by Cross, Mason
“You sound pretty sure.”
“I am sure. Oh, I guess I could rationalize it, talk about how he had a vacation booked and paid for, about how his daughter was expecting his first grandchild, about how he never left a note or gave any indication of wanting to put his affairs in order. But it’s more intangible than those things.”
“You had a feel for it.”
“That’s right.”
I paused, considering whether to risk the next question. I decided to go all in. I had all the hard facts I could expect to get. If I could get Harding to betray his suspicions, it would be a shortcut to confirmation of my theory.
“You really thought the body you found in those woods a couple of years back was Peterson, didn’t you?”
He didn’t speak for a moment, and when he did, his voice sounded guarded. Like I’d lulled him into candor over the last couple of minutes, but now the shields were back up. “Did you see that when you were looking him up? I guess you would have.”
“I saw it in the news reports, that’s right. But it only said the DNA didn’t match. It didn’t say if that other body was a suicide.”
Silence on the end of the line. I could still hear the office chatter in the background, which was the only reason I knew he hadn’t hung up.
“You think there are others out there, too, don’t you, Detective Harding?”
Harding’s voice was quiet when he finally spoke. “When did you say you were at Fort Bragg again, Mr. Blake? I think maybe we need to meet in person.”
“Thanks for your help, Detective,” I said, and ended the call. I switched the phone off and removed the battery. I could dump it in the trash later on.
I closed my eyes and pictured a map of the country. North Carolina was almost as far from California as Florida was. It sounded as though Crozier had killed more people than just Willis Peterson there, and he’d had a lot of time and a lot of space to kill many more since then. A man who did not technically exist would have utter freedom to act on his homicidal impulses, as long as he was careful and could rely on a certain amount of luck. Crozier had been careful, all right, but his luck had run out yesterday morning.
Now it was time to curtail his freedom.
24
I dressed quickly, in the dark suit I’d brought with me and a fresh shirt. I left the usual telltales in the hotel room, locked up, went downstairs, and left through the main door. I walked to Ventura Boulevard. I turned right and walked until I reached the second-closest car rental place to the hotel.
I didn’t spend too long making my decision, choosing a dark blue 2013 Chevrolet Malibu because it wouldn’t be too remarkable. I gave the car a quick look over before signing the paperwork. As I’d expected, there were no stickers or plate modifications that identified this as a rental—a legacy of the rash of tourist carjackings that had plagued the city in the nineties. The rental clerk barely glanced at my driver’s license, as was usual. It was one of the places that leaves about a quarter of a gallon of gas in the tank, rather than providing a full tank up front. I’d noticed the latter type was almost an extinct breed: a sign of the times.
I was still formulating a plan of action. Crozier would be very difficult to find, even for me. He could be borderline impossible to find, in fact, without either some help or another breakthrough of some kind. Quite apart from his background, he had expert local knowledge of Los Angeles. The murder of his parents and sister—still officially open and unsolved—had taken place in ninety-seven, when Crozier would have been sixteen or seventeen. That meant he had sixteen or seventeen more years of experience of this town than I did, plus however long he’d spent here recently. The first order of business, then, was to start orienting myself, and this was one town in which the only way to do that was by car. The logical place to start was the one place I knew my quarry had been within the last forty-eight hours: the body dump site in the hills.
I filled the tank at the gas station next door to the rental place and scanned the front pages of the newspapers. The LA Times carried social media–culled pictures of the three victims discovered in the mountains. The similarity in the three faces was striking and caused me to reconsider my earlier thoughts about Crozier being indiscriminate. He may have been to begin with, but these latest killings suggested he’d developed a type: young, white females with dark hair. I wondered why that was and if it would be unique to LA.
I paid for the gas and a copy of the Times and then drove back toward the 405. At first I chalked the morning mayhem up to rush hour before reminding myself that there was no such thing in LA, a town where no one was able to rush at any hour. Eventually, I saw the exit for Sunset and took it, following the route until I reached Mandeville Canyon Road. As I’d hoped, the traffic thinned. Freed from having to focus on moderating gas and brake so that I didn’t ram a vehicle in front, or let one behind hit me, my thoughts returned to Crozier.
My conversation with Detective Harding had confirmed my suspicions. The veteran investigator had probably started out investigating the disappearance of Sergeant Peterson open to the possibility it was a simple suicide, or even desertion. But he’d quickly intuited that the sergeant had not disappeared by choice, even if he couldn’t prove it. In the absence of evidence of an accident, that left two probabilities: kidnap or murder. The lack of a ransom demand, or any other communication, narrowed that down to one probability.
That was why, when a decomposed corpse of similar characteristics and vintage had been discovered in the woods around Fort Bragg, Harding’s instinct had been that the body was his missing person. It wasn’t, though. It was some other missing person, perhaps yet to be identified, who’d disappeared around the same time and in the same area as Peterson. I knew how the thought process would work for a veteran cop: the non-match against Peterson’s DNA didn’t make it any less likely that Peterson himself had been murdered. On the contrary, the fact of another dead body in the same neck of the woods made that conclusion even more likely. Harding would have assumed, as did I, that Peterson’s body was out there somewhere, and that if there were two bodies, there might well be three, or more. It wasn’t about evidence; it was about experience and balance of probability. Patterns, as Harding had admitted to me on the phone.
