by James Andrus
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.
Twenty-six
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.
Twenty-seven
John Stallings had been at the scene of many shootings. Too damn many. Gangbangers shot from head to toe, a suicide where a man put the barrel of a .357 in his mouth, then turned slightly and blew out the side of his face and died in agony over the course of two hours as he bled to death. John Stallings had seen it all. He’d been involved in three shootings during his c
areer where he fired his duty weapon. Once he hit the suspect in the arm, once he missed with four shots when a grocery store robber pointed a cheap Tecra nine mil at his head. The gun wouldn’t fire, and after the spray of bullets from Stallings, the suspect dropped it and surrendered. He got a medal for that because the Sheriff’s Office had gotten a lot of bad press about “trigger-happy” officers and they appreciated that Stallings didn’t kill the guy like he meant to. Three months later the suspect choked a female jail deputy before his trial on the robbery. He was currently on death row at Raiford.
But the one that haunted him the most, the one time he was truly afraid, involved a kid who was being held for a drug debt, and Stallings happened to spot the dealer with the kid. When he approached them the dealer scooped up the four-year-old and held a gun to the kid. Stallings tried to reason with the dealer, but when the dust settled, Stallings had fired one time and the bullet hit the dealer in the face. He still got a card from the kid every Christmas.
Today he was cooling his heels at the house they had believed the Bag Man owned. It now looked like the resident’s name was Martin Zepher and he was not the Bag Man. He was an operator of a marijuana grow house and slept with a girl who was only fifteen. He was now dead. The girl was in child services because her dumb-ass mother knew of the relationship with Zepher and encouraged it since the dead pot grower supplied her with the best weed in town.
The mother was in custody on child endangerment, possession of marijuana, assault on a police officer for taking a swing at a female uniformed deputy, resisting arrest, and anything else the state’s attorney wanted to file. It was not only to cover the shooting of her daughter’s boyfriend; it was because of righteous indignation from the cops involved.
Stallings sat on a surprisingly comfortable and clean couch along with the uniformed guys who had come on the raid. Outside, crime scene trucks and unmarked JSO units clogged the yard. On the street, a house over, a Channel Eleven news crew with two cameras filmed all the activity at the house. They’d showed up before fire rescue even made it to the scene, but they had stayed out of the way. He wasn’t worried about that as much as how this might slow down their hunt for the Bag Man.
Rita Hester, looking like a lieutenant in charge of the detective bureau, in a green pantsuit with her gun and badge exposed on her hip, stalked through the house making sure everything was done by the book. Patty, Luis, and Mazzetti, who’d been in the room during the shooting, had gone down to the PMB to talk to I.A. about the incident.
The lieutenant paused in front of the couch to address Stallings and the others. She looked down at him like a child who was being punished and said, “You’re goddamn lucky this guy was a criminal with an underaged girl.”
“Otherwise I would’ve been wrong to take a chance to catch the Bag Man?”
“Don’t give me that shit, Stall. You know you could’ve done things a lot differently. If you got a warrant, the SWAT team would’ve done this.”
“But I didn’t know we had the time to wait when I made the decision.” He knew not to get too snarky and didn’t say anything else.
The lieutenant sighed for what seemed like a full minute, wiped her face with her bare hand, and said, “Martinez has a PBA attorney and is doing okay. We’ll lose him on the case for at least ten days for the standard paid leave after a shooting. Mazzetti, Patty, and the uniformed guy are done for the day. I told everyone to meet at the Land That Time Forgot in the morning.”
Rick Ellis and the other uniformed patrolman sprang off the couch and headed for the door. No cop wanted to be around a scene like this if they didn’t have to be.
Stallings got up more slowly and was headed for the door when the lieutenant stepped over to him and said, “C’mon, Stall. What was the idea of rushing in here?”
He didn’t want others to be blamed for his call. “It was the right thing to do.”
“I think you’re getting too tied up in this case. You’re losing perspective.”
“How do you figure that?”
“When’s the last time you spent time with your own kids?”
Now he saw it was Rita talking to him and not the lieutenant. “There’ll be time to see them as soon as we grab this asshole.”
“What if it takes a year?”
“Then I’m afraid a lot of young girls are going to die in that time, and I’m not prepared to let that happen. Are you?”
William Dremmel had enjoyed sitting outside next to Stacey and just chatting for the last twenty minutes. The sun had poked out of the clouds and felt good on his pale skin. A party of seagulls now scurried around the bag of bread he’d dropped about ten feet away, and Stacey seemed calm and relaxed.
