by James Andrus
Grace gave him a warm smile after he finished the story about Frank Ellis and said, “I know this is not the right time to say anything like I told you so.”
Stallings broke out into a smile and said, “But.”
Grace continued, undaunted. “But I did say that Brother Ellis had a good reputation and you might be jumping to conclusions.” She reached across the table and grasped his hand in both of hers. “You are a very fine man, John Stallings. You’re intense but calm, you’re smart but clueless, and most of all you’re a very sweet, loyal husband.” Grace sighed and said, “And you know what I think.”
“No, but I’d like to know what you think.”
“I think you should forget the problems with your wife, Brother Frank Ellis, your dad’s Alzheimer’s, and even put me out of your mind for a little while and focus on nothing but this case. It will clear your mind, settle your spirit, and maybe keep someone else from getting killed.”
Stallings nodded slowly, seeing the perfect sense of the idea.
Grace said, “And once you finish that, you need to figure out what you want to do with the rest of your life and if Maria has a role in it. She is your wife in the eyes of God and the mother of your children. I’d be wrong if I advised you to do anything but try and stay with her.”
Stallings gave her a smile and said, “I feel another ‘but’ coming on.”
Without saying another word, Grace leaned across the table and kissed him. She let it linger so he could feel her full lips and the emotion behind the kiss. When she was done, she leaned back into her chair and said, “That was so you’d have no doubt on how I feel. And when all of this is cleared up, and I mean everything, I’ll still be around.”
Grace had made Stallings feel better about everything.
Lynn lingered at her desk, worried about Leon. How was she ever going to satisfy him? He had proved to be persistent and resilient and now he had turned his attention on her. She didn’t want to hurt him, but at some point she might have to make the choice between her mission and the former marijuana smuggler. Under those conditions Leon lost every time.
Her other concern was the lingering Alan Cole. She had checked with the hospital on and off and been able to pick up that he was still in a coma and unresponsive. For a while she considered just leaving the injured man to his shattered life, but she kept imagining him rousing from his coma, saying that he’d seen her behind the wheel of the blue Suburban. It was a dream that would wake her up at night. And he definitely had to pay the same price as the others. Now the only question was when to make the trip south to Daytona.
She had another target who lived locally. As she considered him, she realized he could be the last one. It made her think about her life after this horrible quest she’d been on. One of the first things she hoped to do was meet someone. Not just a guy in a bar or one of the doofuses from the loading dock at work but a nice, professional man. Someone like Doctor Ferrero, who didn’t care about supply delivery companies or how to effectively murder a college boy.
Lynn could envision raising kids. Sometimes her daydreams were quite specific: two boys with the girl in the middle. If the middle child was of a different gender it might shake up the old idea that the middle child would be a slacker. The oldest was always special because they are first. The youngest is always special because they’re the baby. It’s the middle kid who needs extra care. She loved the idea of taking them all to the beach or the mall or one of the amusement parks in the state.
Her parents seemed to enjoy raising kids. At least until recently. No matter how old the kids got, her parents still tried to take care of them. She knew her father had created a retirement account for her and said she had nothing to worry about after age fifty-nine. He also had a house fund for her, just like he did for her siblings. But it was understood that the fund was for a house in the Jacksonville area so they would be close to her parents. She wouldn’t leave them now anyhow. They were too fragile. It broke her heart. That made her more determined to finish her mission.
She pulled her Buck knife from her purse and stared at it. This last one would be perfect. She’d do it right and finally hear the perfect scream.
FORTY-ONE
Patty thought John Stallings was unusually quiet. That was saying something. He wasn’t brooding. John never brooded. He was just more withdrawn than normal and was focusing on the case notes from their first interview of the day.
The mother of a nineteen-year-old son killed in a car accident said he had no connection to the fraternity. These were touchy interviews that could easily open old wounds for the families of the victims. It wasn’t until the end of the interview that the woman started to sob uncontrollably. It was moments like this that gave Patty an insight into John Stallings’s home life and the sorrow they had all gone through when Jeanie disappeared.
Now Stallings drove his county-issued Impala south on I-95 toward their next interview in Hyde Park.
Finally, Patty had to say, “I know something’s bothering you. You wanna talk about it?”
“Do I ever want to talk about anything?”
“You might be surprised to find it makes you feel better.”
“For your information, I talked my head off last night. I reached my quota and now I’m going to focus on police work for a little while.”
She took his answer as more informative than usual and noted the nice neighborhood as they got off I-95. Hyde Park was an upscale suburb of Jacksonville proper that housed attorneys and doctors. They found the house they were looking for and Patty whistled in amazement. Even by Hyde Park standards this was an opulent home. The two-story house sat far off the street with a winding, semicircular driveway covering much of the front yard. A sturdy, decorative fence ran the length of the property line and an electronic gate blocked the driveway.
