by Cross, Mason
Allen cleared her throat. “I don’t know yet.”
There was an uneasy pause, because neither of them really wanted to be pleasantly shooting the breeze here. Allen ended it by bringing the discussion back around to the subject at hand. “This guy, Blake. He says he wants to help us. I made it clear I had some reservations. He told me to ask you about the Wardell manhunt.”
Agent Banner answered quickly and with authority, as though dismissing a subordinate. “If he’s offering to help, I suggest you take him up on it, Detective.”
“Suggestion noted, Agent,” Allen shot back.
“Glad I could be of assistance,” Banner said. “Good aft—”
“Wait a second.” There was a pause, and Allen could still hear the echo and background noise. “Can I trust this guy?”
More silence on Banner’s end. If it hadn’t been for the crackle, Allen would have assumed a hang-up. Finally, she spoke again.
“I don’t really trust anybody, not anymore. But I’d trust Carter Blake with my life.”
Banner quickly said she had to go and hung up before Allen could thank her. Her partner had already completed his own call and was looking at her over the partition.
“North Carolina looks solid: cut throat, ragged edges. But that wasn’t released to the press.”
Allen’s phone began to ring again. She hit the button to send it to voicemail.
“You talked to the chief out there?”
Mazzucco grunted in the affirmative. “Apparently, I’m not the first person to call him about it today. No prizes for guessing who beat me to it.” He stopped and looked down at his notepad. “Harding investigated Peterson’s disappearance and is as satisfied it was a murder as you can be without a body. Then there’s the other victim they found—they thought it was Peterson himself at first. Harding told me if he had the resources, he’d have a team of guys digging up those woods, because dollars to doughnuts, there are more bodies out there.”
“He may get his wish soon.”
“He may indeed. I didn’t say anything, but I guess the feds will be speaking to them later on. Harding’s convinced that what happened out there five years ago was an undiscovered serial killer at work. He’s had nothing concrete up until now. Which only makes me question how the hell Sherlock Holmes back there knows about it.”
Allen chewed it over, thinking about Mazzucco’s suspicions—which she shared—but also thinking about what Agent Banner had said at the end and the way the tone of her voice had utterly changed when she’d said it.
“He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest,” she agreed.
Mazzucco stared back at her, then shook his head. “No. This is a bad idea. I mean, keep tabs on him? Absolutely. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a person of interest. But let him in? Work with him? Hell no.”
“He gave us a lead. He didn’t need to do that.”
“He’s playing with us, Jess.”
“Agent Banner says he’s okay.”
“Oh, you’re bowing to the wisdom of the FBI now? That’s quite a switch.”
She gave him a withering glance in reply.
“You think there’s any way Lawrence is going to go for this?” he asked.
He looked away for a moment, thinking, and she could tell he was being worn down.
“Let’s not bother him with this, not right now. We’re just following a promising lead.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Allen’s desk phone started to ring. She ignored it. She let Mazzucco’s question hang in the air and stared him out. He always blinked first when it came to this. When he looked away, she spoke. “Go with me on this. I think we have to talk to this guy.”
Before he could respond, his own phone began to ring. He said his name and listened, then said, “Yeah, she’s here. I’ll tell her,” and hung up.
“What?”
“The chief wants to speak to you before the press conference. We’ll talk about Blake after, okay?”
34
Evergreen Memorial Park and Crematory was the oldest burial ground in Los Angeles. It was situated in Boyle Heights, to the east of the city. I was still getting accustomed to driving in LA, and it took me a while to find the place, which was well off the tourist trail. It was a poor, mostly Mexican part of town, and the further east I got, the more Spanish-language billboards and store signs I saw. After today, I knew as much as I’d ever wanted to about the cemeteries of Los Angeles, after the research I’d had to do in order to track down the specific one that I wanted.
I knew, for example, that if you wanted to see the graves of dead movie stars, Evergreen was definitely not the place. You’d be far better off visiting Hollywood Forever, the opulent boneyard conveniently located just over the back wall of Paramount Studios. That one attracted the biggest and the best Tinseltown corpses, from Rudolph Valentino to Dee Dee Ramone. The high-end clientele meant that Hollywood Forever also attracted stargazers from all over the world, drawn to the one place where you could absolutely guarantee that the movie stars would stay still for pictures. They shot movies there; they even hosted rock concerts from time to time.
Evergreen Cemetery wasn’t like that. Its celebrities were of the minor and long-forgotten kind. Pioneers to Southern California, a few early LA politicians. No one of particular note had been buried there recently. If you went to Evergreen Cemetery, you did so because you wanted to visit a specific grave. Which was exactly why I was there.
The sky was darkening in the east as I entered via the wide sandstone gate on North Evergreen Avenue, slowing down to a respectful pace as I drove along the wide strips of asphalt that wound their ways through the seventy-acre necropolis. The first thing that struck me was that the name ‘Evergreen’ was a misnomer. There were palm trees dotted here and there, but the overriding color scheme was comprised of dusty browns and yellows. Irrigation was expensive, and these residents had no need of water. The tombstones were arranged in neat rows, following the twists of the access roads. They looked like gigantic lines of dominoes, ready to be pushed over.
