Stallings eased out of his Impala, smoothing his shirt to his chest. This sucked.
On his way up the long driveway he passed a Mercedes convertible with the top down and a Range Rover with a huge gash in the side. The lights inside the house cast a glow onto the entrance that allowed him to dodge a bicycle on its side with a tricycle positioned like a bull over a fallen matador. He hoped the accident wasn’t as bad as it looked. He knew the younger kids belonged to the stepfather who had entered Lee Ann’s life about the time she started running away.
He mashed a lighted doorbell button, then followed it with a double rap on the door. Out of habit he stepped back and to the side, away from the door or anything that could potentially be shot through it.
After a few seconds he could hear a woman’s voice, and the door opened inward. Lee Ann Moffit’s mother, Jackie, swayed as she tried to focus her vision enough to see who the hell was knocking on her door at this hour.
Seeing Stallings, her harsh expression eased, revealing the attractive woman he’d met when Lee Ann ran away. She still had on the dressy blazer that identified her as a major dealer in the real estate market. A cigarette was wedged between her fingers. “Detective John Stallings. What are you doing so far east?” She stepped aside and waved him inside in a long drunken curtsy.
He nodded and said, “How are you, Jackie?”
“I’m here. What about you? How’s your wife holding up?”
Stallings paused, uncertain how to answer the question. He knew he’d disclosed too much of his private life to this pretty woman. The shared circumstances had caused him to let go with Jackie Moffit. Jeanie had not been gone too long, he was new to the missing persons unit, and he’d known the Moffitt family slightly through lacrosse. Now he realized he might have shared too much with Jackie when Lee Ann had run away the first time, explaining how his wife was having a hard time coping with their own situation. At the time, he thought he was helping her. But it was to help him too. Sharing an experience like a missing child helped people feel they weren’t alone and was a major source of comfort for most people. But most people didn’t have a profession like his. Now he knew he had no frame of reference to help this poor woman whom he was about to tell her oldest daughter was dead. All he could do was promise himself he’d do whatever it took to catch the person who killed her.
Suddenly the migraine made him squeeze his eyes shut as flashes of pain shot through his brain. The distracted Jackie didn’t notice as she searched for a place to lay down her cigarette.
When she turned to face him Stallings said, “You better sit down, Jackie. I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.”
Five
Patty Levine picked at a Lean Cuisine lasagna as she watched the late local news. The first story was, of course, the body Stallings had found earlier in the day. Tony Mazzetti stood in front of cameras to explain that the Sheriff’s Office had taken the homicide investigation and managed to talk about very few actual facts of the case. Jacksonville Beach was the official jurisdiction where the body was found, and Patty wondered why the Sheriff’s Office had decided to take on more work, but in the end it wasn’t her concern. Her job was finding missing persons, usually kids, and it was important. And she got to wear a detective’s shield. But two years at the same thing was getting old. It wasn’t like there were a bunch of volunteers to come into the missing persons unit. Pretty much it was her and John Stallings, and it looked like that’s how it was going to stay.
She looked across the room at her kitchen counter, where she had six prescription bottles lined up in a row, then glanced at the clock in her DVR to see if it was time to throw down a few Ambien. She’d taken the last Xanax about four in the afternoon and didn’t like the drug effects to overlap too strongly. Luckily, she hadn’t needed any Percocet this evening for her chronic hip pain. The years of gymnastics had taken their toll on her young body. When someone commented that she’d been a cheerleader, Patty dropped into her speech about the rigors of gymnastics, one of the toughest sports in the world and recognized by the Olympic committee. She only gave the speech to someone one time; the second time they faced physical confrontation. Cheerleading was fun and games, gymnastics was a sport, which was why she needed the drugs to mask any physical problems. Everyone knew she was as tough as any male cop, and she didn’t intend to let a little hip pain slow her down. No one at the office realized she often had a throbbing ache in her hip or that she was a serious insomniac or that she felt anxious for no reason. And no one ever would. She liked her image.
Right now she needed sleep, and Ambien was the only thing that gave her any chance at that. She exceeded the dosage because the twelve milligrams just didn’t cut it anymore.
Her cat, Cornelia, butted a hard, furry head against her leg, then jumped up onto the low couch. Patty, still looking at the TV, said to Cornelia, “That Tony Mazzetti is a sharp dresser. He looks good on the tube.”
She tossed the plastic container of her dinner and rinsed off the fork; this routine had kept her from using her dishwasher for the last three months. Ready to watch something lighter with Cornelia, she paused at the counter and threw down two Ambien, way more than the usual dosage, knowing the onset would be more than twenty minutes, if at all. Her cell phone, next to the parade of pills, started to ring. She recognized the number as one from the sheriff’s main office.
She flipped it open. “Patty Levine.”
A sharp, fast male’s voice said, “Report to homicide at oh eight hundred. Got it?”
“Yeah, I got it. Who’s this?” But the phone went dead before she got an answer. A wave of excitement swept through her. She had just gotten called to the major leagues.
William Dremmel felt the familiar rush as he learned more about the lovely young waitress, Stacey Hines. He had casually strolled behind the restaurant where she worked and found a beat-up Ford Escort with Ohio tags. From there it was an easy step to access a hacker’s Web site he knew and run the tag through the Ohio motor vehicles bureau and come up with Stacey’s full name and date of birth. Now he’d find out everything about her before he visited her again next week. It made him feel like an all-knowing god.
The hacker’s site he was on was set up by one of his former students who appreciated his Natural Science professor’s ability to see things other than academics. He’d bonded with the little group of social misfits who felt out of place at the community college. They had the grades to go to any state school, but not the drive or, in some cases, the money. They reminded him of himself at that age: lonely, smart, awkward. He enjoyed showing them ways to beat the system. Dremmel had used his knowledge of computers to show the young man how to tap into a number of different computer data banks and then the hacker took it the rest of the way. Now Dremmel used this site as a way to search things quickly and quietly. No one could trace any of his queries back to him.