The Perfect Scream

by James Andrus

  Leon looked at Lynn and said, “It’s not my business, but why would you go out with that turd?”

  Lynn shrugged meekly and said, “I was kind of forced to. I swear to God there’s nothing going on between us.”

  Leon gave her a long, curious look and said, “How’d you like it if Dale was unavailable for your date?”

  “I wouldn’t be too upset.” As soon as she said it, she wondered what Leon might have in mind. Lynn didn’t think a simple comment like that meant anything sinister or violent, but she knew the lean, tough-looking man had his own grudge against Dale.

  Leon said, “I owe it to your dad and I was going to have to do something anyway. That guy is a total dick.” He looked in every direction. “I know everyone in your family can keep a secret. Don’t worry about a thing.”

  Stallings stood in the empty third-floor apartment that Jeanie had once rented. He knew he wouldn’t find any evidence or information; he just wanted to be in a space that Jeanie had occupied within the last few years. The whole idea made him shaky and raised an entirely new set of questions in his mind about his daughter’s disappearance.

  Why had she run away? If she was so close, why hadn’t she called? What had gone so terribly wrong? Did she hate him? Had it all sprung from his own relationship with his father?

  Stallings’s sister, Helen, had been very clear that she’d left because of their father. She was less clear about was what had happened to her after she’d left. That made Stallings wonder what other issues Jeanie might have if, by God’s grace, he did find her and bring her home. He had no illusions. This was not the tidy world of the TV hour-long drama. He had to consider the effect on Charlie and Lauren as well as Jeanie’s well-being.

  So the question came up again, why had she left? It was almost easier to believe she had been taken against her will. At least then there was an explanation. Although the rate of kidnappings in the United States was incredibly small, it still happened. Most detectives went their whole careers without seeing a kidnapping. At least one that wasn’t related to the drug trade.

  Stallings had developed a certain confidence as a police officer that had served him well the past sixteen years. It could be considered the sixth sense cops are expected to have. A confidence to look at someone and know they are feeding you a line of bullshit. The confidence to know you’ll achieve a goal or solve a case. It was the basic personality trait that defined a good cop.

  But as a father, he had constantly compared himself to others. One of the reasons was that he never had a decent role model himself. He adopted other fathers as role models. He appreciated dads who not only spent time with their kids but did stuff with them too. Played sports instead of watching the kids run around the park. Explained things instead of just showing kids what things looked like. It often made him wonder what he’d be like today if his father had done those kinds of things.

  He had a lot of questions about his life and what if scenarios. But there was one question that was more immediate and could lead to other answers: Where was Zach Halston?

  THIRTY

  John Stallings had spent the morning at his desk looking through every database he could think of for a reference to someone named Gator. He also wondered what exactly Zach Halston had done to piss Jeanie off.

  He had found so many references to so many different Gators that Stallings knew there was only one place he could go to get any real answers. It was one of the few places in the PMB that most cops avoided. But he had made up his mind and started the trek up the stairs to the third floor where the rubber-gun squad was located. Some of the patrolman didn’t even realize there was a unit called Intelligence in the sheriff’s office. Years ago the unit had been a dumping ground for cops who had been unable to make a case or work in the streets. But now, with the rising public concern of terrorism and the mushrooming groups of extremists, the detectives assigned to the intelligence unit, or rubber-gun squad, tended to be among the smartest in the department.

  Stallings saw Lonnie Freed sitting at the rear of the squad bay working on a computer. He cut through the empty office and plopped into the chair next to Lonnie’s desk, saying, “What’s going on?”

  The thirty-five-year-old detective leaned back and pulled off his heavy glasses pinching his nose with his fingers, and said, “Stall, you have no idea how close to the apocalypse we really are.”

  Stallings wanted to rush past this and simply said, “If I gave you a name, could you come up with everything you might have in your files about him?”

  “Sure, what’s his name?”

  “I only have his street name, Gator.”

  Lonnie laughed out loud and said, “Do you have any idea how many Gators we have listed in reports and intelligence files? Between the goddamn Florida Gators, the swamp people who still love alligators, the rednecks who think it’s a funny name, and the felons who don’t ever want to use their real names, there must be a hundred and fifty Gators listed in different reports.”

  Stallings leaned in close and slipped him a sheet of paper that had the description the older couple had given him and said, “I don’t care how many you find, I need to talk to one who looks like this.”

  Sparky Taylor had left his house at six in the morning and managed to miss the seemingly unending rush hour of Atlanta when he rolled in just before eleven. Most of the detectives would’ve spent the night in Atlanta, but they didn’t have two boys like him. He missed every night he had spent away from them and didn’t care if he had to work twenty hours just so he could play a quick game in the evening, then tuck them into bed. He’d never realized how rewarding fatherhood could be. It was his solemn duty to produce two intelligent, inquisitive boys who would contribute to society, just like his father had done.

