The Perfect Prey

by James Andrus

  He’d passed Marie Brison’s house several times, but there were no cars and no activity around the little clapboard house. The next time he met this white guy–and there would be a next time–there was no way he was gonna let him get away without a long talk. But now his goal was to find the only person who had spoken to him the night of the shooting. That was Pudge, the street prophet. A portly little man didn’t stick out on the streets at all, and Mazzetti wanted to be subtle when he approached him. That ruled out rumbling into the bars or pool halls and asking a lot of questions.

  Like a lot of police work, it involved time and patience. There was nothing for him to do around the office. Christina Hogrebe had a handle on the backgrounds of the victims and suspects. The little nerd Lonnie Freed from intelligence was trying to scrounge up a snitch who knew anything at all about the Hess Party.

  Without saying a word or even knowing he possessed it, Patty had shamed him into submitting the suspected Ecstasy to the lab. The young female lab tech had muttered, “Seems like we’re taking in a lot of Ecstasy lately.”

  Mazzetti just nodded, leaving her to work her magic. Not that he expected anything from the results, at least nothing that would help his murder investigation. But now he could look Patty in the eye and she couldn’t say that he wasn’t thorough.

  After more than an hour of searching for Pudge, Mazzetti’s stomach growled, so he pulled into a Church’s Fried Chicken. There was no line this time of the day and the pretty young cashier looked surprised to see a large white man walking alone. He ordered a two-piece dinner and the Diet Coke, then plopped on the bench next to his car to enjoy the cool spring day. As he was about to take his first bite of a leg, he heard someone chuckle at the corner of the building. He turned as the short, squat figure emerged.

  “That chicken sure does smell good.”

  “I hate eating alone, Pudge. If I bought you a dinner, you think we could chat?”

  “A three-piece dinner?”

  Mazzetti smiled. “With an extra order of okra if that’s what you want.”

  Yvonne Zuni knew this would be the best time to come by the apartment. She had an ASP stashed in her waistline and her Glock Model 27 in her purse where it was easy to grab. This was tricky, but she’d weighed the pros and cons and decided to knock on the door.

  She heard a chain on the inside slide across the bolt, and then the door opened wide. The pretty, well-endowed blond woman in her early twenties stood in a tight T-shirt and short, short jean cutoffs. Even with no bra on under the thin T-shirt the girl had more curves than almost any woman Yvonne knew.

  The girl smiled, revealing straight white teeth that contrasted nicely with her deep tan, which, Sergeant Zuni suspected, had no tan lines. “I didn’t think I’d see you again. I always felt like I should have thanked you more for what you did.”

  “This might be a chance.” Yvonne stepped into the apartment without being invited and did a quick scan of the living room and hallway. “I know he still comes by sometimes.”

  “About once a week.”

  The sergeant tried hard not to say anything or show any disappointment. But the girl picked up on it immediately, embarrassed by her inability to give this guy the boot.

  Sergeant Yvonne Zuni said, “You know he’s never gonna get serious.”

  “That’s not the problem. You saw just how serious he can get. But I know what you’re saying. He’s never gonna make a commitment to me.” She sat down on the couch and put her face in her hands. “Everyone likes the idea of dating a stripper, but no one wants to bring one home to Mom.”

  “In your case you’re probably better off not bringing that prick home to your mom.”

  The young woman smiled and said, “He’s never even said anything about that night. Even with the ten stitches and the scar on his eyebrow, it’s like he’s blocked it out of his memory. He’s never mentioned the fight, what caused it, what he made me do, or how you shut him up.”

  Yvonne sat next to the young woman and put her arm around her shoulder. “Right now he’s got another problem, and I’ve got to ask you some really hard questions. But first I need to know if you owe me enough to keep from saying anything to him.”

  “You know how he is–I’m sure he’ll get me to admit that I talked to you. But I’ll do my best to keep the nature of our conversation secret.”

  “I won’t put you in any danger.”

  “I’ve been in danger since I dropped out of high school and started hanging out with lowlifes like Gary Lauer.”

  Patty Levine sat in her county-issued Freestyle on the north side of West State Street. She could see Stallings’s Impala three blocks up on the other side of the street. She brought up her binoculars so she could get a clear view of the driver in the blue Nissan 300ZX stopped on the side of the road. Behind the sporty little car Patrol Officer Gary Lauer dismounted from his heavy motorcycle, checked both ways for traffic, then strutted up along the driver’s side of the vehicle.

  She and Stallings had agreed that they needed to do surveillance on the two suspects. Unless something drastic happened this afternoon while they were following Lauer, they intended to pick up Chad Palmer as he left his office. Neither of them could clearly state what they hoped to gain by watching the suspects, but it was better than sitting around the office waiting for leads to come to them. That was one of the things she really admired about John Stallings. Despite his seniority and experience he was still interested and working every day.

