James Andrus - The Perfect Death

“I’m gonna sit on Byrd’s apartment.”

“You need some sleep. We’ll get out and hit it hard tomorrow and find the shithead. Believe me, we got plenty to do without wasting our time sitting on an empty apartment.”

“I got nothing to do anyway. I wouldn’t be able to sleep if I went to bed now. I’m gonna give it an hour or two.”

Mazzetti shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

Stallings noticed Sparky Taylor wasn’t speaking to either of them and was giving Stallings a dirty look as he hustled to his county-issued Impala.

Stallings found a place a block down from Byrd’s apartment where his silver Impala didn’t stand out too much. He could see the entrance to the apartment building and the street in each direction for a couple of blocks. He had Mazzetti’s information sheet on Daniel Byrd, which included several photos from over the years. The guy had been in and out of jails since he was sixteen. He went by a number of aliases and one narcotics report noted Byrd always maintained more than one residence. Sometimes it was a small apartment he could run to in addition to a house in a residential area. That got Stallings thinking about how long it’d been since someone had slept in the dingy apartment. It dawned on him that this place was probably a safe house where Byrd only came if he was in trouble. He wanted to talk to some of the neighbors, but it was too late and that was something he needed to talk over with Mazzetti.

As he was about to start the car and head back to his lonely house, his phone rang.

He flipped open the Motorola phone and said, “Stallings here.”

He instantly recognized Maria’s voice. “John, come to the house right away. I’ve got to show you something.”

The line went dead, but Stallings didn’t need any explanation. If Maria needed him, no matter what time of the night, he was going to be there as fast as possible.

Patty Levine lay on top of the covers of her bed ferociously stroking her cat, Cornelia. She’d been practicing deep, cleansing breaths she’d learned in yoga, trying to calm down from the anxiety built up since earlier in the evening. It was not only backing over the homeless man that had upset her. She realized things were unraveling with Tony Mazzetti. She had no idea where he was or what he was doing, just like he had no idea where she was or what she was doing. If that wasn’t a sign of a dying relationship, she didn’t know what was.

Her big concern was that her drug use had bled over into her daily life. She used to think that she’d confined it mainly to the evenings in the privacy of her own house. But she wondered if the effects of Sunday’s prescription-drug binge hadn’t lingered and made her less attentive than usual. She should’ve known the older homeless man would walk behind the car when she pulled out. She should’ve checked before she put the car into reverse. There were one hundred little things she should’ve done, but she had not. It scared her.

The irony of it was that her solution was to down another Xanax, and now, as she lay on her bed, she popped two Ambien as well. This was not the first time she’d faced irony in her drug use. It was, in fact, her overuse of the sleeping drug Ambien that had saved her life less than a year ago. While working on her first serial-killer case with John Stallings she’d allowed herself to be captured by the killer, dubbed the Bag Man, for his penchant for leaving bodies in suitcases. He’d thought he’d knocked her unconscious with two Ambien and a cocktail of painkillers, but the tolerance she’d built up through overuse allowed her to maintain her consciousness, escape, and save the girl she’d been imprisoned with.

It was also one of the reasons she cared so much about John Stallings. He was the only one who seemed to understand what she’d gone through, yet he hadn’t made a big deal out of it once she came back to work. He treated her like he always had, as an equal and true partner.

The incident also solidified her relationship with Tony Mazzetti. He’d shown that he cared about things other than police work by opting to stay with her at the hospital instead of traipsing off with Stallings to find the killer who’d escaped from the scene. She wondered if he’d do the same thing today.

All that seemed like a lot to deal with for a young woman who graduated from University of Florida with a degree in psychology. That should be reason enough for Patty to keep using a few anxiety drugs now and then.

Buddy was awake late, partially on an adrenaline high from his afternoon with Lexie and partly because he was in the mood to get some work done. That was the true beauty of living above his shop. He’d always kept a small apartment downtown as a place to hide if things ever got too hot. The rent was cheap and he rarely even visited the place anymore. And it was times like this he realized how lucky he was to have a large workspace near his sleeping quarters. Glassblowing wasn’t like any other art. It took space and could be very dangerous. He needed a place for his furnace, as well as plenty of space for the raw material.

The furnace got as hot as two thousand four hundred degrees and radiated heat in all directions. Buddy often used potash and soda ash as an added fuel, which vaporized almost immediately but was easy to get off the final product with a spritz of industrial cleaner. He used a cleaner the consistency of jelly. It looked like a tub of K-Y Jelly but was a hell of a lot cheaper.

He used a mold for the jar so all the jars would be very consistent in size and shape. They had to be to fit into the glass wall he had made.

Next to the furnace was the steel marver, a flat table used to work the glass and form a cool skin on the exterior of the glass.

Buddy liked the idea of practicing an art developed before the birth of Christ. Sure, it had been refined, the equipment updated, but the craft was roughly the same.

After he’d made a jar and cleaned up his workstation, Buddy carefully carried the jar containing Lexie’s last breath to his apartment, where he kept his work of art safely stored behind a padded moving blanket. Once inside he carefully removed the blanket and started the simple ceremony he’d created over the years. It was very personal and, for the first few years, short. All it involved was placing his hand over each jar that contained the final breath of one of his subjects. He took a second to recall them in as much detail possible. How they had looked when he first met them, how long he had talked to them, how easily they had made the transfer to eternity.

In his first three years of this project he’d only had two jars. Then he settled in to about a jar a year until the last three years when he knew things were moving far too slowly. Back then he wouldn’t have believed the pace he kept now.

He rushed the ceremony as he slipped his hand past the jars in the top, then moved onto the next row, pausing only on the jar in the middle. He remembered Alice. She had been so sweet and young. Maybe too young. It was only through the news that he had learned she was fourteen years old. She had those big blue eyes and blond hair and that thin, graceful neck that his left hand was able to envelop completely. He remembered that stunned look on her face. He’d only known her a few minutes. It was entirely a wild opportunity that he took without any hesitation.

During the lunch hour on a job in northern Flagler County she’d sat down next to him on a bench near the Intracoastal Waterway. They chatted for a few minutes. He excused himself and walked back to his van, picked out a jar he’d made only the day before, walked back, and sat next to her like he was about to finish his lunch. Instead, he casually reached across and clamped down on her windpipe like a vise. She let out a little squeak. Her legs thrashed, but he’d used so much pressure he almost didn’t get her final breath. He had never heard for sure, but he thought he might have broken her neck because he’d moved so quickly and she was so fragile. For some reason during the ceremony he always paused over Alice.