The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  “Let’s see if we get lucky,” he said as he finished the call.

  “Doubtful,” Allen said. “Guy looked like he knew how to make a clean exit.” She looked back at the house. “I’m more interested to see if we get lucky with what’s inside.”

  Mazzucco hesitated a second and then followed her back to the front door. He folded his arms as Allen picked the basic lock on the front door. She glanced up at him as the catch clicked back and saw a smile playing at the edge of his lips.

  “Aren’t you going to say something disapproving, at least?”

  Mazzucco shook his head. “I think we passed that point when I gave you the address, didn’t we?”

  Allen smiled and nodded.

  “Anyway,” he continued, “depending on what we find in there, we can leave everything untouched and come back when we can get a warrant.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time with me. What happened to by the book?”

  Mazzucco reached forward and pushed the door handle down with the back of his hand, swinging the door open. “If this is his place, he could be keeping somebody inside. I want to make sure before we do anything else.”

  Allen held out her hand in an after you gesture and watched him step over the threshold. She liked that about Mazzucco—he was all about the rules right up until the point they got in the way of doing the right thing.

  It was dim inside; no lights had been left on. Even so, the blinds were thin enough and cheap enough that there was no problem seeing around. It smelled a little damp and musty, but the stench of decomp Allen had been bracing herself for was absent. That was a good sign, but it didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t going to find a body. Back in DC, Allen had been involved with a homicide investigation involving a corpse that had been double-wrapped in plastic shower curtains and hidden beneath the floorboards of a bedroom closet for three years, unbeknownst to the unfortunate current owner of the house.

  There was a short hallway with four doors on either side. They checked them methodically: living room, kitchen, bedroom one, bedroom two. At the far end was another door with a frosted glass pane—the bathroom. It didn’t take them long to make a cursory search to confirm there was nobody in the house—held against their will or otherwise. In fact, other than the fact that the bed in one of the bedrooms was made up and there was some food in the refrigerator, there was very little evidence that anyone was living here. And yet someone was. Someone who drove a green Dodge Charger, most likely.

  Allen eyed the phone on the bedside table, likely the one used in the call to the warehouse owner. A slipup, for sure, but an understandable one. If the occupant of the house really was the Samaritan, he probably hadn’t counted on his number being remembered all these months later, even if the police ever had cause to look into it. She got the feeling that this morning’s framing of Blake had been an improvisation—a deliberate attempt to throw the authorities off the scent, but not necessarily one that had been planned very far in advance.

  She noticed that something was trapped under the base of the phone. The edge of something flat, like a flyer or a business card. She pulled the sleeve of her jacket over her hand and moved the phone back an inch, revealing the edge of a photograph. She weighed the risks, decided screw it, and moved the phone the rest of the way. She picked up the photograph, being careful only to touch the edges.

  It was a real photograph. Meaning, not a digital pic printed on glossy paper, but a picture taken by a real camera and developed from real film. It was obvious not just from the feel of the paper and quality of the image, but from the fact that it was clearly a decade or two old. The colors had faded a little in the intervening years, and there were scuffs and marks on it, as though it had been taken out and looked at regularly, perhaps moved around from place to place.

  It showed two teenagers sitting on a fence: a boy and a girl. Neither looked much older than sixteen, and if Allen had had to guess, she’d have said the girl was older than the boy.

  The boy looked tall for his age. He had short dirty-blond hair, and his thin, angular face looked as though it was a couple of years away from needing to shave more than once a week. He wore sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and khaki shorts that came down to his knees. The strap of a backpack was slung over his right shoulder.

  The girl was the one who drew Allen’s attention, because she had a very familiar look. Brown eyes and dark hair cut in a style that suggested to Allen that the picture had probably been taken in the nineties. Style aside, the hair and the eyes and the features reminded her of the three bodies they’d found in the Santa Monica Mountains. No way was this a coincidence.

  She wore DIY jeans shorts cut off halfway down the thigh and a faded black T-shirt with a yellow smiley face with crossed-out eyes on it. Allen had seen rock kids wearing those shirts before and knew it probably related to some band.

  It looked like a summer’s day somewhere reasonably warm. Could well have been California. But it could also have been a lot of places with a warm climate. There wasn’t much to see in the foreground, and the background was mostly obscured by the side of some kind of building. It looked like a bar or a diner, because the tubing from a neon sign was visible in the window, although it wasn’t switched on. She could make out the letters S, T, E and the start of something that looked like a V. Steve, maybe? Steve’s Diner? In the extreme left of the picture, she could make out scrubland and blue sky.

  She heard her name called from another room and slipped the photograph into her pocket.

  She found Mazzucco in the other bedroom, on his knees in front of a closet. He was wearing his gloves, and he’d carefully removed the lid of a medium-sized box that had evidently been sitting just inside the closet. Allen had seen boxes like this before in the files. Boxes that contained a specific combination of everyday objects that would only ever be collected in one place by a very specific type of person.

  Mazzucco rattled off the inventory. “Plastic zip ties, duct tape, a knife, some gauze. For a blindfold, I guess.”

