The Perfect Scream

TEN

Dennis Switeck hated working Saturdays in the fall. One of his true passions in life was college football, and living in Florida gave him a firsthand look at three of the perpetually best teams in the country. In the last twenty-five years, the University of Florida, Florida State, or the University of Miami had been in the national championship game nineteen times. That was astounding. He loved the fact that people from Texas talked about what a football state Texas was and how they bragged about it constantly. Whereas Florida didn’t have TV shows made about high school football or have to shout to the world how it was a great football state, but went on to dominate college football year in and year out.

Dennis’s job as an assistant medical examiner in Duval County meant that he had to work every third Saturday. He could still catch most of the games on the TV at the office, but it wasn’t the same as partying with his buddies at one of the sports bars or in someone’s party room. Today had been slow football-wise because everyone was gearing up for the annual Florida-Florida State game next Saturday, the weekend after Thanksgiving. It was almost like a state holiday when the two titans of college football met. Even though Dennis had gone to Michigan, he still got fired up for the rivalry game. It wasn’t Michigan-Ohio State, and Floridians would never understand the intensity of that rivalry on every level, academic as well as sports wise. But it was still a great game and a fun weekend. That’s why he had switched with Lisa Kurtz, who didn’t give a shit about college football. Why would a Syracuse graduate care about sports anyway? She was happy to change weekends because she had some big date with the hotshot homicide guy from JSO.

Dennis got a call about 1:30 from a detective saying he was on the scene of what appeared to be an accidental overdose at one of the fraternity apartment houses near the University of North Florida. Now, two hours later, he was about to do the autopsy on the young man who’d been found in his own bed. He was anxious to get started and cleaned up so he could head out to catch the night games, but the detective on the case, Luis Martinez, had been in the bathroom for what seemed like half an hour.

Finally the short, intense detective came into the procedure room, clapped his hands, and said, “Okay, Dennis, let’s get this show on the road.”

Dennis had to chuckle because Martinez was one of the funniest detectives he knew. But he still had a lot of questions. Martinez explained that the young man’s body had been found in the late morning when one of his fraternity brothers had had to enter his apartment to get the key to their clubhouse. It wasn’t unusual for the young man to sleep late, but when they hadn’t been able to find the key they’d had to try and wake him up.

Dennis said, “You got the notes I needed?”

Martinez handed him a clipboard that started with the decedent’s name, Connor Tate.

Martinez said, “My guess is a mixture of dope and alcohol. We didn’t rush through the scene and we bagged his clothes and the blanket he was lying on. It didn’t appear that anyone else had been in the apartment. None of his buddies saw him last night. He’s a big drinker and is not opposed to using all kinds of pharmaceuticals. Plus his fucking apartment reeked of weed. I mean like every single crevice and carpet fiber smelled like pot.”

Dennis shrugged his shoulders and said, “None of them listen to the public service announcements. We must get ten of these a year from the different universities.” He had already figured out what he would say in the official report even before he started his circular saw and cut the top of Connor Tate’s skull off.

John Stallings was frustrated the week flew by so quickly. A workweek with a holiday in it threw off his schedule. The occasional Monday holiday like Labor Day or Presidents Day didn’t bother him too much, but Thanksgiving, falling in the middle of the week and using up both a Thursday and Friday, put a cramp in his investigations. It also threw off any support he hoped to get. Analysts took the whole week off; even Patty was leaving soon and wouldn’t be back until Monday.

Stallings had kept himself busy by interviewing a dozen different frat boys who were all friends of Zach Halston. Patty had focused more on other aspects of finding the missing young man. She spent a lot of time with the computer techs going through his computer and working with the analysts scouring phone records. Stallings didn’t mind because he showed the photograph he’d found of Jeanie and Zach to everyone he talked to. It made it easier to hide what he was really doing from Patty. Some of the fraternity boys vaguely remembered Jeanie, but no one recalled her name. Stallings could feel the pressure building inside him to find Zach Halston and get some answers.

He heard from one of the brothers about the death of Connor Tate. Stallings checked with Luis Martinez, who’d been assigned the unattended death. Martinez was satisfied it was just a simple overdose. Everything pointed in that direction. Connor had a history of recreational drug use, was a heavy drinker, and wasn’t afraid to mix his pharmaceuticals. The autopsy had shown that he was healthy and suffered no trauma. The medical examiner’s office was still waiting on the toxicology reports, but Martinez had said there were pills in the apartment, half-empty bottles of alcohol everywhere, and the apartment reeked of pot. It sounded like the time Stallings had visited.

