m sorry I took your car. I guess I panicked.” He grabbed two donuts from the box and devoured one in a single bite. “When can I get back to see Marie? She doesn’t do well on her own.”

Mazzetti shook his head as he plopped in the chair across the table from Jason. “We’ve been cutting you a break so you could get a decent night’s sleep here, but you’re not free to go yet.”

“Why?” He looked at Patty with big puppy-dog eyes.

Mazzetti kept talking. “You got until five o’clock today to come up with something good. Someone had better go to jail based on information you provide or at five o’clock you get booked for making your Ecstasy.”

“But I thought you guys liked me. Patty and I bonded.”

“You’re not our fucking mascot. Make a case, or you’ll have a new permanent address.”

“I already told you guys I have the list of my clients on my laptop.”

Mazzetti opened his notepad he carried everywhere with him. “I’m much more interested in a bigger crime. One that happened very close to your love nest.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The triple shooting right across the street. You were there at Marie Brison’s house. I know because that was the first night you ran from me. You had to have seen something.”

“You mean that was real?”

Now he had Mazzetti’s attention. “You did see something. I knew it.”

“It was during a time when the X was still pretty strong, and I might’ve been using a homemade sleeping pill as well. I couldn’t tell you what day it was, and I thought I had dreamed it, but I did see someone shooting up the house across the street.” He slapped his forehead and added, “That’s why all the police were there afterward. Of course it had to be real.”

“Yes, it was all real. Three dope dealers are dead. I’ve got a mother and her two terrified daughters stashed at a hotel for safety. Now what exactly did you see?”

Jason stared off into space, his eyes not clearly focused on anything as he slowly and carefully said, “I cannot believe it was real. The way the girl with the red highlights in her hair stepped out of the front door with the gun in her hand. I thought I’d heard a few firecrackers, so I had looked out the window and I saw her step out and pull the trigger. She wasn’t aiming at anything. She held the gun and let it stitch the windows and one of the cars in the driveway.”

“Then what happened?”

“She sort of strolled back into the house. I think I might’ve dozed back off on the couch in the living room, and when I woke up I had assumed I dreamed the whole thing. I mean, I had seen the girl before. She lives there. Why would she shoot up her own house?”

Mazzetti wrote notes furiously as a lot of things started to make sense now. It was weird that this spaced-out druggie had been able to put all of the pieces of the puzzle into place for him.

Jason watched Mazzetti and said, “Does that help you at all, Detective?”

Mazzetti cut his eyes to Jason, then over to Patty sitting on the edge of the bed. “Think about what you just told me. Go over it in your head carefully. I want you to make sure this is exactly what you saw. Take your time.” Mazzetti knew how crucial this testimony would be. He also knew the slim chances of keeping an X-head like this lucid, let alone alive, until this case could go to trial in a year or more. He was glad Patty was here to witness the testimony, and he intended to get it on video later in the day. But first he wanted to make sure this airhead had it right and clear in his mind. Mazzetti was patient; all good homicide detectives were. He could wait for an hour while this guy sorted out what he had seen. But after about a minute and a half, once Mazzetti stood up again, he realized Jason Ferrell had dozed off with a donut’s powdered sugar trailing down his chin to his chest.

Mazzetti looked over at Patty. “Oh, he’ll make a bang-up witness.”

“Does what he says make any sense?”

“Perfect sense. The girl with the red highlights in her hair is one of the victim’s sisters. She was the only witness, and her statement has changed a couple of times.”

“You don’t think she shot her own brother, do you?”

“One thing homicide has taught me is never be surprised.” He stood and said, “Are you doing okay? Because I really need to grab Hoagie and haul ass over to the hotel where we put the mother and daughters from the shooting. I need to talk to the girl right now.”

Patty looked over at the snoozing Jason Ferrell. “I think I’ll be safe until someone else can come relieve me.”

This time Mazzetti did give her a kiss and darted out the door to take a shot at closing this homicide.