In the same way, I knew the killer hadn’t confined himself to these killings. There would be more out there, waiting to be connected. Maybe a lot more.
The road forked ahead. I’d checked it out on the map beforehand and knew that a right turn would take me on the higher road. I bore right and climbed for about a mile. I’d worked out the approximate location of the dump site by cross-referencing the media coverage, but I realized I’d been wasting my time when I saw the news helicopter hanging in the sky about a mile ahead, like a giant floating signpost. Soon enough, I approached the scene I’d expected. Cars parked on the shoulder. A crowd of people standing at the thin steel crash barrier and looking down the hill. I parked at the end of the line of vehicles and got out. I’d been wearing sunglasses while driving and started to remove them because this side of the hill was in shadow. Then I took a closer look at the crowd at the crash barrier and decided to leave them on.
I looked over the barrier and down the hill and saw the body dump scene. It was easy to identify the three locations where bodies had been found from the concentration of activity around them: uniformed cops and crime scene techs were hovering over each spot. At the bottom of the hill was the road I’d have passed if I’d taken the left turn, only I wouldn’t have made it that far because it was blocked. There were two dark-colored vans, a couple of police cruisers, and an unmarked Ford Taurus parked across the road. Dotting the hillside were scars of earth where the ground had been dug up. I could tell the cops were winding down: in comparison to the manpower evident in the helicopter pictures on the news last night, they’d cut it back to a skeleton crew, and there seemed to be no new digging sites at all. One of the cops looked up, staring at the crowd of people thirty yards to my left before turni
ng his head to me. He shook his head and looked down again. I examined the crowd: it was mainly comprised of men in their thirties and forties, most of them wielding cameras. Paparazzi. Again, far from a unique feature to Los Angeles, but one that the city seemed to do singularly well. A couple of them threw casual glances in my direction, but none of them made a move to take my picture. I was pleased, not to mention unsurprised that I didn’t warrant a photograph.
I looked back down the hill, taking in all the details that I couldn’t get from the text or still pictures or video I’d seen. There’s no substitute for visiting the scene of a crime. I could see immediately why Crozier had chosen the spot. It was easily accessible from two separate roads, but not exactly the kind of spot anyone would have any reason to stop and take a look around. The two back roads isolated it from any of the tracks that hikers used in the hills, so there was virtually no likelihood of anybody happening to cover that ground on foot. A dumping ground off of one of the footpaths might offer more seclusion, but it would also be more easily discovered, particularly by dogs. In contrast, there was the risk that a driver might see something while you were digging a shallow grave on the hillside, but again, that was less of a risk at night, particularly if you wore dark clothing and lay down when you heard a car coming.
The nearest of the graves was about fifty feet down from the barrier. The farthest one equidistant between the two roads. It looked like the killer had brought the bodies down from up here, rather than up from down there. Logical—it meant gravity worked with you.
“Getting a good view?”
The sharp voice came from behind me. I turned to see a balding man in his early fifties. He wore jeans and a plaid work shirt. The lack of either a camera or a baseball cap told me he wasn’t one of the paparazzi. His casual dress said he probably wasn’t one of the cops. I was less certain about the second conclusion. He projected a vibe that said he was used to some kind of authority. I guessed he might be recently retired from the kind of job that would give him that bearing. The thing about him that told me the most, however, wasn’t the way he was dressed. It was the look on his face. Angry, but the anger was covering something else.
I nodded down the hill at the police activity, then glanced at the paparazzi before I answered. “Good morning,” I said. “Just seeing what all the fuss is about.”
The man shook his head. “You’re a little late. They already took all the bodies away.”
The way he said bodies sealed it: grieving family member, understandably pissed at people like me and the gentlemen just along the road. People apparently intruding on his grief to make a quick buck or get a vicarious kick. He was fixing me with a full-beam glare. I met it and said nothing for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry. Did you know one of the victims?”
He didn’t answer right away. Seemed to size me up. I knew he was doing the same thing I’d done: taking in the way I was dressed, the way I carried myself. I’ve been mistaken for a cop myself before. It doesn’t always hurt. Eventually, he nodded, coming to the conclusion that I might be worthy of closer investigation. “That’s right. My kid, Kelly. They told her friend’s dad before me; you believe that? My only kid.” He looked down at the grave excavation site, and then his head snapped back up to look at me. “Who are you, anyway? You’re not one of those vultures, and you’re not a cop either.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I was on the force for thirty years, retired last year.”
“LAPD?”
“San Diego. You didn’t answer my question.”
I stuck my hand out. “Carter Blake.”
“Dick Boden,” he said, taking my hand and shaking it briefly.
“I have a professional interest. My line of work is finding people who don’t necessarily want to be found. It strikes me that this is a person who needs to be found.”
