ONE

Mallory

On December 13, 1989, under a cold sun fast escaping the western sky, three scavengers met in a clearing punched from the thick woods northwest of Daytona Beach, Florida. James Jano Davis and Jimmy Bonchi were scrounging for scrap metal or some other marketable debris. The buzzard was there to dine.

The three were trying to make it through the winter, which in Florida can be particularly cruel when those expecting its usual subtropical hospitality are surprised by sudden frigid temperatures. When the oranges frost, even migrating birds appear confused. Unprepared for arctic nights among the palms, they either wing it farther down the peninsula in hopes of warmth or simply shiver in Kmart parking lots, chirping for a handout.

The black vulture cocked its raw head toward the intruders as they high-stepped through shards of ruined Sheetrock, ghost-ridden mattresses, and eviscerated appliances. Fear overran the bird’s hunger as it spread its mite-ridden wings and beat a retreat from the dirty red carpet runner shrouding its meal. Bonchi and Davis cringed as the septic stench of decay flared through the clearing. Expecting to find a dead deer or some other wildlife carrion, Davis reached toward the carpet and froze. Protruding from the remnant was a blackened crab-fingered human hand.

Twenty minutes after the call came in to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, Major Case Unit Investigator Larry Horzepa bumped his Ford along the rutted trail squirreling off US 1 less than a half mile from Interstate 95 and through the thicket of pine and palmetto to where Davis and Bonchi sat in Deputy Melady’s vehicle scrawling their witness statements. When his supervisor, Sergeant Jake Ehrhart, had called him with the report of the body, Horzepa had had an idea who the John Doe might be. The detective stepped out of the heat of his car, and his glasses fogged. He had to wipe the lenses before he was able to read the witnesses’ statements Melady handed him.

The first, Bonchi’s account, was an agitated parade of crude markings, peppered with exclamation points.

I James A Bonchi & James Davis were out skraping mettle’s and exploring throw the woods and seen a Buzzard and, trompeding through the woods we smelled stink! I was off troming through the Palms when my friend yelled for me and sed look! I saw a tarp with a hand hanging out of It!

Horzepa had to read it again. “What’s ‘t-r-o-m-p-e-d-i-n-g,’ do you suppose? ‘Trom-ped-ing.’”

“Tromping,” said Melady. “He said that. Tromping.”

Horzepa read the second man’s version.

Me and Jim B. were out looking in the woods for steel, iron, aluminum to take to the junk yard. We were walking around looking for scrap. We saw this buzzard and was wondering if it was a dead deer or somethin bonch walked by it and Is saw the tarp laying on the ground I didn’t know what was under it at first and then I saw the hand I showed Jim and we ran for the trek and went to the gass station and called in. we wer 1 mi. north of US 1 and on the west side about 50 yards in the woods.

“I like Bonchi’s better. More drama,” said Horzepa. Melady smiled. Horzepa looked over his shoulder as two cars rumbled in, their headlamps tossing splashes of light over the darkening palmettos and dead refrigerators.

Sergeant Bob Kelley and Sergeant Jake Ehrhart, supervisor of the Major Case Unit, climbed out of the cars. Horzepa shivered as he noticed Kelley’s heavy jacket. In the lengthening shadows, the temperature was rapidly falling. Ehrhart shook from the chill and said, “Look, let’s get back in the car until the crime lab gets here.”

“I’m fine,” grinned Kelley, a second-generation cop. “You guys cold?”

Ignoring their partner’s deadpan dig, Horzepa and Ehrhart climbed into the front seat of the car and closed the doors. Kelley shrugged and joined them.

“What do you think? Is it Mallory’s body?” asked Ehrhart, turning to Horzepa.

“Could be. We’ll have to wait and look at him when FDLE lifts the rug.”

Twelve days earlier, a local resident out walking his dogs had noticed a Cadillac backed into a fire trail off John Anderson Drive in Ormond Beach, just north of Daytona. Suspicious, the man put in a call to the sheriff’s office. Sergeant John Bonnevier arrived to find a 1977 beige Coupe de Ville abandoned among the palmettos. The Caddy had tinted windows, a University of Florida “Fighting Gators” tag affixed to its front bumper and a Florida license plate, GDH-34Q, on the rear. Bonnevier radioed in a DMV check and found that the car belonged to a Richard Mallory of Clearwater, Florida. There were no keys in the car, but just east of the Caddy were scattered a wallet, several papers, two plastic tumblers, a bottle half full of vodka, and some condoms. Apparently someone had tried to bury the items in a sandy divot but had failed to finish the job. In the wallet were Mallory’s driver’s license and invoices from Mallory Electronics, with a Palm Harbor, Florida, address. Bonnevier called for a tow truck and then contacted the Major Case Unit.

