The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  “That’s right. She paid for ten bucks’ worth and went back outside to fill up.”

  “Was there anybody with her? Anybody in the car, maybe?”

  He looked unsure. “No one came in with her. I don’t think there was anybody in the Porsche, but . . .”

  “Got it.”

  It was the manager who’d spoken. Mazzucco looked away from the nightshift guy to the small black-and-white screen on the cluttered desk. The screen showed a paused image: a light-colored Porsche Carrera parked by the back pumps. The time stamp said 23:04. Mazzucco flipped back a couple of pages on his notes and compared the license plate to the one on the screen. It was Sarah Dutton’s car, all right.

  He asked the manager to run the tape. They watched Kelly get out and lock the car with the key fob. They watched her come into the office. They watched her go back out again. They watched her fill up, unlock the car, and get back in the driver’s seat. They watched the car drive toward the camera and then turn and exit the frame.

  Just like the nightshift guy said, right there in crisp, silent black-and-white. Except there was one detail that looked off.

  “Run it again,” Mazzucco said.

  The three of them watched the sequence again. Halfway through, Mazzucco worked out what was wrong with the picture.

  26

  It took us twenty minutes to drive to Boden’s place. He lived in a modest bungalow in Reseda. There were a few photographers loitering outside, but not enough to count as a mob. We ignored them and headed for the door. I kept my sunglasses on and my head down, but the focus was on Boden. He ignored a few yelled questions, not giving them so much as a glance. I noticed a tired edge to the questions: they’d get bored of being ignored soon, which meant Boden was handling them in exactly the right way. He opened the door and I followed him inside. He waved a hand at the living room.

  “Get you a coffee or something? I’d offer you a beer, but I guess it’s early.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  The living room, like the rest of the house, was small and neatly kept. Two leather couches, a coffee table, a bookshelf, and a big-screen TV were the only items of furniture. There were framed pictures on top of the bookshelf. Some of them showed a thin, serious-looking woman in her late thirties, others a dark-haired girl I guessed was Kelly at various stages of her life. Boden caught me looking at them and nodded.

  “That’s her.”

  “Your wife’s not around anymore?” I asked.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Kelly’s a kid in all the pictures with her. And all the ones of her by herself look like they were taken on film, not digital.”

  Boden smiled grimly. “You are good, Blake. Mary took off in 2000. Haven’t heard from her in ten years. I suppose you could find her, if you put your mind to it.”

  “Would you want me to?”

  “I guess I wouldn’t. Maybe she’ll get in touch anyway, if she hears about . . .” His voice cracked a little and he recovered. “About Kelly.”

  I sat down on one of the couches and cast my eyes about the room, thinking that I didn’t really have a reason for taking Boden’s father up on his invitation. I was about as satisfied as I could be that Kelly hadn’t been personally targeted by her killer, so it was unlikely I’d learn anything important here. I had a good idea what he was going to ask me, and I knew I’d be turning him down. But then again, you never know exactly what’s going to be important.

  Boden took his eyes from the photographs and turned to me. His eyes were glassy, the skin around them red.

  “So tell me again, what’s your interest in this guy?”

  “I think I can stop him.”

  “You don’t think the police can handle it?”

  I considered the loaded question carefully. “Normally, I think they could.”

  “Normally?”

  “I don’t think this guy is normal. I think he’ll kill again and then move on before the cops get close to him. If he disappears, we might not get another shot at him.”

  Boden’s eyes narrowed and I wondered if I’d given too much away, let on that there was a personal element here. But he didn’t follow through on the suspicion, if he had one. “Maybe he’ll move on anyway, now that they found the bodies.”

  I nodded. “It’s a risk. But I don’t think he’s done yet.”

  “You say that as if it were a good thing,” Boden said, grimacing. “Blake, I have about twenty-two thousand dollars in a savings account.”

  I started shaking my head, and he held a hand up.

  “Now, I know that probably doesn’t sound like a lot to you, and I can’t pay you up front, but if you find this bastard, you can have it all.”

  “No deal.”

  His eyes narrowed again. “Not enough, huh?”

  “That’s not it. This one is free.”

  He didn’t say anything for a minute. “And why would you work for free?”

  “Call it community spirit.”

  “Funny way for a consultant to operate.” Boden glanced at the pictures of his daughter again. “And what you do with him when you find him. Is that free?”

  “I’m not a contract killer.”

  “You’re not a lot of things, aren’t you? Not a cop, not a bounty hunter, not a hit man. I’ll ask again. What happens when you find him?”

  “I guess I’ll know when I find him.”

  27

  “How long do you need?” the skinny twenty-something tech asked as he looked up from his twin monitors.

  Allen considered the question and decided she had no idea. “How long can you give me?”

  The tech sat back in his swivel chair and scratched the facial hair he was attempting to cultivate below his bottom lip. “I have a report I need to finish by three o’clock. I could go around the block for a cup of coffee. That usually takes fifteen minutes.”

  “Could it take twenty?”

  He grimaced and looked down at the Lakers tickets Allen had handed him, reading the seat details printed above the barcode. “Section 320. That sounds like the nosebleed section.”

