FIFTY-NINE
Tony Mazzetti brought his car to a squealing halt in front of Arnold Cather's shop. He saw Stallings's car and a patrol car in front of the shop. Mazzetti bolted from his car and darted inside. It was empty.
He heard Stallings's voice. He turned toward the steps, but before he could reach them he heard gunshots from the room at the top of the stairs. It was clear as day. Four quick, individual shots.
A uniformed cop and Patty crouched at the top of the stairs with their guns pointing inside.
Mazzetti drew his gun and took the stairs two at a time.
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Sergeant Yvonne Zuni turned down the street where Classic Glass Concepts was located. She felt confident having a veteran like Stallings on the scene but knew that things could get out of control quickly. Over the main radio frequency she heard the emergency alert tone, then the panicky voice of a young patrolman shouting into his radio, “Shots fired, shots fired! Warehouse on Davis.”
Sergeant Zuni picked up the handheld radio from her passenger seat, waited for dispatch to acknowledge, identified herself clearly, and said, “Is anyone hurt? I'm coming down the street in an unmarked Ford Taurus. What is your current location?”
Her calm tone and commanding presence forced the young officer to think for a moment, take a breath, and say, “I'm covering the outside rear of the building. The shots came from inside. I'm headed around front now.”
Sergeant Zuni was quick to come on the radio and say, “Hold your position. I'll be there in less than one minute.” She couldn't resist the urge to press the gas a little harder. Experience had taught her to be steady and calm as soon as she arrived on the scene. It was her job to inspire confidence and dissipate panic. But she was only human and she allowed herself a few moments of anxiety as she wished she were there right now.
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The gunshots reverberated in Stallings's ears. Patty and the patrolman seemed to have suffered less having the open shop behind them. Stallings was relieved no one else had fired out of reflex. Often, one cop shooting spurred others. It had been a fact since the Boston Massacre.
Stallings kept his pistol trained on Arnold Cather's head even after he'd dropped his gun to the ground. The glass structure Stallings had just shot four times was shattered into thousands of pieces. Only the bottom row of jars remained intact and even that had cracks and fissures still erupting.
Cather started to tremble, then weep, and stumbled back against the apartment's flimsy wall and slid to the ground like he had been shot through the chest. Stallings had figured out that no bullet fired into the man could have caused as much damage as the ones fired into his obsession.
Arnold Cather would never harm anyone again.
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Arnold Cather, known to the entire world as Buddy, lost all control of his limbs as he watched his whole world crumble into a pile of useless fused silica. Instead of his life flashing before his eyes, memories of endless hours over the hot furnace, blowing different pieces of the structure and painstakingly making each jar to fit each slot so exactly, flooded into his head. Even the pleasure he had derived from identifying each subject so carefully, then capturing her breath so lovingly, seemed like a dream to him now.
How could that cop be so cruel? How did he know it would hurt him so much to destroy his work of art? He wanted to strike back, but his whole body was fighting just to keep his heart beating. He felt worse at this moment than he had the day he was told he would never recover from the tumors growing in his lungs.
As he bumped the wall, his legs gave out and he slid to the ground with a graceless plop.
Why couldn't the cop have shot him and saved him all this sorrow?
SIXTY
John Stallings felt like a caged animal as he watched Tony Mazzetti and Sparky Taylor interview Arnold Cather at the PMB. He sat in a viewing room next door to the interview room, watching the proceedings on a closed-circuit TV with Yvonne Zuni in one chair and Lieutenant Rita Hester in the other. He couldn't sit still, standing and pacing in the back of the room, giving handwritten notes to Patty in the hallway so she could text them to Mazzetti.
Stallings recognized that, as the lead detectives on the case, Mazzetti and Sparky should be the ones in the room staring down the suspect. Since Arnold Cather liked to go by the name “Buddy,” Mazzetti immediately started calling him Arnold and Sparky called him Buddy. They set up a good dynamic for the classic “heavyset compassionate good cop and annoying bad cop.”
After the fifth question Stallings sent in, Mazzetti turned directly to the camera and shut off his phone. Once again Stallings sprang up and faced the back of the small observation room. He had tipped his hand and it took an old friend and former partner like Rita Hester to call him out on it.
She lifted her wide frame, nicely hidden behind a brown pantsuit, and motioned him out of the small room into the hallway. As soon as he was clear of the door she wrapped her strong hand around his elbow and tugged him into the empty conference room across the hall.
She leveled those clear, brown eyes at him and said, “You trust me, Stall?”
He nodded his head, noting that she had not removed her hand from his arm.
“Then let me monitor this interview and I'll act as your proxy. I'll make sure Mazzetti questions him on every aspect of his activities and ensure that he never met Jeanie.”
Stallings appreciated how she danced around saying something like, “We'll make sure he didn't strangle your daughter.” Stallings looked at Rita Hester's pretty face, feared by every criminal in Duvall County. As usual, she was right. Not just professionally, but personally as well.
Stallings felt the energy seep out of his body and knew he was spent. The killings were over. He'd accomplished his goal. Now he had to trust the cops he worked with to look out for his own interests. Mazzetti was an asshole, but he could handle this.
It was time for John Stallings to step back and recapture as much of his life as he could.
On his way home to his small house in Lakewood, Stallings stopped at the hotel to check on Liz Dubeck. As soon as he walked through the front door of the empty lobby she rushed from behind the counter and threw her arms around him. At that moment he knew she had realized how close she'd come to being part of that monstrous glass structure.
Liz said, “I heard that you figured out Buddy was the killer and sent the others to protect me. You're like my guardian angel.”