  “A torture kit.”

  Mazzucco nodded. Allen had been about to tell him about the photograph, but watching him kneeling by the closet, she found herself remembering an eerily similar scene, not so long ago. Another partner, another house belonging to a vicious criminal. She said Mazzucco’s name quietly.

  He looked up at her. “What?”

  “This thing could end up going the wrong way for me, depending on what happens. I just wanted to tell you something before . . .”

  Mazzucco looked uneasy. “Before . . .” he prompted after a moment.

  “Well, just in case. We might not be partners this time next week. I wanted to tell you about the thing in DC.”

  “The Victor Lewis case? Allen, we don’t need to talk about this.”

  “No, we do. Lewis was guilty as hell. You need to know that. Only we didn’t find what we expected to find in the house. Bratton—my partner—decided to change that. He planted the victim’s necklace in Lewis’s closet.”

  Mazzucco said nothing, waited for her to continue.

  “I didn’t know he’d done it at the time. I thought the bust was clean. Somehow, Lewis’s attorney found out what had happened. There was an investigation. Bratton and I were suspended. He came to my house and told me what he’d done, begged me to say I’d seen him find the necklace, fair and square.”

  “But you didn’t,” Mazzucco said.

  “How did you know that?” Allen asked, surprised.

  Mazzucco shrugged. “Like I said, I’m a good judge of character.”

  “I didn’t tell anyone that he’d confessed to me, but I didn’t back him up either. In the end, they’d have nailed him anyway. A rookie reported seeing the necklace in the victim’s home when we searched it after the murder. Only it never showed up on the inventory because Bratton took it.”

  “You did the right thing, Allen.”

  “Did I? I always thought, no matter what, you back up your partner’s play. And th
en when I was put in that situation, I . . . I just thought . . . we have to be better than them, you know?”

  Mazzucco nodded. “Still, you could have made things easier on yourself by burning Bratton, but you didn’t.”

  “Just because I wasn’t going to help him plant evidence doesn’t mean I wanted to help send a good cop down.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Turns out, half the cops in the department assumed I was in on it and got away with it; the other half assumed I threw my partner under a bus. So ninety-nine percent of my fellow cops ended up hating me anyway. I picked the worst option.”

  “Not from where I’m standing, you didn’t.”

  She said nothing for a minute. Then, “Thanks, Jon.”

  “For what?”

  “For being the one percent.”

  “Always happy to be right,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable at the uncharacteristic display of emotion between the two. He looked back down at the torture kit. “Let’s put this back the way we found it and call it in.” He looked up at her. “You find anything?”

  She remembered the photograph and held it out to him, being careful not to touch the surface. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  He examined the picture and looked back at her expectantly. “The girl fits with the profile.” He nodded.

  “It looks like he’s been keeping this around,” she said. “What do you think it means?”

  Mazzucco shrugged. “Could mean a lot of things. Maybe they’re both victims. Maybe the kid in the picture is him. There isn’t a lot to go on here.”

  “You recognize the location?”

  Mazzucco looked again and shook his head. “Should I?”

  “I don’t know. I was thinking it could be somewhere around here. The light and the colors are right for Southern California. There’s something familiar about it. I just can’t put my finger on it.”

  “It could be around here,” Mazzucco agreed. “Then again, you get blue skies and dust in a lot of other places. Could be Brisbane, Australia, for all I know. Are you going to put it back?”

  “Okay. Okay.” Allen took her phone out and snapped a couple pictures of the original before replacing it on the bedside table. Then the two of them went back outside, closed the door, and called it in.

  64

  The warrant didn’t take long to come through. Being part of an ongoing federal investigation had its benefits after all.

  Only, Allen wasn’t officially part of the investigation anymore, so she made a strategic retreat to her car, leaving Mazzucco waiting at the house. Before long, the unassuming dwelling was crawling with LAPD and federal agents. Not too long after that, the first of the news helicopters arrived overhead, attracted by the activity like flies to a fresh piece of carrion. Allen sat in the car and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, frustrated not to be able to be inside. She thought about what they’d found in there, about the man in the green Dodge. Occasionally, she thought about her conversation with Mazzucco. She hadn’t intended to tell him about it. She hadn’t intended to tell anyone about it, ever. And yet it felt like a weight had been removed from her shoulders. Mazzucco had told her she’d done the right thing, and for the first time, she’d allowed herself to give that idea some credence.

  She wondered why it was she could never meet a guy like Mazzucco in her personal life. Instead, she seemed to be stuck with one long line of Dennys.

  At around eleven thirty, Mazzucco appeared on the street and headed toward her.

  “Got a minute?” he asked.

  Allen leaned over and opened the passenger door, and he got in and started bringing her up to speed.

