The Perfect Scream

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Detective John Stallings shifted in the seat of the county-issued Impala so his Glock didn’t bite into his hip when he turned to look at his partner, Patty Levine. It had taken him a while to get used to the blond hair and pretty face, but now he viewed her like any other cop-only meaner and with a better punch. The Police Memorial Building, or PMB, rose in front of them.

Patty was studying a document in the battered gray-metal pad case where she stored notes and calendars that went back years. She held up a photo and said, “Zach Halston, twenty-one, senior at the University of North Florida. May be out at the beach with some fraternity nerds. Mom hasn’t heard from him in ten days and she’s worried.”

“Great, so now we babysit frat boys?”

“What else do we got going on? This is a nice, lower-stress change of pace.”

Stallings gave one of the noncommittal grunts that had gotten him through nineteen years of marriage. Well, eighteen with a year sabbatical. What he didn’t say out loud, what he’d never mention to another cop, was that he did have better things to do. He had conducted a relentless, secretive search for his daughter, Jeanie, who had disappeared three years earlier when she was sixteen. If his bosses at the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office knew he was working his own daughter’s case he’d have a lot to explain. As it was, the command staff and his immediate supervisors had gone above and beyond the call to help Stallings. The case was open and a detective still did some checking, but Stallings had a schedule of talking to other missing-persons detectives across the country and searching the Internet for any clues on sites about missing kids and runaways. That’s why he resented this jerk-off assignment.

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