Horzepa got the call, gave it the case number 89-12-00185, and then teletyped the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, the jurisdiction covering Mallory’s home and business addresses, for a check on him. Detective Bonnie Richway took Horzepa’s request but was unable to locate Mallory. She called back with a physical description, however, including his clothing, and Horzepa added the case to his list of headaches. Since October the Major Case Unit had had five homicides on its plate, and each investigator was handling nine or ten sex crimes, most involving children.

The lights from an approaching car bounced off the rearview mirror. “That’s Lau,” said Ehrhart. “Let’s go ahead, get the pictures and do a canvass.”

Kelley and Horzepa got out and ducked under the yellow tape surrounding the clearing and began searching the immediate area around the carpet runner. Ehrhart signaled Investigator James Lau to join him in the car for a briefing. Lau slung a 35-mm camera around his neck, picked up a Polaroid from the front seat, and walked over to Ehrhart’s unit.

“Get what you can now,” said Ehrhart. “The FDLE van that’s coming has the lights, so just wait until it gets here to video. It’s getting dark.”

Lau, crime-scene specialist for the Major Case Unit, went about his work with his typical bemused alertness, inured as he was to the grisly and often nauseating circumstances surrounding a homicide. Systematically he documented the setting and its red-carpeted focal point with the Polaroid, the 35-mm, and a tape recorder.

Darkness had enveloped the scene by the time Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents Kelly May and Dan Radcliffe arrived. They parked their van and turned on the spotlights, washing down the clearing with brilliant white light. Lau retrieved his video camera from his car, hooked up its power pack, and joined May, who was photographing the scene while Radcliffe took measurements with a tape.

“That’s it, Jake,” said May, as he put his camera back in the van and took out two pairs of surgical gloves. “Let’s take a look.” He reached down and lifted the carpet.

A visible cloud of hissing steam rose up from the decomposing body as its gases struck the frigid air. Two pieces of cardboard covered the chest and hips. May carefully lifted each of them and put them to the side. Lau rolled more video tape, then shut down the camera and returned to his tape recording.

“The body is facing east and the feet to the west. It is face down with the left arm under the body in the chest area. The head, neck, and portions of the left arm are decomposed and crawling with maggots and other bugs. There is no hair or skin on the skull.”

May and Radcliffe crouched and together turned the body over onto its back. The skull remained connected to the spine; but their movement dislodged the lower jaw and a pair of dentures spilled out. From the collarbone up there was nothing but black decay. “He bled from there,” said Horzepa, pointing to the upper chest. “And up. The insects follow the blood.”

“You think this is Mallory?” asked Ehrhart.

Horzepa noted the clothing. White short-sleeved sport shirt, blue jeans with brown belt. Blue socks and brown loafers. The right shoe was off, lying next to the foot. He stepped closer and looked at the false teeth. “From the clothes and what Rich way gave me, I’m at least ninety percent sure that this is Richard Mallory.”

Lau began gathering evidence into brown paper bags. A hair sample near the body. The right brown shoe. Scraps of paper.

Horzepa noticed that the front pockets of the dead man’s jeans were pulled out. “I sure as hell hope this is Mallory, otherwise we got a bigger problem.”

“Okay,” said Kelley. “There’s nothing much more to do out here for us. Where’s Jake?”

“Back in his car, where I should be,” said Horzepa. “Damn, Bob. It’s like fifteen degrees out here. Shit. We need prints and we’re not getting those tonight. Lau?”

“Tomorrow. At the autopsy. Can’t do it out here. Not in this condition. Gee, it’s really getting cold.”

“It’s not so bad,” disagreed Kelley. “Not bad. This isn’t cold.”

“Goddammit, Kelley, you’re from Boston.”

