The Perfect Death by James Andrus Read Free Book Online

ambition. He’d never really minded being on the outside looking in, but now he realized there was nothing wrong with making a beautiful girl like this smile.
    Even if it wasn’t as much as he had made her smile a month ago.

SIX
    Buddy watched the two women as they marched through the small McDonald’s courtyard. He had to admire the shape of them walking away, even though in Cheryl’s case he didn’t want to. Her surgically enhanced body gave her outrageous curves. It was Donna’s beautiful innocent eyes he noticed as she glanced over her shoulder at him, stepping into the passenger seat of her sister’s Chrysler 300.
    He had considered Donna for his work of art on several occasions. Those big brown doe eyes and wide, full lips gave her an innocent look. She just had nothing to offer eternity. Donna was a lost child who followed her sister around like a puppy. Besides, he knew her and she might point police in his direction if she turned up dead. Buddy liked the twenty-four-year-old. Her sweet disposition more than made up for her lack of brainpower.
    He knew the pressure to break his lease and move out was a direct result of Cheryl’s incessant harping. She’d taken over most of the daily business activities of her father, including the renting of the six warehouses across the city as well as the small apartment complex on the east side of the river. Her mother had been an internationally known model in Lebanon and greatly preferred lounging at their beautiful house in Ponte Vedra Beach to being troubled with the daily burdens of collecting rent and dealing with tenants.
    Cheryl, on the other hand, had a ruthless streak that served her well as a landlord. Buddy had only met her mother once and she seemed pleasant enough and certainly the women’s father was a gentleman. After Buddy had blown him a special glass vase for his twenty-fifth anniversary, the man had signed a sweetheart ten-year lease with him, which he allowed Buddy to pay up front. Now, with six years left on the lease, he was probably Cheryl’s biggest problem.
    He caught Cheryl’s murderous glare from inside the black sedan and thought to himself how nice it’d be to choke the life out of her. Too bad she wasn’t worthy.
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    John Stallings rolled over for the fifteenth time in the last sixteen minutes and stared at the clock on the nightstand. He flung the covers off in frustration and growled quietly to the empty room, then growled louder, so it filled the empty house. It was nearly midnight and he was no closer to sleep than he had been when he laid down at 10:15. His insomnia was as much a result of having no family and therefore no anchor in his life as it was of picturing Kathy Mizell shoved into a Dumpster and Leah Tischler at the bottom of a canal somewhere. Both families were crushed tonight.
    Stallings couldn’t shake the feeling he’d failed Leah Tischler. He knew rationally that wasn’t how to look at the situation, but who could stay rational when a young woman was dead? If you stayed rational you went crazy.
    He felt like he’d done everything he possibly could to save his own family. Maybe it wasn’t the job. Maybe Maria had grown tired of him. But he thought he’d had a handle on both the job and his home after Jeanie disappeared. Now he realized it was just a fantasy. He knew Maria had been through a lot and had her whole life ahead of her. If leaving him on the curb made her feel better, he was prepared to go through it graciously. He’d made no comments when he discovered that Maria had already been out on several dates. All Stallings wanted was the kids to be happy, and right now he wouldn’t mind sleeping for a few hours, but he knew it wouldn’t happen.
    He rolled out of the bed that had been in the room when he’d moved into the small house in Lakewood and slipped on his jeans and a Jacksonville Jaguars T-shirt. It was time to get a