Peep nervously fumbled with his hair.
“Give it up, Peep. What’d you know about her?”
“I, er, I might’ve seen her.”
“Where?” He placed a hand on Peep’s grubby T-shirt.
“C’mon, Stall, I don’t remember. There’s a flood of scared girls rolling through here. Some leaving home for good and some just throwing a scare into their parents so they can use the Navigator more often or stay out on weeknights.”
“Is that all you know about her?”
“Seems like I saw her right around here, but I can’t remember.”
“When?” He twisted the shirt in his grip and pulled Peep closer to him. The familiar anger bubbling up inside of him
Sweat beaded on Peep’s forehead.
“I don’t know. Her face is familiar.”
Now Stallings had the man on his tiptoes and he thought about how Peep made a living on others’ sorrows. He thought about the value of scaring punks like this to get information and Jeanie’s cold trail and the slight possibility of reviving it if Leah Tischler had met the same fate.
A woman’s voice broke his trance.
“What’s going on here?”
Stallings released Peep and turned to see a woman with dark hair in jeans and a Florida State sweatshirt.
She locked her eyes with Stallings, not backing down.
Stallings faced her and said, “It’s all right, ma’am. I’m a police officer.” She had a pretty face and beautiful, oval eyes. She was in her mid-thirties and wore her dark hair in a ponytail.
“Is this how a JSO officer is supposed to act?”
He thought for a moment and wondered if she was right. He let his emotions get the better of him.
Peep blurted out, “I’ll keep my ears open and let you know what I hear.”
Stallings hardly noticed him scamper past the woman and around the corner.
The woman nodded good-bye and was gone as quickly. Stallings wanted to know who the hell she was.
Buddy arranged the photos on the dreary brown wall of his apartment above his shop. He appreciated art in whatever form it took. In this case it was a photographer who, like him, had an eye for beautiful women. The photographer, named Petter Hegre, shot them in black and white, or as they said in the new millennium, monochrome. He missed simple phrases he’d grown up with. He missed the fact that artists were no longer revered, replaced by guys like Warren Buffett or that insufferable Donald Trump.
Buddy had lived in the apartment since his thirtieth birthday over five years ago. Before that, he shared a house with a coworker at another glass company. His mom had kicked him out of the house at twenty-two. Even though she had plenty of room and was all alone.
She had said it was so he’d become more independent, but mainly it was because she suspected him of killing her two cats. It was true, but he’d never admitted it. Not to anyone. He’d learned it was one of the keys to keep from being caught. It was also where he’d learned another important lesson: what attracted him to killing was that one, last, perfect breath. With his mother’s cats he’d used a kitchen knife to stab a tabby called Tiger. He’d stuck it and watched like a scientist as it wiggled on the blade for less than a minute. There wasn’t much thrill to killing something that way. But Blackie, a much bigger cat, was another story. He had a plan for this big black beast that rarely got off the couch and followed him with its eyes to let him know he was further down the affection chain in the house. He’d worn thick, canvas gardening gloves when he wrapped his hands around Blackie’s furry black throat. The cat had kicked and clawed at his hands and made a tiny squeal, but in the end he knew the feeling of choking something couldn’t be replaced: that last moment when his victim was conscious but had no hope. The divine instants when he realized he had the absolute power of life and death. But the whole experiment pissed off his mother. It wasn’t until a year later with a neighbor’s Yorkie he discovered the art of capturing a breath. He slipped a plastic bag over the dog and released his grip on its throat for just a moment. He noticed the fog of the dog’s breath on the inside of the bag and realized it was possible to capture the essence of something. To harness a last breath. Then it was a matter of finding the right container.
He looked around his apartment and considered all he had learned in the past few months. It made him happy to know he had a grasp on eternity. He had a purpose in life that would outlast him. Most things would.
EIGHT
John Stallings picked Patty Levine up at her condo in his Impala so they could cruise along North Davis and talk to the managers for some of the hotels where runaways hung out.
Patty said, “What’d you do last night?”
“Hit the hay early.” It wasn’t an exact lie. He had gone to bed early, giving up trying to sleep, and come down here for a look around, but Stallings didn’t want to hear Patty tell him how he needed time for himself or needed more rest.
Patty said, “I bet Tony five bucks you’d go out on your own time and see what you could discover. I guess I’ll pay up this evening.”
Stallings turned and frowned at her. She knew him too well. He mumbled, “Don’t pay up.”
“I knew it. You gotta stop going out on your own. You coulda been hurt and no one would’ve known where you were.”
He hadn’t considered that argument.
Patty added, “You need your rest. I told you to get seven or eight hours of sleep a night.”
He nodded and listened for the next fifteen minutes as he cut in and out of Jacksonville traffic, taking surface streets and alleys like any good cop would.
Stallings pulled the Impala to the curb in front of a four-story, brick apartment building. Each unit had one window and about twenty percent of those were boarded. Stallings figured there were maybe a hundred tenants in the whole place. He’d heard this was the new runaway central and under new management. Different buildings popped up in the city as mainstays of runaways. Sometimes it was cheap rent that attracted them. Sometimes it was a manager who looked after the runaways. Either way the new manager here might have seen Leah and maybe even if she met with anyone.
They entered the neat lobby with new, cheap carpet and a plain set of Rooms-To-Go furniture in the corner, where people could gather on a couch and three matching chairs around a coffee table.
Stallings stepped to the clean counter and knocked on the countertop. “Hello?”
Like a good partner, Patty wandered to the hallway and casually stood, but in reality it was an instinct that couldn’t be taught at the police academy. She was in position in case something surprising happened and she had to cover Stallings, or if someone rushed them from the hallway, Stallings could do the same for her.
He shifted to expose his gun and badge on his hip so they would be seen by anyone coming out of the office behind the counter. He didn’t want to waste a lot of time explaining who he was. He had plenty of his own questions that needed answers.
He was about to call out again when he heard a woman’s voice say, “I’ll be right out.”
He stared as she stepped out of the office and behind the counter.
Her dark eyes met his and she gave him a cursory smile.
The woman said, “Hello, Officer.”
It was the woman who had scolded him last night.
A stack of small notebooks were spread across the wide conference room table. Tony Mazzetti looked over the mess at his partner, Sparky Taylor. The fact that it looked as if there were two victims had already pushed everyone to the edge. New information was coming at him from three different sets of detectives and everything was piling up fast.
