James Andrus - The Perfect Scream

Stallings scribbled down some notes but still had a sense the boy was hiding something. He cleared his throat until the young man looked up at him; then Stallings said, “Did either of these guys spend much time at the chapter house in Jacksonville?”

Slowly the boy nodded his head. “They both had friends and other things that took them to Jacksonville. I think they usually stayed at the chapter house.”

“Did they ever go together to Jacksonville?”

“I guess they did around Halloween.”

“Why Halloween?”

“Because the North Florida chapter always hosts a kick-ass Halloween party.”

Stallings exchanged a quick glance with Patty.

Yvonne Zuni prided herself on always being on top of homicides, drug cases, and missing children. But this latest wrinkle in the crimes/persons squad was different from anything she had ever had to deal with in her short career as a supervisor. She wasn’t even sure a crime had occurred. They needed more proof than just a crazy theory about bad luck at a fraternity. She’d been told by Lieutenant Hester to keep things low key. But John Stallings and Tony Mazzetti were never low-key for long. Between the two of them something was going to be put on command staff’s radar. Sergeant Zuni didn’t mind; part of her job was running interference for her detectives. She just wished she understood the issue a little more clearly.

She wandered through the squad bay back toward her office, keeping a subtle eye on who was working at their desk and who was running their mouth at someone else’s desk. There was usually too much work to allow much time for watercooler talk. But as effective as the squad had been the last few months she wasn’t going to come down on anyone taking advantage of the lull in homicides or the precipitous drop in robberies over the past two months.

She noticed Tony Mazzetti at Sparky Taylor’s desk working with the peculiar detective on something. She knew the two detectives weren’t friends but had noted how they complemented each other so well. She had heard through the grapevine that Mazzetti’s regular partner, Christina Hogrebe, was going to be promoted to sergeant before she finished her temporary assignment at the police academy. Zuni hadn’t broken the news to Mazzetti yet but was gratified to see that he was working with Sparky on investigations instead of just treating him like an assistant.

She paused at John Stallings’s cluttered desk and noticed a small stack of photographs. She moved aside a sheet of paper on top of them and pulled the first photograph off the desk. She noticed the other ten photographs were copies of this one showing a young man and a young woman smiling next to each other in a long hallway with festive lights strung behind them. It took her a moment to recognize the missing fraternity brother Zach Halston. She didn’t know who the very pretty blond girl was. The sergeant assumed Stallings was using the photos to show different witnesses who might’ve come into contact with the missing fraternity brother.

She kept a photograph in her hand and set the piece of paper back over the remaining photographs on Stallings’s desk. As she neared her office she heard her desk phone ring and hustled to catch it.

Sergeant Zuni absently set the photograph of Zach Halston and the girl down at the side of her desk as she picked up the receiver and simply said, “Sergeant Zuni, crimes/persons.”

Dale squeezed into the tiny chair next to Lynn’s desk. Since she had agreed to have a drink with him Saturday night he’d taken it to mean she wanted to see him more often during the workweek at Thomas Brothers Supply. Until she had a better idea of what he knew and what he planned to do with the information, she decided to stay on the large, smelly man’s good side.

At the moment he was wolfing down a tuna salad sandwich, then gulping a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. He repeatedly offered Lynn a bite of the sandwich or a drink from the bottle, which she politely refused.

Dale said, “What time do you want me to pick you up Saturday?”

Lynn said, “I’m going to meet you. I thought we might go over to Jacksonville Landing to sit at a bar along the river.”

“Lady’s choice. I’ll take you wherever you to like to go. Maybe you could even bring some of your party pills if you want to have a real wild time.”

“What are you talking about, Dale?”

“I’m talking about the Baggie of pills I found the other day in your purse.” Now he cut his eyes slightly to the side and said, “Were you high the day you wrecked the Suburban?”

Lynn suddenly had a sickening feeling that Dale was not the big dumb redneck he pretended to be. She wondered if she might not have a real problem sitting right in front of her.

Tony Mazzetti had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided he fervently hoped that the deaths associated with the Tau Upsilon fraternity were a statistical anomaly. He could deal with one random robbery that resulted in homicide. Ultimately, perhaps after some luck and time, some street thug would be arrested for an unrelated crime and give up who shot the auto parts store manager. But three unsolved homicides meant that he had a severe blemish on his clearance rate. Two accidents were much easier to explain. Hell, half the kids in college today used pharmaceutical drugs recreationally. Mazzetti was surprised there weren’t more overdoses. And the kid who had fallen into the river and been chewed to pieces by the fishing boat could have been anyone. He just happened to be a member of the fraternity.

The events that had attracted the attention of the sheriff’s office had led Mazzetti to review the evidence on the auto parts manager’s shooting. He went through a stack of DVDs from various security cameras, including one located inside the store. That was the only one with any faces that could be recognized. If the killer had walked into the store the night of the shooting, Mazzetti couldn’t tell who pulled the trigger. In the four hours before the store closed there had been only a handful of customers. The man with three children, an older trucker, a guy in the yard service shirt who Mazzetti and Sparky had tracked down and cleared of any suspicion, a middle-aged woman holding a broken windshield wiper, a young, cute woman who ended up not buying anything, and three young black males.

Using a still photo from the video Mazzetti had checked with all of his informants downtown and eventually found one of the three men. He had explained that they were looking for parts to restore a 1967 Mustang. Sparky and Mazzetti had visited the young man’s apartment and seen the car, but more important, Mazzetti could tell the young man was not a thug.

He watched the soundless video once more over his desktop computer. The grainy images produced decent shots of each customer’s face as long as they happened to glance up towards the camera. Right now he looked at the young woman he had never identified and noticed her look across the aisle at the manager, though she never appeared to speak to him. If it had been a male in the same circumstances Mazzetti would be killing himself to identify the man as a suspect.

Stallings had been anxious to get back to his canvass of businesses on University Boulevard. Patty was following up on information they got from the nerd at the University of Florida fraternity. Stallings had tried to hide his interest in returning to the seemingly mundane job of canvassing businesses for a missing person, but the trip to Gainesville had frustrated him greatly. He had lost an entire day. The drive over and back, as well as Patty’s interest in showing him around the campus where she had spent four years on the gymnastics team, had killed any chance he had to talk to business owners the day before.