“You don’t look like a bounty hunter either.”
“That’s because I’m not. I’m more of a . . . locating consultant.”
Boden gave it some thought. “An expensive one, I guess. If you’re good.”
“Depends on the job.”
“And who’s paying you to do this job?”
No reason to lie, and in any case, I had the feeling that Boden would know BS when he smelled it. “Nobody,” I answered simply.
Boden raised his eyebrows but didn’t say anything. He looked away from me, down at the holes in the ground below us again, and his hands balled into fists. “The motherfucker dumped her like trash when he was done with her.”
I said nothing. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, and I could see him mentally struggling to get some objective distance, to put the professional part of his brain to work on this most personal of crises. “And what do you think so far, Blake?”
I took my time before responding, because I couldn’t share everything here. I couldn’t talk about the fact I knew the killer’s name.
“I think this guy has killed before—before any of these three, I mean—so we might be able to do something by backtracking, tagging open and unsolved cases to him. I think he’s done it in the past and he’ll do it in the future, so that means he needs to be stopped by any means possible.”
Boden’s eyes flicked up to me at that last remark, but he didn’t comment. The personal fighting back against the professional, maybe.
I continued. “The disposal site indicates planning, preparation, and local knowledge. He’s a practiced, professional operator who knows the hills.”
“Anything else?”
I hesitated. “Yeah. I think he’s taking them on these roads. I think he’s forcing them to stop and then taking them someplace else.”
Although I wasn’t looking directly at the men with the cameras, I sensed that our conversation had started to draw their interest. Boden’s eyes glanced at them, then he looked at me again, coming to a decision. “You have somewhere to be right now, Blake?”
“Nothing I can’t do later.”
“Okay.” He gestured at a silver SUV parked fifty yards down the road. “Follow me back to my place. It’s not far.”
25
Mazzucco was dead tired. A late night and broken sleep didn’t make for the greatest morning feeling.
After dropping Allen at her apartment the previous evening, he’d doubled back and driven back out to Santa Monica. He dropped in on Sloan’s, the bar Sarah Dutton had mentioned, and asked them a couple of follow-up questions. The answers were consistent with those they’d already given him over the phone. One of the bartenders vaguely remembered the group but couldn’t say when they’d left or whether they’d left together. He was pretty sure they were gone by eleven thirty. No, they didn’t have any video. There was a cam over the bar, but that was it. It hadn’t covered the area of the bar where the party had been sitting.
After that, he’d driven a couple of different routes from the bar to Walter Dutton’s place and turned up four separate gas stations in the vicinity that Kelly could have used. He stopped at each and asked a few questions. In three out of the four, he drew a blank immediately. Nobody remembered serving a girl in a silver Porsche between eleven and midnight. Regardless, he asked for, and got, copies of the security tapes, just in case. He could go through them on fast-wind in the morning. It wouldn’t take long, since he knew exactly what he was looking for.
The fourth gas station was inconclusive. The guy who worked Saturday night was on day shift Monday, so they asked him to come back. The boss would be able to email him a digital file containing the security camera footage for the relevant time when he got in. Mazzucco hadn’t been optimistic. He decided he’d give them a call back in the morning but that it probably wasn’t worth a return trip.
After that, he’d driven back home. Julia had been waiting up for him, against his advice when he’d called. They’d had the usual argument.
“Why the hell are you working so late?”
She knew why he was working so late.
�
��Were you with her?”
Her. She never used Allen’s name if she could avoid it. Before he’d partnered up with Jessica Allen, it would never have occurred to Mazzucco to describe his wife as the jealous type. But then all of his partners until now had been male, overweight, and approaching retirement. Nothing like Allen.
It was always like this when he had a particularly late night. Julia kept at him until her anger subsided, and eventually, they went to bed around two. She went to bed, at least. Mazzucco took the couch in the living room. And then Daisy woke up half an hour later and there was a change and a bottle feed and a minor reprise of the argument.
Back on the couch, and sleep had eluded him for at least another hour. He was too mad to sleep. Julia had no cause to be suspicious of his relationship with Allen. Did she? He turned his mind to less complex matters: the day’s triple murder.
He’d managed maybe a half hour of sleep and been woken again by Daisy sometime after five. After that, he’d left her sleeping with Julia and decided to get an early start on the day. Halfway to downtown, his cell had buzzed showing a number he did not recognize. He’d pulled over and taken the call. It was the fourth gas station. The guy from the Saturday-night shift had reported for work, and guess what? He did remember seeing a Porsche and a female driver. Mazzucco told him he’d be there in half an hour.
Twenty-eight minutes later, he was pulling into the gas station. Five minutes after that, he was in the back office with the Saturday-night guy, the manager, and a cup of shitty machine coffee. The manager was cycling through the security footage of the forecourt while Mazzucco talked to the nightshift attendant.
“Just after it started to rain,” Mazzucco repeated.
“That’s right, would have been just after eleven. News on the radio had just finished.”
“And she came into the store?”