  Allen narrowed her eyes in irritation. The tickets had cost her two hundred bucks, and he was griping about twenty minutes? She leaned in closer. “I think we’re about to have a nosebleed section right here.”

  Her phone buzzed once for a text message, and she took it out to see if it was Mazzucco. It was from Denny, probably looking to make up after last night. She deleted it unread and looked back at the tech expectantly.

  He smirked and got up. “Okay, deal. But if anybody asks, you guessed my password.”

  “What is your password?”

  “Nice try.”

  The tech disappeared with his Lakers tickets and went in search of caffeine. Allen sat down in the chair and adjusted it before turning her attention to the screen. The National Crime Information Center, the NCIC database for short, was the FBI’s key resource for identifying links between crimes committed across state lines. In other words, it was the ideal tool for the job currently in front of Allen. In the spirit of cooperation, the FBI provided mediated access to local law enforcement in all fifty states. Gaining access to the system wasn’t exactly restricted for cops, but there was generally a waiting period and a paper trail. The basketball tickets had removed those barriers, but Allen knew there was nothing she could do about the indelible electronic trail that would be left by her search, should anybody have cause to look for it. She knew the likelihood of Mr. Lakers covering for her was roughly equal to that of his team sweeping the playoffs, but she’d decided it was a risk worth taking. If she didn’t find evidence of the killer’s work during the gap years, her search would probably go unnoticed. One additional query in the hundreds of thousands run through the system each year from across the country.

  If she found what she was expecting to, however, someone else would come looking for the same information, sooner or later. The realization was beginning to dawn on her that she’d need to talk to som
ebody about her suspicions, and if she wanted to hold on to any sort of involvement with the case, it would have to be soon.

  Her phone buzzed, and she picked it up: Mazzucco’s number flashed up on the screen. She hesitated a second and decided to let it ring out. She wanted to catch up with her partner to see if he’d had any luck canvassing the gas stations, but she could call him back once the twenty minutes had passed.

  It didn’t take long to start finding what she was looking for.

  It was impossible to be sure without a closer examination of the individual cases, but when you knew what to look for, a grisly pattern started to emerge. The search was complicated by the fact that she wasn’t searching for one kind of crime: she had to consider not just the open and unsolved torture murders over the past two and a half years, but also deaths where the body had decomposed to the point the cause of death could not be ascertained. She also had to consider unresolved disappearances that could fit the profile. Interestingly, she began to see that the variety of the DC killings had not been an aberration. The victim profile in each state seemed to range much more widely than the type the killer had targeted in LA. She wondered if that meant anything.

  Allen found potential cases in no less than six states. In each case, the victims had been found in a remote location with torture wounds and at least one cut from an unusual ragged blade. Once again, the victim profile, disposal method, and official cause of death varied, but the ragged wounds remained a constant that was there only when you looked closely.

  Even more interestingly, someone had already made one connection between a confirmed murder and a disappearance taking place months apart: a woman in Kentucky and a teenage boy in Iowa. It looked like the killer hadn’t been quite as careful in those cases. It appeared he’d used the same abduction method on both occasions—and Allen felt a shiver as she saw what it was. Both victims had stopped for gas late at night, and surveillance footage had shown somebody getting into their unlocked vehicles while they paid. The footage was typically low-quality in both cases, and the suspect kept his face away from the cameras both times, but the reports indicated that the working assumption was that this was the same guy. They’d even come up with a name for him: the Attendant. But then there had been no more similar cases. The leads had dried up, and no one ever proved it was the same guy. Allen thought it was. And she thought it was her guy.

  “Time’s up.”

  Allen jerked her head around and saw the tech standing behind her with a large cup of coffee from Starbucks.

  “Get what you need?” he said, when she didn’t say anything.

  “Yeah. And then some.”

  28

  After I left Boden’s house, I drove until I found the 101 and then headed west, thinking about my next move.

  Crozier would not be easy to find. I wouldn’t be able to locate him through any of the standard techniques. For a start, I knew he would have left that name behind a long, long time ago. Shedding it like a dead skin, probably as soon as he’d left Winterlong. Phone and credit and vehicle records would be no use to me. He would most likely stay far away from anyplace I could tie to his former life. I knew this because he would have done all of the things I had done to become invisible.

  I stopped in Hollywood to grab something to eat, passing a cemetery that gave me an idea for something to check on later. I found a quiet-looking diner on Santa Monica Boulevard and took a seat at the back. I ordered a cheesesteak and a cup of coffee. While I waited for my order, I checked out the few other customers. Another of my habits. There were less than a dozen other patrons, but in a melting pot like LA, this random sample of humanity cut across boundaries of gender and age and race and appearance.

  Crozier’s appearance, in all likelihood, would be different. I remembered him as a tallish, slender man with unkempt blond hair and an untidy mustache. Almost all of the personnel I’d known in elite units took a fierce pride in their relative freedom from the strict grooming regulations of the conventional military. In a sense, cultivating a scruffy, individualistic look was the regulation. I often thought that if you wanted to differentiate yourself as the devil-may-care, nonconformist rebel in your special operations team, the quickest way to do so was to keep your hair neatly trimmed, shave twice a day, and polish your boots every night before you hit the bunk.