  Even though Sparky had gone to college in Atlanta, the sprawling city held no particular place in his heart. It was too impersonal and had the well-earned reputation of being a dangerous city. But it wasn’t until this moment that he had ever thought Atlanta had anything but a good, professional police department. He didn’t try to hide his deep disappointment in the detective who had written off the death of the Gainesville fraternity brother as an accident without doing the follow-up that Sparky felt was essential to all police work.

  He looked at the table and said, “This was everything you have in evidence?”

  The lanky detective who had been reluctantly helping him looked at the random clothing, singed pillowcase, and evidence receipt for two separate one-kilo bricks of marijuana and said, “The theory is he was just a stoner who dozed off in bed smoking a doobie.”

  “It looks like there was more than one point of ignition. How could a guy who just dozed off start a fire in two different places in this apartment?”

  “That gave us some problems too. But in the end he was just a kid from Florida who probably shouldn’t have been dealing pot in Atlanta.”

  Sparky browsed through the photographs of the damaged apartment.

  The obviously embarrassed Atlanta detective said, “They’ve tried to fix up the apartment, but there may be a few of the kid’s things left over there.”

  “Can we go over and take a look?”

  “We are slammed with two fresh homicides but you can go over and look all you want.”

  Lynn noticed Leon walking toward her near the main office of Thomas Brothers Supply. He gave her a smile and a wink and said, “Something tells me you’re gonna be free Saturday night.” He kept walking.

  She was intrigued by the older man’s contention that something might happen to Dale. Frankly, she didn’t care what happened to him. She didn’t know if her conscience had broken down since she had started on her mission or if the big loading dock manager had just pushed her to the breaking point. As long as Leon handled the issue for her, she could concentrate on other things.

  She paused near her office and watched Leon continue to walk out into the lot. Dale whizzed past him in his golf cart. Leon turned and shot the big man a bird beh
ind his back.

  Lynn had a feeling Leon wasn’t acting solely on her behalf.

  The apartment manager hadn’t even checked Sparky’s badge, just assumed he was an Atlanta cop. He tossed him the keys to apartment 315 and told him to knock himself out because they had not been able to clean it up properly in the nineteen months since the fire had occurred.

  Sparky wondered what he meant by that. Until he walked into the apartment with new drywall and was still struck by the horrible, burnt stench. The apartment itself had been cleaned out except for some boxes and trash in the bedroom where the fire had occurred. There were no black smoke marks on the wall or ceiling, but it was clear to him this was the room where it had happened.

  One of the boxes contained old clothing and textbooks on physics. There was absolutely nothing of value. Two other boxes had evidence of burn marks on them and contained old shoes and a singed leather coat.

  Behind all of these boxes was a much smaller box, which had burned at the top and on one side. It looked like it could have been one of the origins of the flames. He remembered from the crime scene photographs very similar boxes like this on the floor near the bed. The fire had not been a raging inferno, more of a smoldering smoke event with a few open flames.

  Sparky was about to leave the apartment when he kneeled down to inspect the small box more closely. The inside was filled with twisted-up newspaper. Exactly the way he would twist newspaper to start a fire more efficiently. He shook his head at the Atlanta cops’ attitude toward the deadly fire and reached into the box to pick up one of the twisted newspaper pages.

  He opened up the newspaper and realized this was a link Tony Mazzetti might not want to hear about. The newspaper filling the box was the Jacksonville Times-Union.

  THIRTY-ONE

  John Stallings walked into the office at eight o’clock sharp. He didn’t feel fresh and ready to attack the day like he often did because he’d spent so much time running down leads on Jeanie, Zach Halston, and now some guy named “Gator.” For all his effort he could not say he was closer to finding any of them.

  The squad bay was empty, but the lights were on and he could see someone in the conference room. When he poked his head in, Patty Levine and Sparky Taylor had three different easels with large charts and the long table was completely filled with reports and bits of information.

  Stallings just stared at the two detectives speaking in short, cryptic sentences that caused one or the other to jump up and write something on one of the charts. Finally Patty looked up.

  “Hey, John. What’s going on?”

  “It really looks like I should be asking you the same question. What time did you get started on this?”

  “Sparky came into the office around six-thirty last night and we shared the information we’d found. It made me call the Gainesville fraternity house we visited and get some more information. I also swung by the local Tau Upsilon house night before last and talked to Bobby Hollis again. This is everything we have so far.” She waved her hand across the three large handwritten charts.

  Stallings shook his head and said, “I’m out of the loop for a day and a half and you guys look like you solved the case.”

  Now Sparky turned and looked at Stallings. “Hardly solved. But now we have enough information to at least ask the right questions and look in the right direction.”

  “Are you allowed to fill me in on what you found out?”

  Patty said, “We’ve made a link to a fraternity brother who died in Atlanta, Paul Smiley. The one from Gainesville. Now we’re looking at everyone the fraternity brothers told us about and making a time line.”

  “What does a time line do for us?”

