The Perfect Woman (19 page)

John Stallings steadied himself as Tony Mazzetti pushed his Crown Vic around a corner too hard. He wasn’t used to sitting in the backseat of a speeding police car, but there was no time to argue once they had the tip. The old lady had too many details for them not to take her seriously. She said the man lived alone with a cat, acted oddly, and she saw him usher a young girl she described as “petite” into the house a couple of hours earlier. She had also seen him with a small woman Saturday night, the night Trina Ester said good-bye to her coworkers for the last time.

Mazzetti had moved quickly and been decisive. Patty and Stallings jumped into the car with Mazzetti. Luis Martinez and Christina Hogrebe were in a county Crown Vic somewhere behind them.

Stallings’s pulse had cranked up the moment he realized the lady might have a real tip and not the usual stuff that rolled across his desk during a case like this. Now with some time to think about stopping this creep he felt the rush of exhilaration he had as a rookie.

Mazzetti’s phone rang, and Stallings caught his side of the conversation. The homicide detective’s clipped voice saying, “Yeah, yeah, got it. No shit? Got it.” Then he slammed the small phone shut.

Stallings couldn’t wait. “What’d we got?”

“The guy was at the community college, which puts him near at least one victim, the Tawny Wallace chick.” He looked over his shoulder at Stallings. “No arrests, but he’s been questioned for loitering near a school. Could be our guy.”

Stallings nodded, “Could be.”

Patty remained silent up in the front passenger seat. Stallings had detected a strained vibe between her and Mazzetti earlier in the day but didn’t want to stir anything up, so he decided to wait to ask her if everything was all right.

The handheld radio on the front seat crackled as Luis Martinez reached out for Mazzetti.

Mazzetti snatched up the radio and called out a little loudly, “Stay off the radio. Call me on the phone.” The call was short, then Mazzetti tossed the phone on the seat.

“Luis thinks we need some uniformed cops. I’m trying to keep the media out of this by staying off the radio and not involving everyone and his brother.”

Stallings said, “I could call up some uniform help on the phone quietly.”

“Who?”

“Ellis and his traffic guys.”

“That’s perfect, Stall. He’s a good guy and will keep his yap shut.”

Stallings looked up Ellis on his contact list and was talking to him a few seconds later. “Rick, you said you could help if we needed something.”

“You bet.”

“We’re headed over to the seven hundred block of Forrest Street, you close by?”

“The Forrest down south or off the Bridge?”

“Down south.”

“See you in ten minutes on the next block.”

“I’m with Mazzetti in his blue Crown Vic.” He cut the connection and told Mazzetti not to worry.

The briefing was quick and to the point, just the way Stallings liked police work. The fear of endless lawsuits had slowed the process of investigation by several magnitudes. This was important enough that everyone was willing to move fast.

Then Mazzetti pulled him off to the side.

“Stall, I think we need to slow this train down. We got enough people to watch the house while someone gets a search warrant.”

Stallings shook his head. “We got exigent circumstances. The witness says there’s a girl inside.”

“But we gotta make this case airtight. I’d rather err on the side of caution.”

Stallings felt his blood rise. “And what do we tell that girl’s mother if she’s killed in the time it takes us to get a goddamn warrant?”

Mazzetti looked away, obviously weighing the options. Finally he looked at Stallings and said, “Okay, but if this is a fuck-up it’s on you.”

Stallings nodded. He didn’t know why it would be his fault, but he knew he had to get this operation moving. They watched as three marked patrol cars rolled up and Sergeant Rick Ellis popped out with a shotgun in his hand.

The big uniformed sergeant grinned and bellowed, “Real police work. I love it.”

A few minutes later the five detectives and three uniformed cops crowded around Mazzetti’s car’s hood looking at a rough sketch of the house in relation to the other houses on the block.

Mazzetti said, “We all stay off the radio. I don’t want some reporter with a police scanner catching on to what’s going on. We’re gonna cover the back and hit the front. No one in the back comes inside. I don’t want a cross fire and one of us getting hit.” He looked at all the faces, spending an extra second on the two young uniformed guys he didn’t know. “Everyone understand?”

Everyone nodded.

“All we got is a tip, but it may involve a young girl in the house. We know this guy was at the community college. No record, just a field ID card by one of the sex predator detectives a few years ago.”