The three investigators walked back to Ehrhart’s car to wait for the livery service to pick up the body. At seven o’clock a Cadillac hearse slid through the pines and palmettos at the direction of a uniformed deputy. John Doe was carefully bagged and lifted aboard. Horzepa left Ehrhart’s car and carefully stepped through the trash and scrub oak to his own vehicle. He looked up to see the hearse’s red taillights softly bouncing in the darkness as it left the killing ground for the county morgue.

The next morning Larry Horzepa was again on the phone to Detective Bonnie Richway back across the state in Tampa. He wanted everything else she could get on Mallory. He had been arrested for drunken driving, she told Horzepa, and there were latent prints that she would fax to Volusia immediately. Mallory, she said, wore wire-frame glasses and had a full set of dentures and gray hair. Horzepa asked Richway to secure both Mallory’s home and business addresses as crime scenes should the prints confirm the identification.

Upon receiving Mallory’s latent prints, Investigator Lau took them to the medical examiner’s office in Daytona Beach, where Dr. Arthur Botting and John Doe were waiting in the autopsy room. The pathologist and his assistant removed the dead man’s shirt, a dull parchment color shadowed with bloodstains, and Botting probed the chest area, noting three small-caliber bullet holes. Botting looked up through his bushy eyebrows and spoke to Lau in a broad New England accent.

“We already have a projectile. It was lying free in the shroud. We need X rays to find these others.”

The body was then trundled off for pictures. This done, Dr. Botting scanned the negatives, opened the chest, and recovered three rounds. All three appeared to be .22 caliber. One round had ripped through the victim’s right arm and lodged against a rib just below the armpit. A second bullet had torn through the right side of the chest, the third had entered the left side just below the nipple.

“The one through the arm didn’t do much,” Botting observed, “But these others tore his lungs. Tremendous hemorrhaging. The hole on the right side allowed pressurized air into the lung and his respiration went. The lungs collapsed. It would have taken anywhere from ten to twenty minutes for him to die. He was trying desperately to breathe.”

“What about the other bullet?” asked Lau.

“Well, maybe somewhere up here in the neck. But there’s no tissue left. No way of telling. There was no wounding to the spine, which is just about all there is now up here.” Botting swept a broad, gloved hand across the shriveled neck of John Doe. “But you might check the shirt. It appears to have a bullet hole on the right side of the collar.” The doctor tapped the location on the side of his neck.

While Dr. Botting completed the autopsy and labeled the crime a homicide, Lau collected the shirt and bullets and bagged them.

Getting the fingerprints was a more difficult problem. Due to advanced decomposition, the skin of the fingers slid from the tissue, so the doctor had to remove the hands, and Lau found himself bagging them, heat-sealing the bags to lock in the odor, and placing them in an Igloo cooler. After phoning ahead to FDLE agent Kelly May, Lau toted the cooler out to his car and drove the 120 miles to the FDLE lab in Orlando.

Lifting prints in such circumstances can be done any of three ways. One: carefully slipping the skin from the dead hand to leave a morbid glove into which the investigator can insert his own fingers and ink and roll a set of prints. Two: injecting water with a hypodermic needle into the slack finger to inflate it like a water balloon before attempting a lift. May chose the third option instead. Taking the hands from their bags he floated them in a heavy saline solution for a couple of hours to tighten up the skin, figuring that at least one print could be rolled from one of the severed hands. Since Lau had been the designated glove model, he was relieved when May succeeded in making a print with the first roll. Then May compared the latents from the body with those faxed over from Horzepa at the Major Case Unit.

“You got a match, Lau.”

Lau immediately phoned Horzepa with the news, cleaned the ink off Mallory’s hand, rebagged it with the other hand, and dropped them back into the cooler. He had to return them quickly to the medical examiner’s office for reattachment, so that the body could be released to the funeral home. In an unmarked car, Lau sped up Interstate 4 and into the radar field of a Florida Highway Patrol trooper, who immediately pulled the investigator over.

Lau handed over his license and registration to the trooper, who then asked, “What’s the hurry?”

“I’ve got these hands here. Got to get them back.”

“What?”

“Here,” the ever-friendly Lau offered, picking up the cooler from beside him and opening it in the trooper’s face. “These hands here.”

The stench flew up into the trooper’s face.

“Good God!” The trooper took a quick step backward. “Jeez, you guys … get them out of here. Go on.”