The area I was interested in was at the far side of the cemetery. A section that had originally been gifted to the city of Los Angeles by the original owners as a potter’s field. As the city grew and swelled, the patch of ground was taken over by the county, and when they ran out of space, they built a crematorium and started incinerating the unclaimed and unmourned indigent dead instead of burying them. With space at a premium, the cemetery bought the ground back from LA County in the mid-sixties, dumped eight feet of fresh dirt on top, and started burying the more recently departed on top of their forebears. The approach was striking in its unsentimental practicality.
When I found the approximate site I was looking for, I parked at the side of the road and got out. I’d passed a few other vehicles on my journey through the cemetery, and even one or two people on foot, but when I looked around, there was no one within sight. No one who was going to give me any problem, anyway. The sun was beginning to sink in the west and was already well below the tops of the palm trees. I started to feel a chill in the air and grabbed my jacket from the backseat before I set off.
It took me another fifteen minutes to find the row I was looking for, but when I did, my eyes homed in on the specific plot. Dusk was advancing by now, and it was difficult to read the dedications on the stones from more than a few feet away, but one grave in particular caught my eye. I glanced around me again, saw nothing and nobody. I looked back down the hill toward the blue Chevy. It was a dark shade of blue, but somehow in the dusk it suddenly seemed bright, out of place among the dust and the stone. I felt a strong sense of unease and chalked it partly up to the fact I’d almost had my head blown off the last time I’d been in a graveyard.
I walked along the row and stopped at the tenth marker from the start. It was a granite headstone, of good quality. Certainly more impressive than anything that would have been provided for any of the original inhabitants of this part of the cemetery. I cr
ouched down to read the inscription. Three different first names: David, Martha, and Terri. All with the same last name: Crozier. Three different dates of birth, all with the same date of death.
January 4, 1997.
A Bible quotation below the names and the dates:
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in Hell—MATTHEW 10:28
At the foot of the headstone was the thing that had attracted my attention from the start of the row: a single red rose, the petals folded in on themselves like a fist but still looking relatively fresh. I reached out to touch it, to check that it was as real as it looked. It was. I straightened up again and slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees. Even in the half-light, the dry, dusty feel of the landscape was evident. The day had been relatively cool for the time of year, but even so, the rose couldn’t have been placed there more than a few hours before.
I looked around at the acres of orderly markers. A city of the dead. I still couldn’t see a soul, and yet I had the nagging sensation of being watched. Another of those feelings that’s difficult to explain but unwise to ignore. I took one last glance at the Crozier family marker and wondered who had picked the inscription. Then I turned and walked back down toward the Chevy, across two layers of corpses.
35
“Looking good, Allen.”
She didn’t look at Coleman. The ever-present undertone of insincerity was there in his voice, of course, but Allen didn’t know if it was deliberate this time or if that was just the way his voice always sounded. It was just the two of them and Mazzucco in the squad room. No one to show off to, so perhaps it really was intended as a compliment.
“Glad you approve.”
They were rewatching Allen’s segment of the press conference earlier that evening on Channel 7. They’d held it in the press room downstairs. Allen had met the LA chief of police for the first time ten minutes before they went on camera. The chief was a solid-built man of sixty, with a cop mustache and a permanently weary look in his eyes. He’d greeted Allen like a longtime friend, asked one or two perceptive questions, and called it good to go.
The chief had opened up the press conference and explained that they were now liaising with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on what had become a far more complex case than anyone could have anticipated. He spoke for five minutes, sounding authoritative and calm despite the fact they’d had to tear up the script a half hour before the cameras were switched on. The chief finished up, brushed off some shouted questions, and introduced the primary detective on the Samaritan case, Detective Jessica Allen.
Watching the recording, Allen kept her face impassive but winced inside as her image on TV began to speak. She hated seeing herself on video, and the knowledge that this piece of footage was being broadcast across the country and around the world did not help with that.
“Good evening,” she said onscreen, reading from the prepared statement in her hands. She was pleased to see that the shaking of her hands was not perceptible onscreen. “As you are aware, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, acting on a report from a member of the public, discovered the bodies of three murder victims buried at a location in the Santa Monica Mountains yesterday morning around eight o’clock. We have subsequently identified the victims as Kelly Boden, Carrie Elaine Burnett, and Rachel Anne Morrow.”
Background chatter broke out around the mention of Burnett’s name: the TV star. That was why Allen had sandwiched her between the other two vics and read the names as quickly as possible.
“Preliminary forensics indicates that all three women were likely killed by the same individual. Further investigation has uncovered additional cases that we think may be related in”—she paused here and looked up from the statement to meet the camera—“seven different states, dating back as far as 2010.”
