by Cross, Mason
“Great. So we pay eight hundred bucks an hour for some pen pusher to tell us we’re looking for a white male between twenty and forty-five with a history of violent relationships.”
The new Police Administration Building was only a couple of miles from the County Coroner’s Office. Allen went along with the habit of calling it the new building, even though, of course, it was the only headquarters she’d known in this town. The LAPD had been based out of Parker Center for more than fifty years, and she expected it would take a decade or so for the new place a couple of blocks over on West First Street to feel like home, as far as cop folk memory was concerned.
She didn’t have access to one of the rare and coveted basement parking spots beneath the PAB, so she parked in a more spacious lot a couple of blocks over. A lot of cops parked there, which had a drawback: people could wait around for you to show up. As she pulled past the barrier, she saw her partner’s head snap around as they passed a familiar face on the sidewalk outside. The two exited the car, and she followed his gaze back up the ramp to where the man they’d seen stood. He was a little taller than average, and fairly slim. He wore a vintage T-shirt displaying the poster for the original Evil Dead movie, under a flannel shirt. He wore a skull cap, and a camera dangled from a strap around his neck.
“Shrinks ain’t the worst we’ll be dealing with,” Mazzucco said as they approached the man. “These bastards bring it all out of the woodwork.”
“Smith.” Allen sighed. “Thought you’d be out in the hills,” she stated as they drew level with him.
The man grinned and shook his head. “Got all I could use already. There’s only so many shots you can take of guys digging, you know? Thought I’d try my luck with you, get myself a fresh angle.”
Allen sighed. Eddie Smith was as bad as the rest of them, maybe worse, but she owed him one. That didn’t mean, of course, that she couldn’t be selective in how she repaid that favor.
“There’s no angle, Smith. Just an unexplained death.”
Smith angled his head. “Nice try. I got there just before they found the other two. So tell me, is this a new killer, or somebody who’s already on your radar?”
“No comment,” Mazzucco said, brushing past.
“What he said,” Allen added.
They left Smith standing on the sidewalk, staring after them like he knew something they didn’t.
“Fucking new mutation,” Mazzucco said under his breath as they reached the doors.
“Huh?” Allen asked, wondering if she’d misheard.
“Symptom of the modern world,” he said, jerking his head back in Smith’s general direction. “Used to be there was a dividing line between the paps and the on-the-payroll journalists. You could almost trust some of the traditional guys. Ever since print media started circling the drain, everybody’s gone freelance, doing a little bit of everything. I don’t know how to deal with this new hybrid.”
“Kids today,” Allen said, mocking only gently.
Smith ran his own crime blog, operating like a one-man news network. He linked to AP stories around the Greater Los Angeles area and cherry-picked the most sensational for featured articles. He’d built up a good network of sources and was reliably among the first responders to a big story, whether it was a celebrity overdose or a gang shooting.
After his path had crossed with Allen’s a couple of times, she’d visited his website out of curiosity. His copywriting was okay, maybe good enough to be a staffer at a provincial newspaper, but his photography was the real deal. His fundamentals were solid in terms of light, composition, and all the rest of it; but more important, he had a war reporter’s talent for capturing the aftermath of violence. He prided himself on showing images that the legitimate news outlets shied away from, and that was why his site racked up more page views than many a larger operation. If it bleeds, it leads was unspoken policy at most news organizations, but Smith actually used it as a banner tagline on his site. Allen didn’t know exactly how paid advertising on websites worked, but Smith certainly seemed to be doing all right.
Most of the cops who knew of Smith hated him. They hated him because he was good at his job, and that meant sometimes he got in the way of their jobs. He’d got talking to Allen in her first couple of weeks in the department, at the scene of a supposed suicide: a lawyer who’d fallen sixty feet from a bridge crossing a dry river bed. Perhaps Smith had sensed a similar, if lesser, isolation in her when they met.
