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made up on the missing girl, Leah Tischler.”
    â€œOh God, you found her body?”
    â€œNo. This victim is named Kathy Mizell.”
    â€œI don’t understand. What’d you need me for?”
    â€œWe identified the belt used to strangle her. It’s from the swanky private school the missing girl attended.”
    Stallings didn’t say anything as silence held on the crackle of static over the cell phones.
    Mazzetti said, “I think it’s Leah Tischler’s belt.”
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    Patty Levine sat in the passenger seat of John Stallings’s county-issued Chevy Impala. She didn’t try to engage him in small talk; she knew him too well. His mood always turned dark after hearing about the death of any young woman. This one was more devastating because of the implication that Leah Tischler was dead as well. No cop took a missing girl more seriously or her death harder. Unfortunately it was an all too common event. And that was just one of many concerns Patty had for her partner, who’d endured far too much stress in recent months. Patty looked across at Stallings, who focused his attention on the road, moving fast but not recklessly. His normally short, brown, curly hair barely touched his collar, and his handsome face, with the scar over one eyebrow and a slightly broken nose, gave him the look of a former football star who’d stayed in pretty good shape since college.
    He rarely spoke to her about his problems with Maria, but that wasn’t the heaviest weight on him right now. Patty didn’t think he or his wife had ever moved past the disappearance of Jeanie. No parent really did, and Maria and John Stallings weren’t just any parents. They were both trying to change the world in their own ways: Maria by involving herself in peer counseling for other grieving parents and Stallings through his work in Missing Persons. Now Stallings had set up house not far from the family and had been working hard to make time for the kids. Any time something like this happened, Stallings tended to tune out everything by finding the person responsible. For his sake Patty hoped they had a suspect in custody already.
    A few blocks after exiting I-95, Patty could see the police activity and the first of the news trucks arriving on the scene. Stallings pulled the car to the curb more than two blocks from the action in an effort to stay under the radar of the news reporters. Based on his history of capturing serial killers, every reporter in Jacksonville tended to focus on Stallings whenever he arrived at a homicide scene. Stallings didn’t like it and it drove Tony Mazzetti absolutely crazy. Patty and Stallings slid over to the edge of the scene and gave their names to the patrolman who was keeping a log of everyone who entered the crime scene.
    Stressful times like this pushed Patty to reach for a Xanax or some other pharmaceutical crutch. She’d been working hard to ease off the pills and hadn’t used an Ambien to sleep in over a week, resulting in about five hours of total sleep in seven days. She had taken one Xanax for anxiety two days ago and purposely hadn’t carried any with her the last two days. She’d even allowed her prescription for Vicodin and another painkiller expire. Now, as they faced another traumatic scene, Patty felt the familiar pang of anxiety and desire for her soothing drug. She craved one to calm her down. Instead she focused on the grim task at hand.
    Patty did a quick survey of the scene, wondering who was here already. A call like this, happening in the middle of a weekday, when things were generally slow, attracted cops from all parts of the city. But her new sergeant, Yvonne Zuni, did a pretty good job of scaring away anyone who wasn’t vital to the investigation. Her reputation and nickname, Yvonne the Terrible, tended to keep people on task. And nothing was more at odds with her nickname than her looks. A petite build and exotic face