Free The Perfect Woman by James Andrus Page B

women, any reports of assaults where a man approached a young woman and tried to get her to leave a public place with him. She was fascinated at how much raw data had to be sifted and how this one guy seemed to be doing it all.
    She gestured to the photos on her desk. “I’m just getting familiar with the case and looking for a pattern.”
    “We’ll have a meeting later with specific assignments. Then you’ll have plenty to do.”
    “Will I be working with my partner, Stallings?”
    His face darkened. “No, he’s been told to run some specific leads alone. We have a mountain of things that need to be done. I doubt we’ll see much of the master detective.”
    Just by the phrase “master detective,” Patty sensed there was a bigger problem than she thought between John Stallings and Tony Mazzetti.
     
    William Dremmel drove over the Fuller Warren Bridge to his Tuesday morning biology lab class at the community college. He bumped along in his tan Nissan Quest. It gave him the appearance of a family man, but the missing middle seats gave him plenty of storage room, and the minivan never seemed to have any mechanical problems. It was as invisible a vehicle as there was. No one noticed a bland minivan tooling along at the speed limit. In a sense the van was like him, unnoticed by almost everyone. It could hold a suitcase or a pallet of decorative sand from Home Depot with equal ease. Easy to vacuum out and wash down, it was the perfect vehicle for him.
    At the school he automatically set up the frog sections so students could prepare slides for the microscope. He was distracted by the image of the cute Stacey Hines, the waitress from Ohio who didn’t want to go back. The hours he’d spent on the computer discovering the little mysteries of the girl had been so satisfying that he’d experienced a near-constant erection since he first learned just how alone the young woman really was. Soon, after her roommate had returned to Ohio, he would step in and show her the attention she deserved. Just the idea of her living so quietly in his special darkroom made him grin from ear to ear.
    He’d done some research on men who had been successful in endeavors similar to his own. Ted Bundy had escaped detection several times by cleaning his VW bug with chlorine on a regular basis. Of course forensics were a lot less sophisticated in the 1970s, but the theory was sound. Bundy went on to become a legend of American killers.
    Dremmel knew that few people learned the lessons of today from studying history. That was what he tried to get across to his students; by studying the past you can avoid the same mistakes again. No one followed this concept: not presidents, not generals, and apparently not serial killers.
    He’d been reading up on Jacksonville’s most recent serial killers. One of the killers, Paul Durousseau, had broken a simple rule: don’t let anyone see you with a victim. As a taxi driver, Durousseau had access to a number of victims, but one concerned family tracked their missing daughter to him. Jovanna Jefferson’s body had been found in early 2003, and the fact that she had ridden in his cab was the break the Sheriff’s Office needed to direct their attention to the former soldier. It was his troubled time in the army and violent disputes with his wife that convinced the detectives he was their man.
    Dremmel had no criminal record. There was hardly any record of him at all, anywhere. He was truly the invisible man, and he had something else Mr. Durousseau didn’t: brains. He could outwit anyone looking into the disappearance of a couple of petite girls. Hell, he hadn’t even heard anything about Tawny Wallace since he dumped her over in Springfield. It was as if she had never existed.
    The other local killer he had read about was Carl Cernick. The crazy Czech upholsterer had strangled four women over nine months when a cop named Stallings, who at the time was investigating some other crime, had found him. That was