The Perfect Prey (26 page)

Stallings was surprised when Palmer rolled into the parking lot of the dance club south of the city. It was still early for the dance club crowd, but maybe he tried to maintain some kind of schedule. They waited about twenty minutes. Patty was dressed very casually, in jeans and a cute blouse with her hair up in a ponytail, and was wearing glasses in an attempt to be harder to recognize. It sounded lame when she told Stallings what she was going to do until he saw her and realized a guy like Palmer might not even pick up on her in the club. She looked entirely different from the way she had on Monday morning when they interviewed him in his office. She never failed to surprise the veteran detective.

After about half an hour Patty came out from the club and slipped into the front seat with Stallings.

“He’s in there talking to a very young blond girl at the end of the bar. It looked as if he knew her and she might’ve been expecting him. If we’ve got his car covered out here all we have to do is wait.”

“I don’t see any other choice. But if a girl gets in a car with him, I’m not sure I can let him drive away considering what we suspect him of.”

Patty looked concerned and said, “We’re probably not gonna have any PC. She was at least eighteen, and he wasn’t forcing her into anything that I could see.”

“I’ll find the PC if I have to.”

“I was afraid you might say that.”

He checked for Ann as soon as he walked in the club. She knew that he’d be there early, and he hoped that would be enough incentive for her to show up alone. He’d gone so far as to tell her he’d only be there for about an hour and certainly be gone by nine.

The best he could do was try to develop a new target who had joined him at the end of the bar. But the girl had used her cell phone too many times in the hour that he had spent with her to try and separate her from the herd. If she couldn’t sit there with him, downing Stolies on the rocks, and not have to chat with nine different friends, then there was no way he could slip away with her quietly.

She was pretty to look at and had a breezy manner, but it was mainly that light hair and pale blue eyes that held his attention.

Even the best predators went home hungry now and then.

Patty Levine wasn’t used to starting her day at noon, but in an effort to use their time efficiently she and Stallings had decided to change schedules. She sat at her desk studying records when Yvonne Zuni approached.

The sergeant said, “Gary Lauer was in Daytona last year and Panama City the year before. The dates line up with the girls’ deaths.”

Patty said, “How’d you find out where he went on vacation?”

“Sometimes you have to work outside the box. I cleared up an ugly issue for a young woman who was romantically involved with Lauer last year. I asked her a simple question, and she gave me a straight answer.”

“That creep has a girlfriend?”

“Several. You’ve seen him, and you know how young people can be. This is a nice girl who thought he was something he wasn’t. The hell of it is she still sees him on and off.”

“How ugly was the issue? Does it relate to this case at all?”

The sergeant slipped into the seat right next to Patty,
leaned in, and quietly said, “The son of a bitch knocked her up, then forced her to get an abortion. One night they had an argument that got out of control. He was on temporary assignment to narcotics, so when neighbors complained about the noise the responding patrolman called me to talk some sense into him. He started to get shitty with me, and I had to crack him in the head with my ASP.”

“How’d you avoid an IA investigation?”

“Let’s just say everyone agreed to keep their mouths shut. And don’t tell your partner, but Ronald Bell in IA did a great job of smoothing everything over.”

“I doubt Stall would believe you anyway. He hates Bell.” Patty thought about it and said, “So, what do we do now, switch all surveillance over to Lauer? We told you we thought IA was on him already.”

The sergeant smiled and said, “Again, I’m working outside the box on this. These are still serious but vague allegations. I’m going to brief Ronald Bell on what we’re doing and see what kind of help they can give us. I think he likes to play his cards close. He never mentioned they were going to keep tabs on Lauer. In the meantime, I arranged for Officer Lauer to be offered one of the few overtime gigs still available. He’s going to work the next three evenings at the big soup kitchen near the stadium. The mayor’s office funds a uniformed officer to be there every night. That should keep him busy while we get our ducks in a row.”

“So this guy makes extra cash for being a suspect in Ecstasy distribution?”

