by Cross, Mason
He shook his head. “Well, please accept my apologies for thinking I could spend time with my girlfriend when she’s off-fucking-duty.”
Allen rolled her eyes and turned away from him, walking across the room to the small galley kitchen where she kept the phone and the Chinese menu. “That’s not how it works, Denny. We’ve done this before.”
She heard a snort. “You’re damned right we’ve done this before. How many times is this? You care about these fucking cases more than you care about us.”
More than you care about me, you mean, she thought. “I’m not gonna be much fun to be around tonight, Denny,” she said, scanning the menu. She read through the options every time, although she always wound up ordering the same thing. “Why don’t I call you tomorrow? We’ll do whatever it was you wanted to do tonight.”
“Whatever . . .” Denny stopped and stared at her for a second. Then he made up his mind, turning and walking to the door. “You know what? I don’t need this shit. See you around, Jessica.”
He slammed the door to the living room, and Allen quickly called out his name.
The door opened again and his face appeared, scowling petulantly. “What?”
“The spare key?”
Denny shook his head once again, dug a hand into his pants pocket, and pulled the key out, throwing it at the coffee table. He slammed the door again, and a moment later there was a louder slam as the entrance door got the same treatment.
Allen’s eyes stayed on the door for a moment and then dropped to the phone in her hand as she considered her next move. It didn’t take her long to decide: spicy beef chow mein first and then Michael Sanding.
19
Fort Lauderdale
The name was Dean Crozier.
I’d worked alongside him. I’d seen bodies like the ones described in LA once before, and I’d heard about others. The clincher was the archived news story from the nineties: a husband, wife, and their seventeen-year-old daughter found butchered in their beds in their Santa Monica home. There was only one survivor: the sixteen-year-old son, who had apparently been across town at the time of the murder. The authorities had been very interested in him but had never been able to prove anything. The family’s name was Crozier.
The rumors had always been passed around the team in quiet voices: that Crozier had killed his family. None of the others seemed to take it particularly seriously, and I’d been inclined to agree at the time. I thought it was probably bullshit, that Crozier himself was most likely the source of the rumors and was simply burnishing his mad dog credentials. Or maybe I just wanted it to be bullshit, because otherwise I’d have to look a little more closely at what exactly I was doing in an outfit that saw fit to employ a man like Dean Crozier.
I’d traveled light on the way down to Florida, but the urgency of my trip to the West Coast meant I’d have to travel lighter still. Taking a gun was out of the question. Even if I could somehow get it through post–9/11 airport security at both ends of the trip, it would be a liability when I reached LA. Unsurprisingly, given its long history of gang violence, Los Angeles was one of the stricter cities in America when it came to owning, and particularly carrying, a handgun. If you were a resident with a spotless record, you might conceivably manage to swing a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but if not, forget about it. Instead, I packed my small case with a change of clothes, my laptop, and a couple of cell phones: my usual one plus a cheap prepay I carried in case I needed a burner.
As I’d expected, it was too late in the day to get a direct flight from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles. Instead, I had to settle for a trip via Fort Worth, Texas, scheduled to get into LAX around midnight local time.
I spent the first leg of the trip trying to recall the details of my every encounter with Crozier. It didn’t take that long, because there wasn’t much to recall: there hadn’t been many times we’d been together one-on-one. I hadn’t much liked the guy, even early on, and I’d gotten the idea the feeling was more than mutual. That wasn’t to say he’d been close to any of the other guys, either. In a company of loners, Crozier seemed to work hard at being the outcast.
Winterlong was not the official name for the operation. It was just one of a series of code names for an operation established in the late 1980s, when the cold war was coming to an end and smaller, more personal warfare was becoming the in thing. It was paid for out of a Pentagon slush fund and given a decoy official title so dull and administrative-sounding that you forgot it as soon as your eyes passed over it in a budget report. The code names were supposed to be refreshed once every eighteen months. They cycled through a few—Royal Blue, Silverlake, Olympia—before deciding that what they’d created was better off not having a name. It was too late, though, because Winterlong had stuck.
Mutual dislike aside, Crozier and I were separated within the team by our respective specialties. It was a small, elite unit, at any one time involving eighteen to twenty operators. Drakakis was the CO, and Grant was his second in command. Below that, the personnel was mostly distributed among three separate but complementary sections: the Signals Intelligence, or SigInt, guys worked communications, covert surveillance devices, hacking and tracking cell phones, breaking into secure web servers and databases. Human Intelligence, or HumInt, covered the people side of the equation: identifying and approaching potential assets and then handling them. SigInt and HumInt tended to lay the groundwork for the third group when it was needed: the shooters. Crozier was in this final group, the team that executed, often literally, the operations that came about through the intelligence gathering and planning of the other two sections. Winterlong ranged far and wide, not tied to any one region or officially designated conflict zone. Usually, we kept to our own activities, deploying and carrying out our operations without the need for cooperating with the CIA or the more visible special operations teams. The advantage was we could go into an area without any underlying intelligence infrastructure and quickly create our own. Occasionally, the Joint Special Operations Command would bring us in on an operation that was already in the planning stages but had been deemed by the brass to be unsuitable for the involvement of the Navy SEALs or Delta, and officially canceled. Too tough for the teams, was how they generally sold it to us. Closer to the truth would be that we were brought in for only two types of assignments: those that required the uniquely wide cross section of skill sets within an extremely compact team and those that required deniability beyond the standard requirements of black ops. The deniability was absolute: when a member of the unit was killed in action, nobody was ever told, not even their families. The dead of Winterlong just disappeared, as though they’d never existed. Perhaps that was why so few of the operators, myself included, had families. We never heard what happened to the badly injured, although I had my suspicions. The upside? The money was great and there was a lot of downtime between assignments.
