by Cross, Mason
Allen took a break, made herself a pot of coffee, and then sat down with her four names: Randy Solomon, September twelfth, found at 2:31 a.m. with stab wounds in the 700 block of Delafield Place. James Willis Hendrick, September thirtieth, found with head trauma—nonspecific—in Lamont Park. Audra Baker, October fifth, stab wounds, inside the Fourth Street deli where she worked. Bennett Davis, October seventeenth, stab wounds, the 1200 block of Sixth Street.
The individual summaries on the website hadn’t provided much more than the bare bones of information. She knew from experience that there could be a world of difference between two murders recorded under the same cause of death: head trauma, for example, covered everything from an accidental concussion that resulted in death all the way up to decapitation. She went back over the four names, typing each into Google in order to cross-reference the dry, factual information on the unsolved site with the reliably lurid accounts in the press or the crime blogs.
It didn’t take her long to eliminate two more names. Randy Solomon had been stabbed in the chest following an altercation in a bar, and although there had been witnesses to the killing, the suspect was never found. Bennett Davis had been found facedown in an alley with his wallet missing. There had been only one stab wound—unluckily for Davis, to the femoral artery. He’d bled out in the alley following what looked like a cut-and-dried mugging-turned-homicide. In both cases, the victims had been killed quickly—perhaps even unintentionally—and left where they fell. A different brand of murder entirely from the victims in LA, or the ones she’d discussed with Sanding.
That left James Hendrick, the park victim, and Audra Baker, the deli worker. Other than geography and the manner of their untimely deaths, the two didn’t seem to have much in common: Hendrick was a white male office manager in his late forties, Baker a seventeen-year-old black female with a minimum-wage job. But once you got beyond age and race, the similarities soon began to mount up. Even before you took anything else into consideration, the two cases had one important thing in common: the bodies were found in secluded, quiet locations. Locations that were ideal for dumping the bodies of victims who had been killed elsewhere. Or alternatively, they allowed a killer time to work on his victim.
That common thread made these two victims the best candidates from the original list of sixty. The additional details Allen had found in the news reports practically sealed the deal. Both were discovered in the morning, having been dead for hours. Both showed evidence of torture; both had had their throats cut. The reports didn’t specify a ragged wound pattern, but that was exactly the type of detail that would not be released to the media. It was why she was so pissed about the leak here in LA. It was sound practice: withholding the fine detail so that it could be used to weed out the cranks and to validate confessions. But having spent the best part of a couple of hours tracking down this pair of needles in a haystack, Allen saw it for the first time as a potential disadvantage. The number of homicides annually in Washington had been steadily falling from a peak of nearly four hundred a year in the early nineties, but the numbers were still considerable, and the resources to investigate them finite. With different personnel on separate cases, it was easy for patterns to be missed, particularly when the victim profile was so divergent. And knife murders weren’t like gunshot murders—there were no ballistics to precisely match any two killings to a single weapon. The best you could do was to say that two people had been killed by the same type of bladed weapon, unless you had the knife itself.
She went back to the Metro PD unsolved website and checked the reward flyers for her two victims. As she’d anticipated, they’d been investigated by different teams in different homicide branches. Finally, she used her personal email account to send links to the Hendrick and Baker cases over to Mike Sanding with a brief explanation of what she wanted. With some smooth talking, he’d probably be able to access the autopsy reports on both victims and run them by the coroner, who would by now have no illusions that he was being asked to judge whether they were looking at the work of a serial killer. That was okay, though, as long as he assumed this was a dormant killer who’d operated in DC two years before and didn’t tie it to the case out here in LA.
After hitting send on the email to Sanding, Allen looked at the clock at the bottom right-hand corner of her screen for the first time and was surprised to see she’d been working for more than four hours. She sat back and massaged her eyeballs. It wasn’t just a theory anymore. She had three victims of the same killer out here in LA. She’d now identified four similar killings back in Washington, all falling within a period of four weeks in late 2012. She couldn’t be 100 percent sure it was the work of the same man, but all of the instincts she’d honed over the past twelve years as a cop told her it was. And she was betting when Sanding’s coroner compared the idiosyncratic wound patterns from 2012 with those from LA, they’d have a match.
What the hell did she have here?
Leave aside the tiny remaining element of doubt for a moment. Say the four murders in DC and the three in LA were definitely committed by the same man, what did that say? For a start, it said that this killer was unusual in a number of ways. Serial killers tended to keep to one patch: a familiar city or location. Occasionally, they roamed farther, killing along the route of a particular highway or train track. But this would be something rarer: a killer who struck quickly and lethally in one city and then disappeared, only to turn up in a different city, on the other side of the country and after a gap of more than two years.
It was easy to see how the similarities would likely have been missed had it not been for the coincidence of Allen happening to work two of those apparently unrelated homicides. It was evidence of a smart, calculating murderer. Choosing a range of victim types, varying the exact cause of death and method of disposal, and yet unable to resist using his signature weapon on each one. If it was the same guy, he’d adopted a different approach for the murders in Los Angeles: relying on concealment of the bodies to allow him to carry out his work. And had it not been for the landslide that revealed them, she would not be sitting here now, having made these connections.