So far his plan had gone off without a hitch. He’d parked away from her little Ford Escort, then while she was still on the beach, he’d slipped his arm in her opened window, popped the hood, and pulled two spark plug wires, then put everything back the way it was. After he saw her feed the birds on the beach, he ran up to the Publix and picked up a loaf. He let her see him and not the other way around. This was a brilliant plan even for him.
Now he’d confirmed that she still lived alone, hadn’t talked to her family in over a week, and basically was lonely. Welcome to the club.
Stacey said, “I can make it here, but I need more hours at the restaurant, or have to find a second job.”
That gave him an idea. “You ever work with older people?”
“Tank the bartender is fifty-nine.”
“No, I mean care for elderly patients.”
She shook her head slowly. “No, why?”
“Could you do it?”
“Yeah, I like hanging out with my grandma.”
He loved her midwestern accent and quaint notion of family. He couldn’t see someone ever calling his mom “Grandma.”
He gave her his earnest face. “I’ve been looking for someone to check on my mom on the days I’m at work late. You wouldn’t have to do anything but talk to her and keep her company. I could pay fifty bucks a day for about two hours.”
Stacey brightened just like he thought she might. “Really, you’d give me a try?”
“Sure, but you’d have to meet her first. That way you and she could see how well you get along.”
“Sure, when can we meet?”
“How about today?”
She looked down at her Timex sports watch. “I have to work at six.”
“That’s no problem. I live in Grove Park. Shouldn’t take long.”
She immediately started gathering her stuff as Dremmel helped her with her chair. He packed it in her backseat as she cranked the little Escort. When it wouldn’t start he had her pop the hood and pretended to evaluate the problem. In fact, all he did was make sure the spark plug wires were not connected but looked like they were.
He walked around to the driver’s seat and leaned into the window. “Tell you what. I’ll drive you to my mom’s, then I’ll get you to work. I have a buddy who could get this running in no time after he’s off work. We’ll have this to you before you get off work.” He smiled and forced himself to stay calm.
She hesitated, then said, “I hate for you to waste your whole day.”
“It’s no waste if I find someone to help with Mom. Besides, you need a little support about now. If I was in Cincinnati, I bet your brother would help me.”
“Yeah, I guess he would.”
“I’ll go get my van. I’ll be right back.”
She locked up the car and by the time she had her purse in her hand he pulled up in his minivan.
Stacey hopped in the passenger seat with a big grin.
She had no idea how close she was about to become with Dremmel and his mother.
Twenty-eight
Tony Mazzetti had a lot going on in his life. The serial killer case should’ve been the most important. The goddamn shooting should’ve been up there too. But somehow all he found himself thinking about was Patty Levine. If he closed his eyes he could picture
her perfect, naked body, taut and tan. When she walked by, he smelled her perfume. All he could think about was Patty and his dick. Holy crap, what had happened last night? He thought he’d fixed the problem. That was his first chance in a long time to test it out and it should’ve worked. He used the mental tricks the psychologist had taught him and still it was a dud. And Patty seemed irritated by the whole adventure. He’d definitely picked up a weird vibe from her in the morning. Since Luis Martinez capped the pot dealer it was a different situation, but he worried about her early reaction to his failure to launch.
It was troubling, but who could he talk to? His mom supported him on everything, but her overriding goal in life was grandchildren. Lots of them. She’d tapered off on her inquiries the last few years, but he knew how she felt. He couldn’t talk to any of the guys at work. Someone would leak it as surely as they leaked details on the Bag Man case. It would only be a matter of time before he was a laughingstock at the Sheriff’s Office. No, this was an issue he had to deal with himself. He had to tell Patty the truth.
Now, Tony Mazzetti sat in the “hot seat” between the two internal affairs detectives. He knew both of them from their days in homicide. To be on the Sheriff’s Office shooting investigation team or, as everyone called it, “the shoot squad,” you had to have put in a few years in homicide. The shoot squad was housed in the Internal Affairs Unit on the third floor in surroundings that made Crimes/Persons look like a forgotten village in Somalia. The regular officers and detectives avoided the third floor as if it contained an infectious disease ward. No one wanted anything to do with the unit. It could be the route an ambitious detective took for promotion. It also gave the detectives a chance of promoting to sergeant without going back onto the road for a few years on midnights. In Mazzetti’s opinion that was a shortcoming of most police forces. They put their smartest people in the detective bureau, encouraged them to try for sergeant, then, if they were successful, they threw them back out into road patrol to look after a bunch of rookies too scared to step out of their cruisers.