If you weren’t a member of Winterlong, you didn’t know about Winterlong. Men trained for years and qualified for some of the most elite fighting teams in the world without ever hearing the name. At the very top of those units, you started to hear whispered rumors of a secret team that was beyond secret. When you were approached to join the unit, it was only after they’d confirmed two things: that you were the best of the best and that you’d accept the assignment.
I didn’t fit neatly into any of the three sections. I’d come in on HumInt, my specialty in locating hard-to-find targets, but had quickly developed my skills in the other two sections with Drakakis’s approval. There was one other man in the same position, and Drakakis called us his swingmen: we could handle the human and tech work with the best of them, but could also pick up a weapon and operate downstream when called to.
Because of this, I tended not to tag along on the bulk of the shooter operations, except where the job called for it. It was on those sporadic occasions that I came into Crozier’s orbit. I guessed I’d been alone with him on no more than two occasions, been involved with him on maybe
half a dozen operations. The last of those ops was the catalyst that had started me thinking about leaving.
I changed planes at Fort Worth just after eleven p.m. Pacific: a quick layover, and thankfully both planes were on time. I had no checked baggage to transfer, and my photographic ID caused no problems. The onward flight to Los Angeles was a short one. I spent it looking out of the window, down on the dark patches of landscape and the pincushions of light. I thought about how the LAPD had so much more on its hands than a simple serial killer. I thought about the last time I saw Crozier and then about my own final deployment in Karachi. Mostly, I thought about Crozier’s dead-eyed stare and the whispered rumors, and I wondered why the past wouldn’t leave me alone.
20
The sun had long since set and the light that intruded through the blinds was the dirty sodium yellow of streetlights, but he felt no need to switch on the lamp.
He had left the house for a couple of hours earlier on, but now he was back and watching the live news broadcasts with an interest that almost made him feel ashamed. This had not been part of the plan, not yet. And yet he’d known deep down that it was an inevitability sooner or later.
He actually liked the name they’d conjured up for him this time. He’d had other names in other places: names like the Woodsman, the Attendant. It was nothing to be proud of, not really. It only meant he’d been noticed in those places, that he hadn’t been careful enough. Most times, he’d completed his task quietly and moved on without a ripple, leaving only questions in his wake. An unexplained disappearance, a random isolated act of violence.
Feeling as though he’d gorged himself on something that was not good for him, he switched the television off and walked across the narrow hall to the other room. He lay down on top of the sheets and knitted his fingers together behind his head. He stared at the ceiling as he thought about the first time. Ninety-six. Three of them had hiked up there, into the mountains, but only two had come back.
The howl of a police siren approaching snapped him out of his thoughts and back to the present. He got off the bed and went to the window, standing at the gap in the blinds until he saw the cruiser flash by without slowing, on its way to some nameless emergency. After the lights disappeared and the noise of the siren faded, he stood there watching the empty street for a minute, wondering about how effective the police would be here in Los Angeles. There was no real danger of them finding him before it was time to move on again, but perhaps it would be prudent to change his approach a little.
The Samaritan lay back down on the bed and knitted his fingers behind his head once again. He wondered how long it would take them to find out about the others.
1996
They’d left the Buick parked at a wide spot in the road just before they reached the track. He let Kimberley take the lead, with himself in the middle and Robbie bringing up the rear. Eighty-plus degrees, but the heat didn’t bother him. It didn’t seem to bother Kimberley, either. Robbie, however, was flagging.
“Screw this,” Robbie declared a half hour into the trek. “We’re never going to find it. Hey, man, give me the water again.”
He hadn’t liked Robbie to begin with. He was liking him less and less as the day progressed.
But he shrugged his backpack off anyway, reached into it, and handed Robbie his bottle of water. They had one pack between them, and he’d volunteered to carry it. He supposed Robbie would assume he was doing that to impress Kimberley, and maybe even Kimberley thought that, too. But the truth was he liked to push himself. The hike wasn’t enough. The heat wasn’t enough. It was always good to push further. Besides, there was another, more practical reason to be the one to carry the pack.
