“You scare people, I tease people. We each have our skills, and as long as we don’t abuse them, it’s no problem. For instance, you haven’t punched anyone in front of me for several weeks. I think you’re using your scary skills reasonably. I made no promises to any of the computer nerds, but I’ll admit I unbuttoned my shirt one button and leaned in while I was talking to them. If that makes me a bad cop then I’m guilty.”
Stallings let out a laugh and said, “You’re not a good cop, you’re great cop, and don’t forget it.”
“Does that mean you won’t think less of me if I cut out early this afternoon and head down to my parents’ house?”
“That where you’re having Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Yep, what about you?”
“I signed on for the whole deal tomorrow afternoon at my mom’s house. It’s supposed to be my dad, my kids, and Maria. My mom says my sister may even make a guest appearance, which would make it the first time we were all in the same room together in more than twenty years.”
“It was nice seeing you and Maria out last Friday night.”
“There wasn’t much to it, I’m afraid. But I’m working on it.” Stallings paused and smiled and said, “Your date looked like a nice young man.”
“You think anyone that isn’t Tony Mazzetti is the perfect match for me.”
Stallings started to argue the point, then held up his hands. “I’m just saying, Ken seemed very nice.”
“I thought about asking him to my parents’ for Thanksgiving dinner, but I didn’t want to scare him off. I hope to hook this fish more securely before I decide to reel him in.”
Stallings looked up and said, “Enjoy your time off and we’ll crank up again on Monday.”
Patty gave him a dazzling smile and a quick wave and was on her way.
Tony Mazzetti returned Patty’s wave as she hustled out the door. All morning he’d been hoping she might sit down and chat with him at his desk. He didn’t need much, just a quick whiff of her perfume or an up-close look at that beautiful smile. He knew they weren’t getting back together, but he wished she’d spend more time with him in the office.
His cell phone rang as he watched Patty disappear out the door. He dug the phone out of his pocket and whipped it open to see Lisa Kurtz’s office number on it. He felt guilty not answering it. It had nothing to do with how he felt about Patty. He just couldn’t face the pretty Syracuse grad explaining why she was the most fascinating and intelligent woman in the world.
She may not have been all that bad. Mazzetti had to recognize he liked being the center of attention himself and it may be that she was just too close a reflection of himself. Regardless, he had no intention of spending his Thanksgiving with her, nor did he really want to explain to her why he wouldn’t be. The easiest solution seemed to be to avoid her at all costs.
The medical examiner and the homicide squad worked hand-in-hand, and she would know he wasn’t too busy right now. Just the thought of the tall, red-haired assistant medical examiner surprising him in the office caused him to gather up his stuff and scurry for the door right after Patty.
Lynn gripped the Buck knife with the blade facing away from her hand. She swept past her target and then drove it in with a hammer fist. She did it two more times and watched the holes open. She stepped back switched grips, plunging the knife three times quickly into the center mass of her target. She stepped back, breathing heavy, watching the sand drip out of the large burlap bag she had strung up in a tree behind her duplex. She had studied knife fighting through YouTube videos and two books she checked out from the library. She realized she wasn’t big enough to carry a lot of power behind her strikes so she had to focus on targets. The only target everyone agreed on was a victim’s throat. She could slash it or gouge it and cause enough trauma to kill the victim.
The first few days she had practiced so hard with a knife that her hand had bled in several places. Lately she had started to realize how tough she was. A few scratches or blisters on her hand weren’t going to keep her from completing her mission. When she’d first started dealing out her own kind of justice, she’d been a mild-mannered bookkeeper no one took seriously. But she had proven herself to be dangerous and, over the course of her mission, grown confident and efficient. If she had regretted any of her actions, that was behind her now. She looked forward to dealing with her next obstacle. It made her feel like she mattered. She wasn’t a mousy coed. She was in charge. She was in charge of life and death. Justice had failed her and her family, and it made her feel sort of like a superhero to be handling matters herself.
Her next plan was more complicated than the others. It involved waiting for one of the creeps near his parents’ house in Orlando. College kids always headed home for Thanksgiving dinner. That was a no-brainer. She also knew none of these fraternity assholes could resist going to a bar at night. That’s where she’d make her move. By doing it in Orlando she added one more jurisdiction that wouldn’t be able to figure out why a nice young man had been killed for no apparent reason.
She closed her sharp Buck knife and took one more look at the sad and ripped burlap bag in front of her. This was a skill that could last for her whole life.
John Stallings had a list of nine phone numbers in the Jacksonville area from Zach Halston’s computer. Usually Patty handled jobs like this. It wasn’t that he was anti-technology or unable to figure out how to track down information, but everyone recognized Stallings’s strength lay in talking to people. And that was the strength he was going to use right now. He thought about what Patty had said earlier. She really could get help from people in the building who barely acknowledged his existence. So now he swallowed hard and thought about Jeanie as he approached one of the squad analysts. She was the last analyst on duty before the Thanksgiving break. Alice, the analyst, had made it clear to Stallings on several occasions that she’d like to take him out for dinner and possibly other things whenever he felt he was past the breakup of his marriage. It didn’t matter how many times he explained to Alice that he was only separated and hoping to reconcile with Maria, she still probed and questioned him about when they might meet after work.
Stallings approached her with a single sheet of paper in his hand. He had handwritten the nine different phone numbers, four with 904 area codes, two with 386 area codes, and two more with 850 area codes. All the numbers were either in Central or North Florida and they had all been called by Zach Halston within five days of his disappearance. The phone records that Patty had retrieved on his cell phone had not shown any calls since the last day anyone had seen him almost three weeks before.
Before he had even reached her workstation, Alice glanced up and a smile spread across her pretty face. She brushed her bleach-blond hair out of her eyes and turned to meet Stallings, who slipped into the chair on the other side of her desk.
Alice said, “Does this mean you’ve finally come to your senses?”
Normally, at this point, Stallings would set her absolutely straight. Instead, he tried to work it, handing her the sheet of paper and saying, “I’m sorry, Alice. I’ve just got too much going on right now to think about my private life.”
“Even with the long weekend coming up?” She winked at him. Alice was in her mid-thirties and very attractive. She was not known as a flirt around the sheriff’s office and Stallings couldn’t understand why she was fixated on him.
“
Alice looked at the numbers and said, “Wait right there and I’ll run these through our intelligence database and see if it ever came up in any other investigations. Otherwise we’ll have to get a subpoena from the state attorney to figure out who owns the phones.” She didn’t wait for a reply; instead she used her mouse to click through a few screens on her computer and then typed furiously for about thirty seconds. Then she looked back up at Stallings, making sure her eyes met his. “One of these numbers in the 386 area code came up in a narcotics case earlier in the year.”
“Can you see what it was about and who owns the number?”
After a minute of typing and reading, Alice said, “Looks like it’s a number from northwestern Volusia County. All it says here is that it belongs to a J. L. Winter, who was supplying pot to a couple of low-level dealers here in Jacksonville.”
