might have inadvertently driven her off. He hated to even consider that, but it was still possible. The emotions from his childhood flooded back as he looked at Uncle Earl. The beatings his drunken father laid on him and his sister. The crazy demands made in the middle of a drinking jag that sometimes lasted an entire weekend. His father’s dead certain attitude that serving in the Navy gave him the right to say and do anything he wanted to in his own house.
He had plenty of reasons to feel the way he did. He wanted this killer so badly he was starting to lose focus on other parts of his life. It wasn’t just Lee Ann Moffit that drove him. It was his own daughter, Jeanie, and his sister Helen’s secret trauma from running away from their bullying, drunken father.
Now Stallings was just pissed off.
As they pulled away from the set of trailers, Patty looked over at Stallings behind the wheel of his Impala.
“You gonna tell me what that was all about?”
“What?”
“You and the uncle. You wanted to kill him. Why?”
“Look, Patty, I don’t wanna talk about it. It’s just that all any parent or guardian should want to do is make a better life for their kids. There’s just too much that could go wrong with life, so you gotta be a good parent. If you think about it, raising a kid is scarier than police work. And that asshole back there did not help that poor girl.”
“How can you know that?”
“I lived it.”
He had more to say on the subject, since she’d gotten him started, when his phone rang. He dug it out of his front pocket and barked, “Stallings,” still with an edge to his voice.
He heard Rita Hester say, “Stall, we got another body.”
Fifteen
Stallings heard Patty say, “Holy shit, look at the news trucks. How’d they get here so fast?”
His throat went dry at the sight of the media vehicles. This wouldn’t help the investigation, and he knew from experience that it could make some of the detectives crazy and competitive for attention. The whole idea of a goat- fuck like this made his anxiety over finding Peep Morans move to the back of his mind.
“Someone probably put it out over the radio and it was a slow news day. What else are they gonna cover? The missile frigate docked at Mayport?”
“You think they’ve linked the bodies yet?”
“If they haven’t, they will, or someone’ll leak it.” Stallings pulled the Impala into the lot across from the wooded park. Yellow crime scene tape blocked the entrance and patrol units were parked at the corners of the woods to discourage anyone interested in a closer look. For now the reporters were behaving, crammed together in the designated media area roped off near the main road. Two helicopters circled overhead, giving the scene more of a Francis Ford Coppola feel.
He could see Rita Hester and Tony Mazzetti talking to a group of the task force detectives within the crime scene tape. It was a staged move to give the media some decent video and make the Sheriff’s Office look like they were throwing a lot of effort into the problem. Keep the soccer moms calm and give the realtors something good to say about the area. They used phrases like, “Our police force is outstanding and jumps on any problem that arises.”
Stallings was already in a bad mood from his encounter with Tawny Wallace’s Uncle Earl. His own childhood memories didn’t help things today. He had a job to do and had to move past his own issues. The idea that this creep had killed again made him realize how he’d blown his desire to stop the asshole before some other poor girl paid the price. Now this scene looked like a zoo, some family would be heartbroken, and Stallings felt like shit.
Patty looked around like a kid at the fair. “Wow, you ever see anything like this?”
“Yeah,” was all he said as he ducked under the tape and nodded to a patrolman, who almost saluted the senior detective. It reminded him of the circus he had endured after capturing Carl Cernick. Even his family got dragged into it as reporters hounded him for information.
Mazzetti looked up and motioned the two detectives over to his group. “I was about to go over what we’ve got so far.” He waited as they all crowded in, so he didn’t broadcast sensitive information across the crime scene to the media outside the tape. “We’ve got a young, white female, nude, in a suitcase.”
Stallings felt himself sag. He had hoped, by some wild chance, that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t their killer.
Mazzetti added, “This one’s been stabbed.”
Stallings head jerked up, but he didn’t say anything because someone else said it for him. “A copycat killer?”
Mazzetti looked down and said, “Christ, I hope we don’t end up with two of these creeps running around. The body is already over at the M.E.’s office, and they know what to look for. But I gotta say my first gut reaction is it’s our man. She’s short, barely five feet, same age range and method of disposal. The media hasn’t caught on about the first two deaths. No chance someone just happened to kill a short woman and stuffed her in a suitcase.”
Patty said, “Why the change in method of death? This is more violent than the others.”
Mazzetti nodded. “That’s what we been talkin’ about. Right now I wouldn’t want to guess. There are two visible wounds. One in the upper abdomen and one deep one all the way through the neck from back to front.” He used his right hand on the rear of his neck to emphasize the angle of attack.
Stallings caught Patty processing the death and shuddering. All he could think was, Welcome to homicide, kid.
Mazzetti cleared his throat and stood a little taller. “The good news is that this girl might have gotten in a shot of her own.”
“How’s one punch good news?” asked one of the older detectives.
“There’s a cut on her knuckles and some blood and skin under her fingernails. We got some decent DNA samples and maybe even some marks on the killer. At least for a few days.” He sounded proud of the girl.
Stallings agreed. Maybe she was dead, but she gave them something to look for. He hoped whoever she was, they could identify her and bring some closure to her family.
They started to assemble teams to comb the woods for any possible evidence. Stallings knew how important tasks like this could be to a big case, but he still felt the urge to get out onto the street and turn up some kind of information that would end this quickly. He wanted the killer stopped. Making a case was secondary.
His stomach growled, but he knew he couldn’t eat.
Tony Mazzetti squatted to take a look at the pine needles on the edge of a trail where he believed the killer had dragged the body. Of course it had been trampled, but not too badly. After a jogger had noticed the suitcase and opened it, he turned on the afterburners back to the street and just happened to flag down a JSO cruiser. By the time the fat patrolman had crunched through the trail and then his sergeant and two other patrolmen who wanted to see what the fuss was all about, the scene had some contamination. Mazzetti shook his head.
It was a senior sergeant named Ellis who was smart enough to chase everyone out and wait for crime scene and homicide. Mazzetti thought the big sergeant was going to punch someone the way he was laying into the patrolmen for not being more careful. The Sheriff’s Office needed more hardasses like that. Christ, it seemed like they had been hiring social workers for so long that no one knew how to do police work anymore.
As Mazzetti looked at some orange string or carpet fiber near the suitcase, he sensed someone behind him. Looking over his shoulder he saw the extremely cute Patty Levine gazing out toward the news crews.
Mazzetti said, “Like vultures around a dead antelope.”
Patty jerked her head at the sound of his voice, her blond hair flipping like a model’s at a photoshoot. “Huh?”
“The media types love juicy crime scenes.”
“Yeah, I guess. I was just watching how all the cameras followed John as he walked across the lot. You think they realize he’s the guy that caught Cernick?”
Mazzetti sprang to his feet and stepped closer to Patty for a better vantage point. Sure enough, three camera
