James Andrus: The Perfect Prey

He was fully clothed and still had his wallet in his pocket. Thank God he hadn’t had sex with Ann and found himself running naked once again. Instead, he calmly stepped onto the bus, dug in his pocket for his wallet, and gave the driver five dollars. Change automatically dropped out of the dispenser, and he walked past two derelicts to sit in the seat opposite the rear door as the bus picked up speed.

There was only one more stop before they hit the wide swampy area and then the St. Johns River. No one got on at the second stop, and he noticed two police cruisers racing east.

A smile crept over his face when he realized he’d have another season to hunt.

Stallings and Patty wrapped the girl in a blanket and kept talking to her until paramedics took her away. One of them had told Stallings the wound was superficial and would require stitches. He said the same thing every fireman had ever said about a facial injury: “All head wounds bleed a lot worse than they really are.”

Sergeant Zuni had arrived and taken over control of the perimeter, sending patrol cars a mile or more in each direction to block any route of escape. It was a slow night, and every cop in the city seemed to have come out to help. Even though Larry Kinard was obviously the man they sought and was a lot more than an everyday Ecstasy dealer, Stallings couldn’t help but think about Gary Lauer and what had happened. Stallings’s instincts might have been right about a cop not killing young college girls, but Lauer had other issues. Maybe he couldn’t work out how he felt about his girlfriend. Stallings didn’t want to think how responsible Lauer felt for the girl’s suicide, because right now he knew how responsible he felt for Lauer’s.

Stallings and Patty were waiting for Crime Scene to come and process the apartment as well as for Mazzetti to run a search warrant past the judge. But it hadn’t taken long for them to notice the collage of blond girls in the hallway. And Allie Marsh’s photo was in the corner of the corkboard.

Patty stared at the framed collage and said, “Do you think these could all be victims?” Her voice was hushed, and it showed the dread she had at asking the question

“God, I hope not.” It was all Stallings had for the moment.

To John Stallings this is what police work really meant. They might’ve missed the killer, and Larry Kinard was loose on the street, but with the right people in the detective bureau they had accomplished a lot in a couple of hours. He listened to a patrol sergeant’s radio as they sat on the porch of Larry Kinard’s house. He could visualize the wide perimeter that had been set up to catch the fleeing suspect. A patrolman had been smart enough to question a bus driver coming back from downtown, and he said he’d picked up a man matching Kinard’s description an hour before and dropped him off downtown. It hadn’t been enough verifiable information to cancel the perimeter, but it had caused another dozen patrolman to flood downtown looking for the fugitive.

Stallings had roughed out a probable-cause affidavit on someone’s laptop computer, and Sergeant Zuni had assigned another detective to run it through the duty judge so they could search the house. The days of just tossing someone’s house were long over, and the procedures and details of search warrants and subpoenas had taken a firm hold in most large police departments in the country. Although Stallings was anxious to search the house, he was actually more concerned with the capture of Larry Kinard.

The girl the paramedics had taken said Kinard had given her Ecstasy and he was acting weird. Everyone seemed weird when they tried to stab you. She admitted to having sex with him at Neptune Beach and that they got involved in rough horseplay in the water. The horseplay had upset her, so she had left him at a park near Neptune Beach without clothes or keys. She’d really thought that’s why he had gotten upset and attacked her with a knife. Patty had done an outstanding job of keeping her calm and getting the pertinent information out of her. But now Stallings thought about the photo collage of blond girls and felt sick to his stomach at the idea that these girls could be murder victims.

He’d been very impressed with Yvonne Zuni’s grasp of command and how she’d organized the search for Kinard as well as getting a search warrant and pulling in Crime Scene. Now she was on her phone. She quickly looked at the porch where Stallings, Patty, and a uniformed sergeant sat on a wide bench and said, “Warrant signed. Stall, you direct Crime Scene and get this show on the road.”

After the preliminaries, which included a videotape of the premises, sketches of how the searches took place, and an evidence tech on a computer near the front door, Stallings and Patty went immediately to the collage. He pulled it off the wall and set it on the desk. He found Allie Marsh’s and Kathleen Harding’s photos. Stallings identified the two girls from Daytona. That left twenty more photos.

The crime scene techs found a box of Durex condoms, which they took into evidence. Patty discovered the small box of odd pieces of jewelry. While Stallings looked over her shoulder, she turned and said, “Trophies.”

“What’s that?”

“These are trophies. Something from each of his victims.”

“How do you know?”

“It seems clear to me. Right here under the photographs, I can picture him digging through this box, recalling each of his victims.

“How many pieces are there?”

Patty counted slowly and said, “Thirteen pieces.”

They were single earrings, belly-button rings, and a nose stud, as well as rings and bracelets. Stallings leaned in closer, feeling as if he might vomit, praying to God he didn’t find any of Jeanie’s jewelry in the box. He thought hard about his daughter’s choices in jewelry, and nothing in the box seemed familiar, but it didn’t make him rest easy. This guy was a monster and would have no defense other than insanity. And he might pull it off. He could convince a jury he’d been abused as a kid or neglected or had some seen traumatic event that pushed him to this unthinkable violence. There’d be legal motions, which would drag on for years. Maybe he’d even end up at Raiford with the last serial killer Stallings had caught, William Dremmel. He’d acted so crazy that the case barely even made it to court. Stallings had shown great restraint and captured the man who’d drugged girls until they slipped into death. He had wanted to kill the bastard, but in deference to Patty’s efforts to reform him he’d risked his own life to capture the killer alive. But that effort had been mooted by the lenient treatment Dremmel had received in the media and court. Much of it was based on Dremmel’s childhood abuse by his mother. But the result had still been Dremmel skating on the most serious punishment after taking the lives of several girls and shattering the lives of their families. Stallings had known one of the girls and her family.

Stallings thought of something even more disturbing. What if Kinard cooperated and traded information about the victims to avoid the death penalty? It was a common enough tactic, and sometimes parents of missing children welcomed the closure. The media fed on it, and often that media attention only bolstered the killers. The whole concept made Stallings ill.

Of course all of that nonsense was contingent on catching him.

Patty Levine stretched in her bed, turned, and checked her alarm clock. It was ten o’clock in the morning. She’d slept five hours after being awake almost forty. But she had slept without the aid of any pharmaceutical drug even if it was on the edge of extreme exhaustion. She checked in at the office, and nothing was new on the search for Larry Kinard. She took a few minutes to clean her condo, grab a decent breakfast, and reconnect with her cat, Cornelia.