She wondered about the two-and-a-half-year gap. Again, from experience, it was rare—although not unheard of—that a killer would be able to stop himself from killing for so long a period once he’d gotten started. Serial killers tended to work themselves into a frenzy, allowing a smaller window of time between each victim until they were caught or stopped in some other way. The easiest explanation was that he’d been in jail. That he’d been arrested on some other, lesser charge and been safely locked away for the past thirty months. That theory could definitely provide a viable lead, if they could come up with recently released convicts fitting the profile.
But it didn’t explain why the killer had moved to LA.
As Allen thought it over, a new, more worrying thought occurred to her. Four killings in Washington, DC, followed by a gap of two and a half years, and then three more killings in Los Angeles—that was the theory she’d been working on. But what if that was wrong? What if it hadn’t been four killings in one city and then three in a second city? What if there had been more killings, more cities?
What if there hadn’t been a gap?
22
After landing at LAX, I passed through security and stopped to withdraw some cash. Again, force of habit. If anyone had the interest or wherewithal to monitor activity on the bank account I’d used, it wouldn’t lead anywhere too specific, just to an ATM at the sixth busiest airport in the world. I didn’t use credit cards when it could be avoided, so I always made sure I had enough paper money with me to last me for a day or two.
The bodies had been discovered off a fire road near Mandeville Canyon, close to San Vicente Mountain. That meant Encino or Sherman Oaks would be the closest parts of town in which to base myself. I happened to know a suitable hotel in Sherman Oaks from my sole previous visit to the City of Angels.
The taxi driver was a tall man of Indian d
escent. He didn’t talk much after taking my destination, and I was just fine with that. The cabdrivers I’d encountered on my first trip to LA had all made a point of complaining at length about the traffic, as though it were somehow a unique feature of the city. In its own way, I supposed it was, if only in its indelible effect on the day-to-day life of everyone who lived here or visited. The freeway wasn’t quiet, not even at this time of night, but the trip from the airport took only half an hour or so on the 405. The lack of chitchat allowed me to think some more, to decide on the initial moves I had to make in the morning.
One of my quickest conclusions was that Crozier had not suddenly made the decision to start killing people after a well-earned break. He’d left our common employer a little while before I had made my own exit, which made it just over five years ago. As was the norm, there had been no warning and no notice period. People didn’t just leave Winterlong. In my time in the unit, I saw a few depart—either becoming too old or too burnt out. Those people didn’t exactly leave. They were just retired from active service. And then, of course, there were those who were killed in action. But Crozier hadn’t been phased out and he hadn’t been killed in action. He’d just disappeared. Inasmuch as I’d thought about it, I’d suspected Drakakis had finally come to the conclusion that Crozier was too crazy in a way that could no longer be safely harnessed. He’d either been rotated out and into some other team . . . or he’d been dealt with permanently. Unfortunately, I now had a pretty good idea that the second possibility hadn’t happened.
So I had a five-year gap where I couldn’t account for Crozier’s movements, ending with yesterday’s discovery of the recently buried bodies of three murder victims that looked very likely to be his work. There was no way he’d been sitting around for the past five years playing World of Warcraft, so that meant I had to assume there were more bodies buried out there in LA . . . or somewhere else.
We arrived at the hotel, a four-story art-deco place just off Ventura Boulevard.
“You sure you wanna stay here?” the cabbie had asked. “It’s old. I can take you to a nicer place a block away.”
“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head and handing over cash for the ride. I liked the place, even if it was old. I always prefer old hotels, and not just for aesthetic reasons. There are always fewer security cameras. Fewer ways to leave a trace. Force of habit or superstition again. I checked in as Gil Kane of San Francisco and took the key for my room on the second floor. The hotel might have been old, but it had dipped enough of a toe into the twenty-first century to provide WiFi in its rooms. I wanted to get some sleep before morning, to make sure I was rested up for hitting a few locations I wanted to check, but first I wanted to see if I could find evidence of Crozier’s work before yesterday’s exhumation.
I opened my laptop and went to the LAPD’s website. For a city of Los Angeles’s size and reputation, there were relatively few unsolved murders over the preceding five years that I wasn’t able to eliminate right away. A lot of gang shootings, a lot of cases where the motive was clear, even if no suspect had been tracked down. That worried me. It meant Crozier had been careful—either by concealing his victims, or by operating somewhere else entirely. If it was the former, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I could check the numerous resources for missing persons in the Los Angeles area, but without a confirmed cause of death, I was nowhere.
I didn’t even think it would be possible to narrow down possible victim types, because I didn’t really believe that Crozier had a victim type. I guess he was already technically a serial killer by the time he left Winterlong, albeit in a professional capacity. But if he’d continued that profession on his own time, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be a particularly discriminating killer. It was a rare personality type, but one I knew well: the kind of person who just enjoys the experience of killing. The thrill of taking a life. Therefore, opportunity would be more important than the appearance or age or gender of the victim.