“Okay. Thank you, trooper.” Lau smiled and shut the box of hands. He drove the rest of the way back to Operations just as fast as he thought necessary. If another FHP wanted to take a peek, he was welcome to it.

With the John Doe now positively identified as Richard Mallory, Horzepa and Kelley returned to where Mallory’s car had been discovered, and canvassed the neighborhood. They learned from a local man whose daily morning walk took him along John Anderson Drive that Mallory’s Cadillac had not been parked on the fire trail the morning of December 1. Sometime during that day whoever had killed Mallory must have driven his car to Ormond and left it parked in broad daylight until it was discovered at 3:15.

Horzepa went to the compound where Mallory’s car had been towed. As no keys had been found, Horzepa called for a locksmith to open the trunk. Although there was nothing inside, Horzepa noticed in the carpeting near the spare tire an imprint of what could have been a toolbox. From inside the glove compartment, Horzepa pulled a bonding ticket that showed Mallory had secured the release of a white male by the name of Michael Rosenblum, arrested in Pinellas County for cocaine possession and carrying a concealed weapon. Horzepa phoned Detective Richway, described the bond ticket, and asked her to run a check. “I’ll be over in a couple of days with Kelley,” he told her.

On December 18, Horzepa and Kelley left the operations center outside Daytona and hooked Interstate 4 west to Clearwater and the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office. Detective Richway was ready for them. Horzepa and Kelley sat back as Richway detailed what she had on Mallory.

“This guy isn’t easy to put together. Number one: he was very paranoid. He changed the locks at his apartment eight to ten times in the last three years. He didn’t have any friends. But,” said Richway, “he was very much into porno and the topless-bar scene. Flashed a lot of money when he was in these places. Big tipper. Heavy drinker.”

“What about Rosenblum and this bond ticket?” Horzepa interrupted.

“He’s got a string of arrests up and down the Gulf Coast. He says he worked for Mallory until six months ago. Says Mallory was mental.”

“What about Mallory’s girlfriend? Jackie Davis.”

“Ex-girlfriend. She said she’d dated him for about a year and a half. Just broke up. Mallory told her he’d been arrested in Maryland when he was nineteen. Said he became involved with a woman who was separated from her Arabic husband. The husband came back and it ended. Then, Mallory said he was attacked by some guys and part of his ear was cut off. That’s why he moved to Florida. Davis also said Mallory told her he’d been married five times and had a son, but never saw him.”

Horzepa thought, This guy just isn’t going to be easy to put together. There were too many options opening up. The bond receipt on Rosenblum suggested drag and gun connections. Then there was Mallory’s paranoia, the locks, and the topless joints.

A steady rain out of the Gulf fell on the detectives as they walked up to investigate Mallory’s apartment on Oak Trail in Clearwater. “That’s one of his vans,” said Richway, pointing to a maroon vehicle with yellow police tape across its doors. “He’s got two of them.” Horzepa, Richway, and Kelley waited as the Crime Scene Unit pulled their vacuum cleaners, Luma Lite, and print kits out of their van and lugged them up to the door. They slipped on their booties and white gloves and set to work. The unit finally came out with ten bags of sweepings and three latent-print cards. The Luma Lite had detected no blood. Horzepa and Kelley then went in.

While the apartment was being photographed, Horzepa and Kelley set about piecing together the habits of the man who had once lived here. In the living room they found a collection of X-rated videos, all of them dubbed, plus a stash of off-the-rack soft-core magazines and personal photographs of unidentified naked women. In the kitchen a Smirnoff vodka bottle, blackened from dusting, stood on the counter. Another fifth of vodka was found in the freezer. On the kitchen counter next to the wall phone was a scrap of paper with two scribbled phone numbers. Horzepa pocketed the paper while Kelley stacked the videos, magazines, and photographs. They bagged Mallory’s checkbook, a set of keys, and miscellaneous papers and then toted the lot out to their car. The next stop was Mallory Electronics.

Jeff Davis, the son of Mallory’s ex-girlfriend, and a one-time Mallory employee, was waiting with the key when the detectives arrived at the small shopping strip where Mallory had his repair shop. A white van with a sign reading MALLORY ELECTRONICS was parked directly in front of the shop.

Inside, there was no evidence of foul play. The Crime Scene Unit took photographs while Horzepa and Kelley collected repair slips along with the customers’ names and telephone numbers. Richway remarked that there had been a number of angry notes taped to the front door of Mallory’s shop when she first came by the place, all of them from irate clients demanding to know when their repairs would be done.

