The Perfect Woman (17 page)

Handcuffs bit into Ernie’s wrists in the front seat of the county-issued Impala. Stallings wanted to be sure they were in a secluded, quiet place. This time of day Brentwood Park was perfect for an impromptu interview. He turned to face the younger man.

“Ernie, why’d you run?”

The man’s eyes flicked back and forth as sweat beaded on his forehead. His greasy brown hair dipped between his eyes.

Stallings said, “I just want to talk. I don’t care if you’re holding. I need help on a case, and I want to know why you ran.”

After a few seconds he said, “I’m holding.”

“What are you holding?”

“Pills.”

“What kind?”

The young man shrugged and said, “Every kind.”

“Where?”

“My shoe, my pockets, a pouch under my shirt.” He leaned back and wiggled his left foot. “Only this shoe.”

Stallings bent down, slipped off the young man’s smelly Top-Sider, and retrieved a plastic bag with sixty dark blue pills. He cut his eyes up to Ernie.

“Ambien.”

Stallings reached carefully into the young man’s front pockets and pulled out two more bags.

Ernie said, “Oxy and assorted painkillers like Percocets and Vicodin.”

Stallings shook his head, then patted Ernie’s midsection until he felt the bag of pills. He reached under the shirt and pulled out the bag with odd-looking and unevenly colored pills. “Okay Ernie, what the fuck are these?”

“Those are all combinations. I know a fella who can melt shit and recast it. Most of it is Oxy with Ambien mixed in. The kids think they’re getting Oxy, but Ambien is a lot cheaper, and once they fall asleep they don’t care. When they wake up they only remember the short high they had first.” He shrugged again. “Just good capitalistic business.”

Without saying a word Stallings opened the car door, took the pills, and dumped them all down a storm drain on the curb. When he came back to the car, he said, “There, you satisfied I’m not trying to make a cheap drug case?”

The young man visibly relaxed.

“Do a lot of dealers mix the two drugs like you?”

“Every single pharmaceutical dealer in the city does it.”

Then it made more sense to Stallings. Trina had been doing the same thing. The Bag Man had tried to drug her but she had built up a half-assed resistance from using this shitty, homemade Oxy-Ambien. The knife wounds were an emergency measure.

Then Ernie said, “I know the girl in the photograph.”

“You saw the photo when Sallie passed it around?”

He nodded.

“Know the girl’s name?”

“Lee Ann.”

“Lee Ann Moffitt?”

“I try not to use last names.”

“How’d you know her?”

He hesitated, then finally said, “She hung out with us sometimes. Nice girl. I think she worked at a copy place.”

“You know if she had any boyfriends?”

The young man shook his head.

“She buy from anyone else?”

“Everyone does, that’s why it’s such a tough business.”

“It’s no picnic being a consumer either.” He hoped Ernie understood his meaning.

The drug dealer snapped his fingers. “She did mention a guy she was close with who supplied her. I even saw him once. He picked her up from a little party.”

“What’d he look like? What’d he drive? You remember a name?”

Ernie shook his head. “It’s fuzzy in here.” He tapped his temple. “I meet a lot of people and sometimes use my own stuff to keep mellow.”

Stallings quizzed him a while longer until he realized he wouldn’t get anywhere. The young man was cooperating as best he could. He gave the young drug dealer his cell phone number with the instructions to start looking for this mystery dealer and to call him if he found him.

Stallings felt that he might be getting closer as he started questioning the enterprising young drug dealer about anyone else who might be buying a lot of Oxy.

Tony Mazzetti had tagged along with Patty Levine to the Home Depot across I-95 near the PMB. He liked the way she thought and made decisions, both as a person and a cop. She’d tracked down the info on the report from the UF geologist, contacted the manufacturer, and discovered the sole distributor was the largest home-improvement chain in the country. That wouldn’t narrow down things much, but it was a start. Now she just wanted to see how Home Depot maintained their inventory and if tracking the purchasers would be feasible.

