The Perfect Scream

THREE

John Stallings was still annoyed at his assignment finding the wayward fraternity nerd. As far as he was concerned Zach Halston was a spoiled rich kid whose friends couldn’t keep their yaps shut. They had given up his secret apartment off campus with hardly any argument at all. Now that Patty had sweet-talked the key out of the manager, Stallings thought the boy was just trying to keep a low profile and stay off his parents’ radar for some reason. Patty and he had jointly decided to come here before going by the fraternity house again. Their first visit to the Tau Upsilon house had been a bust except they had discovered most of the brothers were over at the hotel on the beach. One of the brothers who stayed at the house, a young man named Connor Tate, was supposed to be close to the missing Zach Halston. They had a few questions for Connor.

Stallings glanced around at the tables and kitchen counter and immediately picked up signs of relatively serious marijuana use and sales. Small plastic Baggies were stacked in one corner next to a scale and ashtrays were filled with half-smoked roaches.

Patty said, “This keeps getting better and better. This halfwit must be stoned every hour he’s awake and it looks like he sells fifty bags a day. That must be how he affords this place off campus and he doesn’t have to answer any of Mom or Dad’s questions. Too lazy to work, too stoned to be bored. This boy is a real credit to society.”

Stallings let out a snort of laughter, but that was it. This was not a good use of his time. A shiftless pothead who hasn’t checked in with his parents. Fucking great.

Patty said, “Jackpot,” as she pulled a Toshiba laptop from under a pile of Playboy magazines.

Stallings recognized the key to many missing young people’s whereabouts lay in their personal computers. The odd email or Facebook entry had led them to more runaways than all the phone tips to a hotline combined. Technically, at twenty-one, Zach Halston wasn’t a runaway. He was classified as a missing person, and if his parents hadn’t been educated and influential, Stallings doubted anyone at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office would have told him to look for the kid. In fact, Stallings was thinking about turning the laptop over to narcotics when Patty had gotten everything she needed, since he figured it held the names of the kids’ customers. But that undermined the whole concept of a warrantless search to find a missing person.

Patty started to rustle through the kitchen drawers as Stallings glanced up at a long hallway filled with cheaply framed photographs on the wall. He flicked on the overhead light and slowly started strolling down the hallway. Most of the photos were of Zach with his drunken frat brothers at wild parties and in bars. They were more than a few bongs and other drug paraphernalia prominently displayed. Stallings started understanding the concept of a second, secret apartment more clearly.

There were a number of photographs with young women posing in different states of drunkenness. He briefly thought about trying to talk to some of the girls but figured it would take more time to identify them than it would to actually locate the missing frat brother.

Near the end of the hallway, Stallings was about to turn and join Patty when one photo of Zach Halston with his arm around a young woman caught his eye. He stepped to one side so the light would fall on it. He reached into his breast pocket and quickly yanked out his cheap, cheater reading glasses he’d been forced to use over the past year. He stared at the photo and every detail, slowly reaching up with a trembling hand and pulling the four-by-six photograph off the wall. He fumbled with the frame, roughly pulling the back off it so he could look at the photograph without any distortion from cheap glass.

He stared until he realized he was certain of what he was looking at.

The girl in the photo was his missing daughter, Jeanie.