James Andrus - The Perfect Death

He dressed quickly in jeans and a short-sleeved, button-down shirt he could leave untucked to conceal his Glock in the waistband of his pants. Just because he wasn’t on duty didn’t mean he might not have to take action sometime today.

His first stop was his father’s rooming house. As he walked up the path in front of the two-story house he was surprised no one was on the porch on such a nice Saturday morning. The wooden planks of the porch creaked under his careful steps to the front door. He didn’t bother to knock, not wanting to wake anyone. Instead, he turned the knob slowly, poked his head into the entryway, and called out, “Hello?”

The woman who ran the house poked her head from the doorway down the hall. She smiled and said, “Come on down here, Johnny. I’m getting breakfast together for everyone.”

He followed her into the kitchen, where she worked a big griddle with ten eggs frying and four pancakes cooking on the hot surface. A small smile crept across his face as he watched the older woman hustle around the kitchen, keeping everything in motion.

He didn’t even have to ask the question. She looked up and said, “I checked the room ten minutes ago and your father hasn’t been home since we talked. Now I’m worried too. This isn’t like James at all. He’s usually so responsible and good about letting us know where he’s going and when he’ll be back. It’s almost like we’re all one big, odd, former alcoholics, not-too-sharp-on-hygiene family.”

Stallings let out a little laugh at that comment and appreciated that this woman stayed sane while doing so much for so many. He quickly lost the smile when he thought about talking to his mother.

Tony Mazzetti had not slept well. It often happened in the middle of a homicide investigation. But this time it had more to do with an awkwardness that had developed between him and Patty. Not only in bed, but last night, that was the focus, it seemed like it had crept into their relationship too. How many super exciting rescues could either of them have to keep things interesting? Last night he had realized Patty felt it too. Maybe it was just the freshness of the relationship wearing off. He didn’t have enough experience to know for sure.

Now he was having a dream he couldn’t quite figure out when the same sound kept occurring in his head. His eyes snapped open. His cell phone was ringing on the nightstand next to Patty’s bed. He reached across and fumbled with the Nextel phone, squinting in the dim light trying to pick up the name of the caller before he flipped it open. Finally he gave up and answered with his usual abrupt greeting, “Mazzetti.”

“Tony, it’s Francine over at the SO. We got a report of a body buried in a park east of the river. Yvonne the Terrible told me to get you moving over there as soon as possible.”

“Have we ID’d the body? Is there someone maintaining the scene? Are there any witnesses?”

The flat nasal voice of the dispatcher said, “All I know is what I’ve told you. Sergeant Zuni wanted me to call her back when I got you and crime scene on the phone. You want me to tell her you’re headed that way, or do you have a different message?” She explained exactly where the body was found.

Mazzetti took a moment to clear his head and said, “I’ll be there as quick as I can. Call crime scene and get their fat asses rolling.” He slammed the phone shut and sat up in bed. Through his entire conversation, Patty had not moved one inch. He placed two fingers on her exposed throat to make sure she had a pulse. Maybe he’d been in homicide too long. Then he gently rubbed her hair trying to wake her. When that failed, he shook her head and still barely got a response.

He climbed out of the queen-sized bed and padded to the bathroom. A few minutes later he came out, dressed in his clothes from the night before. He finally managed to get Patty to grunt in acknowledgment. When he told her what had happened she slowly sat up in bed and in a sleepy voice said, “I’ll come with you.”

Mazzetti said, “Meet me at the park. I have to go by my house and pick some stuff up.”

“What’d you have there, you don’t have here?”

“Clean clothes and the gel I use on my hair. This is probably gonna attract media attention before the day is over.”

A few minutes later, as he drove away in his Crown Vic, Tony Mazzetti had a fresh wave of concern about his girlfriend and what sort of things she was doing to make her so groggy in the morning.

Stallings rehearsed some of the ways he might phrase things to his mother. One lesson he’d learned on the job was to not provide false hope or unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, he didn’t want to alarm her either. Even with his father’s history, Stallings could find no explanation for his disappearance other than something bad. He had done the whole routine of checking with hospitals to make sure nobody matching his father’s description had been checked in. He imagined the multitude of car crashes and hit-and-run accidents, cardiac arrests, strokes, and violent crimes or anything else that could happen to a sixty-five-year-old man with a shoddy memory running around Jacksonville completely unsupervised. When he thought of it in those terms he felt like a bad son. But considering the life his father had provided him, he felt like he was doing the best he could.

He parked and took the three stairs in one leap to the porch of the three-bedroom house a block from the St. Johns River. He hesitated outside the door, trying to come up with something that might cushion the news his father was missing. In all honesty, he didn’t know how close his mother and father were, but knew that she had stayed in touch with him after the rest of the family had completely blocked him and the memories. He also knew that his mother tended to be lonely and that was one of the reasons his sister, Helen, still lived with her.

He knocked gently on the door and stepped back, waiting see his mother’s usual smiling face. He could hear footsteps coming toward the door as the knob slowly turned and the door opened out. He was about to greet his mother when he was shocked to see who had opened the door.

It was his father.

Tony Mazzetti prowled inside the crime scene like an anxious tiger. The crime scene investigators had decided to rope off the entire fenced-in playground. It made for a very wide scene because no one had any idea how far away from the body they would have to search for evidence. That also gave Mazzetti a reason to close down the larger surrounding park with its open soccer fields and running trail. That kept the two news trucks almost two hundred yards away from where the crime scene techs were now excavating the body.

God bless the crime scene techs. Mazzetti would never let them know how important they were, but he needed them. They had the patience, concentration and determination to do what almost no detective could: lay out a detailed map of the evidence. It always took hours and sometimes the better part of the day. It was time that Mazzetti spent formulating theories and deciding who needed to be interviewed on any specific case. Right now he was anxious to see if there was anything to identify the body or if he’d have to rely on the medical examiner and hope there was a matching record of fingerprints or dental records. He’d seen her T-shirt used to be white and had a logo of a sun rising. He couldn’t make out the lettering yet. Someone would clean it up so he’d see it later. The decomposition around her face would make identification of her by sight much less certain. He hoped there was enough flesh to get fingerprints. There were a number of lab tests to confirm an identity, but there was still something about recognizing a face, even in death, that made a homicide detective feel more competent.