Mazzetti liked how she had the huge manager of the store crammed in his minuscule office behind kitchen and bath remodeling going over possible lines of investigation while not scaring the guy into thinking she was a bully. This was the mark of a good cop. He realized he often came off as a bully even when he was trying to be pleasant.

Patty said, “You have to understand, Larry, that this is confidential and no one can know why we’re looking at this line of sand.”

He shook his massive bald head. His drawl was more central Georgia than Florida. It’d taken almost twenty years, but Mazzetti was finally getting his accents and drawls down here straight.

Larry, the manager, said, “Ma’am, I can’t think of nothin’ as important as catching this Bag Man. We’ll help all we can and I won’t say a word, I swear.”

Patty flashed him that perfect smile and squeezed his arm to let him know he was part of the team. It was important to make people feel like they are working
with
the police instead of working
for
the police. Mazzetti didn’t know if this guy cared about the investigation that much, but he wasn’t about to let a little hottie like Patty be disappointed. The manager scrambled to find a sheet of paper so even the stupid cops could figure out how the process worked.

“Each store now,” he started in a voice too high for his frame, “gets in a shipment of ten to fifty bags depending on how many the store sold in the previous month.”

Mazzetti marveled at how much effort the man put into his impromptu lecture on the finer points of decorative sand distribution. He wished he had that kind of power over people, where they helped for reasons other than necessity. He just hoped avenues of investigation like this were kept quiet so the investigation could proceed unhindered.

He listened to more details about buying with credit cards or cash and how Patty could find out how many bags were sold and when. She really wanted to know who bought the sand.

“Only way to tell is if they used a credit card. Even then it’d take a good long while,” said the manager. The he added, “Could be talking about a lot of people if we count all the stores in the area and go back a few months.”

Mazzetti started trying to figure an answer for that. This was a piece of the puzzle that might yet fall into place.

John Stallings had never been comfortable in gatherings like this. Even though the concept of dinner meetings made sense, he didn’t like missing meals with his family. But a squad dinner at the Law and Order Pub, less than a mile from the PMB, was a tradition most units kept, even if it was just the occasional meal to boost morale.

Tonight nine detectives and no management were spread along a long table in the rear of the pub that was generally frequented by cops. Right now the bar held only identified Sheriff’s Office personnel so they could speak somewhat freely as each detective caught everyone else up to date on their aspect of the serial killer investigation.

Patty had explained how they might be able to track the purchasers of the sand found on two of the victims. She’d spent the afternoon at a Home Depot, and now, with her natural intelligence and inquisitiveness, she sounded like an expert on how products moved through the giant retailer.

Mazzetti looked down the table from his position at the end and said, “The question now is whether this is a good use of resources.”

Stallings considered the reasonable question as all the other detectives looked to assess the pros and cons as well.

Luis Martinez, always one to move forward, shook his head. “Hell, no, we need to be banging our snitches’ heads. Someone has seen something and is talking about it.”

Mazzetti said, “That’s a good point, Luis, and that’s why we’ll be offering a reward of fifty grand for info starting tonight.”

Someone down the table whistled.

“This Home Depot lead is just another route.” He was about to say something else when he noticed someone standing by the bathroom a few feet from the other end of the table. He recognized him. “Hey, Sarge, what’s up?”

The big man in a blue plaid shirt gave a quick wave and said, “Didn’t mean to interrupt. I was gonna say hey to Stall.”

Stallings smiled at his friend Rick Ellis’s reluctance to approach the table. He spoke up and said, “Just a dinner meeting, Rick.”

“I know y’all are busy so I’ll move along. You guys gotta catch this asshole before the whole city gets spooked.”

Mazzetti said, “I’m working on it.”

Stallings wanted to correct him and say “we” were working on it but that was just Mazzetti. As much as he hated to admit it, the guy had run a decent case and kept everyone on task.

Mazzetti told everyone about Trina Ester working at the Wendy’s, making the whole lead sound like something he developed, not that Stallings had seen her there.

Luis Martinez asked, “Why didn’t they report her as missing?”

Mazzetti said, “Wendy’s isn’t like the S.O. The manager just thought she quit and didn’t tell him. Happens more than half the time.”