  It had been easy to find Lauer in the middle of his shift. All they had to do was monitor his zone’s radio traffic and listen for a stop. Based on his record he was an industrious traffic enforcement cop. It was Stallings who had picked three different spots where he thought Lauer would be working. Stallings called them “game trails.” Those were places where it was easy to hunt, because the game wandered along the trail. Lazy hunters and even lazy animals could find a comfortable spot to sit and wait for a target. In this case, Lauer sat west of the Arlington Expressway and waited for people to hit the slower speed on the on State Street. If traffic wasn’t bad, drivers tended to keep moving along quickly. That was money in the bank for a traffic cop like Gary Lauer.

  Patty could see the driver was a younger woman. Lauer crouched down to look at her eye to eye through the window, and the way both he and the woman were smiling made Patty believe the young woman was very attractive too.

  This was a trend with the burly motorcycle cop. The first traffic stop that she and Stallings had pulled up on was a pretty young woman in a Volvo S60. The stop before this one was an attractive woman with a cowboy hat driving a Dodge pickup truck. Patty could almost guess the line he was feeding this woman now. How he liked his job even though it was dangerous. How he had to go to the gym to stay in shape in case he was in a life-and-death struggle. How it was hard to find a woman that understood the stress of police work. Christ, she heard enough guys feed that bullshit to waitresses, strippers, and nurses that she knew all the lines by heart.

  She used her Nextel phone to call up Stallings on the direct connect. “Whatcha think?”

  “Statistically I wonder how many women he pulls over compared to men.”

  “You think this is gonna get us anywhere?”

  “I doubt it, but I did want to get a feel for how the guy worked. It looks like he uses the job as a way to meet women. It wouldn’t be an issue except for what we suspect him of. I’m still hoping the cop in him wouldn’t have any part of that.”

  “My female radar, which has been honed over the years, says that this guy is a creep who does not respect women. I don’t think he’s above giving Ecstasy to a girl to make her come home with him.”

  She kept watching Lauer as he stood up and patted the car with his left hand. He didn’t write a ticket or even a warning to the young lady, but he did hold a piece of notepaper that she’d given him. Patty said into her phone, “Looks like he just scored a phone number.”

  “My guess is that this guy has volum
es of phone numbers at home.”

  He let the Nissan pull away, then climbed back onto his motorcycle. He slowly pulled into traffic, shutting off his rear blue light once he was rolling west again. He passed Stallings without even giving him a glance. That was when two cars moving at once attracted Patty’s attention. A silver Ford Taurus and a black Dodge Charger fell in behind Lauer on his motorcycle.

  Then Stallings clicked her up on the phone. “Looks like we have company.”

  “You saw them too?”

  “I’d lay money that it was Internal Affairs.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because they’re about as subtle as a sledgehammer and can’t follow people for shit.”

  Thirty-nine

  Tony Mazzetti sat with Pudge in front of the fried chicken place for more than an hour. If nothing else, the little guy was entertaining.

  Pudge said, “The word on the street is the shooters you’re looking for are, in fact, Caucasian. That would mean this could be the start of the race war I have foreseen for quite some time.”

  “You don’t think it could just be a squabble over money or drugs?”

  “You just assume that since young black men were shot they were involved in the drug trade. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Mazzetti stared at the corpulent little man. “Yeah, Pudge, that’s exactly what I’m assuming. We did find a half a kilo of cocaine under one of the mattresses and thirty thousand dollars in cash.”

  “I see you are skilled in the lessons of rhetoric and are prepared to debate me on the subject.”

  “Actually I’m not prepared to debate you at all. I bought you dinner to see if you had any new information. Come on, Pudge, you see what’s going on here. No one benefits from an unsolved homicide. If you know something, now would be a good time to spill it.”

  Pudge took a moment and turned to look Mazzetti in the eyes. “In this case it might not hurt to think the killers came from outside the neighborhood. White men are a convenient excuse to avoid the truth. Also you found cocaine and money. Wouldn’t successful drug dealers like those three dead boys have more cash than that?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Your search for the killers might be too wide. Perhaps you need to focus more on why those boys were shot than on who shot them. I don’t know anything firsthand, I just hear rumors. I still think the lovely Miss Brison might help you if you caught her in the right mood.”

  Mazzetti was about to pull out a small notepad when he heard a sharp voice say, “Pudge, why you talkin’ to the po-po?”

  Mazzetti’s head snapped up to see a thick young man in shorts riding low on his hips and no shirt standing a few feet away. Mazzetti stood up and faced the young man, his hand dropping to his right hip in case he needed to go for a gun. He wasn’t sure what to say to the allegation. He turned to see what Pudge’s reaction was, but the bench was empty and there was no sign of the street prophet.

  A two-person surveillance team wasn’t very effective against seasoned drug dealers or the slick white-collar fraud guys who expected cops to be following them. But Stallings hoped he and Patty would be enough to keep a loose tail on a dumb shit like Chad Palmer. They had done all right following Lauer but backed off when they realized IA had their own ideas. Stallings didn’t care who solved the Ecstasy mystery as long as it was cleared up and out of his brain.

  He’d slipped a portable tracker under the wheel well of Palmer’s BMW, and Patty was using a laptop computer in her car to keep up with the signal. The tricky part was getting close enough to see what Palmer did once he was inside another building. They had followed him from his office and waited while he worked out at a high-end gym downtown near the river. Then waited while he had eaten at a Panera Bread.