  Patty turned one of the easels toward Stallings and said, “The only event that all of the dead brothers had in common was a Halloween party held at the local fraternity house two years ago. Whatever other information we have, Sparky and I believe that this particular party plays a major role in the investigation.”

  “You think that someone got pissed off at the party, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Big-time.”

  Sparky was quick to add, “We still have a lot of work to do.”

  Lynn had been working diligently, itemizing the expenses related to the Thomas Brothers supply company’s fleet, which included twenty-six tractor-trailers, forty large step vans, forty-four cargo vans, and eleven vehicles listed as general use. Lynn always smiled at the way the oldest Thomas brother listed his Mercedes 450 SL as part of the fleet. As much money as the family had, they still wanted to beat the federal government out of a few bucks in taxes whenever they could.

  She looked up from her computer out the window that faced the parking lot. In the far corner of her view she could just see a marked police car pull up to the loading dock. Curiosity got the best of her and she wandered from her office toward the main loading dock.

  Before Lynn had even left the hallway she could hear shouting, then saw two men arguing with Dale on the very edge of the wide dock. The two men, dressed in jeans and casual shirts, were by no means small, but compared to Dale they looked like little kids. A tall, thin uniformed police officer stood behind the other two men.

  The crowd of loading dock workers and drivers had backed away to the rear wall so Lynn eased up next to the first driver she knew by name and said, “What’s going on?”

  The older man shrugged and said, “Two fellas there are from the DEA and tried to handle things quietly with Dale. You know how stubborn he can be.”

  “Handle what things?” Then Lynn heard Dale yell, “I told you dipshits that if you don’t gotta warrant, I ain’t sayin’ shit. I know my goddamn rights.” That’s when things took an ugly turn. Dale emphasized his point by shoving one of the smaller men in the chest. The man moved back a step, but that step was a long one because he slipped off the edge of the dock.

  That’s when the uniformed cop and the other man took action.

  It was always easier for John Stallings to find Peep Moran earlier in the morning before he really got moving around the city. For all of his faults, no one could say Peep was lazy. If he wasn’t sidetracked by his odd fetish or slowed by use of narcotics, the quirky young man from Detroit would’ve probably have been a tremendous success in the business world.

  He was sitting out in the open on a park bench just north of the main downtown area. He showed no interest in fleeing for a change so Stallings took the bench next to him to find out what his informant had learned.

  Peep didn’t even waste time with small talk. “No one knows the girl. I been all over Arlington and a couple of the areas I know up north and not one person had ever seen the girl before.”

  “What about the boy, Zach Halston?”

  “That little prick has been all over the city. A couple of the tougher dealers scared him until he focused on the college crowd. Someone told me he got into a beef there too. Another dealer was undercutting him to the college students, which caused a confrontation.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  Peep shook his head. “I’m not even sure where I heard it. Just gossip on the street. You know how it goes.”

  Stallings did know how word got out on the street. The shocking thing was how accurate it was most time. No one could ever cite one source, but everyone knew what was going on.

  Stallings patted Peep’s shoulder. “That’s good, Peep. Got anything else for me?”

  “The last anyone saw of Zach was he collected a little money someone owed him about four days ago.”

  Now Stallings gripped the smaller man’s shoulder. “Four days ago? So he’s still alive?” Then Stallings asked, “Where was he?”

  “South of the river, closer to the university.”

  “Did you hear if anyone was after him or if he was in danger?”

  “I haven’t heard about anyone being pissed off at him. You know how paranoid pot dealers can be.” Peep gave him a half smile showing Stall that his years on the street hadn’t robb
ed him of his sense of humor.

  But Stallings hardly noticed him because right now all he could focus on was Zach Halston.

  Lynn was amazed how quickly the two cops subdued a man so much larger than them. While one stepped away and pulled a can of pepper spray, the other one threw two quick punches into Dale’s massive gut and stepped to the side and kicked him in his upper leg. Dale listed to one side like he was going to fall over just as the tall, uniformed police officer let a stream of orange liquid loose in Dale’s face. At first there was no reaction as Dale went down on his injured leg. He gripped his thigh where he’d been kicked and started to yell at the man who had kicked him. Then it seemed like the pepper spray completely occupied his mind as he grabbed his face and started to babble incoherently.

  The man Dale had shoved off the edge of the dock was climbing up the stairs, apparently uninjured but eager to get a shot in on the big man who had pushed him down. They rolled Dale on his side like a beached whale until they were able to handcuff his massive hands behind his back.

  Lynn heard a voice in her left ear say, “Now you don’t have to worry about your date.” She snapped her head to see Leon standing right next to her.

  Lynn said, “I don’t understand.”

  “One call, a few grams of crack, and a bad attitude will manage to keep him occupied for the next couple of years. Best of all, old man Thomas will can his ass before lunch.”

  “But how?”

  “There’s nothing a narcotics agent likes more than a reformed smuggler. Half the numbers in my cell phone are for DEA agents and local narcs looking to make a case. This was so easy I’m embarrassed.”