Theatrical gasps and yelled questions from the assembled pack of journalists. Allen looked back down again and raised her voice over the hubbub.
“The LAPD is now liaising with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on this case. We are pursuing a number of active leads, and we believe the individual is still at large within the Los Angeles area. One of our lines of inquiry suggests the individual is currently targeting lone female drivers, particularly at night. It’s possible that he’s offering his help to drivers who have broken down in isolated areas. The advice is simple, folks: try not to drive alone at night unless it’s absolutely necessary. Make sure you have a full tank of gas, and lock your car when you’re filling up. Keep your doors locked at all times, and do not stop for anyone unless it’s a marked police car. We urge all citizens to be vigilant and report any suspicious behavior to the telephone number or the email address you can see on your screen.”
Allen finished with a “thank you” to indicate she was ready for the questions. The first one out of the pack was predictably stupid.
“Detective Allen, is the Samaritan targeting celebrities?”
Allen watched her face on the screen as she heard the question and was pleased to see she’d kept her irritation under wraps pretty successfully, just making eye contact with the speaker and shaking her head as soon as he’d finished. “We have no evidence to suggest that, no. If you’re referring to Ms. Burnett, we don’t know that the killer was necessarily aware she was a television personality.”
Which would make two of us, Allen had thought but did not say.
Another disembodied voice piped up from behind the camera’s line of sight. That one was Jennifer Quan from KABC: “The related murders in the other states, did they all have the same MO?”
Allen had needed a second to think, so she had asked Quan to repeat the question.
“Were they all lone female drivers, too? And if so, how has he managed to operate undetected for this long?”
Allen cleared her throat, not wanting to give the little information she had on the additional murders away so freely. “I’m afraid I don’t have that information for you right now.”
“You mean you don’t know, or—”
“Next question.”
As Allen watched herself fielding questions on the screen, she started to think about that MO again. If the cases in the other states varied so much, could there be earlier cases in LA that also diverged from this, apparently new, “Samaritan” modus operandi? Cases that did not involve kidnaps from vehicles? Her brief brush with the media had just given her the idea of someone she could approach about this.
Onscreen, she took another question.
“Is the FBI taking over the case? If so, when can we talk to them?”
Allen shot a brief, sarcastic smile at the questioner. Looking back on it onscreen thirty minutes later, she was pleased to see the implicit fuck you had come across. Beside her, she heard Coleman snort in amusement at the look.
“You heard the chief,” she said, nodding at her superior. “We’re working closely with the Bureau on a coordinated investigation with the aim of getting this individual into custody as quickly as possible. The FBI will be coordinating the multistate investigation and assisting the LAPD with the current investigation here in Los Angeles.”
That was the party line, and again, Allen was reasonably pleased with the conviction with which she’d sold it. The feds had gotten much more diplomatic over the past couple of decades, and they were touchy about being seen to swoop in and take over every aspect of the big cases. These days, it was all cross-agency task forces, coordinated mixed scenes, and joint communication strategies. That meant that on paper, Allen would keep the three LA murders, with close assistance from the feds. In reality, it was the same old story: the government boys were taking this case, and Allen was welcome to tag along just as long as she played by their rulebook.
The questions went on for another couple of minutes before the chief wound things up and reminded the viewers that they could keep up to date by monitoring the department’s Twitter feed. Watching again onscreen, Allen notic
ed the visible discomfort with which he said that last line.
Mazzucco turned the screen off and turned to face Allen, giving her four loud claps. “Couldn’t have done it any better myself.” He smiled.
“Come on, Jon, you hate this shit even more than I do.”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
Allen smiled. “What time are we meeting with our cooperative coordinated colleagues again?”
“Fuckin’ feds,” Coleman muttered under his breath as he looked back down at his own, less glamorous case: a seventy-two-year-old woman shot to death during a burglary in Compton.
“Eight-thirty tomorrow morning,” Mazzucco answered.
“They were too busy to speak to us today, huh?” Allen mused.
“I offered this evening, but they were fine with the agent’s phone conversation with Lawrence. Apparently, they can start moving on this before they need to speak to us. They want to sit in on the psych briefing, and then they’ll catch up with us.”
“I bet they can start moving without us. They’re sending us a message. Me a message.”
Mazzucco nodded and smiled. “Don’t worry; it is us. Same as always. As far as they’re concerned, the us is not just you and me. It’s the whole department.”
Allen turned back to the screen, where they were showing helicopter footage from earlier in the day. Mazzucco was right. Us and them. They’d gotten off on a worse footing than necessary, thanks to Allen’s reticence, and it wasn’t as though the relationship between the two agencies was lacking in friction as it was. She was lucky to still be as involved as she was, and she knew that was down to Lawrence giving her a break. But Lawrence wouldn’t be running the show for much longer. She’d be intrigued to find out how involved she’d feel after tomorrow morning’s meeting with the FBI liaison.
But before that, she had a call to make.