  At the side of my table was a wooden menu holder that held a couple of regular menus plus a paper children’s menu and a little plastic packet of colored pencils. I took the children’s menu out and placed it face down on the table, giving me a blank sheet. I used the blue pencil and started to sketch a rough likeness of Crozier the way I’d known him. The hair, the mustache, the general shape of his face and jaw. I had to stop myself from giving him the mirrored shades he wore habitually. I closed my eyes and tried to recall what his eyes had looked like without them, and then I filled them in. I looked at it for a couple of seconds. Not bad, but definitely not perfect either. The eyes were hard to get right.

  I started to draw the face again, alongside the first likeness. I kept the general shape, but this time I tried shorter hair and removing the mustache. This one took longer, because it was pure speculation. I didn’t even have the dusty mental picture to draw on. When I’d finished, I looked at the new face for a few seconds. The eyes still weren’t right. I looked back at the old one, comparing the two. I sighed. The clean-shaven version looked utterly anonymous, and for a good reason, I guessed. I had no way of knowing how Crozier might have changed his appearance. He could have grown his hair longer instead of trimming it, cultivated a full beard. He could have shaved his head completely, or succumbed to male pattern baldness. He could have started wearing glasses, or even colored contact lenses.

  When the police use a sketch artist or a computer to generate a composite image of a suspect and end up with something so generic as to be useless, they call it a ghost. This was worse than that. I didn’t even have a ghost in front of me; I had a figment of my imagination. It was—

  “Not bad.”

  I looked up to see the waiter, who’d appeared with my cheesesteak. He was a husky, twenty-something guy in a black short-sleeved shirt.

  “Thanks for the critique,” I said.

  The waiter beamed at me. “He’s hot. Who is he?”

  I thought about the question for a second. “I’m really not sure.”

  The waiter gave me a nonplussed look and put the sandwich down in front of me. “Enjoy.”

  I ate quickly and turned down dessert but asked for another coffee. While I drank it, I checked some local and national news websites on my phone. Nothing much was new.

  The Samaritan Killings.

  I thought about that MO some more. It didn’t seem likely that he’d leave the breakdowns to chance, which was just one more element that reminded me of Crozier. One of the LA Times pieces mentioned that anyone with information should contact Detectives Allen or Mazzucco in Robbery Homicide Division. There was an 800 number, too, but I didn’t want to call from the cell, since I’d already had to dispose of my burner.

  He was out there somewhere. Crozier. The Samaritan. I thought back to the quiet, reserved monster I’d been acquainted with, and for the first time since I started in this line of work, I felt a strange sense of apprehension about taking on a job. I wondered briefly if it could be just because this was the first time I’d decided to go to work without a client. Even as the thought crossed my mind, I knew that was bullshit. The Samaritan needed to be stopped, and it probably had to be me who stopped him. That wasn’t what was giving me pause.

  I’d spent the previous few years being scrupulously careful not to cross paths with anybody from Winterlong. I wasn’t sure that my former employers would have made the connection yet, but they would in time, particularly if Crozier was caught, booked, and fingerprinted. If that happened, there would be some difficult questions to answer. Questions that would lead to nothing but dead ends for the cops and probably even the feds, but that would result in othe
r, less accountable people taking an interest in the case. And in anyone else involved.

  I knew I could find Crozier on my own. It would take time, but I could do it. It would be safer, cleaner to resolve the problem without ever coming into contact with local law enforcement.

  There was only one problem with that. The Samaritan had already taken at least three victims in Los Angeles over a two-week period. I wasn’t sure why he’d returned to his hometown, if something personal had dragged him back to his roots, but I was certain that he wasn’t done with killing people yet. Killing people here, or wherever he went next, if he elected to move on once again. I would track him down if it took a week or a month or a year. I would track him down and I would stop him, one way or the other. But more victims would certainly die in that time. More Kelly Bodens.

  I drank the last from my cup and made my decision. I nodded at the waiter and asked him for the check and one other thing. “Do you know where there’s a pay phone around here?”

  His face crumpled in incredulity. “What is this, 1986?”

  “I’m old-fashioned like that.”

  He shrugged as though it was my funeral and pointed across the street. “I think they still have one at the 7-Eleven.”

  Three minutes later, I was speaking to a bored-voiced woman who sounded like she’d been taking the same call all day.

  “I’d like to speak to Detective Allen, if he’s available.”

  A sigh. “He’s a she. This is about the case out in the hills?” The tone of voice suggested the operator wasn’t exactly expecting a major breakthrough from this call.

  “That’s right.”

  “What is the nature of your information?”

  “I kind of need to speak to Allen about that.”

  Another sigh, this one more audible. “Name and phone number.”

  “I’ll call back,” I said, and hung up. I remembered from a previous job that Robbery Homicide was based out of LAPD headquarters at Parker Center. Another quick Internet check told me they’d moved since the last time I’d been in town. RHD was now based out of the new Police Administration Building, on West First Street. There was another number, which I called.