Stallings didn’t hesitate to pull the Impala into the driveway and press a button on a stone pillar.
Patty noticed a camera on the opposite pillar move as someone inside the house examined the car. After a few seconds the voice came over a speaker in the stone pillar.
“May I help you?”
Stallings looked down at the sheet of paper and said, “Is Mr. or Mrs. Hickam available?”
“Please identify yourself.”
Stallings and Patty exchanged glances at the formal and direct command.
He leaned out the window closer to the pillar and said, “Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office.”
There was a long pause and the camera on the opposite pillar continued to scan the car. After almost twenty seconds another male voice came over the speaker, saying, “May I ask what this is in reference to?”
“We’re doing some follow-up on a two-year-old death investigation. We would like to speak to the Hickams. Are they at home?”
Patty always admired how Stallings could put a slight inflection in his voice that seemed to force people to do whatever he wanted without being overtly threatening. She may not have had the same level of experience as Stallings, but her instincts told her something was definitely not right about this house.
Just as the gate started to slide open, the voice came over the small speaker and said, “Drive up to the front door.”
Patty heard Stallings mumble, “Is today the day that changes the rest of my life?”
That set her on edge.
Emmanuel White was not as thrilled with his new job as he thought he’d be. He’d worked his ass off to get through Ohio State and worked just as hard for two years to get this job. He was so happy to be out of the Midwest and assigned to Florida that he didn’t even care that he had been sent to Jacksonville. He knew in the rest of the state, the northwest city was a little bit of a joke and so far the weather had not proved to be as sunny as he’d hoped. But he was pretty sure he’d make it through the winter without snow and none of the rivers here could catch on fire like the Cuyahoga.
He’d watched the two monitors during the twelve-hour day shift for five days in a row.
He was scheduled to be off for the next two days, but on this job he never knew when he’d have free time. In fairness, his job wasn’t only to monitor the two cameras; he was expected to review recorded telephone conversations from a number of different phone lines. There still wasn’t enough to keep him occupied for twelve hours at a time.
He noticed an Impala drive up and stop at the gate. It was one of the few times there was any activity at the house. The camera he monitored was across the street from the house. Emmanuel could see the security cameras at the house scanning the car before they opened the gate and allowed it to drive in.
Emmanuel was able to copy down the tag and decided to run it instantly, rather than wait until later. He liked watching the national news at 6:30 and always tried to have his work done before Brian Williams came on TV. He turned to a small Toshiba computer, typed in his password, and ran the tag. It came back to a corporation in Jacksonville. He ran the corporation through a separate computer databank and recognized it as a company used to register cars for the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. The practice was designed to foil drug dealers who tried to figure out who was following them. It didn’t slow him down one bit.
He hesitated, then pulled out his cell phone and dialed a supervisor to advise him about the unusual visitors. It was sad that this was the highlight of his last five days. He may have been new to the job, but he expected something different after being an Ohio State trooper for two years and then surviving the DEA training Academy in Quantico, Virginia. Somehow he thought the life of a federal narcotics agent would be more interesting than this.
Emmanuel White advised his supervisor what was going on. All the supervisor wanted to know was if he had finished reviewing the recorded telephone calls from the day before.
Emmanuel wondered if life was any different with the other federal agencies.
John Stallings kept alert and remained very aware of his surroundings as he and Patty followed Mrs. Hickam through the house to a den that overlooked a sprawling backyard and small lake. Several things had caught Stallings’s attention during the stroll through the house. It had a surprisingly homey atmosphere with a number of photos of the family. He recognized one of the kids as the victim of the alcohol poisoning case that Stallings had come to investigate. His name was Josh Hickam and he’d been a sophomore at the University of North Florida when he had died in early November, two years ago.
Mrs. Hickam was an ordinary-looking woman of about fifty-five, who had a muted personality that reminded Stallings of Maria when she was using heavy doses of prescription drugs. Aside from introducing herself and asking them to follow her, she had not said a word during the walk through the house.
Mr. Hickam met them in the den and Stallings could tell by the man’s darting eyes that he was nervous and making a detailed assessment of him and Patty. The walls of the den were lined with books and framed photographs of the family. One section of the south wall contained a locked, glass display case with more than thirty handguns on various racks and pedestals. This house was secure if Mr. Hickam felt comfortable displaying so many guns so prominently.
Patty and Stallings sat across from the Hickams on two small couches. The older couple held each other’s hands tightly, and Mr. Hickam assumed the role of communicator.
Stallings had been careful to advise them right from the start that they had no new information and were simply doing follow-up on a number of deaths in the county over the past two years.
Mr. Hickam said, “We never really thought Josh had died of anything other than alcohol poisoning. We knew the college life could get wild, but we assumed that since he was so close, he was safe.”
Patty said, “Did he live here with you?”
“No, we wanted him to have the full college experience even if he was only a few miles away. He lived in the apartment complex that houses the fraternity.”