For the moment, I was stalled. Except for one possibility . . . I already knew that Crozier was a native Angeleno, almost a rare breed in a city of transplants. The news story about the murdered family sharing his name I’d seen last night had confirmed that. But I remembered one other thing he’d mentioned, on one of the two occasions I’d had something approximating a conversation with him.
In any unit that was frequently deployed overseas, in inhospitable locations, it was common for the men to talk about the things they missed and the things they were looking forward to doing when they got home. Favorite girls or bars they wanted to visit when they got back, things like that. Crozier, as in all things, was a little different. Crozier talked about a guy he wanted to kill.
The individual in question was a sergeant who taught at the Q Course at Fort Bragg when Crozier was trying out for the Green Berets, a few years before our paths crossed for the first time. Crozier held the sergeant responsible for a training accident that resulted in Crozier breaking his arm.
I couldn’t remember the name of the sergeant, or if Crozier had even told me it, but I had a location and a rough time frame. I could look for murders or fatal accidents involving army personnel occurring in the vicinity of Fort Bragg within the last five years. I just had to hope that if Crozier had acted on his impulse for revenge, he had done it within the North Carolina state boundary.
It took me less than five minutes to find what I was looking for. It wasn’t an unsolved murder. Actually, it wasn’t a confirmed murder of any kind, as far as anybody knew. I sat back and looked at the square-jawed face staring back at me from the screen: a service photograph above a news story. Sergeant Willis Peterson, a decorated veteran of Vietnam and one of the best-regarded instructors on the Special Forces program. He’d disappeared en route to work sometime after eight a.m. on Tuesday November 10, 2010, and neither he nor his car had ever been seen again. I found another mention of his name in 2013, when investigators had linked him to a decomposed body found in the woods along his route, but DNA testing had ruled out the match. Suicides were hardly rare among military personnel adjusting to civilian life, or the quasi-civilian life of an instructor, and I got the feeling that all concerned with investigating the disappearance had quietly chalked Peterson’s disappearance up to a case of undiagnosed PTSD.
I had another theory, and what’s more, I didn’t think the second body they’d found nearby was unrelated at all.
In another minute, I had the phone number of Cole Harding, the detective who’d been investigating the body in the woods. The number put me through to his voicemail. I found the number for his squad, dialed it, and found out that he’d be back on shift in the morning. They asked if I wanted to leave a message, and I declined, saying I’d speak to him later on.
It was three in the morning now, local time. Six a.m. by my body clock. I felt frustrated by the little progress I’d made so far. Crozier was out there, maybe getting ready to kill someone else tonight, and I was no further forward.
I decided there was nothing I could do about that for now. The best I could do was to get some rest and recharge my batteries. It looked like I had a start point and an end point for Crozier’s movements since 2010. I could build on that tomorrow. I had a phone call to make and a couple of places to visit in the morning. I set the alarm on my phone for seven. Then I lay down on top of the sheets in a hotel room that was three thousand miles away from the one in which I’d expected to spend the night and closed my eyes.
MONDAY
23
I called again just after seven, using the burner I’d brought with me, and got Detective Harding this time. I told him I’d known Sergeant Peterson from training under him at Fort Bragg. That I’d looked him up on a whim and been shocked to find out he’d disappeared. Harding asked me a couple of innocent-sounding questions to see if he could catch me out, but I dealt with them easily enough. He knew full well he was operating at an information deficit: with all the men that passed through Bragg over the course of a decade, the
re was no way for a lowly cop to know for sure if I was who I said I was. Besides, I got the feeling he was curious about why someone was calling him out of the blue about a case that was so cold it could give you freezer burn.
“Peterson had a lot of friends, a nice stable family,” he said. “Although I guess you would know that.”
“You don’t think it was a suicide, then?” I asked, avoiding committing to any more than I needed to.
“Well, I would never rule it out, Mr. Blake. You know how it is. A person can seem to be hunky-dory, and then one day they jump in front of an express train. You never can tell. Especially with you military types. No offense.”
“None taken. I guess you must have a lot of cases tied to the base, right?”
“We get our share. Nothing quite like Peterson, though.”
“How so?”
Harding paused, and I could sense him hesitating. I waited him out. Eventually, he sighed. “You’ll appreciate I can’t go into the specifics of the investigation, particularly for someone who’s not a family member.”
“Of course.”
“But I’ve been in this job for going on thirty years. Homicide doesn’t just mean homicide; it means any suspicious or unattended deaths, and disappearances that could be deaths, too. You start to get a feel for things. For certain patterns.”
He paused, and I said nothing, relying on his frustration with the problem to keep him talking.
“A lot of people around here decided that Sergeant Peterson drove into the woods and ate a bullet. Maybe even his family decided that was the explanation. But I never believed it. Not for a second.”