After collecting Mallory’s papers, Horzepa and Kelley canvassed the strip mall. A veterinarian told them he had seen Mallory on the morning of November 30, driving off in his maroon van.

Back at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, the two Volusia County investigators sat at a table cluttered with the debris of Mallory’s life. Horzepa shuffled through the papers and found a service-call receipt to a customer by the name of Franco, dated 11-30-89.

“What it looks like here,” said Horzepa, “is that Mallory took the white van on the call, came back, dropped off the receipt, then went home in the maroon.”

“It also looks like he was seriously in debt.” Kelley shifted through a stack of Mallory’s mail as he spoke. “He owed thirty-eight hundred dollars in back rent.”

Horzepa pulled up another sheaf of paper “Repair orders. Uncompleted. Let’s see … one, two, three …” As Horzepa counted, Kelley said, “Oh-kay. IRS. Well, Richard doesn’t have to worry about this audit now.” He waved the notices and put them aside.

“One hundred and twenty. One hundred and twenty back orders. The oldest is May 1989. Not diligent.”

“Diligent? The guy’s life was a goddamn disaster. He was floating. The only thing he was serious about was this.” Kelley tapped the stack of porno videos. “The guy was pussy-crazed.”

“Okay. Then that’s where we look.”

Horzepa and Kelley spent the next day taking statements from Mallory’s employees and Jacqueline Davis. They learned Mallory had an unusually erratic business system. He would backlog repair orders and then hire a squad of repairmen to clear the shelves. They would work until all the jobs were done, and then he would pay them out and let them go. No one worked steadily, not even Mallory. From his former girlfriend they soon learned why.

“He would be gone for days at a time. Just take off and you wouldn’t see him. Then, he would just be back. It was impossible. I couldn’t deal with the porno and the strip bars. He drank heavily and smoked dope. He’d have a bottle in the car and two tumblers, you know? Not constantly … he’d be all right and then he’d go off on a tear. He’d be off to the strip clubs. I never went with him. A year and a half of that. I broke it off around Thanksgiving. He didn’t trust anyone. Never. You know about the locks? Changing his locks? He was just weird about things. Always had this black briefcase. Never, ever went anywhere without it. Always had cash in it. We’d go to a restaurant. He’d put it in the trunk.”

Horzepa interrupted. “Excuse me. I want to ask you about some things he might take with him besides this briefcase. You know, if he were taking off on one of his trips?”

“He had some cameras. One was a Polaroid. The other a 35-mm. He might have those. An electric razor. He used a hair dryer. And those tumblers. Vodka. If he was on the road he’d have those.”

“Any idea why he might go to Daytona? Family?”

“No. As far as I know, no. I can’t think why he’d go to Daytona. Look, he’d just take off. Nobody knew where he’d gone. And he never talked about it either.”

In response to further questioning, Jackie reiterated the story they’d heard earlier about Mallory’s former marriages and his estranged son.

“Is there anything else you can tell us about him?”

Jackie Davis shifted in her chair and looked away from the detectives. “Well, you know he was in trouble when he was younger. When he was around seventeen or eighteen. I don’t know any of this but what he said. He said he did some dumb thing like go into this house once. There was a woman in the house and she got scared. He … ended up in jail.”

“Where was this?”

“It was Maryland.”

“He just went to jail?”

Davis sighed. “No. He said he was in prison. Burglary was the charge. But that was when he was very young.”

Horzepa didn’t show any concern as he made notes on a yellow legal pad.

“He went into some kind of hospital after that. Or when he was in the prison. He said it was an experimental program.”

“This program … like a … alcohol thing … drugs … or what was it?”

“No.” Davis raised her head stiffly. “I think it was some sort of sexual … problem kind of … he was just very young.”

Horzepa looked down at his notes and then gave Davis his reassuring smile, the one that said, “Oh, that’s nothing. No big thing.” He glanced over to Kelley. “Well, if Sergeant Kelley doesn’t have anything more …”

Kelley shook his head.

“Thank you, Ms. Davis.” Horzepa stood up and extended his hand to the lady.