They’d exchanged pleasantries, and then Smith had casually dropped in that he’d noticed from his zoom shots of the body before it was covered up that there were scratches on the wrists. Not the kind that would suggest a different kind of suicide attempt, but the kind you get from being bound or handcuffed. Inconsistent with an open-and-shut suicide. Allen had caught this already, of course, but she warned him not to spread that around, whereupon he’d smilingly reminded her that it was a free country and a free press. No stranger to negotiating with journalists back in DC, Allen realized that a different approach would pay dividends. She’d asked him—nicely—to sit on this particular detail until they’d had enough time to look into the lawyer’s background. Twelve hours later, they had the lawyer’s wife in custody following a full confession, and Smith got to be first with the story anyway. Allen assumed that the gruesome pictures of the lawyer’s body got him a lot of hits, or clicks, or whatever.
Allen shook her head in wonder as she remembered the case. The wife had doped the lawyer up with sleeping pills before tying him up and driving him out to the bridge. Every cop who’d come near the investigation had been openly skeptical at first, that a relatively slight woman would have been capable of leveraging her husband’s two-hundred-pound frame over the barrier. Then they’d been just as openly impressed when the woman explained, proudly showing off her toned arm muscles. Pole-dancing classes, apparently. What a city.
“He likes you, you know.” Mazzucco’s voice brought her back to the present.
The thought had occurred to Allen. Smith had called her a couple of times after she’d contacted him – making the mistake of not withholding her number. Not about anything specific. Just touching base, he’d say. Then again, she guessed there were plenty of professional reasons why he’d want to cultivate open communications with a homicide cop. And if she was smart, she could make sure she benefited more than Smith did.
She hadn’t told Mazzucco about any of this. She didn’t think he—or any of the others—would be comfortable with her getting too close to somebody like Smith. But they didn’t have to worry about her.
She shook her head. “Nah. He just thinks I’m an easy mark, ’cause I’m new. Nothing I can’t handle.”
Mazzucco stopped and met her eyes. “I hope you’re right. Because this thing is already going primetime. Any hope we might have had of keeping this thing low-key just vanished.”
13
They rode the elevator up to the sixth floor, where Lieutenant Lawrence was waiting for them. Lawrence was a well-built and well-preserved sixty, with a good head of hair that had retained much of its original color. The only things about him that betrayed the pressures of the job were the lines and bags under his eyes. The look on his face said they could skip the introduction.
“Congratulations, Detective Allen,” he said. “Only been with us six months and you already get to be on TV.”
“Just lucky, I guess, Lieutenant.”
He watched her face for a moment, and she could tell he was uneasy about her leading on a high-profile investigation. Maybe because it was too early, maybe for other reasons. She wondered if he was thinking about taking it away from her. It would be bad protocol, but he had the authority. But then he looked from her to Mazzucco and seemed to shrug it off, beckoning the two of them over. “Come on in.”
They sat down in Lawrence’s office and thrashed out a plan of action over the next forty minutes. They kept it simple and focused, knowing that complexity and tangents and factors outside their control would be
inevitable soon enough.
Goal one: find Sarah Dutton. Goal two: confirm the IDs on the remaining victims. Goal three: start chasing up leads, identifying suspects. As they’d anticipated, Lawrence had already engaged a forensic psychologist to produce a psych profile on the killer.
The final point was maybe the toughest one: manage the media.
“Let’s keep it by the book,” Lawrence said. “Release the basics: location of the bodies, number of victims, names when next of kin have been notified, not before. No speculation, nothing specific around cause of death. We’re following a number of lines of inquiry. You know the drill.”
Allen nodded, conscious of the need to feed the media without compromising the investigation. If they wanted to be able to sort the kooks from the genuine leads, they needed to keep the details under wraps: stuff like the fact they’d been buried, the fact they were all nude, the torture wounds . . . and of course, those ragged, grinning neck slits. Allen’s mind wandered to those ragged edges and then back to Washington.
