Stallings saw Lonnie Freed sitting at the rear of the squad bay working on a computer. He cut through the empty office and plopped into the chair next to Lonnie’s desk, saying, “What’s going on?”
The thirty-five-year-old detective leaned back and pulled off his heavy glasses pinching his nose with his fingers, and said, “Stall, you have no idea how close to the apocalypse we really are.”
Stallings wanted to rush past this and simply said, “If I gave you a name, could you come up with everything you might have in your files about him?”
“Sure, what’s his name?”
“I only have his street name, Gator.”
Lonnie laughed out loud and said, “Do you have any idea how many Gators we have listed in reports and intelligence files? Between the goddamn Florida Gators, the swamp people who still love alligators, the rednecks who think it’s a funny name, and the felons who don’t ever want to use their real names, there must be a hundred and fifty Gators listed in different reports.”
Stallings leaned in close and slipped him a sheet of paper that had the description the older couple had given him and said, “I don’t care how many you find, I need to talk to one who looks like this.”
Sparky Taylor had left his house at six in the morning and managed to miss the seemingly unending rush hour of Atlanta when he rolled in just before eleven. Most of the detectives would’ve spent the night in Atlanta, but they didn’t have two boys like him. He missed every night he had spent away from them and didn’t care if he had to work twenty hours just so he could play a quick game in the evening, then tuck them into bed. He’d never realized how rewarding fatherhood could be. It was his solemn duty to produce two intelligent, inquisitive boys who would contribute to society, just like his father had done.
Even though Sparky had gone to college in Atlanta, the sprawling city held no particular place in his heart. It was too impersonal and had the well-earned reputation of being a dangerous city. But it wasn’t until this moment that he had ever thought Atlanta had anything but a good, professional police department. He didn’t try to hide his deep disappointment in the detective who had written off the death of the Gainesville fraternity brother as an accident without doing the follow-up that Sparky felt was essential to all police work.
He looked at the table and said, “This was everything you have in evidence?”
The lanky detective who had been reluctantly helping him looked at the random clothing, singed pillowcase, and evidence receipt for two separate one-kilo bricks of marijuana and said, “The theory is he was just a stoner who dozed off in bed smoking a doobie.”
“It looks like there was more than one point of ignition. How could a guy who just dozed off start a fire in two different places in this apartment?”
“That gave us some problems too. But in the end he was just a kid from Florida who probably shouldn’t have been dealing pot in Atlanta.”
Sparky browsed through the photographs of the damaged apartment.
The obviously embarrassed Atlanta detective said, “They’ve tried to fix up the apartment, but there may be a few of the kid’s things left over there.”
“Can we go over and take a look?”
“We are slammed with two fresh homicides but you can go over and look all you want.”
Lynn noticed Leon walking toward her near the main office of Thomas Brothers Supply. He gave her a smile and a wink and said, “Something tells me you’re gonna be free Saturday night.” He kept walking.
She was intrigued by the older man’s contention that something might happen to Dale. Frankly, she didn’t care what happened to him. She didn’t know if her conscience had broken down since she had started on her mission or if the big loading dock manager had just pushed her to the breaking point. As long as Leon handled the issue for her, she could concentrate on other things.
She paused near her office and watched Leon continue to walk out into the lot. Dale whizzed past him in his golf cart. Leon turned and shot the big man a bird behind his back.
Lynn had a feeling Leon wasn’t acting solely on her behalf.
The apartment manager hadn’t even checked Sparky’s badge, just assumed he was an Atlanta cop. He tossed him the keys to apartment 315 and told him to knock himself out because they had not been able to clean it up properly in the nineteen months since the fire had occurred.
Sparky wondered what he meant by that. Until he walked into the apartment with new drywall and was still struck by the horrible, burnt stench. The apartment itself had been cleaned out except for some boxes and trash in the bedroom where the fire had occurred. There were no black smoke marks on the wall or ceiling, but it was clear to him this was the room where it had happened.
One of the boxes contained old clothing and textbooks on physics. There was absolutely nothing of value. Two other boxes had evidence of burn marks on them and contained old shoes and a singed leather coat.
Behind all of these boxes was a much smaller box, which had burned at the top and on one side. It looked like it could have been one of the origins of the flames. He remembered from the crime scene photographs very similar boxes like this on the floor near the bed. The fire had not been a raging inferno, more of a smoldering smoke event with a few open flames.
Sparky was about to leave the apartment when he kneeled down to inspect the small box more closely. The inside was filled with twisted-up newspaper. Exactly the way he would twist newspaper to start a fire more efficiently. He shook his head at the Atlanta cops’ attitude toward the deadly fire and reached into the box to pick up one of the twisted newspaper pages.
He opened up the newspaper and realized this was a link Tony Mazzetti might not want to hear about. The newspaper filling the box was the Jacksonville Times-Union.
THIRTY-ONE
John Stallings walked into the office at eight o’clock sharp. He didn’t feel fresh and ready to attack the day like he often did because he’d spent so much time running down leads on Jeanie, Zach Halston, and now some guy named “Gator.” For all his effort he could not say he was closer to finding any of them.
The squad bay was empty, but the lights were on and he could see someone in the conference room. When he poked his head in, Patty Levine and Sparky Taylor had three different easels with large charts and the long table was completely filled with reports and bits of information.
Stallings just stared at the two detectives speaking in short, cryptic sentences that caused one or the other to jump up and write something on one of the charts. Finally Patty looked up.
“Hey, John. What’s going on?”
“It really looks like I should be asking you the same question. What time did you get started on this?”
“Sparky came into the office around six-thirty last night and we shared the information we’d found. It made me call the Gainesville fraternity house we visited and get some more information. I also swung by the local Tau Upsilon house night before last and talked to Bobby Hollis again. This is everything we have so far.” She waved her hand across the three large handwritten charts.
Stallings shook his head and said, “I’m out of the loop for a day and a half and you guys look like you solved the case.”
Now Sparky turned and looked at Stallings. “Hardly solved. But now we have enough information to at least ask the right questions and look in the right direction.”
“Are you allowed to fill me in on what you found out?”