The Perfect Death by James Andrus Page A

the new manager here might have seen Leah and maybe even if she met with anyone.
    They entered the neat lobby with new, cheap carpet and a plain set of Rooms-To-Go furniture in the corner, where people could gather on a couch and three matching chairs around a coffee table.
    Stallings stepped to the clean counter and knocked on the countertop. “Hello?”
    Like a good partner, Patty wandered to the hallway and casually stood, but in reality it was an instinct that couldn’t be taught at the police academy. She was in position in case something surprising happened and she had to cover Stallings, or if someone rushed them from the hallway, Stallings could do the same for her.
    He shifted to expose his gun and badge on his hip so they would be seen by anyone coming out of the office behind the counter. He didn’t want to waste a lot of time explaining who he was. He had plenty of his own questions that needed answers.
    He was about to call out again when he heard a woman’s voice say, “I’ll be right out.”
    He stared as she stepped out of the office and behind the counter.
    Her dark eyes met his and she gave him a cursory smile.
    The woman said, “Hello, Officer.”
    It was the woman who had scolded him last night.
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    A stack of small notebooks were spread across the wide conference room table. Tony Mazzetti looked over the mess at his partner, Sparky Taylor. The fact that it looked as if there were two victims had already pushed everyone to the edge. New information was coming at him from three different sets of detectives and everything was piling up fast.
    Mazzetti said, “What’d you think, Sparky? It would help to have some kind of viable theory to filter through some of the shit.”
    Sparky slowly raised his face from the open file he’d been studying intently and focused his brown eyes on his new partner. “We’ve already checked former boyfriends and possible stalkers. Those would be the most likely suspects in a case like this. But if we look at the circumstances of the body being dumped it leads us in another direction.”
    Mazzetti slowly sat down in the seat at the opposite end of the table, staring at Sparky. “Go on.”
    â€œFirst, I don’t think the killer, which I’ll assume is a ‘he’ based on the nature of the crime and location of the body, lived close to the construction site. I believe he was driving, so why stay in an area that could help identify you if you’ve already made the risk of transferring a body to the vehicle? He’s pretty strong, yet not necessarily tall because he was able to get the body into the Dumpster, but there were two cinder blocks stacked next to the Dumpster where the body was found. With the number of canals and rivers all over Duval County, a construction site is a poor choice to dump a body.”
    â€œAll right, Columbo, where does that leave us?”
    â€œIt leaves us with a lot of suspects if we considered all the construction workers in the city. I wonder what percentage of construction workers are felons?”
    Mazzetti let out a snort of laughter and said, “That’s like saying ‘What’s the bad part of Jacksonville?’ I have to say, Jacksonville.” He laughed at the old joke every cop in the city liked to tell.
    Sparky didn’t change his expression and said, “I like Jacksonville. I’m raising two boys here.”
    â€œHave you ever seen the NBC special on runaways in Jacksonville?”
    â€œWe don’t really watch TV around our house.”
    â€œReally? None at all?”
    â€œWe watch one hour a night as a family. Usually half is the national news and the other half is The History Channel.”
    â€œWhat’d you guys do for fun at night?”
    â€œWe play games.”
    â€œLike Monopoly?”
    â€œMonopoly leaves too much to luck and has too simplistic a view of world economic pressures to be of