Ellis looked up and said, “Where do you want us?”

“Sarge, you, one of your guys and Stall will cover the back. Hoagie and one uniform will cover the front. Luis”—he pointed at a the biggest uniformed officer—“you and me and Patty will hit the door.” He looked around. “Any questions?”

Stallings didn’t like the idea of staying in the back, but there was nothing to argue. That was his assignment.

Ellis’s radio beeped and a male voice asked for him by his radio number. When the big man answered the voice said, “What’s going on out there? Brief me.”

Mazzetti said, “Not over the radio.”

Ellis clicked the broadcast button and said, “I’ll call you, Captain. Stand by.” He reached for his belt, then cursed and turned to Stallings. “Stall, let me use your phone. In the excitement I left mine in the car.”

Stallings handed over his phone and turned back to the hood of the car as Ellis walked off with the phone glued to his ear.

Mazzetti said, “You cool with this, Stall? We’re going in without a warrant at your insistence.”

He nodded. “It’s the right thing to do.”

Ten minutes later Stallings stood behind the small, single-family house with the two uniformed cops. They had crept into the yard with a few scraggly bushes and weeds instead of grass. No one had noticed the cops as they cut between neighbors’ houses and now stood at each corner of the suspect’s square house. Rick Ellis was right behind him on one side and a young patrolman on the other. Stallings looked down at his watch. Any second now the other team would hit the front. His heart pumped hard, forcing blood into his eardrums like thunder.

Stallings put his hand on the grip of his pistol, waiting for the expected pounding on the front door or, if things didn’t go well, the sound of the door being knocked in. He tensed and waited. Still nothing, and it started to spook him. He drew his pistol, and Ellis, behind him, held his Remington shotgun up to his shoulder, then the officer on the other corner drew his service pistol. Stallings didn’t know if they had their own gut feeling or if he had started the trend.

He crept around the corner, closer to the flimsy, cracked sliding glass door that looked like it had been cut into the back wall by a third grader. The cement was unpainted and slapped around the sides to fill in the gaps. There was a chunk of wall missing near the handle, and the track looked bent.

The first hard rap at the front door made Stallings jump and freeze in his position. Another hard knock echoed through the house, and he heard Mazzetti yell, “Police, open the door.”

Stallings fought the urge to look in the glass door. Just his head in the door could distract the cops on the entry team not to mention the possibility of drawing fire from either a desperate killer or a cop.

He looked over his shoulder to make sure Ellis was in place and ready.

Then he heard shouting from the front.

Someone unlatched the slider from the inside and it creaked along its uneven tracks, wobbling like a tricycle with a crooked front wheel.

Stallings raised his gun as a teenage girl scampered out the rear with nothing but a floral pattern towel wrapped around her.

She turned and saw the gun, gasped, then froze right in front of the door, as the shouts inside the house grew more urgent. He heard, “Drop the gun.” Then a single gunshot.

Instinctively he dove onto the girl to knock her out of the line of fire the door provided. They fell onto the sandy ground with a hollow thump. The uniformed cop moved past them with his pistol up to protect them in case someone came through the door.

Stallings rolled to the side, looked at the girl, guessing her age to be about thirteen. “Are you okay?”

She was shaking and nodded quickly.

“You’re safe now. Everything is gonna be okay.”

From inside he heard Patty call out, “Clear.”

He stayed on the ground with the frightened girl as Ellis and his patrolman rushed inside.

It didn’t sound like things had gone well, but looking at this young girl, Stallings couldn’t care less if the case was made or not. She was safe. At least he still had his priorities straight.

Stallings turned on the ground, still shielding the girl, then sprang into a low crouch with his pistol up. After a few seconds one of the young patrolmen leaned out and motioned Stallings inside.

Stallings stood and said in a low voice, “Stay with the girl.”

As he stepped to the door a black cat darted out the open door and shot across the tiny yard toward the cover of a neighbor’s hedge. He recalled the M.E.’s comment about cat hair being present on the victims’ bodies. Things were adding up to look like this might be their man.

