The Perfect Prey

Fifty-six

To John Stallings this is what police work really meant. They might’ve missed the killer, and Larry Kinard was loose on the street, but with the right people in the detective bureau they had accomplished a lot in a couple of hours. He listened to a patrol sergeant’s radio as they sat on the porch of Larry Kinard’s house. He could visualize the wide perimeter that had been set up to catch the fleeing suspect. A patrolman had been smart enough to question a bus driver coming back from downtown, and he said he’d picked up a man matching Kinard’s description an hour before and dropped him off downtown. It hadn’t been enough verifiable information to cancel the perimeter, but it had caused another dozen patrolman to flood downtown looking for the fugitive.

Stallings had roughed out a probable-cause affidavit on someone’s laptop computer, and Sergeant Zuni had assigned another detective to run it through the duty judge so they could search the house. The days of just tossing someone’s house were long over, and the procedures and details of search warrants and subpoenas had taken a firm hold in most large police departments in the country. Although Stallings was anxious to search the house, he was actually more concerned with the capture of Larry Kinard.

The girl the paramedics had taken said Kinard had given her Ecstasy and he was acting weird. Everyone seemed weird when they tried to stab you. She admitted to having sex with him at Neptune Beach and that they got involved in rough horseplay in the water. The horseplay had upset her, so she had left him at a park near Neptune Beach without clothes or keys. She’d really thought that’s why he had gotten upset and attacked her with a knife. Patty had done an outstanding job of keeping her calm and getting the pertinent information out of her. But now Stallings thought about the photo collage of blond girls and felt sick to his stomach at the idea that these girls could be murder victims.

He’d been very impressed with Yvonne Zuni’s grasp of command and how she’d organized the search for Kinard as well as getting a search warrant and pulling in Crime Scene. Now she was on her phone. She quickly looked at the porch where Stallings, Patty, and a uniformed sergeant sat on a wide bench and said, “Warrant signed. Stall, you direct Crime Scene and get this show on the road.”

After the preliminaries, which included a videotape of the premises, sketches of how the searches took place, and an evidence tech on a computer near the front door, Stallings and Patty went immediately to the collage. He pulled it off the wall and set it on the desk. He found Allie Marsh’s and Kathleen Harding’s photos. Stallings identified the two girls from Daytona. That left twenty more photos.

The crime scene techs found a box of Durex condoms, which they took into evidence. Patty discovered the small box of odd pieces of jewelry. While Stallings looked over her shoulder, she turned and said, “Trophies.”

“What’s that?”

“These are trophies. Something from each of his victims.”

“How do you know?”

“It seems clear to me. Right here under the photographs, I can picture him digging through this box, recalling each of his victims.

“How many pieces are there?”

Patty counted slowly and said, “Thirteen pieces.”

They were single earrings, belly-button rings, and a nose stud, as well as rings and bracelets. Stallings leaned in closer, feeling as if he might vomit, praying to God he didn’t find any of Jeanie’s jewelry in the box. He thought hard about his daughter’s choices in jewelry, and nothing in the box seemed familiar, but it didn’t make him rest easy. This guy was a monster and would have no defense other than insanity. And he might pull it off. He could convince a jury he’d been abused as a kid or neglected or had some seen traumatic event that pushed him to this unthinkable violence. There’d be legal motions, which would drag on for years. Maybe he’d even end up at Raiford with the last serial killer Stallings had caught, William Dremmel. He’d acted so crazy that the case barely even made it to court. Stallings had shown great restraint and captured the man who’d drugged girls until they slipped into death. He had wanted to kill the bastard, but in deference to Patty’s efforts to reform him he’d risked his own life to capture the killer alive. But that effort had been mooted by the lenient treatment Dremmel had received in the media and court. Much of it was based on Dremmel’s childhood abuse by his mother. But the result had still been Dremmel skating on the most serious punishment after taking the lives of several girls and shattering the lives of their families. Stallings had known one of the girls and her family.

Stallings thought of something even more disturbing. What if Kinard cooperated and traded information about the victims to avoid the death penalty? It was a common enough tactic, and sometimes parents of missing children welcomed the closure. The media fed on it, and often that media attention only bolstered the killers. The whole concept made Stallings ill.