The Tau Upsilon fraternity overall didn’t seem like a bad bunch of kids; most were focused business majors and some of the alumni had decent jobs. The gaudy, multicolor tattoos on the inside of their right ankles were the only thing they all had in common. All the tattoos were identical and showed the fraternity Greek letters set in palm trees in the back of a red pickup truck. Stallings liked the sense of Florida and the boys’ sense of humor.

But here it was the day before Thanksgiving and he was no closer to finding Zach Halston than he had been last week. He’d made a dozen copies of the photograph of Zach and Jeanie and given them to a couple of the boys. He’d been very specific about them only showing it to other fraternity brothers and only telling him of the results. No one else.

Stallings started to sketch out some plans to talk to fraternity brothers outside the area when Patty walked up to his desk.

She had a bright smile when she said, “Whatcha working on?”

“Figuring out who we might need to talk to next week. What about you?”

“I used my feminine wiles to get the computer guys to rush the review of Zach Halston’s computer.” She plunked down a pile of paper on his desk. “List of what appears to be his customers. The list of all the fraternity brothers. Some unknown telephone numbers that look like they might be associated with his partners in the pot business and a half a dozen credit card numbers that he and other brothers were using to buy stuff online. All the cards are under other people’s names and the two people I checked with didn’t know that they had credit cards under their name. So it looks like Mr. Halston, in addition to being a college student, is a pot dealer, identity thief, and probably at the top of many people’s hit lists.”

Stallings patted the paper and said, “Does it bother you to go outside of guidelines to have some computer nerd rush your request?”

“You scare people, I tease people. We each have our skills, and as long as we don’t abuse them, it’s no problem. For instance, you haven’t punched anyone in front of me for several weeks. I think you’re using your scary skills reasonably. I made no promises to any of the computer nerds, but I’ll admit I unbuttoned my shirt one button and leaned in while I was talking to them. If that makes me a bad cop then I’m guilty.”

Stallings let out a laugh and said, “You’re not a good cop, you’re great cop, and don’t forget it.”

“Does that mean you won’t think less of me if I cut out early this afternoon and head down to my parents’ house?”

“That where you’re having Thanksgiving dinner?”

“Yep, what about you?”

“I signed on for the whole deal tomorrow afternoon at my mom’s house. It’s supposed to be my dad, my kids, and Maria. My mom says my sister may even make a guest appearance, which would make it the first time we were all in the same room together in more than twenty years.”

“It was nice seeing you and Maria out last Friday night.”

“There wasn’t much to it, I’m afraid. But I’m working on it.” Stallings paused and smiled and said, “Your date looked like a nice young man.”

“You think anyone that isn’t Tony Mazzetti is the perfect match for me.”

Stallings started to argue the point, then held up his hands. “I’m just saying, Ken seemed very nice.”

“I thought about asking him to my parents’ for Thanksgiving dinner, but I didn’t want to scare him off. I hope to hook this fish more securely before I decide to reel him in.”

Stallings looked up and said, “Enjoy your time off and we’ll crank up again on Monday.”

Patty gave him a dazzling smile and a quick wave and was on her way.

Tony Mazzetti returned Patty’s wave as she hustled out the door. All morning he’d been hoping she might sit down and chat with him at his desk. He didn’t need much, just a quick whiff of her perfume or an up-close look at that beautiful smile. He knew they weren’t getting back together, but he wished she’d spend more time with him in the office.

His cell phone rang as he watched Patty disappear out the door. He dug the phone out of his pocket and whipped it open to see Lisa Kurtz’s office number on it. He felt guilty not answering it. It had nothing to do with how he felt about Patty. He just couldn’t face the pretty Syracuse grad explaining why she was the most fascinating and intelligent woman in the world.

She may not have been all that bad. Mazzetti had to recognize he liked being the center of attention himself and it may be that she was just too close a reflection of himself. Regardless, he had no intention of spending his Thanksgiving with her, nor did he really want to explain to her why he wouldn’t be. The easiest solution seemed to be to avoid her at all costs.

The medical examiner and the homicide squad worked hand-in-hand, and she would know he wasn’t too busy right now. Just the thought of the tall, red-haired assistant medical examiner surprising him in the office caused him to gather up his stuff and scurry for the door right after Patty.

Lynn gripped the Buck knife with the blade facing away from her hand. She swept past her target and then drove it in with a hammer fist. She did it two more times and watched the holes open. She stepped back switched grips, plunging the knife three times quickly into the center mass of her target. She stepped back, breathing heavy, watching the sand drip out of the large burlap bag she had strung up in a tree behind her duplex. She had studied knife fighting through YouTube videos and two books she checked out from the library. She realized she wasn’t big enough to carry a lot of power behind her strikes so she had to focus on targets. The only target everyone agreed on was a victim’s throat. She could slash it or gouge it and cause enough trauma to kill the victim.