“I don’t think it’s right, Patty, but it’s the best way to handle it right now. Don’t forget we’re still working on a wild theory, and he’s not even the only suspect. You
guys stay on Palmer tonight, and I want you to keep Stallings in check.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Everyone knows he can become irrational dealing with crimes against young women. He respects you and listens to you. You’re on the list for sergeant–this is as good a time as any to learn the subtleties of supervision.”

Stallings sat on a low wall in the sunshine, eating an Italian sub from Gino’s. He had a can of soda resting perilously on the narrow wall. The Police Memorial Building was not exactly set up for casual dining outside. He liked the feel of the sun and he was hungry, so he plopped down to eat his favorite sub in the whole world. It used to be you could see the river from the spot, but now classless condos rose across the street, blocking the once-beautiful view. He intended to spend a couple of hours at his desk before he and Patty started their surveillance of Chad Palmer again. This was an odd case propelled by politics and his desire to satisfy Diane Marsh’s perfectly reasonable parental expectation that anyone connected to her daughter’s death be found. No matter why it was proceeding, Stallings was committed to see it through.

He reached down for his can of caffeine-free Diet Coke as a shadow fell across him. Stallings squinted into the sun to see who would bother him during lunch. In the bright spring sun all he saw was the outline of a large man in uniform with a holster on his right side and radio on the left. The patrolman said, “You’re not man enough to come talk to me directly?”

Stallings immediately realized he was talking to Gary Lauer. In one quick motion he set down his sandwich and stood from his perch so he could face the motorman. “I did come talk to you face-to-face.”

“Then why’d you talk to my girlfriend?”

Stallings shrugged. “Where do you get your girlfriends, middle school?” He couldn’t resist baiting this asshole.

Lauer edged closer, an old intimidation trick that Stallings wasn’t about to fall for. He casually brought up his hand in a fist with his thumb sticking out in front of his index finger. He held it in place so when the younger man moved closer it would strike him right in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him.

Lauer said, “I know someone was by my girlfriend’s apartment asking questions about my vacations.”

Stallings knew to play dumb even though he wasn’t sure what the younger man was talking about. Besides, nothing provoked an irrational person like silence.

Lauer looked him in the face but stepped forward quickly, and Stallings felt his thumb mash into the uniform shirt. But the motorman was wearing a concealed ballistic with a steel shock plate vest over his heart and solar plexus. The move had no effect other than to hurt Stallings’s thumb.

Lauer raised his voice. “You think you’re better than everyone else because you put away a couple of big-time killers. But I got news for you, we all work hard around here, and I thought we all watched each other’s asses. Guess I was wrong.” Now he had Stallings’s back against a hedge.

“Look, you douche bag, you brought this on yourself. You like to scare women, like to boss them around–I know your kind. Younger women are easier to intimidate.
If I find out you gave Ecstasy to any spring breakers you won’t know what hit you.”

“You got no juice left around here, old man. No one cares if you’re looking at me or not. I even got a decent overtime detail for a few nights. So you keep wasting your time while real criminals run loose around the city.” He started to edge closer, forcing Stallings back into the bush. Stallings let him push forward, then slipped to the side, turned, and smirked as the big motorcycle patrolman stumbled hard into the bush. He shoved his way back out and spun quickly to face Stallings.

Lauer said, “You better hope I don’t see you away from this building. Out on the street, your ass is mine. I’ll have another trophy to show off.”

Stallings smiled and replied, “You mean like a matching scar on your right eyebrow?”

Patty Levine was better prepared for tonight’s surveillance. She knew exactly what to wear to blend in at the tiny club on the southeast side of Jacksonville. Today she had on shorts and a nice shirt with her glasses and a baseball cap changing the shape of her face. She looked nothing like the professional detective who’d spoken with Chad Palmer on Monday morning. As a result she was sitting a few stools away from him and was even able to hear some of his conversation with the young woman on the other side of him.

She didn’t like watching Mr. Rich Kid, and she hated to see a guy like him attract so many very young women. He’d chatted with three different women in the short time she’d been inside. Maybe he’d do something tonight to expose his role in Allie Marsh’s death as well as the others.

