James Andrus - The Perfect Scream

“That’s not true. Patty and I have never been anything more than partners and good friends.”

“I would’ve liked to be your friend. I didn’t mind seeing you have coffee with the pretty woman downtown at the cafe. I knew there wasn’t anything real between you. I could tell with one look. But Patty is different. She’s important to you.”

Stallings thought about it, nodded his head, and said, “I guess she is. But like a sister.” Stallings looked at his wife’s beautiful face and said, “How do you feel about Frank Ellis? Do you think about him as a brother?” He had to laugh at his own, unintentional Brother Frank Ellis pun. Maria’s expression told him she didn’t think it was that funny.

It was awfully early in the morning, but Tony Mazzetti gritted his teeth and marched toward his partner’s desk. The lull in homicides had kept him from having to spend too much time with the eccentric Sparky Taylor. Thank God for small favors. Now Mazzetti needed that giant brain of Sparky’s to process some of the information they had and see if his odd perspective on life could tell him if the deaths related to Tau Upsilon fraternity were an accident or something much more sinister. As he approached the immaculate desk, his partner finished his last piece of wheat toast that he ate every morning, wiping his mouth after every bite with a new, clean napkin. Mazzetti cleared his throat.

“Hey, Spark. What’s new?”

The rotund black man looked up at Mazzetti with those soft brown eyes and pleasant face-unlike almost any cop Mazzetti had ever met-and said, “I’ve been reading the files on the robbery victim, the overdose, and the accident victim from the marina to see if there was anything we might have to do on this case.”

Mazzetti couldn’t believe his partner was so far ahead of him, but he resisted saying something like no shit . Instead, he nodded calmly and said, “That’s great. You come up with something?”

Sparky had a light Southern accent that Mazzetti assumed he had developed growing up in the Jacksonville area and honed during his four years at Georgia Tech. It was Sparky’s engineering background and mind-set that gave him new ways of looking at the same old problems.

Sparky said, “I’ve taken the liberty of running a statistical analysis and boiled it down to its most basic components. I’ve come up with this formula. If you take into account the two-year span in education of the victims and you assume that the fraternity has an average of forty-two members plus or minus three each year with a turnover of ten to twelve members each year, you would have to assume that the fraternity had approximately sixty to seventy members from the time the shooting victim graduated until now. Three deaths among that number of young, relatively wealthy white men is out of the ordinary. That being said, there are always statistical anomalies.”

Mazzetti looked at his partner and said, “Come on, Sparky, what the fuck does all that mean?”

As usual, Sparky didn’t change his expression in any way. He simply said, “It means we have a problem that needs investigating and I suggest we jump on it with both feet.”

Lisa Kurtz enjoyed being an assistant medical examiner and had aspirations to become the chief medical examiner of some jurisdiction, preferably in Florida. She liked the weather and the people. Although she found that most Floridians took college football far too seriously. She didn’t worry about factoring her relationship with Tony Mazzetti into her career decisions. Those choices were at least two years down the road and she didn’t get the sense that she and Tony would be together for too long. She enjoyed his company and his cute, simple tactics in the bedroom, but they didn’t share many interests. What really fascinated her about Tony was his job. Although she had gone to medical school and considered herself part of the law enforcement community, she was not a detective and that’s what really interested her. She read novels about detectives, she watched Law and Order almost every night, and she had read virtually every true crime book ever published. If it weren’t for the hassle of the police academy she would consider becoming a cop herself.

The natural curiosity that made her think she’d be a great cop had led her to seek out the shirt that the overdose victim, Connor Tate, had worn the night he died. She knew she should take the shirt over to the sheriff’s office crime lab or at least tell Tony what she was doing. Instead, she and one of the coroner techs, a former evidence custodian for Dade County, did their own forensic analysis of the shirt. They had scraped the residue from a stain that ran almost the length of the front of the filthy shirt. Now she would have to include the crime lab. She decided to deliver the tiny sample of scrapings herself and say it was part of an ongoing medical examiner’s probe, which was true. They were always interested in overdose deaths and the prevalence of certain drugs in the community.

If anything came of it, she’d let Tony know. Until then she just would enjoy being a detective.

Stallings had been born and raised in North Florida, yet he had not spent much time on the campus of the University of Florida in Gainesville. He was glad Patty had been with him and able to guide them both around campus as well as using her status as a graduate to assist them in finding the fraternity house with little or no trouble. They wanted to branch out from the Jacksonville chapter of Tau Upsilon, which served several of the smaller universities in the area. Stallings had had a theory that perhaps other fraternities had suffered a recent spate of bad luck as well. Although he considered three deaths among such a small number of young men unusual, Stallings still wasn’t convinced it was the work of some mastermind.

Now they were inside the house talking to a very nervous UF student who had been a member of the fraternity for his entire four-year career at the sprawling university. Stallings could tell by the look in this kid’s eye that he was very uncomfortable talking to any law enforcement officer. Stallings let Patty start off the conversation smoothly and in her own style. There was no reason for this young man to be as shaky as he was acting.

Patty sat next to him on a long sofa and patted his knee in an effort to calm the young man down. She said, “There’s nothing for you to worry about. We’re just curious if you know of any members of your fraternity who have died accidentally or otherwise in the past two years?”

The thin young man turned his pale eyes to Stallings, then back to Patty. He swallowed hard, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a fast elevator. “There’s no one in the chapter that died for as long as we’ve existed. At least as far as I know.”

Patty nodded like she was thinking, but Stallings knew she was trying to figure out what this boy’s story was too. Finally she said, “What about any alumni?”

The boy physically winced and slowly nodded his head. “One of our brothers, Paul Smiley, died in some kind of fire in Atlanta last year.”

Patty waited, thinking the boy might expand on his answer. When he didn’t say anything else she said, “You sure that’s it?”

“That’s the only person who died that I know of.”

There was something in his tone and delivery that made Patty say, “What about anyone seriously injured?”

The boy bit his lower lip and finally said, “Another one of our alumni, Alan Cole, is in the hospital in Daytona after he was hit by a car.”

“Do you know any details about either incident?”

The boy shook his head. “I think whoever hit Alan drove away and hasn’t been found.”