Kimberley stopped and turned around, looking at Robbie with disdain. She was holding a thick branch, using it as a makeshift hiking stick, though in truth it was too short and too thick to be of much real use. “It’s up here. I’m telling you.” Then she looked straight at him. “How about you? You’re not gonna quit on me now, are you?”
He shook his head. “Let’s keep going.”
Kimberley flashed a wide grin at him, and her chocolate-brown eyes danced. “Didn’t I tell you we’d have fun together?”
He nodded slowly and then looked back to Robbie. Robbie was taking another deep slug from his water bottle. Asshole. There would be none left for the return trip at that rate.
By the time Robbie handed the bottle back to him, Kimberley had set off again. She was already twenty yards ahead of them, swinging her branch as she walked. He stowed the bottle in the pack, slung it back over his shoulders, and started walking again. Had he made up his mind to go through with it at that point, as he watched Kimberley stride ahead, masking her own obvious fatigue? He supposed he had. He had already decided this was a day for pushing boundaries.
21
After ordering food, Allen called Mike Sanding back. He’d left the office already, but she managed to talk the desk into giving her his cell number.
“I talked to the ME,” he said as soon as he answered the phone. “We pulled the files of those two unsolveds we talked about. He actually performed the autopsy on the snitch. We looked at the transcripts, photographs of the wounds. In his opinion, they could have been made by the same weapon in both cases.”
“Profile on the weapon?”
“Short knife or dagger, maybe six inches long. A curved, jagged pattern on both sides of the blade.”
Allen considered this. “Sounds like what they said here—maybe some kind of ceremonial dagger.”
“Yeah, I saw the news—they’re saying some kind of black magic shit?”
“Don’t remind me. Can I ask a favor?”
“You want to send me the pics of the wounds in LA, see if our guy thinks they’re a match, too? No problem, Jess. I already said I might have more to show him.”
“That’s not the favor. I want you to do what you just said, yes, but I don’t want anyone to know about it.”
Sanding paused, and she heard him suck air through his teeth. “He’s gonna ask.”
“I know, Mike. Make something up. Tell him you’re working another case and it’s need-to-know.” The suggestion came out sounding as lame as it was. If the coroner had been paying attention to the news, he would put two and two together.
Sanding thought about it for another couple of seconds and agreed. Hanging up, she knew he had a pretty good idea of what she was worried about. From the hesitation, she had the idea he didn’t entirely approve, but he’d go along with it just the same. Mike was a good man, and he’d been as good as his word on her last day with the department—Anything you need, give me a call. He’d given her everything he could on this, but she would be on her own for the next part, because there was no one else back in Washington whom she trusted enough to ask the same questions.
The Chinese food arrived at her door fifteen minutes later, and she ate it in front of her computer with a Coke from the refrigerator. She ignored the beers that were in there, still feeling the residual effects from the previous night.
If she was right about the link between the bodies in the hills and the two victims she’d discussed with Sanding, it was likely there would be more Washington, DC victims, probably among the pile of unsolved murders for that year. In the absence of a direct contact from one of those investigations, what she really needed was access to the national crime database. But that would mean leaving an audit trail on the system, and she didn’t want to do that if she didn’t have to.
Instead, she navigated to the website of the MPDC, realizing the irony of the fact that this was her first visit, despite being a former serving officer with Metro PD. The website hosted a section listing unsolved homicides going back as far as the early fifties. By making the information available to the public and offering rewards, they left the door open for the occasional thousand-to-one chance that someone would come forward with useful information on a cold case.
The older cases were grouped by decade, but each year sin
ce the millennium had its own page. She scrolled down a long list of around sixty victims: the year she was interested in had its share of people getting away with murder in the nation’s capital.
The list had a name, and usually a photograph, for each victim, along with date and location of death. Each entry could be clicked on for more information about the crime. As Allen scanned the list, she couldn’t help but notice how many of the faces were black. Sure, the inner city was more than 60 percent African American, but this roll call of the dead and yet to be avenged was more like 90 percent. She reminded herself that she wasn’t carrying out a sociological exercise here and started narrowing her search to the months between August and December. The cases were arranged alphabetically by victim name, and there was no way of sorting, so she had to resort to a pen and paper.
Keeping it to this date range narrowed the search down to a dozen names. She spent time clicking into each one for more information. In most cases, there wasn’t too much more detail. Information about the date and time the crime was committed, or the body discovered, along with very basic details of the cause of death. Each record contained a link to a PDF flyer containing the same information and promising a reward of up to twenty-five thousand dollars for information leading to a conviction. The reward flyer also included cell and desk numbers for the investigating detectives, as well as the direct number for their homicide branch.
Twenty-five fairly depressing minutes later, Allen had narrowed the list down to five candidates by eliminating the victims whose cause of death was something other than bladed trauma: mostly gunshot wounds, hit-and-run deaths, even one poisoning. She’d eliminated one of those five—Michael Antonio—because he’d been found alive with stab wounds and had died in the hospital three days later. She was interested only in the victims who’d been killed outright. The Samaritan didn’t make mistakes when he decided to kill.