She paused at John Stallings’s cluttered desk and noticed a small stack of photographs. She moved aside a sheet of paper on top of them and pulled the first photograph off the desk. She noticed the other ten photographs were copies of this one showing a young man and a young woman smiling next to each other in a long hallway with festive lights strung behind them. It took her a moment to recognize the missing fraternity brother Zach Halston. She didn’t know who the very pretty blond girl was. The sergeant assumed Stallings was using the photos to show different witnesses who might’ve come into contact with the missing fraternity brother.
She kept a photograph in her hand and set the piece of paper back over the remaining photographs on Stallings’s desk. As she neared her office she heard her desk phone ring and hustled to catch it.
Sergeant Zuni absently set the photograph of Zach Halston and the girl down at the side of her desk as she picked up the receiver and simply said, “Sergeant Zuni, crimes/persons.”
Dale squeezed into the tiny chair next to Lynn’s desk. Since she had agreed to have a drink with him Saturday night he’d taken it to mean she wanted to see him more often during the workweek at Thomas Brothers Supply. Until she had a better idea of what he knew and what he planned to do with the information, she decided to stay on the large, smelly man’s good side.
At the moment he was wolfing down a tuna salad sandwich, then gulping a twenty-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew. He repeatedly offered Lynn a bite of the sandwich or a drink from the bottle, which she politely refused.
Dale said, “What time do you want me to pick you up Saturday?”
Lynn said, “I’m going to meet you. I thought we might go over to Jacksonville Landing to sit at a bar along the river.”
“Lady’s choice. I’ll take you wherever you to like to go. Maybe you could even bring some of your party pills if you want to have a real wild time.”
“What are you talking about, Dale?”
“I’m talking about the Baggie of pills I found the other day in your purse.” Now he cut his eyes slightly to the side and said, “Were you high the day you wrecked the Suburban?”
Lynn suddenly had a sickening feeling that Dale was not the big dumb redneck he pretended to be. She wondered if she might not have a real problem sitting right in front of her.
Tony Mazzetti had given the matter a great deal of thought and had decided he fervently hoped that the deaths associated with the Tau Upsilon fraternity were a statistical anomaly. He could deal with one random robbery that resulted in homicide. Ultimately, perhaps after some luck and time, some street thug would be arrested for an unrelated crime and give up who shot the auto parts store manager. But three unsolved homicides meant that he had a severe blemish on his clearance rate. Two accidents were much easier to explain. Hell, half the kids in college today used pharmaceutical drugs recreationally. Mazzetti was surprised there weren’t more overdoses. And the kid who had fallen into the river and been chewed to pieces by the fishing boat could have been anyone. He just happened to be a member of the fraternity.
The events that had attracted the attention of the sheriff’s office had led Mazzetti to review the evidence on the auto parts manager’s shooting. He went through a stack of DVDs from various security cameras, including one located inside the store. That was the only one with any faces that could be recognized. If the killer had walked into the store the night of the shooting, Mazzetti couldn’t tell who pulled the trigger. In the four hours before the store closed there had been only a handful of customers. The man with three children, an older trucker, a guy in the yard service shirt who Mazzetti and Sparky had tracked down and cleared of any suspicion, a middle-aged woman holding a broken windshield wiper, a young, cute woman who ended up not buying anything, and three young black males.
Using a still photo from the video Mazzetti had checked with all of his informants downtown and eventually found one of the three men. He had explained that they were looking for parts to restore a 1967 Mustang. Sparky and Mazzetti had visited the young man’s apartment and seen the car, but more important, Mazzetti could tell the young man was not a thug.
He watched the soundless video once more over his desktop computer. The grainy images produced decent shots of each customer’s face as long as they happened to glance up towards the camera. Right now he looked at the young woman he had never identified and noticed her look across the aisle at the manager, though she never appeared to speak to him. If it had been a male in the same circumstances Mazzetti would be killing himself to identify the man as a suspect.
Stallings had been anxious to get back to his canvass of businesses on University Boulevard. Patty was following up on information they got from the nerd at the University of Florida fraternity. Stallings had tried to hide his interest in returning to the seemingly mundane job of canvassing businesses for a missing person, but the trip to Gainesville had frustrated him greatly. He had lost an entire day. The drive over and back, as well as Patty’s interest in showing him around the campus where she had spent four years on the gymnastics team, had killed any chance he had to talk to business owners the day before.
His mood yesterday had not been helped by the way Maria systematically ignored him when he’d come over to visit the kids. But today he had managed to squeeze in nine stores; unfortunately all of them but one were under new management and had no idea about who had worked there previously.
In the midafternoon Stallings found a vintage clothing store just on the south side of the river close to the University of North Florida. He took a moment to look in the windows noticing the expensive price tags on what he considered used clothing. When he was a kid they’d called them hand-me-downs. A bell tinkled as he stepped through the front door and a large woman with what appeared to be a tent covering her form glanced up from a copy of In Touch magazine.
Without looking up at Stallings, she said, “I already gave to the police athletic league and I don’t give two shits about the Police Benevolent Association.”
Stallings said, “I’m looking for someone.”
“Who?”
Stallings laid down the photograph he’d taken from Zach Halston’s apartment.
The woman glanced down at it, then said, “You’re looking for Kelly?”
TWENTY-FIVE
Sparky Taylor had used his connections in Atlanta to get the details on the death of UF student and Tau Upsilon member Paul Smiley, which had occurred in the city a little over a year ago. It was death by fire, which in Sparky’s mind was the worst way to go. He wasn’t entirely sure he liked this assignment in homicide. They didn’t seem to be as interested in following policy as he was. All his partner, Tony Mazzetti, ever thought about was ensuring his clearance rate on homicides was the best in the state. Mazzetti was a good detective, but he didn’t always dig deep enough into the circumstances of a death. Sparky didn’t think that was how the public expected a police department to work.
That was one of the reasons he had volunteered to track down any possible information on the death of a Tau Upsilon fraternity member who had graduated from the University of Florida the year before.
Sparky’s call had been taken by one of his buddies who had attended Georgia Tech with him, and he was now speaking to a sergeant in narcotics. Sparky said, “Why aren’t I speaking to someone in homicide?”