doing what Stallings had asked. He didn’t feel right rushing him if he was working diligently.
After a few more minutes and two more tests, the young man looked at Stallings and said, “It’s the same chemical exactly.”
FIFTY-FOUR
John Stallings rushed through the corridors of the Police Memorial Building like a maniac, at one point knocking a dispatcher out of his way with barely an apology or glance behind him. He’d dialed Luis Martinez’s cell phone three times only to reach his voice mail. The secretary in the Land That Time Forgot had seen him earlier and thought he was in the building somewhere.
As Stallings headed back to the crimes/persons squad bay, he decided, on a whim, to check Luis’s former unit, Auto Theft. As soon as he banged through the door he saw Luis chatting and laughing with a detective in fatigues and a T-shirt that had the JSO emblem on the chest.
Luis looked up and smiled at Stallings and started to introduce him to the other detective when Stallings gripped him by the arm and said, “What was the name of the guy you were talking to when you got the stain in your notebook?”
“Huh?”
Stallings resisted the urge to shake him. “Yesterday you told me about talking to some guy at a glass company.”
“Oh, that guy. He’s nobody. He knew the victim on my homicide, but there’s no way that little fruit ball did it.”
“Luis, what was his motherfucking name?” The tone and language clearly caught Luis Martinez by surprise.
“Arnold Cather.”
Stallings grabbed a pen off whatever desk they were standing next to and snatched a piece of paper. “Spell it.” He wrote out the name. “What was the name of the company?”
“Classic Glass Concepts.”
For some reason that name rang a bell with Stallings too. He wondered if his father’s memory problem wasn’t genetic.
Liz Dubeck was having one of those days where everything fell into place. Her three employees actually showed up, sober and helpful. She had taken an hour right at sunrise to run, climb the four flights of stairs ten times, and finish with four sets of push-ups. The guy from Classic Glass Concepts had come on time and, although he appeared to be very slow and methodical, was making progress. She had eaten nothing but fruit and avoided any coffee. Mornings like this were rare indeed.
She’d been in a good mood for several days since the money from the federal grant had been deposited into her business account. She had been planning on it for some time and had everything in place to start sprucing up the hotel immediately. The only thing she was taking her time with was bringing the wiring up to code. It was not a cosmetic, superficial job and was proving to be much more expensive than she’d anticipated. She had two estimates scheduled after lunch and hoped one contractor might see the other and get into some kind of bidding war. Devious was not part of her nature, but she could justify her actions if it meant helping even one more runaway in greater Jacksonville.
She knew a lot of this was to cover guilt she felt over Leah Tischler. No matter how many people told her it wasn’t her fault, she couldn’t help but worry about the missing teen.
She sucked down half a bottle of water as she surveyed the lobby and approved of the job the carpet guy had been doing in the sitting area across from her office. The new glass that was being fitted in the window was so clear it took a moment for her to realize it was already in place.
Could this day get any better?
Tony Mazzetti was reeling from the discovery of the link between Katie Massa and a man who gave her crossword puzzles. The fact that Marvin wasn’t really an orderly but a psychiatric patient didn’t affect the information. It meant that someone at the hospital had to have seen Katie with the man. He delivered Marvin back to the floor where he was being treated. He was a noncustodial, voluntary patient and posed no threat to the public. But he was still as crazy as a shithouse rat.
Mazzetti’s phone was in his pocket, and he dug it out to see Stallings’s name. He flipped open the phone, “What do you need, Stall?”
“I might have a suspect’s name. Can you check it out at the hospital?”
“How’d you get the name?”
“Tony, it’s a long story. But Martinez talked to him on a different homicide and ended up with the same chemical residue as the one from Lexie Hanover’s apartment on a sheet of notebook paper.”
Stallings’s information made his crossword seem lame so he kept his mouth shut and copied down the name Arnold Cather.
“Sit tight, Stall. I’ll check this guy out and get back to you.”
John Stallings had never been good at waiting patiently for anything. Now he paced while Luis Martinez gathered all the information he had on Arnold Cather and while Tony Mazzetti checked the guy out at the hospital. He forced himself to sit at his desk and write down the facts he had learned on one sheet of paper so he could explain it coherently if someone asked why it was important.
Finally Luis Martinez came over to his desk with several reports. The smaller detective said, “I don’t know if this guy could be your killer. I didn’t get that kind of vibe at all.” He dug through a stack of papers and pulled out a report from the driver’s license bureau known as a D.A.V.I.D., which recorded the address, vital information, and a large color photo taken when a driver’s license is issued in Florida.
Stallings looked at it for a moment and realized where he’d seen the name Classic Glass Concepts before. “That fucking guy was replacing the bay window over at a hotel where a missing girl had been seen.”
The look on Martinez’s face told Stallings he might be onto something.
It didn’t take long for Tony Mazzetti to track down the name Arnold Cather. He was on the log entering the hospital and when Tony ran down to records they immediately referred him to a doctor in the oncology unit.
The doctor was on rounds when Mazzetti caught him as he was entering a room on the fifth floor. “Excuse me, Doc.” Mazzetti held up his badge. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
The young Indian doctor sighed and rolled his eyes. “I’m really quite busy right now. Can it wait?” The doctor assumed that would be enough to stop Mazzetti and turned his back on the detective as he started to enter the room.
Mazzetti reached out and grasped the man’s pencil-thin arm, perhaps too aggressively, then decided to go with it and jerked him back out into the hallway. “No, it cannot wait.” He led the doctor down the hallway to the first empty room he found and all but shoved him into it.
The young doctor said, “I don’t think I like this sort of treatment. Perhaps I shall have to speak to your supervisor.”
“You can speak to whoever the hell you want after you answer a couple questions. This involves the murder of a nurse right here at the hospital and is absolutely time sensitive.” That seemed to catch the attention of the doctor, who remained silent, but now his eyes focused on Mazzetti. “Do you treat a patient named Arnold Cather?”
The doctor hesitated. “Look, Detective, I understand you have a job and this is a serious matter. But ethically I cannot talk about who I treat or don’t treat without a subpoena. I have to worry about being sued every minute of every day.”
Mazzetti swallowed hard, trying to think of a counterargument. Instead, he thought about the faces of the dead women he’d looked at over the past few weeks. “Doctor, I’m going to give you immunity to talk to me. I will