“Allen?”
She snapped back into the present, feeling like she’d been caught daydreaming in class. She winged it, assuming she was being asked for general feedback.
“Sounds solid,” she said. “We need to find Sarah, although I don’t think any of us are expecting to find her alive now. Aside from that, the priority is establishing where these women were when they went missing, that and finding the vehicles. We know that, we’re on track to finding out how he’s abducting them.”
Lawrence stared at her for a moment and then nodded. “Okay. We’re already getting a lot of calls about this; looks like one of the victims was some kind of celebrity, whatever that means anymore. The chief’s talking about a press conference, and he likes to have somebody close to the case up there with him. You up for it, Allen? You’re the primary.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
Lawrence told them to get to it and picked up his phone as they exited his office, Allen closing the door behind them.
Mazzucco almost walked right into Don McCall as he turned into the corridor. The solidly built, clean-shaven SIS captain was coming the other way, holding a paper cup of coffee, which he exaggeratedly swung out of harm’s way.
“Whoa, easy there, tiger.”
Mazzucco grumbled an apology and tried to keep going, but McCall tapped him on the shoulder with his free hand. An onlooker might have seen it as a friendly gesture rather than the deliberate invasion of personal space it was.
“I hear you two caught a big one. Need any help?”
Mazzucco sighed and met McCall’s eyes. “Thanks. We got it.”
McCall grinned and looked at Allen. “I bet. Watch and learn, Allen. Mazzy here will have the snazziest SharePoint environment set up in good time for the next body.”
Mazzucco leaned closer, so their faces were inches apart. “You’re right, McCall. Maybe I should go out and shoot a few unarmed suspects dead to get the ball rolling. That approach work better for you?”
The smile vanished from McCall’s face. “That was ruled a good shooting, Mazzucco.”
They were referring to the incident the previous December, not long after Allen had transferred in. McCall’s team had had a couple of armed robbery suspects under surveillance in Crenshaw. They’d ambushed the two suspects in their vehicle and things had gotten ugly. The net result was two dead suspects—only one of them armed—and one dead civilian by the name of Levon Jackson, a twenty-four-year-old local resident who multiple witnesses said hadn’t even been near the two suspects and their car. Had Jackson not had an impressive list of busts for selling crack cocaine, things might have gone a lot worse for McCall. But Allen had it on good authority that things never seemed to go all the way bad for McCall.
McCall opened his mouth to say something, then reconsidered as he thought of a more subtle way to get Mazzucco’s back up, turning to smile at Allen.
“Good thing your partner’s leading on this. I heard she knows how to get things done. That right, Allen?”
She didn’t return the smile. “Your coffee’s getting cold, Don.”
McCall shrugged, met Mazzucco’s eyes again with a cold stare, and then passed by them. He gave Lawrence’s door a cursory knock and entered.
“I wonder what that’s about,” Allen said, watching as the door closed again.
Her partner shrugged. “Probably just asking again why it is they can’t have tactical nukes.”
“I guess he wouldn’t still be around if he didn’t have a use,” Allen mused.
“That’s one way of looking at it. It’s assholes like him that give all of us a bad name.”
They headed into the main squad room, where the orange light on Mazzucco’s desk phone was flashing to indicate voicemail. Allen hoped it was the callback he was waiting on from AAA. He sat down at his desk to listen to the message, and Allen circled around the hub to her own desk, which faced Mazzucco’s. In contrast to Mazzucco’s neat, squared-away desk, hers was littered with assorted reports and stationery and doodled-on pieces of notepaper. She raised the handset of her phone and dialed a number. The call put her through to the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia. Allen cleared her throat and kept her voice low. She didn’t want anyone else—even Mazzucco—to hear this until she was sure. She identified herself and asked for Lieutenant Michael Sanding in the Homicide division. The call was transferred, and a minute later a familiar voice answered.
“Sanding.”