“Are you seeing Jeff today?” Davis looked from one detective to the other.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Davis’s son, Jeff, had gotten his job with Mallory as a result of his mother’s relationship with the victim. “I was probably the employee he had for the longest time. And he dumped me the day he left, after my mom broke off with him. Just left a message on my answering machine.”

“When was that?”

“The thirtieth. The day he went off to Daytona. Had to have left somewhere between seven and ten-thirty that night. Just fired me. I wasn’t really surprised. You didn’t know what he was going to do, but I figured after they split up, that was it.”

“Did you know a Michael Rosenblum? Worked for Mallory?”

“I don’t know. There was a guy came in three days before Richard disappeared. Said he used to work there.”

Horzepa riffled through an accordion file and pulled up Rosenblum’s booking photograph. “Is this the guy?”

“Yeah. He came in and talked to Richard.”

“On the twenty-seventh?”

“Yeah.”

“Any idea what it was about?”

“No, they went off and talked.”

While Horzepa and Kelley retrieved Jeff Davis’s tape from his answering machine and then had his photograph taken, Detective Richway managed to turn up Mallory’s sister out in Amarillo, Texas. Dulcie Turbin was contacted by Texas deputies and advised of her brother’s death. She told them neither she nor anyone else in the family had heard from Richard in years. He had just dropped off the planet as far as they could tell.

Back in Daytona, Lau was making the rounds of the pawn shops—a daunting labor since Daytona Beach seemed to have one every six blocks or so. The cops knew that Mallory had had a suitcase and briefcase with him as well as a Radio Shack Micronta radar detector. None of these were found in the abandoned vehicle.

Right after the New Year, Horzepa and Kelley drove back to Clearwater. They took a hair sample from Jackie Davis to check against the various hair fibers that had been collected from Mallory’s Cadillac by the FDLE technicians. At the same time, they showed Davis a batch of Polaroids from the dead man’s home collection. All were of white females. Davis identified one as a forty-year-old Clearwater nurse. The nurse told the investigators that she had met Richard back in 1988 through a local dating service, but had broken off with him when she learned about his relationship with Jackie. Horzepa got the name of the dating service, contacted its president, and asked for a membership list.

Then a call came in from a Dunedin, Florida, police detective who advised Horzepa that Rosenblum had been involved in an arrest some time ago. A .22-caliber revolver had been taken from him.

Horzepa and Kelley spent the next day canvassing Rosenblum’s apartment complex and a nightclub called New York, New York, where Rosenblum hung out. When the detectives flashed Rosenblum’s photograph nearly everyone recognized him, but no one had much more to offer. On January 4, Maryann Beatty, president of the M.C.I, dating club, handed over a list of one thousand members. Horzepa and Kelley told Beatty to let the female members know that the sheriff’s office would be in contact with them in the near future.

Out in the car, Kelley flipped the pages of the list. “It really is a thousand, Larry,” he said, as his finger trailed down to the bottom of the last page. “One thousand. Easily.”

“Well, given Mr. Mallory’s habits, there is a distinct possibility he went out with at least half of them.”

“Don’t say that, Larry. That’s not a good thing to even think.”

“Okay. Two hundred and fifty. Piece of cake.”

Their next stop was Jersey Jim Towers Electronics out on the south side of Clearwater, where Mike Rosenblum was supposedly employed. Jersey Jim led the detectives back to his office and pulled Rosenblum’s time cards for November and December. Horzepa shuffled through the cards and pulled aside the critical dates.

11-30-89 (Thursday) 10:10 A.M.–6:48 P.M.

12-01-89 (Friday) 8:58 A.M.–7:14 P.M.

12-04-89 (Monday) 9:52 A.M.–6:44 P.M.

When Rosenblum came to the door, Kelley glanced over at Jersey Jim, who got up and left the room.

An hour later, Horzepa and Kelley walked back to their car with a plastic Baggie of Rosenblum’s hair, and his handwritten statement. Kelley read while Horzepa took the wheel.

“It’s not much. But with the time cards, it’s enough for Rosenblum to skate off for the time being. Says he called Mallory about a job. Hired the same day. Worked for him six to eight months. Quit because of Mallory’s erratic behavior.”

“Think we’ve got a theme there, Bob?”

“The erratic Mr. Mallory.”

