James Andrus: The Perfect Scream

Connor could hear the girl rustling around in his kitchen, so he took the time to struggle with his shoes and slip off his jeans.

This was going to be one great night.

Tony Mazzetti had enjoyed his dinner with the cute assistant medical examiner, Lisa Kurtz. He’d known she was interested in him for some time when she’d invited him to work out with her at the JSO gym. She always took extra time with him, explaining anything she found during his investigations and slipping in obvious hints about the lack of datable men in the Jacksonville area. She’d moved down from upstate New York, where she had gone to Syracuse. Somehow she felt like that was a connection between them. He didn’t mention to her his opinion of upstate New Yorkers was no better than it was of Southerners. Basically, if they weren’t from one of the five boroughs or maybe Long Island, they were just a bunch of rednecks who were lucky if they knew how to read. It wasn’t that bad, but sometimes he really did feel like it was. He knew a lot of the native Floridians resented this attitude that many New Yorkers held. He couldn’t have given a shit. These backwoods morons never failed to remind him that he was living in a state that used to be a swamp. He didn’t care about his partner Sparky Taylor’s assertion that the average Floridian had a higher level of education than the average New Yorker who moved to the state. He didn’t care about the embarrassing things that went on in New York City because he could explain it away as an anomaly. He didn’t care what people down here said about New York. His role as the top homicide investigator in the entire sheriff’s office, maybe the whole state, backed him up on his attitude about Southerners.

He had sat quietly and listened while Lisa prattled on about her numerous romances and challenges in medical school and how she had become interested in being a coroner or medical examiner after a class on the subject. Her career decision had horrified her gynecologist father and psychiatrist mother, but she loved her work and apparently loved talking about herself too.

Mazzetti didn’t mind as he stretched and leaned back in his chair at the chain seafood restaurant on the second floor of Jacksonville Landing. Even though he enjoyed being with this pretty girl, he’d seen too much crazy shit in this tourist trap to not keep his eyes moving over the restaurant and the people walking along the river. Not too long ago the body of a woman stabbed through the heart had been found in her car parked in the parking garage. They never figured out who killed her and there was a second set of blood drops in the car that were never identified. Jacksonville, not the place to let your guard down.

The whole time Lisa talked about her brothers and sisters and experiences in college, Mazzetti couldn’t help but think about Patty Levine and feel a pang of guilt. Even though it was she who had broken off the romance, he felt like he should’ve given her a heads-up he was going on a date. The first one since they had broken up. He decided maybe he’d just have a nice sit-down with her Monday morning.

As Lisa droned on about some class she’d taken, Mazzetti caught the waiter’s eye and signaled for another Jack and Coke. Then he held up two fingers to make sure he got a double.

Maybe a walk along the river would quiet her down.

Lynn stood on her tiptoes to make Connor believe she was interested in kissing him. He tended to ignore the way she swiped his hand away from her breast and broke the kiss off early. She had a burning desire, but it wasn’t the same as his. This loathsome, drunken creep was a stereotype of what she had expected. He was tall and handsome and his parents no doubt had money, and because of all that he expected women to do everything he wanted. Just like he’d expected Lynn to drink with him at the bar. But he had not noticed how she would slide her nearly full glasses down the bar. He hadn’t noticed her encouraging and cheering him when he threw down shot after shot of tequila. It was a fine line to get this moron plastered but not so plastered he called attention to them at the bar. She had been careful to allow him to walk out to the car, excusing herself to the ladies’ room, then meeting him in the parking lot. There was no way she would be identified as leaving the bar with him.

The only guilt she felt so far was letting him drive while still hammered. Her fear was he would plow into a car of innocent people. Shattering their lives like her family had been shattered. It was still early and she wondered if Connor and his friends did this kind of drinking every night. If he did, she hardly needed to intervene. But she had a plan and knew it would work.

In his small kitchen she took the cleanest-looking glass and grabbed a half-empty plastic bottle of water from the refrigerator. She filled the glass halfway, dug in her purse and recovered the Baggie filled with mixed and matched pills, and started the final phase of tonight’s mission. She pulled out two homemade ecstasy tablets one of her neighbors had stashed in his apartment. They had a logo that said J2A. She didn’t know what it meant, but she had been assured they were powerful. She crushed them both up and slipped them into the drink. Then she took three sleeping pills her doctor had prescribed her mother several years ago. She did the same with them. She poured some red Gatorade from the refrigerator into the glass and stirred it. The half-and-half mixture was a light red.

As she walked back to the living room, Lynn forced a smile.

Connor sat up on the couch, his jeans tossed on the floor, tighty-whities visible under his shirt. He grinned and said, “Whatcha got there, cutie?”

She avoided a shudder. “You need to drink this to stay up with me and to keep from getting a hangover.”

“Right on” was all he said as he eagerly reached for the glass. He gulped it down, spilling a few drops on his shirt. He patted the couch next to him.

Lynn’s eyes darted around the room until they fell on a long bong in the corner. She pointed to it and said, “Fire one up while I use the ladies’ room.” She made a show of wiggling her butt to motivate him before the drugs all hit him at once.

Inside the tiny, disgusting bathroom she waited until she smelled the unmistakable aroma of pot. She’d tried it a couple of times in college and never saw the appeal. She heard him call out to her twice, the second time nearly incomprehensible.

This was too easy.

Patty Levine couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled so much in the evening. After a moment of reflection she realized it was her last real date with Tony Mazzetti. She had been supposed to meet him at a swanky Italian place named Gi-Gi’s. Instead, she’d thought she’d surprise him by stopping by a construction site where he was conducting interviews. She’d walked into the middle of a fight Tony was losing badly against several burly construction workers. It had been her quick work with her ASP, cracking some of the construction workers in the leg, that had saved Tony at least a few punches and certainly some embarrassment. By then she’d known there was something wrong with the relationship anyway. She realized it was mostly her fault, but the fact that they were both cops and there was always some work issue breaking into their personal life had been what really broke them apart.

Tonight she had eaten sushi, drank a really big twenty-two-ounce Ichiban beer, and even tried some sake with Ken, the runner she’d met in the park. It was their first date, which was always special, unless the guy was a dud. Ken was no dud. He was a podiatrist who specialized in sports injuries and was a consultant to the Jacksonville Jaguars. He was laid-back and funny, with interests other than police work. He was exactly what Patty needed tonight.