The first few days she had practiced so hard with a knife that her hand had bled in several places. Lately she had started to realize how tough she was. A few scratches or blisters on her hand weren’t going to keep her from completing her mission. When she’d first started dealing out her own kind of justice, she’d been a mild-mannered bookkeeper no one took seriously. But she had proven herself to be dangerous and, over the course of her mission, grown confident and efficient. If she had regretted any of her actions, that was behind her now. She looked forward to dealing with her next obstacle. It made her feel like she mattered. She wasn’t a mousy coed. She was in charge. She was in charge of life and death. Justice had failed her and her family, and it made her feel sort of like a superhero to be handling matters herself.

Her next plan was more complicated than the others. It involved waiting for one of the creeps near his parents’ house in Orlando. College kids always headed home for Thanksgiving dinner. That was a no-brainer. She also knew none of these fraternity assholes could resist going to a bar at night. That’s where she’d make her move. By doing it in Orlando she added one more jurisdiction that wouldn’t be able to figure out why a nice young man had been killed for no apparent reason.

She closed her sharp Buck knife and took one more look at the sad and ripped burlap bag in front of her. This was a skill that could last for her whole life.

John Stallings had a list of nine phone numbers in the Jacksonville area from Zach Halston’s computer. Usually Patty handled jobs like this. It wasn’t that he was anti-technology or unable to figure out how to track down information, but everyone recognized Stallings’s strength lay in talking to people. And that was the strength he was going to use right now. He thought about what Patty had said earlier. She really could get help from people in the building who barely acknowledged his existence. So now he swallowed hard and thought about Jeanie as he approached one of the squad analysts. She was the last analyst on duty before the Thanksgiving break. Alice, the analyst, had made it clear to Stallings on several occasions that she’d like to take him out for dinner and possibly other things whenever he felt he was past the breakup of his marriage. It didn’t matter how many times he explained to Alice that he was only separated and hoping to reconcile with Maria, she still probed and questioned him about when they might meet after work.

Stallings approached her with a single sheet of paper in his hand. He had handwritten the nine different phone numbers, four with 904 area codes, two with 386 area codes, and two more with 850 area codes. All the numbers were either in Central or North Florida and they had all been called by Zach Halston within five days of his disappearance. The phone records that Patty had retrieved on his cell phone had not shown any calls since the last day anyone had seen him almost three weeks before.

Before he had even reached her workstation, Alice glanced up and a smile spread across her pretty face. She brushed her bleach-blond hair out of her eyes and turned to meet Stallings, who slipped into the chair on the other side of her desk.

Alice said, “Does this mean you’ve finally come to your senses?”

Normally, at this point, Stallings would set her absolutely straight. Instead, he tried to work it, handing her the sheet of paper and saying, “I’m sorry, Alice. I’ve just got too much going on right now to think about my private life.”

“Even with the long weekend coming up?” She winked at him. Alice was in her mid-thirties and very attractive. She was not known as a flirt around the sheriff’s office and Stallings couldn’t understand why she was fixated on him.

“Especially with the long weekend coming up. I need to get a fix on these numbers as soon as possible. Any ideas?” He leaned in and gave her the best smile he could come up with. He had to think about Charlie and him kicking the soccer ball and Lauren laughing at one of his stupid jokes.

Alice looked at the numbers and said, “Wait right there and I’ll run these through our intelligence database and see if it ever came up in any other investigations. Otherwise we’ll have to get a subpoena from the state attorney to figure out who owns the phones.” She didn’t wait for a reply; instead she used her mouse to click through a few screens on her computer and then typed furiously for about thirty seconds. Then she looked back up at Stallings, making sure her eyes met his. “One of these numbers in the 386 area code came up in a narcotics case earlier in the year.”

“Can you see what it was about and who owns the number?”

After a minute of typing and reading, Alice said, “Looks like it’s a number from northwestern Volusia County. All it says here is that it belongs to a J. L. Winter, who was supplying pot to a couple of low-level dealers here in Jacksonville.”

“That’s it!” Stallings didn’t mean to shout, but it came out a little too loud. His intuition told him this was the guy supplying Zach Halston with the pot he, in turn, supplied to the youth of Jacksonville. He was so happy he wanted to jump up and kiss Alice, but the look on her face told him she might not let it stop at that. He understood what Patty was talking about. It was fun to use every possible skill to get the job done. He stood and said, “Alice, you’re a lifesaver.” Because he didn’t feel right about leading anyone on, he said, “I couldn’t do my job without you.”

Now he had a lead.