Stallings tried to hide his surprise and calmly asked, “What fraternity was he in?”
“Tau Upsilon.”
Tony Mazzetti sat in the corner of the detective bureau with Sparky Taylor, going through reports and other documents relating to their case. The new information, that Stallings had seen a blue SUV driving away from the scene of a hit-and-run in St. Augustine, provided dozens of more leads to follow up.
The cheapskate lieutenant avoided overtime by reassigning four detectives and an analyst to help him cope with the growing investigation, but he knew the break in the case would lie with him or Sparky or one of the full-time detectives on the squad. Experience counted for more than anything else in homicide. He felt like he’d seen just about everything that could be thrown at him, and if you saw something once it was easier to spot a second time.
Sparky was reading reports from other cities, including Atlanta, Daytona, Gainesville, and Orlando. Scanning through hundreds of documents hoping to find a link to this case that could be used to find the killer. As much as he hated to admit it, Mazzetti now realized the deaths of the Tau Upsilon fraternity members had not been accidents. The lieutenant was even now conferring with officials from other cities to decide how they should notify the members of the fraternity that they could be in danger. The way Mazzetti saw it, if the fraternity brothers couldn’t figure out something was wrong by the fact that they each knew several dead men, it wouldn’t change much when the cops told them they had linked all the deaths. No one ever thinks it will happen to them.
Sparky looked up from a faxed police report and said, “I just found a report from a witness in Daytona regarding the hit-and-run of a fraternity member. The traffic investigator had asked several local witnesses if they had seen any vehicles in the area. Five witnesses listed five completely different vehicles.”
Mazzetti said, “So?”
“So one of the vehicles listed was a blue SUV.”
That caught Mazzetti’s attention. On its own, with no license tag information, the report was useless, but coupled with what a reliable witness like John Stallings had seen, it could be the link they’d been looking for.
“Do we have the list of license plates that start with A?”
“It’s two hundred and three vehicles long just for Duval County.” Sparky moved some papers around the long table and pick up another print. “Three hundred and sixteen if we include adjacent counties. The number climbs to five hundred and two if we include Volusia County. That’s a lot of vehicles to look at. Stallings had the same report run after the hit-and-run.”
Mazzetti leaned back in his chair in a sign of frustration. At what point was it useless? These were the kinds of things that the press could use to crucify him later. The reporters had the luxury of time and perspective to look at information. After the dust had settled, they loved to point the finger at detectives who tried to be efficient and prioritize investigative tasks.
As soon as Stallings heard the fraternity mentioned, he couldn’t keep from turning and looking at Patty, who gave him a quiet, professional nod and wrote a few more notes on her pad.
Mrs. Hickam said, “They were nice boys. You should’ve seen the crowd that came to Josh’s funeral. Each of them dressed up in a nice suit and they greeted all of the family members, making us feel like one of their own.”
Stallings asked a few more questions and discovered that Josh studied business, but the most important thing was they had another body to tie into this conspiracy. It wasn’t the right time to explain what was going on to the Hickams, but it could be that their son was the first known victim.
Stallings said, “I have one more question.”
Mr. Hickam said, “Sure, anything you want to know.”
“Did your son have a job?”
Now the Hickams exchanged glances and after a short pause Mr. Hickam said, “He made a little money doing different things, but he wasn’t employed by anyone specific.”
Stallings nodded, slowly stood, taking a closer look at photographs on the wall. He said, “You have an attractive family.”
“Thank you. We
tried to stay very close.”
Stallings noticed the Hickams’ daughter in some kind of clinical setting. “Is your daughter a nurse?”
Mr. Hickam shook his head and said, “She works part-time at a veterinarian’s office, keeping the books.”
Stallings moved to the gun collection, noting the man’s love of Smith & Wesson revolvers. One entire row of eight handguns were Smith & Wessons from the ancient model 10 to the much newer 686.
Stallings turned to Mr. Hickam and said, “If we have any more questions, can we come by and talk to you?”
Mr. Hickam nodded his head and said, “You just have to call ahead of time. You can see that we cherish our privacy.”
Stallings was beginning to wonder about that privacy and if the reasons for it had led to their son’s death. Something wasn’t right about this house.
FORTY-TWO
It’d been two hours since their interview at the Hickam house and still it was all Stallings could think about. They’d talked to the father of a young man who’d drowned while partying with some former high school friends. The man seemed very matter-of-fact and calm about the whole incident and had never suspected any type of conspiracy. He had accepted his son’s death and moved on with his life. Although they hadn’t been extraordinarily close, the father knew his son had never been involved with the fraternity and all details of the accident had made sense when the friends talked to the police.
Now Stallings and Patty were just finishing a sandwich at a Firehouse Subs off I-95. Patty looked up and said, “Are you still thinking about the Hickam interview too?”
