James Andrus - The Perfect Scream

As soon as Martin caught a glimpse of this girl’s face in the rearview mirror of her Nissan Sentra, he realized he had to get her phone number. She had brown hair and an all-American, cheerleader look. He couldn’t see what her body was like, but based on her neck and shoulders he wasn’t worried. He didn’t even bother to call out the vehicle stop on the radio. He had stopped her because she was going eleven miles over the speed limit, but he already knew he wouldn’t write her. It was probably better he had no record of ever stopping her if he intended to ask her for her phone number.

He made sure his gig line was straight and she got a glimpse of his forearms that he worked so hard to make broad and muscular. He didn’t bother to approach the car tactically like he normally would because his best features were his abs and forearms and he needed to face her directly to show them off properly.

Martin hesitated at the door as he leaned down and said, “You were going a little fast, weren’t you, ma’am?” He was rewarded with a very beautiful smile. This was starting out to be a good night.

As he rolled down the highway, Stallings reflexively took his foot off the gas as soon as he saw the blue flashing lights of a JSO patrolman. As he eased past, he saw how the young patrolman leaned in to talk to a female driver and laughed out loud to himself. He knew the ploy uniformed cops used. He was already married by the time he joined JSO, but he had plenty of friends who’d met girlfriends or wives after stopping them for speeding.

Some of the other detectives would recall their time in patrol with fondness and even a certain degree of reverence, but Stallings was more practical. There was no doubt the patrol work could be fun, working with cops who were your friends and enjoyed doing something as interesting as police work. But that didn’t change the fact that with each vehicle stop there was constant stress and the knowledge that a simple speeding ticket could turn into something much worse. Every time a cop stopped someone for a traffic infraction, the cop had no way of knowing if the driver was on his way to work or fleeing some horrible crime. More than a few patrol officers had been shot in the line of duty simply walking up to a window of the driver who had rolled through a stop sign or been going a few miles too fast.

Stallings was aware that patrol officers were often the only contact the general public had with police. Often the public’s view of police work was shaped by TV and they couldn’t understand when the officer who pulled him over was short or irritable, as if they weren’t allowed to have a bad day. No one ever cut a surly patrol officer slack. And no one who was stopped speeding ever thought they deserved the ticket, only that they had been singled out.

After Stallings had passed the busy patrol officer he decided to skip the fishing docks and go directly to the ocean to fill his lungs with the clean, salt air. It was one of the few things he knew he didn’t do enough. He lived a mere fifteen minutes from the ocean but saw it fewer than five times a year.

As he zipped east on the highway, a patrol car with its lights on roared past him, followed by two fire rescue vehicles. He briefly considered following them to see if he could help but realized they didn’t need an older, plainclothes detective interfering with their duties.

Before he could even see the ocean, he rolled down the windows and felt the breeze and smelled the salt air.

This had not been a bad evening at all.

Lynn let her hand slip down around the handle of the knife as the patrolman walked along the side of the road from his car to hers. She wasn’t sure exactly what she intended to do, but knew that it wasn’t a good idea to get a ticket so close to the site of the murder. When the cop spoke to her, all she could do was give him a good smile and hope he leaned down closer.

What surprised her was the response to her simple smile. As soon as he leaned closer, showing off muscular arms and a handsome face, the young man returned her smile and somehow conveyed to her that she wasn’t going to get a ticket. Instead he said, “You were going a little fast, weren’t you, ma’am?”

Lynn nodded her head. “I’m sorry.” She patted his hand, which was now resting on her car door.

The cop said, “That’s okay, everyone makes mistakes sometimes.” He looked up and down the highway. Then he smiled and said, “My name’s Martin.”

His friendly manner took her by surprise and she blurted out, “I’m Lynn.”

“Well, Lynn, would you consider letting me take you out to dinner one night and explain the dangers of speeding to you? We could avoid a lot of messy court time.”

He said it as a joke and not as any kind of threat. Lynn was stuck in a tricky position. Right now he didn’t know her last name. But if she refused dinner there was no guarantee he wouldn’t write her an official ticket or at least copy down her tag. She decided to give him her business card instead. All it had was the Thomas Brothers Supply number and not her personal cell.

The young cop looked at the card and said, “Thomas Brothers, that’s a big operation.”

“Biggest in Northeast Florida.” She’d learned to recite the line after the eldest Thomas brother decided to start saying it whether it was true or not.

The young cop was about to say something else when his radio flared to life. Lynn could only catch a few words but recognized “marina” and “fatality.”

The cop stood up and said, “I’ll call you soon, but I’ve got to go to this accident. There’s never a fireman around when you need one.” He hustled back to his car and made a quick U-turn onto the road.

Lynn that let out a long sigh of relief as she saw his taillights fade into the darkness. Just from that brief encounter she knew that the cops already thought Kyle’s death was an accident. She also saw how susceptible they were to flirting.

She would never be caught. Just the idea made her smile.

Tony Mazzetti felt antsy as he entered the small white administrative building of the Duval County Medical Examiner’s Office. He still wasn’t sure what he was going to say or how he would to say it. The last thing he wanted to do was to hurt Lisa Kurtz’s feelings. That wasn’t entirely accurate. The last thing he wanted to do was be lonely again, but the concept of having to hide from your girlfriend did not make for a particularly positive relationship. He realized it late Sunday night when his ears were ringing slightly from the constant chatter of his new girlfriend. That was reinforced last night when he’d spent the evening alone and decided he preferred it that way.

He nodded to a couple of the administrators and the operations officer, a tall gregarious fellow who never let an opportunity pass to tell Mazzetti he did not hold detectives in high esteem. Maybe that was because the lanky former investigator taught a class on what cops shouldn’t do when they happen on to the scene of a homicide. He’d seen all the mistakes that could be made from trampling evidence to moving the body. He’d even yelled at a young JSO patrolman for placing a blanket over a nude women’s body in her own apartment, thinking that it was a sign of respect. The medical examiners’ operations officer pointed out to him that she had lost her modesty and the most important thing was finding out who’d killed her and left her nude in the middle of her living room.

Mazzetti was certain the operations officer didn’t like the prospect of a homicide detective dating one of the assistant medical examiners. He’d probably like it even less when he found out Mazzetti intended to break up with Lisa.

He followed the instructions of several assistants and administrative people who kept directing him farther back down the hall toward Lisa until he found himself in the procedure room at the back of the building. Things had been so slow around the squad that he had not been in the room for some time. He could remember when things were rocking and rolling in homicide, coming to the ME’s office four times a week. In the last month he had come far more times on personal, social business than on official business. Hell, that’s what this visit was all about.