  Stallings was surprised when Palmer rolled into the parking lot of the dance club south of the city. It was still early for the dance club crowd, but maybe he tried to maintain some kind of schedule. They waited about twenty minutes. Patty was dressed very casually, in jeans and a cute blouse with her hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing glasses in an attempt to be harder to recognize. It sounded lame when she told Stallings what she was going to do until he saw her and realized a guy like Palmer might not even pick up on her in the club. She looked entirely different from the way she had on Monday morning when they interviewed him in his office. She never failed to surprise the veteran detective.

  After about half an hour Patty came out from the club and slipped into the front seat with Stallings.

  “He’s in there talking to a very young blond girl at the end of the bar. It looked as if he knew her and she might’ve been expecting him. If we’ve got his car covered out here all we have to do is wait.”

  “I don’t see any other choice. But if a girl gets in a car with him, I’m not sure I can let him drive away considering what we suspect him of.”

  Patty looked concerned and said, “We’re probably not gonna have any PC. She was at least eighteen, and he wasn’t forcing her into anything that I could see.”

  “I’ll find the PC if I have to.”

  “I was afraid you might say that.”

  He checked for Ann as soon as he walked in the club. She knew that he’d be there early, and he hoped that would be enough incentive for her to show up alone. He’d gone so far as to tell her he’d only be there for about an hour and certainly be gone by nine.

  The best he could do was try to develop a new target who had joined him at the end of the bar. But the girl had used her cell phone too many times in the hour that he had spent with her to try and separate her from the herd. If she couldn’t sit there with him, downing Stolies on the rocks, and not have to chat with nine different friends, then there was no way he could slip away with her quietly.

  She was pretty to look at and had a breezy manner, but it was mainly that light hair and pale blue eyes that held his attention.

  Even the best predators went home hungry now and then.

  Forty

  Patty Levine wasn’t used to starting her day at noon, but in an effort to use their time efficiently she and Stallings had decided to change schedules. She sat at her desk studying records when Yvonne Zuni approached.

  The sergeant said, “Gary Lauer was in Daytona last year and Panama City the year before. The dates line up with the girls’ deaths.”

  Patty said, “How’d you find out where he went on vacation?”

  “Sometimes you have to work outside the box. I cleared up an ugly issue for a young woman who was romantically involved with Lauer last year. I asked her a simple question, and she gave me a straight answer.”

  “That creep has a girlfriend?”

  “Several. You’ve seen him, and you know how young people can be. This is a nice girl who thought he was something he wasn’t. The hell of it is she still sees him on and off.”

  “How ugly was the issue? Does it relate to this case at all?”

  The sergeant slipped into the seat right next to Patty, leaned in, and quietly said, “The son of a bitch knocked her up, then forced her to get an abortion. One night they had an argument that got out of control. He was on temporary assignment to narcotics, so when neighbors complained about the noise the responding patrolman called me to talk some sense into him. He started to get shitty with me, and I had to crack him in the head with my ASP.”

  “How’d you avoid an IA investigation?”

  “Let’s just say everyone agreed to keep their mouths shut. And don’t tell your partner, but Ronald Bell in IA did a great job of smoothing everything over.”

  “I doubt Stall would believe you anyway. He hates Bell.” Patty thought about it and said, “So, what do we do now, switch all surveillance over to Lauer? We told you we thought IA was on him already.”

  The sergeant smiled and said, “Again, I’m working outside the box on this. These are still serious but vague allegations. I’m going to brief Ronald Bell on what we’re doing and see what kind of help they
can give us. I think he likes to play his cards close. He never mentioned they were going to keep tabs on Lauer. In the meantime, I arranged for Officer Lauer to be offered one of the few overtime gigs still available. He’s going to work the next three evenings at the big soup kitchen near the stadium. The mayor’s office funds a uniformed officer to be there every night. That should keep him busy while we get our ducks in a row.”

  “So this guy makes extra cash for being a suspect in Ecstasy distribution?”

  “I don’t think it’s right, Patty, but it’s the best way to handle it right now. Don’t forget we’re still working on a wild theory, and he’s not even the only suspect. You guys stay on Palmer tonight, and I want you to keep Stallings in check.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Everyone knows he can become irrational dealing with crimes against young women. He respects you and listens to you. You’re on the list for sergeant–this is as good a time as any to learn the subtleties of supervision.”

  Stallings sat on a low wall in the sunshine, eating an Italian sub from Gino’s. He had a can of soda resting perilously on the narrow wall. The Police Memorial Building was not exactly set up for casual dining outside. He liked the feel of the sun and he was hungry, so he plopped down to eat his favorite sub in the whole world. It used to be you could see the river from the spot, but now classless condos rose across the street, blocking the once-beautiful view. He intended to spend a couple of hours at his desk before he and Patty started their surveillance of Chad Palmer again. This was an odd case propelled by politics and his desire to satisfy Diane Marsh’s perfectly reasonable parental expectation that anyone connected to her daughter’s death be found. No matter why it was proceeding, Stallings was committed to see it through.