  The torture kit had been quickly found, along with an unregistered Smith & Wesson SD40 pistol and a dozen or so boxes of ammunition. On a work desk in the second bedroom, they’d found the cannibalized remains of some electronic devices, along with a full complement of miniature tools for working on them. Mazzucco said that one of the techs had identified some of the parts as belonging to some high-end bugging and tracking devices. In the wastepaper basket beneath the desk, they’d discovered pages from recent editions of the LA Times, with rectangular holes where pictures and articles had been cut out of them, as though for a scrapbook. It didn’t take long to confirm that the missing clippings were from articles about the Samaritan. But the scrapbook, if there was one, was nowhere to be found in the house. Evidently, he was keeping these clippings at his other place. That summed up the bad news: they were still missing the primary crime scene; there was no sign that anyone had been killed or even held in the house.

  The good news was that there were plenty of recent, usable prints all over the domicile, suggesting that the Samaritan had not expected this hideout to be blown. A perfect set of prints had already been lifted from a fresh carton of milk in the fridge and was even now being rushed to the lab. The FBI guys wanted to run the prints, and Mazzucco hadn’t argued. The result would come back a whole lot quicker, and given that the Samaritan had been operating nationwide, it was as likely they’d get a match from some other state as one from a Los Angeles crime scene.

  Mazzucco had stuck around long enough to be satisfied the techs were doing a good job and had left them to it. He had paperwork to file downtown, and besides, he’d heard Agent Channing was on his way over. He got out of Allen’s car and said he would give her a call if anything came of the BOLO on the Dodge.

  Allen watched him leave and then considered her options. It was pointless to stick around here without being able to officially take part in the investigation, but she wasn’t sure where else to go either. The focus was here.

  She checked her phone for missed calls, half expecting some kind of message from Blake, but the screen was blank. She’d just put her key in the ignition when a knuckle tapped softly on the window. She started and looked up to see Jim Channing staring back at her, a vaguely amused look in his eyes. She had an urge to turn the key and drive away, but she resisted it. Instead, she turned the engine off again and got out of the car.

  “I heard you were . . .” Channing began.

  “I am,” Allen said. “But it’s a free country, and I can take a drive wherever I like.”

  Channing shrugged. “Anyway. This was good work, Detective. You got a look at the suspect?”

  “Excuse me?”

  Channing broke out the disarming smile again. “My mistake. What I meant to ask was, did Detective Mazzucco see anything and relay that information to you?”

  Allen cleared her throat. If Channing was holding her link with Blake against her, he wasn’t showing it. Not yet, anyway. And why should he? She’d basically done him a favor, effectively highlighting the professionalism of the FBI’s conduct in comparison to her own.

  “Not much of one. Male, Caucasian, probably. Dark glasses and a hat. There’s a BOLO out on the car; it was a green Dodge Charger. So far, nada. Not exactly a surprise. This guy’s made cars disappear a couple of times before.”

  Channing, who had been gazing along the street toward the house, looked back at her.

  “So you think this guy could be an accomplice?”

  “An accomplice?”

  “Working with Blake.”

  She thought about going along with it for a quiet life. Not for the first time, she chose the path of greater resistance. “Blake isn’t our guy. I think he was set up.”

  Channing looked back at her for a minute, refusing to take the bait by reacting too quickly. “Then where is he?”

  “Where would you be, if half the cops in the city were looking for you and your face was on the morning news for something you didn’t do?”

  He didn’t hesitate this time. “I’d be turning myself in. I’d be trusting in the LAPD to hear me out and establish my innocence, so they could move on to other lines of inquiry.”

  “Goddamn, Channing. And you can say that with a straight face, too. I’m impressed.”

  “Come on, Detective. He was caught in his den with a body. Dead to rights.”

 
“In response to a suspiciously well-informed tip from an as yet unknown person. A person I suspect may have been the guy living in this house. And anyway, if it was his den, why did they find evidence of only the one murder? We still need to find out where he took the others.”

  “He has multiple safe houses. Maybe this is one, too. Maybe the prints we’re running at the moment are Carter Blake’s. Maybe the guy in the green Dodge was Blake. Can you rule it out? Tell me honestly.”

  Allen felt bile rising in her throat. Channing had let the good-humored mask slip a little there, had slipped too easily into condescension on that last shot. She took a deep breath and said, “I’ve got somewhere else to be.”

  She opened the car door again, got back in, and started the engine. She didn’t look up when Channing rested his arm on the windowsill and said, “You certainly do, Detective.”

  She didn’t want him to see her face. Didn’t want him to see that he’d hit a nerve. Because she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t swear that the guy in the shades and the hat could not have been Blake.

  65

  As she drove away from the Samaritan’s safe house, Allen suddenly realized how fried she felt. With everything that had happened since Mazzucco’s early-morning phone call, it felt like she’d pulled a full shift already.

  Since she’d be unwelcome at headquarters anyway, she decided to stop off at her apartment to make some coffee and something quick to eat. She spent the journey trying to shake the doubts Channing had put in her head. If Blake really was the Samaritan, if he had killed the victim in the warehouse, then who had called in the tip? Added to that, she knew from the flight details that Blake physically could not have killed Kelly Boden. But that didn’t rule him out for any of the other murders. Not even the girl in the alley last night. Maybe he could have killed her before meeting Mazzucco and her at Gryski’s apartment. It would be ballsy, but that was one attribute this killer certainly had in spades.