She kept a casual eye on Palmer from down the bar. Two young men took stools to the right of her. The overpowering odor of Axe Body Wash made her eyes water slightly. After only a minute, the guy closest to her turned her way and said, “You go to school around here?”

Patty laughed involuntarily. She said, “UF.” Everyone in Florida understood that meant the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The young man smiled. “No shit, me too. What’s your major?”

Patty wondered if the young man was blind or just so drunk he didn’t notice the eight years’ difference between them. She knew how to end this quickly. With a casual turn of her head she said, “Physics.”

As she expected, the young man sort of nodded his head and turned back to his friend.

Her phone vibrated in her front pocket. She dug it out of the tight shorts, saw it was Stallings calling her, and flipped it open. She had to mash it to her ear to hear over the noise inside the bar. She knew to keep it very general on her side of the conversation and said, “Hey, what’s going on?” Her partner had been very quiet this evening. He mentioned a quick run-in with the detestable Gary Lauer at the PMB earlier in the day but didn’t go into any details. But she knew the confrontation had affected him. He didn’t want to admit a cop might be involved in any kind of crime against a young woman. As much as she disliked the motorman she wanted him to be cleared in this too.

Stallings said over the phone line, “You doing okay in there by yourself?”

Patty glanced over at the boy to her right, laughed,
and said, “You’d be surprised how well I could do in here if I wanted to.”

“What about our boy?”

Patty turned slowly to see what Palmer and the young woman were up to. As soon as she faced his way he laid a twenty-dollar bill on the bar, took the young woman’s elbow, and they both started heading out the door. All Patty had time to say was, “He’s on the move now. He’ll be through the front door in about five seconds.” Now came the tricky part.

Tony Mazzetti sat in the dark office alone, wishing he’d become a fireman instead of a cop. No one expected anything of firemen except the obvious: spray water on a fire. The rest of the time they could work out, train, and sleep. Three things he liked to do anyway.

Instead he hunched at his desk, puzzling over the cryptic comment Pudge, the street prophet, had made. When the odd fat man said to look closer rather than farther, did he mean the neighborhood? The drug trade? The fucking Hess Party? He hated riddles like this. Good investigations were logical, direct, and straightforward. That’s why he was in homicide and not narcotics. Shit, he’d rather be in fraud than narcotics. At least he could still identify scumbags and know exactly what the crime was with fraud. In narcotics, victims were other scumbags and the targets were more scumbags trying to make a buck off dope. Usually in his homicide investigations he had forensic information to corroborate witness testimony. It was simple: Someone saw Joe Blow shoot Sam Citizen and the medical examiner pulls a thirty-eight slug out of Sam Citizen. Case
fucking closed. But all he had in this triple shooting were nine-millimeter slugs inside bodies and a lot of holes outside the small house. Sure, the forensic weenies could tell that the killers used at least two guns and one of them had to be some kind of automatic weapon. They had fired from the front door and hit all three victims immediately. The only wounds in common were a single nine-millimeter shot to the head. They’d all been riddled with body shots, but each had a bullet in the head. Probably after this occurred, the outside of the house and a Lincoln Navigator parked in the driveway were hit a total of nineteen times. The crime scene guys counted thirty-four shots fired. None by the victims.

Now, for some reason, Mazzetti was concerned about something some crazy street guy had to say. The rumors on the street had all been conflicting. Some people saw a Camaro before the shooting; others saw a Cadillac Escalade with dark windows. Once the rumor about white men started, everyone jumped on board.

Mazzetti stared at his desk hoping some kind of answer would pop into his head. It wasn’t as if he had anything to do other than work right now anyway. Patty was stuck on some kind of bullshit surveillance with Stallings. He didn’t count on seeing her again until late. They said they would eat a very late dinner at her condo. It was kind of nice to look forward to spending time with someone for a change.

Mazzetti muttered a few curse words as he fixed his eyes on the file and thought,
I hate open cases.