Of course all of that nonsense was contingent on catching him.

Patty Levine stretched in her bed, turned, and checked her alarm clock. It was ten o’clock in the morning. She’d slept five hours after being awake almost forty. But she had slept without the aid of any pharmaceutical drug even if it was on the edge of extreme exhaustion. She checked in at the office, and nothing was new on the search for Larry Kinard. She took a few minutes to clean her condo, grab a decent breakfast, and reconnect with her cat, Cornelia.

An eleven o’clock news teaser for the noon broadcast said, “Jacksonville police search for possible killer.” Patty knew things were not going well if the sheriff’s office had gone to the media for help. Then a photo of Larry Kinard provided by the Wildside popped on the screen.

Patty noted they didn’t use a name. She and Stallings had learned during their investigation, which had lasted much of the night, that Larry Kinard was a fictitious name, and everything he’d given the bar except his address and cell phone number were from various other people both living and dead. Somehow Stallings had even gotten a security rep at the cell phone company to go through some records, but there were more than two hundred different numbers called from Kinard’s phone, and it would take some time to figure out where he was hiding and whom he’d contacted. Kinard had left the cell phone in his haste to escape, so they couldn’t try and triangulate where he was from the cell phone or see whom he called after he fled. All the easiest ways to find fugitives were out.

As Patty got into her county car, Stallings called her and said to meet him at the Wildside. They had a lead.

It didn’t take long for her to shoot across the river and rumble into the empty lot of the Wildside dance club. Stallings was out front with the manager who’d helped them before and a young man with long greasy hair, whom she didn’t know.

As she approached she heard the young man say to Stallings, “No lie, man. I helped him push a Mazda into the water at a park east of the river. Then I gave him a ride.”

Stallings gave the young man a hard look and said, “Where’d you give him a ride to?”

“Over west of the river. On Cleveland Street past Edgewood. You know, where there’s a mix of houses and crappy strip malls.”

“You didn’t know this guy at all?”

The kid shook his head and said, “I saw him working here the other night. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known anything about him. I wasn’t sure what to do-that’s why I came by here. I swear I would’ve called the cops.”

The manager laughed. “He tried to shake me down for cash to keep the club’s name out of the news.”

Stallings had a half grin when he said to the kid, “And you helped this guy push a car into the river and gave him a ride for no reason?”

The kid said, “Just a good Samaritan.”

Stallings looked at Patty, and she knew, as any good partner would, that he was asking her what she thought without saying a word. She said, “He’s full of shit. He knows we’re looking for this guy as a suspect in a murder and he’s trying to shake money out of the bar. I say we charge him as an accessory.” She contained her smile, but it had the effect she wanted. The young man started to talk fast with details they could use.

At least now they had a decent lead.

Larry Kinard didn’t have time to feel sluggish. He only got a few hours’ sleep, but now he was up and around in his neat bedroom at his sister’s house, figuring out what he could take with him and what he’d have to leave. His sister had no connection to him on paper. He’d told her he was avoiding a mortgage fraud charge and that’s why he had a new name and Social Security number. She’d gone along with the story for more than three years now. For his part, he’d stuck by her through a number of dicey relationships and once had to knock a man unconscious in the living room after he’d spanked Kinard’s nephew.

As he hurried through the living room his sister said, “What’s going on? Are you going to have to leave again?”

“Yeah, there’s not enough work to keep me going here. But I’ll still come by and see you guys, and I should be able to send you money every month too.”

She followed him into the kitchen. “But I need a good male role model for Justin.”

He looked at her and thought about his near-silent nephew. Briefly he considered taking them with him, but he could never share a house with them, at least not during spring break.

His sister turned and silently stalked back into the living room, plopping down on the couch to watch TV. She got like this sometimes. These feelings of abandonment had never left her after their parents had divorced. They had seen their father once in almost twenty years. The parade of men in and out of her bed had not helped the situation. Kinard was the one constant in her life besides Justin.

Then he heard his sister say, “Oh my God.”

He hurried out the living room and saw she was staring at the TV. It only took a second for him to notice his employee photograph from the Wildside was on the screen, and he knew things were going bad fast.