James Andrus: The Perfect Prey

Patty immediately stood up and said, “Let me make a quick call and I’ll be right back.” Stallings caught her quick look at him.

Once she had left, he stood and stepped over to the man. “While we wait, tell me why you think Jason was on a slide.”

The man leaned in and said, “I think it was drugs. He got paranoid and then started coming in later and later. He was forgetful and barely completed any of the chemical work he was supposed to.”

“Chemical work?”

“He was our chemist. Quite smart actually. Went to Northwestern.”

“He have any friends here?”

The manager shook his head.

“You have his file out already, right?”

The manager turned and plucked it off the top of his messy desk. “I was just going through it.”

“Can I take a look?”

The manager handed it to Stallings, who thumbed through the few pages. He noted a couple of past addresses and several phone numbers. He didn’t want to scribble them down in front of the man, so he locked them in his head as best he could.

Stallings said, “Thanks very much.” He stood and got ready to leave.

“But I thought the lady detective was getting a subpoena to cover me?”

“I think you might have read too much into that. She said, ‘Would you feel more comfortable?’ Then she asked to make a call. The statements weren’t connected.” Stallings loved doing things like this. It made him feel smart once in a while. It also saved time because he knew he’d never have to deal with this squir-relly little man again.

He grabbed Patty’s notecase and wrote down some addresses as he left. The manager had given them a few leads to work.

Allie Marsh used all her powers of persuasion, some learned in rhetoric class, some developed during her two-week stint on her high school debate team and some of it from her gut, to convince the other three girls to go back to the Wildside and stay there a while. She knew the loud, crowded dance club was her best bet to meet up with him. She’d already decided that tonight was the night. Allie couldn’t go back to Mississippi if her only experience of note was trying half a speckled pill one afternoon. She’d felt jittery as an aftereffect of the pill, but a two-hour nap and decent dinner had convinced her the little pills held no real danger.

Susan had just gotten back to the room after spending the entire afternoon up in the UGA student’s room. Her broad smile told Allie that her friend didn’t mind the half a pill either. The other two girls had been snoring in separate beds, still in their clothes from the night before when Allie had returned from the downstairs bar.

Now they were all on the same sheet of music. Dressed nicely but casually in jeans and each of them in a different kind of blouse. That was part of Allie’s brilliant plan. A couple of the places didn’t let you inside with jeans. She was narrowing the field. Karen’s Chrysler 300 was headed west toward downtown with the other girls quietly taking in the scrub brush and occasional house. This wasn’t a crowd ready to party; this was a crowd who already had. Except Allie, and she was anxious. She remembered the odd feeling that had crept through her after she had taken half the speckled pill. It was warm and electric, and it made her think that no one would judge her or care what she did. It made her want to dance, and that was in the relative calm of the hotel bar in the middle of the afternoon. What would she do tonight?

Her cell phone chimed to the University of Southern Mississippi fight song. It made her realize just how few calls she’d received this week. The small Verizon screen showed her mom’s number. She hesitated, then decided to let the call go directly to voice mail. She didn’t want to talk to her mom while she was thinking of what the night held for her.

As she stuck the phone back in her small purse, a broad smile spread across her face. Tonight was all about her.

John Stallings waited in his county-issued Impala outside the house he’d lived in for fourteen years, wondering if he had the guts to say to his wife, “Where are we going?” It might be the catalyst to move back or more likely, at least for the moment, Maria telling him she was filing for divorce. This thought occupied his mind more and more as the days stretched into weeks, then months, of living in a one-bedroom duplex over in Lakewood. He had yet to miss a day of visiting the kids. Thankfully it had been slow around the office and he’d made use of the easier schedule to show up most days in the afternoon and really try to connect with the kids. He thought he’d been doing that for years, but it took Maria pointing out his obsession with police work, and his justification that if he worked hard he might somehow help find Jeanie, to make him realize he hadn’t.

His oldest daughter had disappeared three years earlier at sixteen, and to this day no one was certain if she ran away, was dead, or had any number of other things happen to her. It had eaten at Stallings day and night, and not until Maria showed him so clearly had he realized how working in missing persons had soothed the ache of a missing daughter.

His own sister, Helen, who now lived in the house with his wife and kids, had disappeared when she was a teenager. Everyone knew she’d run away. The way his father had bullied and beaten them as children, it was probably a smart move. Then Helen showed back up a couple of years later and barely acknowledged her absence. She still lived with their mother most of the time. He thought she liked feeling needed and helping out around his house. He just wished he was experiencing the same thing.

He slipped out of the car and slowly made his way up the walkway, then paused at the front door. It didn’t feel right to just barge in, and it felt equally awkward to knock at his own front door. He had this debate with himself every day. Today he turned the knob as he knocked, announcing himself as he stepped into the foyer that led to either the family room or a small formal dining room. He turned to see his daughter Lauren at the end of the couch, engrossed in a thick hardcover book. She glanced up and mumbled, “Hey, Dad.”

He was struck by how mature she seemed with her dark hair straight down and a casual, long-sleeved shirt over a T-shirt. There was something else he couldn’t quite grasp. Oh shit, she was wearing makeup. He wasn’t a conservative dictator that outlawed makeup and dancing, but he was a father, and the first time your daughter is involved in either of those things it rattles you. He’d seen her dress up for nighttime school functions, but not just for reading in the house.

Before he could comment, which was perhaps for the best, Charlie came barreling down the stairs, using his left hand to hook his momentum and send him into a wide arc directly into Stallings’s arms.

From the instant hug the boy said, “Ready to kick?”

“You bet.” Kicking the soccer ball with the seven-year-old was about the best exercise he got right now. How had he slipped from a potential pro baseball player to a cop who stayed in shape with a half an hour of kicking a youth-sized soccer ball everyday?

Stallings looked over to Lauren. “Where’s your mom?”

She shrugged.

“Aunt Helen?”

“In the kitchen.”

He was about to ask her if everything was all right, a dangerous question for a teenager, when he heard a car horn outside and Lauren popped up off the couch and said, “Gotta go, my ride is here.”

“Where are you going?”

“To study.”

He peeked over her shoulder as she opened the front door and was only slightly relieved to see two girls in the front seat of a new Nissan Altima. They appeared to be a little older than Lauren, maybe seventeen.