of the officers, the ones who didn’t really know Stall, speculated that there was something fishy about it. She knew it was all bullshit, and she knew that one of the things that drove a guy like Stallings was his sorrow over losing Jeanie.
A voice snapped her out of her tunnel vision.
“I’m glad you got assigned to the case.” It was Tony Mazzetti, and the cute smile seemed at odds with his reputation or even the way his Brooklyn accent changed from funny to harsh.
Most people raised in the South didn’t view an obvious accent from north of Maryland as friendly and inviting. She smiled back. “Thanks.”
“You’ll see how things run pretty quick, but keep an eye out for practical jokes. The guys pull ’em on everyone who joins us.”
She let out a laugh and said, “Doesn’t every unit?”
He nodded, his brown eyes focused and clear. She’d seen him directing most of the detectives and looking over at the material that was starting to flow into the bureau. Mazzetti had pulled all the reports of drug thefts for the past three months, the missing persons reports for young women, any reports of assaults where a man approached a young woman and tried to get her to leave a public place with him. She was fascinated at how much raw data had to be sifted and how this one guy seemed to be doing it all.
She gestured to the photos on her desk. “I’m just getting familiar with the case and looking for a pattern.”
“We’ll have a meeting later with specific assignments. Then you’ll have plenty to do.”
“Will I be working with my partner, Stallings?”
His face darkened. “No, he’s been told to run some specific leads alone. We have a mountain of things that need to be done. I doubt we’ll see much of the master detective.”
Just by the phrase “master detective,” Patty sensed there was a bigger problem than she thought between John Stallings and Tony Mazzetti.
William Dremmel drove over the Fuller Warren Bridge to his Tuesday morning biology lab class at the community college. He bumped along in his tan Nissan Quest. It gave him the appearance of a family man, but the missing middle seats gave him plenty of storage room, and the minivan never seemed to have any mechanical problems. It was as invisible a vehicle as there was. No one noticed a bland minivan tooling along at the speed limit. In a sense the van was like him, unnoticed by almost everyone. It could hold a suitcase or a pallet of decorative sand from Home Depot with equal ease. Easy to vacuum out and wash down, it was the perfect vehicle for him.
At the school he automatically set up the frog sections so students could prepare slides for the microscope. He was distracted by the image of the cute Stacey Hines, the waitress from Ohio who didn’t want to go back. The hours he’d spent on the computer discovering the little mysteries of the girl had been so satisfying that he’d experienced a near-constant erection since he first learned just how alone the young woman really was. Soon, after her roommate had returned to Ohio, he would step in and show her the attention she deserved. Just the idea of her living so quietly in his special darkroom made him grin from ear to ear.
He’d done some research on men who had been successful in endeavors similar to his own. Ted Bundy had escaped detection several times by cleaning his VW bug with chlorine on a regular basis. Of course forensics were a lot less sophisticated in the 1970s, but the theory was sound. Bundy went on to become a legend of American killers.
Dremmel knew that few people learned the lessons of today from studying history. That was what he tried to get across to his students; by studying the past you can avoid the same mistakes again. No one followed this concept: not presidents, not generals, and apparently not serial killers.
He’d been reading up on Jacksonville’s most recent serial killers. One of the killers, Paul Durousseau, had broken a simple rule: don’t let anyone see you with a victim. As a taxi driver, Durousseau had access to a number of victims, but one concerned family tracked their missing daughter to him. Jovanna Jefferson’s body had been found in early 2003, and the fact that she had ridden in his cab was the break the Sheriff’s Office needed to direct their attention to the former soldier. It was his troubled time in the army and violent disputes with his wife that convinced the detectives he was their man.
Dremmel had no criminal record. There was hardly any record of him at all, anywhere. He was truly the invisible man, and he had something else Mr. Durousseau didn’t: brains. He could outwit anyone looking into the disappearance of a couple of petite girls. Hell, he hadn’t even heard anything about Tawny Wallace since he dumped her over in Springfield. It was as if she had never existed.
The other local killer he had read about was Carl Cernick. The crazy Czech upholsterer had strangled four women over nine months when a cop named Stallings, who at the time was investigating some other crime, had found him. That was a huge element of luck, but Cernick could’ve survived it if he’d been prepared with a story and nothing to link him to the victims. Instead he had kept mementos, in this case, a finger from one of the victims. But that had more to do with being a psychotic than it did with being smart. Dremmel would avoid that problem, because he knew he wasn’t crazy.
He was a scientist.
Tony Mazzetti had tried to focus on assigning duties to the other detectives, but he kept wondering what John Stallings was doing and if he was more than just lucky. Stallings’s capture of Carl Cernick had seemed like the luckiest break any cop had ever had. That was the kind of arrest Mazzetti had always dreamed about making. Glory, news coverage, citation. Damn it, Stallings even got the medal of valor for making the arrest by himself. That’s the kind of thing that Mazzetti needed.
He knew these rednecks didn’t necessarily appreciate a New Yorker in their midst. But no one, not the lowest crime scene weenie, all the way up to and including the all-powerful sheriff, could say he wasn’t a great detective. No one had his clearance rates. No one spent more time keeping his shit straight. All he needed was a big, flashy arrest like the one Stallings had made. With something like that no one would care if he was from New York or a goddamn Arab. He’d just be the best fucking detective anyone knew.
He decided to test Stallings right away on his willingness to be a team player. He had the secretary call everyone involved in the case to be at a meeting right after lunch in the homicide squad bay. That way he could see what the detective was up to, show him who was in charge, and set the right example for all the lesser detectives who’d been sent to help on this case.
Eight
John Stallings knew the town pretty well. The city of Jacksonville was traditionally good to visitors. It was essentially a Southern town both geographically and culturally. But it had a severe inferiority complex. The industry wasn’t large enough to support the town alone. Tourism wasn’t nearly as strong here as in South Florida, and the climate made it a lot more like Georgia than Florida. Jacksonville wanted to be a shining star in the Sunshine State, but felt more like a traffic tie-up on the way to Disney World.
The city dumped tax dollars into image control, hosting the Super Bowl, promoting the Jaguars and the annual Florida-Georgia game at the Alltel Stadium, which used to be called the Gator Bowl, but no one wanted to talk about the homeless and runaways who had to pretty much fend for themselves. BusinessWeek magazine listed J-Ville as one of the saddest cities in America based on stats like cloudy skies, crime and suicide rates, and unemployment.
John Stallings had spent a few hours checking some of the places that attracted runaways. It wasn’t like the old movies or stupid TV shows where everything happened at the bus station. Hell, the Greyhound terminal in Jacksonville on Pearl Street was relatively clean and comfortable, and it took people to other places. Teens who had left home were either gone or had come to Jacksonville from somewhere else. Finding runaways while at a transit point was like finding supermodels at the deli.
Teens who lived out on the street had hangouts. There was an old, abandoned hospital that homeless people found ways into and used as a shelter. Houses that offered some security either by an understanding adult or sometimes quietly by some foundation that figured having the teens safe was better than letting them loose on the streets, where they always ran into trouble. These safe houses may not contact parents or get the kids back home,