“Well, Mallory bailed Rosenblum out on that coke charge and then fired him for getting arrested. Paranoid about the bust. Then Rosenblum says Mallory ‘exhibited disgust with his personal life and business endeavors.’ Says he left for Orlando and didn’t come back to open the shop. Left Rosenblum in the parking lot waiting all day. Yes. The erratic Mr. Mallory. What’s the deal with this guy? We’re getting nothing dirty on him. He’s just like … paranoid and pussy-crazy, with bad business habits.”

“Yeah. And dead.” Horzepa said drily. “It’s a lifestyle kind of thing.”

The weekend of January 6 and 7 the newspapers in Tampa and Clearwater ran a story on Mallory’s killing. Horzepa had done interviews with reporters before leaving, in hopes some civilian might kick up a new lead. When he and Kelley returned to the sheriff’s office in Clearwater on Monday, there was a payoff.

A Ms. Snyder had read the article on Mallory’s murder and called in the name and phone number of Mallory’s ex-wife. Horzepa immediately tapped in the digits, only to get an answering machine: “Linda Nusbaum is not at home right now …” Horzepa left a message, then began flipping through the box of evidence from Mallory’s apartment until he came to a manila envelope. He opened it and shook out its clutch of papers, spreading them across the table.

There it was. A small page from a notepad that had been found on Mallory’s kitchen counter. On it was a phone number and a name—CHASTITY. Horzepa checked with the phone company and found that the number was listed to Alicia Wright. Then Linda Nusbaum called. The former Mrs. Mallory told Horzepa that she hadn’t seen Richard for several months, and then proceeded to support what the detective had learned from Davis—Mallory was obsessed with pornography, was extremely paranoid, drank heavily, and smoked a ton of weed. “Sometimes he would just hop in the car and take off for Maryland,” said Nusbaum. “Wouldn’t give it a thought. Just take off.”

“Was he the type who would pick up hitchhikers?”

“Sure, he would do that. If they were female. You know?”

“Yes, ma’am. I think I do.”

“I can’t see Richard picking up some guy. He didn’t even have men friends. You know about changing his locks?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“No way he’d pick up some strange guy. But he’d definitely stop for a woman. That was his problem. You know?”

Back in Daytona a witness came forward saying he’d seen a maroon car leaving the scene where Mallory’s body was found. Bob Goodwyn told deputies he had seen a man driving the car out of the woods around December 1. He said that there had been a woman in the car and that they both had appeared nervous. Despite questioning, Goodwyn could not remember any further details. He agreed to hypnosis and came down to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office operations center on January 18. The session resulted in Goodwyn’s recalling a maroon two-door Dodge Aries with a maroon interior, black-wall tires with wire-spoked wheels, and a Florida tag from Volusia County, numbered GFE 723.

A check through the computer revealed no such tag. Cal Eden, the hypnotist conducting the session, said the numbers were likely mixed up. “It’s probably all turned around some way,” said the Daytona Svengali. “On the whole, I’d say we had a huge success here.”

Horzepa and Kelley were less enthusiastic. They knew this one was in for a long haul. The killer or killers were not going to be sprung from an entranced civilian’s sublimated recall. Nothing but basics were going to break this case out. Somewhere in the scrambled array of Mallory’s paranoid and porno-fixated lifestyle was the key. Horzepa called assistant state attorney David Damore and asked for a court order to obtain Mallory’s mail. The young, intensely thorough prosecutor was known for having the instincts and demeanor of a well-trained Doberman. He immediately responded. Cops liked Damore’s style.

On January 23, Horzepa and Kelley were back at the Clearwater Embassy Suites. After checking in, they drove to Mallory’s local postal station to check on his mail. Nothing was there. The detectives made arrangements to forward the victim’s mail to their office in Daytona and then headed for the Pinellas sheriff’s headquarters. There they began calling numbers gathered from slips of paper found in Mallory’s apartment. All the numbers were annotated with female names.

The first one up was for Kimberly Guy, Danielle. The number turned up her stepfather, a Tampa cab driver who gave Horzepa Kimberly Guy’s new address. The detectives were there within half an hour.

They arrived at North Bay village and were checked out by a guard at the security gate. Kelley surveyed the landscaped townhouses and gave a low whistle. “She’s not doing so bad for a topless dancer.” When she met them at the door and invited them in, Horzepa noted the furnishings and stereo equipment. No, not too bad at all. She led them to the living room.

