William Dremmel eased the van down the street, rehearsing out loud the casual way he intended to approach Stacey. “Hey, what’re you still doing here?” then, “Am I too late to eat?” He figured she’d laugh and tell him how her car wouldn’t start. He’d be ready with, “I got a buddy who’ll fix it for free. Can I give you a lift home?” It couldn’t miss.
After he had her in the car he’d make an excuse to go home. He had his lab all set up with the bed in place, furniture in the closet, and the chains ready to go. He didn’t want another disaster like Trina. But he did have a knife in his pocket and would from now on. It was just luck he had one available to use the way he did with Trina. His first priority was to avoid detection. If he was caught, his research ended. He didn’t like losing a test subject, but it was better than the whole project going down the drain. Not to mention what might happen to him. He thought the authorities might frown on the way he’d been conducting research.
Now he looked out his spotless windshield and saw Stacey still in profile at the door. He slowed down to a crawl to give her time to get out and to the car.
She stepped away from the door, then down the two steps to the ground, but the rear door was still open.
As Dremmel approached, he saw her hop into the small car and crank it as a large, round black man in an apron stood on the back stoop shaking his head. When the van was almost even with the rear parking lot, still moving slowly, the cook stepped to the car and bent to open the hood.
Dremmel didn’t hesitate. He kept a steady speed right past them and hoped no one noticed. He’d have to figure another way to make his approach to Stacey Hines, and he knew he had to do it soon.
John Stallings sprawled on his comfortable micro-fiber couch with Lauren equally relaxed next to him, her head nestled on his arm. He took a sip of the cranberry juice he had been drinking all night. He had an occasional beer if he was away from the house without anyone from the family, but around the house it was strictly no alcohol. He and Lauren had been watching an ESPN replay of Jaguar highlights of the 2007 playoffs. He could watch David Gerrard scramble for a touchdown a hundred times and he wouldn’t get tired of it. Lauren proclaimed a mild interest, but he knew that sometimes she just needed to spend time alone with her father. And he was glad of it. He needed time with the kids too. He wished time as a family was easier to come by and more rewarding for all of them, but that didn’t happen much right now. Baby steps. That’s what he kept telling himself.
He switched channels and caught a news update at the end of the hour on a local channel. The anchor said, “JSO detectives invade the community college looking for leads in the death of Tawny Wallace.” Video of the crime scene for the latest victim came on screen. “Veteran homicide detective John Stallings, known for his heroic capture of serial killer Carl Cernick, is heading the investigation of the so-called Bag Man, who is believed responsible for at least three deaths.”
He snatched up the remote and switched off the TV.
Lauren leaned up, then turned to look at him in the face. “I didn’t know you were in charge.”
“I’m not. They say whatever sounds good to them. I’m more interested in how they got the information. Probably someone out at the community college called the TV station, but it’s still gonna piss off the lieutenant.”
“Why?”
“They wanted to keep the whole thing as low key as possible. Now that it’s got media traction it’ll cause us more grief.”
“Is the killer really looking for runaways?”
He knew what she was thinking. It had darkened his own mind since he first saw the face of Lee Ann Moffit in the duffel bag. “We’re not sure yet, but I promise we’re doing everything we can to stop him.” The same promise he’d made to Lee Ann and even to Jeanie as soon as he knew they had a killer like this on the loose.
She hugged him and said, “I worry about Jeanie.”
“Me too, sweetheart, me too.”
“I worry about you too. You have to be careful.”
He was touched. Neither of the kids had ever expressed that kind of concern. Common among most cops’ families was the idea that police work was just another job. The dangerous nature and risk were almost never acknowledged, let alone discussed openly. He could see the concern on her pretty face.
“I’ve got it easy, sweetheart. All I do is interview a few people and hang out at my desk in the Land That Time Forgot.”
She snickered. “You still call the office that?”
“They haven’t done anything to make us stop. Even if they renovated the whole floor we’d still call it that because it’s a good name that stuck.”
Lauren’s smile faded and she focused on her father. She turned her head and checked the room even though they were the only two awake in the house. “You still look for Jeanie, don’t you?”
“I’ll never give up.” He thought about all the checks he made and cops he called on a regular basis. He really was looking for his oldest child while he tried to help others in the same boat. “I promise I do everything I can to keep the streets safe for her until she comes home.”
She hugged him tightly and he felt the lump in his own throat cause a tear to run down his cheek.
Stacey Hines cried softly, sitting at the flimsy folding table she used in her “dining room,” which was actually the corner of her living room with the kitchen occupying the opposite corner. She had a decent-sized bedroom, but now it held an empty bed.
