Mazzetti said, “Meet me at the park. I have to go by my house and pick some stuff up.”
“What’d you have there, you don’t have here?”
“Clean clothes and the gel I use on my hair. This is probably gonna attract media attention before the day is over.”
A few minutes later, as he drove away in his Crown Vic, Tony Mazzetti had a fresh wave of concern about his girlfriend and what sort of things she was doing to make her so groggy in the morning.
Stallings rehearsed some of the ways he might phrase things to his mother. One lesson he’d learned on the job was to not provide false hope or unrealistic expectations. On the other hand, he didn’t want to alarm her either. Even with his father’s history, Stallings could find no explanation for his disappearance other than something bad. He had done the whole routine of checking with hospitals to make sure nobody matching his father’s description had been checked in. He imagined the multitude of car crashes and hit-and-run accidents, cardiac arrests, strokes, and violent crimes or anything else that could happen to a sixty-five-year-old man with a shoddy memory running around Jacksonville completely unsupervised. When he thought of it in those terms he felt like a bad son. But considering the life his father had provided him, he felt like he was doing the best he could.
He parked and took the three stairs in one leap to the porch of the three-bedroom house a block from the St. Johns River. He hesitated outside the door, trying to come up with something that might cushion the news his father was missing. In all honesty, he didn’t know how close his mother and father were, but knew that she had stayed in touch with him after the rest of the family had completely blocked him and the memories. He also knew that his mother tended to be lonely and that was one of the reasons his sister, Helen, still lived with her.
He knocked gently on the door and stepped back, waiting see his mother’s usual smiling face. He could hear footsteps coming toward the door as the knob slowly turned and the door opened out. He was about to greet his mother when he was shocked to see who had opened the door.
It was his father.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Tony Mazzetti prowled inside the crime scene like an anxious tiger. The crime scene investigators had decided to rope off the entire fenced-in playground. It made for a very wide scene because no one had any idea how far away from the body they would have to search for evidence. That also gave Mazzetti a reason to close down the larger surrounding park with its open soccer fields and running trail. That kept the two news trucks almost two hundred yards away from where the crime scene techs were now excavating the body.
God bless the crime scene techs. Mazzetti would never let them know how important they were, but he needed them. They had the patience, concentration and determination to do what almost no detective could: lay out a detailed map of the evidence. It always took hours and sometimes the better part of the day. It was time that Mazzetti spent formulating theories and deciding who needed to be interviewed on any specific case. Right now he was anxious to see if there was anything to identify the body or if he’d have to rely on the medical examiner and hope there was a matching record of fingerprints or dental records. He’d seen her T-shirt used to be white and had a logo of a sun rising. He couldn’t make out the lettering yet. Someone would clean it up so he’d see it later. The decomposition around her face would make identification of her by sight much less certain. He hoped there was enough flesh to get fingerprints. There were a number of lab tests to confirm an identity, but there was still something about recognizing a face, even in death, that made a homicide detective feel more competent.
Inside the crime scene there were only two detectives, Mazzetti and Sparky Taylor, and a four-person crime scene team. This remained standard at almost every homicide crime scene investigation. Occasionally, if circumstances required it, another detective might come into the area. But the rule of thumb-and, as Sparky had pointed out, the policy of the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office-was to limit the number of people who might come in contact with evidence relating to a homicide.
Outside of the scene, on a picnic bench under a tree, Patty Levine comforted a clearly upset young mother and her little girl. She had arrived at the scene about fifteen minutes after Mazzetti and he was pleasantly surprised to see how alert she looked.
Sergeant Zuni motioned him over to the edge of the fence. She was dressed more casually than during the week but still had a professional and direct air about her. She was a good sergeant who managed the scene without interfering. She didn’t even try to enter the immediate scene around the body. Her job was to keep the perimeter secure with uniformed patrol officers, figure out what needed to be done right now, and keep the command staff informed of developments. She also talked to the media. Mazzetti didn’t like that so much. Before the squad had a regular sergeant, he’d gotten to like talking in front of the cameras. It made him feel important and gave his mother something to brag about. It was tough to compete with a sister who was a judge in Westchester County. The TV interviews aside, he’d found that Sergeant Zuni made life easier for him and that’s what a sergeant was supposed to do.
He stopped at the fence and leaned down on the top tube that ran the perimeter.
The sergeant said, “How’s it going?”
“Female, dressed like she was in her late teens.” He looked over his shoulder at the team working around the body with Sparky Taylor hovering right over them. “We’ll know more soon.”
Sergeant Zuni said, “I couldn’t work with someone over my shoulder like that.”
“That’s his interpretation of the policy that says a detective must supervise evidence collection.”
The sergeant laughed. “He follows policy like a religion.”
“And he’s trying to convert me.”
“Need anything else?”
“Where’s Stall? He’s usually good for some theories.”
“I didn’t call him out yet. I have to manage man power. As it is you’re not going to get a day off today or tomorrow. I had to send another team over to the Landing because someone found a body in a car parked in the garage.”
“Please tell me the mode of death wasn’t strangulation.”
“Relax, Tony. Knifing. Lots of blood.”
“Thank God. I got enough to worry about.” He didn’t even bother to ask who was going to be assigned; as long as it didn’t take Sparky or his crime scene away he didn’t care.
The sergeant looked at him and said, “I didn’t call out Patty, either. How’d she find out about it?”
Mazzetti paused, considering what he should say. She kept those sharp, green eyes on him and he understood why so many dopers confessed to her. “I called her.”
“May I ask why?”
“I heard kids had found the body and she’s better at keeping people calm.”
The sergeant eyed him a moment more, then nodded as she turned away.
Tony Mazzetti joined Sparky by the shallow grave and looked at the body. He thought about this girl’s family and felt something resembling pity. He wondered if he was getting soft. He thought back to the conversation he’d had with the construction worker last night. He’d been hoping to get a chance to track down this Daniel Byrd. Something in his gut said this was a suspect he needed to look at. Mazzetti had broken bigger cases with weirder hunches over the years and had learned to rely on his sixth sense. It was not something he could put into a PC affidavit or even something he could explain to the sergeant without a snicker or being dismissed altogether. But he knew he needed to find this Daniel Byrd.