“Hey, Mike. Got five minutes for an old acquaintance?”
“Allen,” he said at once, his voice perking up. “How you been? You still in LA?”
“Yeah. I had to stop going when I realized they put an ocean right in my way.”
“How are you doing?” He paused, sounding circumspect, like he wanted to know, but didn’t want to ask her straight out. “You . . . okay?”
“I’m great,” she said briskly. “Be even better if you can help me out on something, though.”
“Shoot.”
“Two and a half years back. Body in the Potomac. Ring any bells?”
“You’re gonna have to be more specific,” he cracked, sounding happier on less dangerous ground. He was exaggerating about needing to be more specific, but only mildly. The line went quiet, and she could hear him tapping a pen on his desk, the way he always did when he was thinking. “Sure. Fall time. Homeless guy, right? Can’t recall the name.”
“There wasn’t one. We never got an ID. ”
“That’s right. He’d been in the water a while, and there wasn’t much in the way of physical evidence. I guess he wasn’t missed. The body could have washed out to sea and nobody would have even known there’d been a murder.”
Something about that sentence sent a shiver through Allen. It reminded her of something the uniform at the gravesite had said earlier, about the undiscovered dead in the mountains. That made her wonder how long Boden and the other two might have lain in their unmarked graves had it not been for the rain and the landslide.
“Hello?” Sanding said. “Allen, you still there?”
“Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking. The guy in the Potomac, do you remember anything else about him?”
“He had that weird slash cutting his throat. Like somebody had hacked away at it with a butter knife or something. The ME thought maybe it could have happened after he wound up in the river. Like he got caught on something that ripped the wound up more.”
“Did you ever see anything else like that?”
There was silence at the other end. No tapping this time.
“Actually, yes. Maybe a couple of months before that. A snitch down in Columbia Heights. We found him in a boarded-up apartment; figured it was his homies did it. Looked like they’d found out he was telling tales out of school.”
“How so?”
“He’d been tortured. It was bad, Allen. Maybe the worst I’ve seen.”
“Throat cut?”
“Nah. Cigarette burns, missing
digits, castration. His belly had been ripped open at the end of it, like he was literally spilling his guts. And the wound looked kind of like the one on the homeless guy.” He paused; then his voice got louder again, like he was returning to the present. “What’s this about, Jess?”
“I’m not sure yet,” she said. “Thanks, Mike. I’ll call soon.”
She hung up before he had a chance to question her further and stared at the postcard she’d pinned on the partition separating their desks. It was kind of a joke, a reproduction of some fifties advertising art, showing a glamorous couple lounging on the beach. Come to Los Angeles, California—City of Dreams! She always got a kick out of that whenever she looked up from crime scene pics of some grisly murder. She stared at the vibrant colors and the upbeat sentiment, lost in thought.
Mazzucco’s fingers tapping on the partition snapped her out of it.
“What?” she said, looking up.
“The shift runner at the Triple A branch confirmed the timeline on Carrie Burnett. They took a call from her last Sunday night, saying she’d broken down on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. The tow truck driver got out there pretty quick because they prioritize single women. When he made it to the scene, there was no sign of her or her vehicle.”
Allen opened her mouth to ask about the driver, but Mazzucco stopped her.
“We’ve got somebody going to talk to the driver, but I think he’s clean. The manager checked the record before calling me back. Turns out these guys all ride with an onboard digital video camera now, for security. He drove out to the scene and the car wasn’t there. He made a call back to base and they told him to come back in. The tape backs up his account perfectly, as does the mileage on his truck and the fact he was assisting a different driver in West Hollywood a half hour later.”
Allen thought about it. “Can we get them to check if there are any other no-shows? Anybody we can’t account for?”
“Worth a shot.”
Mazzucco’s hand was on the phone to call the AAA guy back when it rang again. He picked it up and said his name, then listened. He said okay and thanked whoever was on the other end, and then hung up.