She missed her roommate a lot more than she thought she would. By now Marcie was back in Ohio, but she hadn’t called Stacey. The tiny apartment held only a turtle in an old aquarium with a few rocks, an inch of water, and a mound of mud for the turtle to rest on. She had found the turtle on the edge of a creek that ran off the St. Johns one Sunday afternoon when she and Marcie were exploring the area and stopped at a wooded park to hike. The heat had been refreshing back then. She still liked it and the fact that the beach was nice in the autumn as well as the summer.
Stacey hadn’t called home yet this week, because she knew that if she talked to her folks they could probably convince her to come back. The way she felt right now, she might go on home anyway. She’d have to take a bus, because there was no way her car would ever make it and being stranded in Atlanta sounded ten times more scary than just lonely in Jacksonville.
She blew her nose into a paper towel, looked into the aquarium, and said, “Don’t worry, Sidney. I’ll set you free at the exact spot I found you if I go back.” At the time Stacey found the turtle, she’d been worried for its safety, but in the three months she had kept him and fed him raw hamburger and turtle food from Walmart he had seemed to double in size. She didn’t know what kind of turtle he was, but right now she felt like he was the only one who hadn’t deserted her.
She did have a couple of friends at work. Don, the cook, had fixed her car this evening when it wouldn’t start. He seemed concerned that the wires would be messed up for no reason, but she told him it was fine and drove back home. He was nice to her at work but not someone she could hang out with.
Tank, the bartender, was fair to her, but he was also the manager and didn’t have any favorites. She doubted he even knew where she lived or if she lived alone. Then there was the nice guy who’d been in to eat a couple of times the last few days. Today he had a pretty, younger black girl with him but said she was just a coworker. That wasn’t the vibe Stacey got from the woman, but he was clear about it. She liked him and wondered if he might ask her out.
She thought about William and how he was a little older than her but had a job, seemed nice, and took coworkers out to lunch. She hoped he’d come by the restaurant again soon.
John Stallings sat upright in front of the computer in the den at his house. The light of the Web site was all he used to navigate the keyboard. He’d been on three sites he visited regularly in an effort to calm his racing mind that he had covered everything that could be related to Jeanie for this month. It’d been his talk with Lauren that got him thinking, and once he got something in his head he knew he’d never sleep or eat or do anything useful until he had accomplished his goal. In this case, making sure there were no new unidentified bodies or unidentified medical patients that could, somehow, be his Jeanie.
He knew Tony Mazzetti had hit a dead end at the Wendy’s where the last victim had worked. There was still more follow-up to do, but no one at the restaurant knew who she hung out with, and no one even realized she was such a heavy drug user. At least no one admitted knowing it.
Stallings couldn’t just sit still, even this late at night. He usually went through official channels at work, but he had the addresses to several databases and knew how to find information even from his home computer.
The National Center for Missing and Exploited Children had the best resource dedicated exclusively to finding missing kids. Most children who were taken by an adult were taken by a noncustodial parent; the public tended to regard this as a lesser crime, but the parent who earned custody legally often didn’t get a chance to see the child for years. Stallings felt for them.
The Web site had galleries of photos of teenagers who had either run away or been lured away and, sadly, either way they were gone. The parents were left without answers, frustrated with law enforcement, and felt a void that nothing else could fill in their lives. He’d experienced it all. Even with the support of the Sheriff’s Office he felt like there had to be more they could’ve done.
Then there was the accusation that Stallings had hidden Jeanie’s disappearance. That he had concealed vital information. He had, and he knew it. His actions didn’t affect the search for her and protected what little he had left at the time.
His mind buzzed with the decisions he’d made on that lonely Friday night three years ago. Images of Charlie, too young to understand what was really going on, and Lauren, scared and looking for someone to cling to, and Maria. By that time Maria had already started to check out. And Jeanie’s disappearance was a blow that knocked her into an abyss.
Stallings continued to click through galleries of missing kids, recognizing many from fliers or leads he had run over the years. He felt connected to all of them. Then he came to a screen and found his eyes frozen on a photo of a girl from Cleveland who’d been gone less than a year. Her dark hair was long and she wore cute rimless glasses. It was a yearbook shot, he could tell, provided by some family member while their world was crumbling.
The bright smile on her face gave no indication of fear or loneliness or any of the other things that might push a kid to listen to a stranger about the wonders of a far-off city. It was hard to tell in the photo, but she looked small. The description listed her height as 61 inches. Five foot one. Then it all clicked.
This was the victim they had just found in the park.