Horzepa and Kelley sat on the couch and put a tape recorder and their notebooks on a glass coffee table. Guy took a chair across from them.

“Ms. Guy … is it Kimberly or Danielle?”

“Uh, Kim. Danielle is my stage name.”

“Okay. Kim, could you tell us when you met Richard Mallory?”

“I don’t know … last year. He came into the 2001 Odyssey … that’s where I used to dance. I don’t work there now … but, okay … Mallory. The first time he spent about a hundred and fifty dollars … for dances. Wanted me to date him. I told him I was gay.”

“Kim, when you say date you don’t mean like go out for a drink or dinner or …”

“No. Sex. You know. Have sex.”

“For money.”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay. And then you said no. You refused.”

“Yeah, I didn’t want to. I don’t do that … I mean, I’m gay. I live with somebody. I’ve got a girlfriend.”

“You don’t have sex with customers at the club. Is that what you’re saying?”

Guy turned in the big chair and then sat back. She looked at Horzepa. His eyebrows were rifted. He waited for the answer he knew she had to give.

“No. I’m saying I didn’t want to. I’ve done that. Sure. I’m saying, when he first asked me I said no. He kept at it. He said we could go over to his shop in Clearwater, some TV shop, and do it there. I said I’d do some lap dances.”

“Lap dances.”

“You know, get over them … you know, get them off in the club. They sit in a chair. Mallory was constantly hitting on me and the other dancers. He was like a permanent fixture. But, he always had cash. A couple hundred or so all the time.”

“So, he offers you a hundred and fifty dollars.”

“No, not this last time. The night you’re taking about … November. Last day in November?”

“Yes.”

“No. He said he’d give us … me … a TV and VCR for some dances at his shop. I said, ‘Okay, if you bring some cash. So, he gave me fifty bucks and a nineteen-inch Magnavox and a Fisher VCR … took me out there and back here. I don’t have a car. We went in his van. Kind of red or maroon. Then when we were done, brought me back here, hooked up the Magnavox and VCR. And left. Wasn’t here more than twenty, twenty-five minutes. That was it. The last I saw him. I gave him my phone number. I guess that’s how you got it, right?”

“Danielle … sorry. Kim.” Kelley leaned forward and flipped through his notebook. “You know Chastity?”

“Worked at 2001.”

“Wouldn’t happen to be the other girl with you and Richard that night, would she?”

“Let’s … I mean, if it was, I wouldn’t want her to know I was saying anything about that, you know? I mean … Oh, well, Chastity was with us. I mean she was with him. I got let off first. We came back here. Richard dropped me off, set up the Magnavox and the VCR and then left with Chastity. But you know, I didn’t have sex with him. Chastity did. I just danced. Gave him ten dances. We smoked some pot, drank some beer …”

“This was at Mr. Mallory’s shop?”

“Yes. Then he got the TVs and VCRs, loaded them into the van, and drove me back. I came back first. He left with her. I never saw them again.”

“Are those still here? The TV and VCR?”

Guy got up. “Yeah. They’re back in the bedroom.”

“Well, Kim, we’d like to take some pictures.”

“All right.”

“And we’d like to take one of you too, if that’s okay.”

Guy looked at Horzepa. “Whatever’s right.”

Horzepa smiled. “Good. And Chastity You seen her lately?”

“I don’t know. She was just there at the club. She’s not my friend or anything. You ought to try the club.”

“Yes, thank you. We will.”

Kelley snapped Polaroids of Kim, the TV, and the VCR. He noted there were no serial numbers on the electronics. The detectives left their card and told Guy they would be getting back to her. With Kelley behind the wheel on the way back to the Pinellas sheriff’s office, Horzepa watched the wipers slop rain across the windshield. “Bob, I think we’ve got a handle here with these two. With Mallory there’s got to be a woman in it. Look at him. Out at the topless joints two or three or four times a week. Carries a roll. Spreads it. This is not a discriminating guy. He thought with his dick.”

Kelley took the left lane and braked for a red light. “Mallory was a Part One waiting to happen. It’s blind luck he wasn’t done years ago.” (On a police incident report, “Part One” designates the victim of violence.)

Horzepa pulled a pack of gum out of his black Members Only jacket, slipped two sticks, and handed one to Kelley. “Let’s find this Chastity and see if she makes a noise.”