Inside, Patty was frantically performing CPR compressions on a man with a bullet hole in his chest. Patty had carefully placed her hands over the wound to make an effort to keep the blood from pumping out onto the grimy tile floor. Mazzetti kneeled over the man and attempted rescue breaths after every thirty compressions Patty completed.

It looked to Stallings as if all they had done was keep the guy alive long enough for his heart to pump a puddle of blood that had spread across the entire front room.

In the corner, Rick Ellis had his arm around Luis Martinez’s shoulder. The big sergeant just nodded to Stallings letting him know it was okay. He knew better than to ask, “What happened?” Things would become clearer to him in the next few minutes. The important points were that the girl was safe, none of his team had been injured, and he was hoping this guy was the Bag Man and their problems were over.

Sirens began to tweak his ear from more than a mile away and from different directions. Stallings saw a pile of clothes that looked like the girl’s from outside. He scooped them up and headed out the open slider. The uniformed cop stood next to her but obviously wanted nothing to do with her. She stood by the house holding the towel and squirming nervously.

He didn’t want her to see the blood inside, so he led her around the front and then stood guard while she climbed in one of the police cars and got dressed. When she was ready he leaned in the window and started to chat with her.

“You okay, sweetheart?” He had patience. She’d tell him what he needed to know soon enough.

The girl nodded but started to sniffle.

“What’s your name?”

“You’re gonna call my parents.”

“Someone will. You can’t avoid that.” He thought about it, then said, “I don’t think you realize how much danger you were in.”

“How?”

“That guy in there could be a killer.”

“My boyfriend?”

“What?”

“My boyfriend.”

“If he was your boyfriend why were you running out the back?”

“Because I’m underage, and I didn’t want him to be in more trouble.”

“More trouble? What kind of trouble was he in?”

“For the pot.”

Stallings felt a lump in his stomach. “What pot?”

“The pot he’s growing in the garage. Isn’t that why you guys came to arrest him?”

Stallings didn’t like the direction this interview was going at all.

Stacey Hines allowed the cool sea breeze to wash over her as she lounged in a low folding chair on the grass above the beach. The wind had been just a little stiff, and she had suffered the stings of the whipping grains of sand earlier, so she’d moved back up to her current spot. Now the Tess Gerritsen novel she’d been reading sat on the grass next to her, and she reminded herself why she wanted to stay in Jacksonville.

She hadn’t called her family this week because she knew, as lonely as she was, they might talk her into coming home. It was the longest she’d ever gone without speaking to her mother. She worried about them and knew they worried about her, but this was the first time in her whole life she felt like she could make it on her own. She’d managed to find the apartment and had a decent job that paid her almost enough to live on. The little savings she had left would be gone by February, then she’d have to leave, but for now she just wanted to feel the ocean breeze, know that all she had to do was show up for work and try not to dwell on missing her family.

She sat up in the chair as two seagulls approached her cautiously. The bag of bread she always brought with her for the pigeons and seagulls was almost empty. She smiled, wondering if the seagulls recognized her from her other visits and the times she had fed them. No one else sitting on the grassy patch was being stalked by birds.

Stacey emptied out the bag so the few flecks left of whole-wheat bread sprinkled onto the ground. The birds pounced, pecking up every fragment; their little hip-hop dance made her smile.

Stacey looked to the side, near her car parked in the front of the small parking lot, and saw someone else feeding a trio of crackles or whatever the brown crow-like birds were really called. It was a man in jeans and a nice button-down shirt. He was even feeding them the same kind of bread she was. He cast it down in three separate piles so the birds didn’t fight over it.

There was almost no one else on the beach or up here at the park. She stayed in her chair, but hoped the man would walk over toward her. She wanted to talk to someone and liked the idea that the man thought enough ahead to bring bread for the birds. After five minutes when he hadn’t looked her way, she pushed up and out of her aluminum chair and headed toward him at a casual pace.

When she was a few feet away from him, Stacey said, “I was just feeding them too, but I ran out of bread.”

The man turned slowly, and it was the nicest surprise of the day.

Stacey smiled. “Hello there, what’re you doing out here?”

“I told you I liked Neptune Beach.”

“You don’t know how happy I am to see you. You like to be called William, right?”

He smiled too and said, “Right, William Dremmel, and you’re Stacey.”

Maybe her life was about to change here in Jacksonville.