Martinez said, “So she didn’t leave with anyone Saturday?”

“Nope. I even talked to a couple of the counter people who worked the same shift. She ate there and checked out around nine. No fanfare, just, ‘good-bye, I’ll see you tomorrow.’”

They paused in their meeting as the waiter brought over a tray of assorted hamburgers, sandwiches, sodas, and chips. Unlike the old days before Stallings had become a cop, there wasn’t much drinking on duty anymore. He knew that he was headed back out onto the streets for a few hours after dinner and he didn’t need the guilt or effects of a couple of beers.

He was pleased to see everyone else agreed. As he thought about that and looked down the table at Patty, he realized he’d never seen her drink.

That was a dedicated cop.

William Dremmel sat in his silent Nissan Quest with the driver’s window down and the cool Atlantic breeze pushing the majority of bugs right past him. He was only a block from Stacey Hines’s little apartment, which was attached to a larger, single-family house. The space that normally held her Escort was empty, and he was waiting for her to show. His plan this time was a little more direct. Grab her and take off. He had a variation of chloroform, which he had made himself and tested first on Mr. Whiskers IV, then on his mother. Neither knew what had happened and awoke an hour later. The cat looked a little dazed, and his mom complained of a headache until the next day, but he knew the stuff worked.

The rear of the van was empty except for a moving blanket and some heavy nylon rope, both items he could explain to any cop who might stop him. The tiny bottle of chloroform looked like a commercial nasal spray, which made it easy to spritz onto the washcloth he had to go over Stacey’s lovely, delicate face. He’d prefer to talk to her for a while and interact, but his patience was wearing thin. He couldn’t even concentrate on simple tasks anymore because she had filled up so much of his head.

Another lesson he’d learned recently had taught him to have a knife handy. His wasn’t a large suspicious knife, just a folding Gerber with a sharp, serrated edge. He even knew the target now if he ever had to do it again: center chest and neck. Somehow he didn’t have the impression that Stacey would ever have the bad manners to act like Trina did before he was forced to deal with her. But he was prepared and flexible. That was the key to success in any endeavor.

He checked his watch and saw it was just after eight with no sign of her. She wasn’t at the Fountain of Youth either. A pang of jealousy, like any boyfriend might have, popped up in him as he wondered what she might be doing. Did she have another man? Then a much worse thought had hit him—what if she had been lonely and moved back to Ohio?

Now his main urge was to enter her apartment through the back where no one would see him and see what was left around. He had to know if she had moved. He didn’t think she could do it so quickly, but maybe he didn’t know her like he thought he did. He knew all about her. Her checking account back in Ohio, her power consumption, her rent, and even the grocery store she shopped at, but maybe, just maybe, he didn’t know her that well.

As he considered hopping out of the van and easing into her apartment he noticed some movement in his rearview mirror. He’d been so preoccupied with what Stacey could be doing that he’d gone soft on being aware of his surroundings. That was another key to avoiding detection. No one should be able to tell the cops they saw his van or give a description.

Now he saw that an elderly man was standing almost directly behind his van with a pipsqueak dog on a leash. Dremmel froze and waited to see what the man’s movements would be. From the streetlight all he could make out was the stoop of age, a light jacket like old men used to play shuffleboard, a cane, and the leash. From his side mirror he saw the dog sniffing near the light pole directly behind his van. The dog had a tiny shirt that covered its chest and two front legs and its movements seemed jittery like all miniature dogs’.

Dremmel swallowed and consciously held still while the man lingered behind the van. He knew the old man had spotted him and wondered why he was just sitting there. Hell, old people like that, with nothing to do but walk their dogs, might even write down his tag, then he’d have to forget about Stacey. Nothing could happen to her if there was a record of his presence in her neighborhood.

Give up on Stacey? Not after all he had been through. He reached into his front pocket and felt the weight of his new Gerber knife. He pulled it out and used his thumb to pop open the vicious blade as his eyes cut back up to the mirror and saw the old man in the same spot.

He knew what he had to do.