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.
He also let his hand linger over Rhonda. She’d been a few years older than most of his subjects. Classy and beautiful in her own way. He remembered seeing her eighteen-year-old daughter on the news afterwards and wondered if there was a place in his art for her too. How old would she be now? Twenty-six?
Overall he was well satisfied with his efforts and knew, given the expanse of time to look back, each of the women would appreciate how much care he had taken to save them for eternity.
Stallings arrived at his former residence, darted up the driveway, and knocked once before bursting in. Maria had sounded serious enough for him to not waste time and knock. Maria sat alone on the living-room couch, and when she looked up he could see she’d been crying. Her eyes were red and puffy and a pile of tissues sat on the coffee table they’d bought together the week after they moved into the house. She had a notebook in her lap as she slowly turned her head to Stallings with that sad face.
Stallings did a quick scan of both downstairs rooms to see if either of the kids were around. He stepped forward and said, “What’s wrong? What do you have to show me?” He eased down on the couch next to her and she immediately grasped his hand. He asked one more question, “Where’re the kids?”
Maria sniffled, then said, “Charlie’s already asleep and Lauren’s in her room studying.” She held up a small leather notebook and turned it so he could see Jeanie’s name on the small brass plate in the front. “This is the diary I gave Jeanie on her tenth birthday. The detectives with JSO took it for a couple of weeks after she disappeared, but because her last entry was more than two years before she disappeared they returned it to us.”
Stallings couldn’t recall the exact details of what they had taken from his daughter’s room. It sounded about right. That was sort of thing Patty Levine would look into. Stallings was more of an interviewer and hunter.
Stallings gave Maria plenty of time. No pressure, just a gentle arm around her shoulder while she started to cry again. Finally she sniffled and wiped her eyes with a Kleenex before blowing her nose. “I never looked at the diary. It felt like an invasion of Jeanie’s privacy. It was like I didn’t want her to be angry when she came home. But tonight I searched through her closet and pulled this out of storage.” She tapped the leather cover of the diary. “And I found an entry that might lend credence to your father’s comment that he saw Jamie after she disappeared.” Maria carefully opened the diary and read a passage.
Stallings had looked through the diary himself when it was returned. He’d jumped to the same conclusion as the JSO detectives. He had been so frantic to find a fresh clue that he hadn’t read back into the diary two years before she disappeared.
Stallings was stunned into silence, unable to do anything but stare straight ahead as a thousand possibilities raced through his brain. He clearly remembered the evening he’d come home and told Maria he’d seen his father shambling along the sidewalk on Davis. Stallings had been working the homicide of a homeless man not far away and had canvassed the entire neighborhood for witnesses. He’d slowed his car and stared at the old man but couldn’t work up the nerve to stop and actually speak with him. It was one of only a few times he’d seen the man during their long period of estrangement. Stallings had seen him in lockup after he’d been arrested for drunk and disorderly. And he’d seen him on the street now and then but never anything regular. Maybe only three times in the