Stallings wasn't sure he knew what to say. “Just glad you're safe.”
She stepped back, smiled, and said, “Am I safe as far as you're concerned? Have I dropped into female-friend mode?”
“I'm not sure we ever progressed past that stage. And there's nothing wrong with being friends, is there?”
She stepped forward, ran her fingers through his hair, and planted a kiss on his lips. Then she stepped away from him and said, “I'll always be here for you.”
“You can't know how important that is to me.”
Stallings felt a stab of sorrow as he trudged to his car. He sat in front of the hotel for a moment wondering if he had enough energy to make it to his house and collapse in his bed.
As it turned out, that was exactly how much energy he had left.
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Patty Levine had given Tony Mazzetti a good night's rest to recover from the investigation. She knew there was so much more to do, but at least they were confident the killings had stopped. The strangler was behind bars. As far as Tony Mazzetti was concerned they had cleared a bunch of homicides.
She looked across the table in the Caribbean-themed restaurant out on Atlantic Beach and smiled at him. She felt the effort it took to smile. It wasn't the organic, warm smile she could've produced a month ago.
Mazzetti said, “This is the first chance we've had to chat in almost a week.”
“Not so good for people in a relationship, huh?”
“Anyone would acknowledge that these were special circumstances. Now we can focus on us.”
“But for how long? Our whole lives are special circumstances.” She took a moment, then reached across and grasped his right hand in both of hers. “That's why I wanted to talk. I think I need to focus on me for a while.”
“What's that mean?”
Patty knew he didn't understand exactly what she was talking about. She could never go into the details of her concern. She wouldn't intentionally put anyone in that position. The fact that Sparky Taylor had shown the insight to figure it out had shocked her. She didn't want to seem like a whiner or admit there were days she couldn't handle the job. Tony Mazzetti would land on his feet now that she had taken him out of his comfort zone of ignoring everyone and everything except his job.
When Patty cleaned up her act, she'd be interested in talking to him about a life together, special circumstances and all.
SIXTY-ONE
On Sunday morning about ten o'clock, John Stallings's phone rang and he was surprised to hear Lois Tischler on the other end. She was crying and asked him to come by the house. When he hesitated she threw in a “please” and hung up. He wasn't scheduled to take the kids and his father out to lunch until one o'clock so he hopped in his Impala and drove out to the beach, wondering if it was some kind of domestic Mrs. Tischler wanted to keep quiet. Often grieving parents identified with a cop investigating a missing child and called the cop for any number of reasons. He saw no harm in easing this woman's sorrow.
He pulled in the winding driveway and was met at the door by Mrs. Tischler in simple jeans and a top that showed off her athletic body. She surprised him by jumping up and hugging him and kissing him on cheek. While he was entangled with Mrs. Tischler, he looked over her shoulder, and standing in the ornate entryway was a young lady. That was the phrase that came to his mind since she looked every bit of a youthful, graceful, cultured lady.
Her hair was cut differently, but Stallings knew immediately who it was. A smile broke across his face as he said, “Leah?”
The girl nodded, then rushed forward and joined the hug. Stallings felt a tear pop out of his eye as he said, “How? What happened?” He noticed in the hallway Bob Tischler bawling like the rest of them.
Ten minutes later, after everyone had settled down and he sipped a remarkably strong cup of exotic coffee, Leah sat across from him on a leather couch. Her parents were on either side like they intended to prevent any planned escape.
Leah said, “I saw my photo on TV in Tennessee. It made me realize how much pain I caused and I had to come home to face the consequences.”
Eventually Stallings was able to ask if she'd ever met Arnold Cather.
“He gave me a ride from near the hotel downtown. But while I was at his shop two women came in and started arguing with him over rent or the lease. I just got up and walked away. The next day I took a bus as far as Atlanta and then caught a ride with a truck driver to my friend's house in Tennessee.”
Stallings marveled at the young woman.
Leah continued, “The guy at the glass warehouse gave me an old flannel shirt and I had a pair of jeans and my backpack. I left my school uniform and the backpack at his shop.”
It was amazing how many questions were being answered by a girl who had never even known she had been moments away from death.
Stallings felt something that hadn't surfaced in a long time: hope.
SIXTY-TWO
Almost a month after the capture of Arnold Cather, a few days after Halloween, Stallings sat next to his father in the living room of the rooming house where he lived. His memory had not improved and he had provided no more details about his brief visit with his missing granddaughter. His prognosis remained grim. Stallings felt the pain of never connecting with his father until recently, and now the old man was likely to forget him altogether. But the goodwill he had built up over the years had provided a solid core of volunteers to help care for the ailing James Stallings. It was gratifying on a number of levels.
The father and son watched an Orlando Magic game that led directly into the local news. The lead story caught Stallings's attention when the announcer said, “Arnold Cather, being held for the murder of at least four local young women, has died of lung cancer in the medical unit of the city hospital. He had been transferred there from the county jail two days ago and had remained under constant guard.”
Stallings noted, as the story continued, that the JSO captain made a point of mentioning that Cather had suffered and wasted away. His defense attorney had the balls to say, “He lost his valiant battle with cancer.”
To Stallings the only hero in the story was Leah Tischler. She had done more for him than he ever thought possible. Her return had allowed him to move on from not only a missing persons case but the murder investigation. It had given him motivation to deal with Maria and the kids differently. He and Maria were talking much more frequently and the kids seemed happy.
But most of all Leah Tischler had given him hope.
If Leah could make it back to her family, so could Jeanie.