James Andrus: The Perfect Scream

Then everything went black.

Lynn was disappointed all she heard was a short yelp of terror instead of a more satisfying scream. She had been spoiled by her first victim. That had been a healthy scream. She glanced in the rearview mirror to see his crumpled heap lying across the strip of grass and sidewalk in front of the bank.

One more asshole dealt with.

A smile crept across her face as she casually pulled out onto International Speedway Boulevard and turned toward I-95. In about an hour she’d pull back into the main parking lot of Thomas Brothers, toss the keys to the fleet manager, and go back to work like she had only been out running a few errands.

No muss, no fuss, no regrets.

Now she could focus on who was next.

John Stallings was still annoyed at his assignment finding the wayward fraternity nerd. As far as he was concerned Zach Halston was a spoiled rich kid whose friends couldn’t keep their yaps shut. They had given up his secret apartment off campus with hardly any argument at all. Now that Patty had sweet-talked the key out of the manager, Stallings thought the boy was just trying to keep a low profile and stay off his parents’ radar for some reason. Patty and he had jointly decided to come here before going by the fraternity house again. Their first visit to the Tau Upsilon house had been a bust except they had discovered most of the brothers were over at the hotel on the beach. One of the brothers who stayed at the house, a young man named Connor Tate, was supposed to be close to the missing Zach Halston. They had a few questions for Connor.

Stallings glanced around at the tables and kitchen counter and immediately picked up signs of relatively serious marijuana use and sales. Small plastic Baggies were stacked in one corner next to a scale and ashtrays were filled with half-smoked roaches.

Patty said, “This keeps getting better and better. This halfwit must be stoned every hour he’s awake and it looks like he sells fifty bags a day. That must be how he affords this place off campus and he doesn’t have to answer any of Mom or Dad’s questions. Too lazy to work, too stoned to be bored. This boy is a real credit to society.”

Stallings let out a snort of laughter, but that was it. This was not a good use of his time. A shiftless pothead who hasn’t checked in with his parents. Fucking great.

Patty said, “Jackpot,” as she pulled a Toshiba laptop from under a pile of Playboy magazines.

Stallings recognized the key to many missing young people’s whereabouts lay in their personal computers. The odd email or Facebook entry had led them to more runaways than all the phone tips to a hotline combined. Technically, at twenty-one, Zach Halston wasn’t a runaway. He was classified as a missing person, and if his parents hadn’t been educated and influential, Stallings doubted anyone at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office would have told him to look for the kid. In fact, Stallings was thinking about turning the laptop over to narcotics when Patty had gotten everything she needed, since he figured it held the names of the kids’ customers. But that undermined the whole concept of a warrantless search to find a missing person.

Patty started to rustle through the kitchen drawers as Stallings glanced up at a long hallway filled with cheaply framed photographs on the wall. He flicked on the overhead light and slowly started strolling down the hallway. Most of the photos were of Zach with his drunken frat brothers at wild parties and in bars. They were more than a few bongs and other drug paraphernalia prominently displayed. Stallings started understanding the concept of a second, secret apartment more clearly.

There were a number of photographs with young women posing in different states of drunkenness. He briefly thought about trying to talk to some of the girls but figured it would take more time to identify them than it would to actually locate the missing frat brother.

Near the end of the hallway, Stallings was about to turn and join Patty when one photo of Zach Halston with his arm around a young woman caught his eye. He stepped to one side so the light would fall on it. He reached into his breast pocket and quickly yanked out his cheap, cheater reading glasses he’d been forced to use over the past year. He stared at the photo and every detail, slowly reaching up with a trembling hand and pulling the four-by-six photograph off the wall. He fumbled with the frame, roughly pulling the back off it so he could look at the photograph without any distortion from cheap glass.

He stared until he realized he was certain of what he was looking at.

The girl in the photo was his missing daughter, Jeanie.

Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office homicide detective Tony Mazzetti was in a miserable mood. A mood that had lasted for months. That was one of the reasons he was looking at the case file of an open homicide with such contempt. A simple shooting in Arlington. Some poor schmuck manager of an auto parts store. No robbery, no known enemies, no motive. Just a nice middle-class kid shot for no apparent reason. And Mazzetti had been unable to solve it. He felt like shit.

But it wasn’t just a blot on his immaculate homicide clearance rate. Three articles of his had been rejected by various history magazines in the past three weeks. That had never happened before either. He’d pulled a hamstring at the gym and now wobbled around like an arthritic old man. Mazzetti thought he could trace back the string of bad luck and sustained bad mood to breaking up with Patty Levine.

No matter how he spun it in his head or talked about it with his mom or sister, Patty was the only one who’d done any breaking up. He’d just sat there like a mute dolt and let the best thing that ever happened to him walk right out of his life. While she had been polite and professional in the office, he had no indication she was remotely interested in hooking back up with him romantically. Now the problem had to do with him needing a girlfriend. He had gone years without a steady girlfriend and thought he was getting by just fine. But Patty had shown him the wonders of a committed relationship and now he found himself chatting with women more and interested in starting a new relationship. It was exhausting.

His immediate concern was finding who had pumped three.38 rounds into Kirk Topps, manager of the Independent Auto Parts store in Arlington. This was a real puzzler. The young man was a graduate of the University of North Florida, came from a nice, middle-class family. Both of his parents were teachers. He’d had the same steady girlfriend for three years and no history of drugs, alcohol, or gambling. Those were usually the big three culprits in an unexplained shooting.

Mazzetti’s partner, Sparky Taylor, had used that enormous brain of his to find unbelievable video of the street coming and going to the auto parts store. Sparky was a technical genius who knew how to talk to other tech geeks. He’d found security cameras at different businesses that covered the street from a number of angles. Then Sparky spoiled some of his efforts by finding JSO policy regarding the use of unrelated videotape. It made him fill out way too many forms and permissions.

Sparky had been driving Mazzetti batty with his constant citation of policy and investigative ideas. Mazzetti didn’t care what the former tech agent made him do as long as it helped solve a goddamn homicide.

His cell phone rang and he snatched it up absently, barking into the receiver, “Mazzetti.”

A flirty female voice said, “Hey there. You think you could find a reason to run over to my office sometime today?”

Mazzetti immediately recognized the voice belonging to Assistant Medical Examiner Lisa Kurtz. The cute, redheaded graduate of Syracuse Medical School had been playing a game of catch me if you can with Mazzetti for weeks. Now Mazzetti was ready to catch her.