The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  “One more digit, Blake. I press it, and time’s up.”

  “Wait.”

  She held a finger poised on the last button, turned her face to me expectantly.

  “What gave me away?” I asked.

  Allen didn’t put the phone down, but she did move her finger away from the button. “I never really bought the idea you’d come all the way out here on a whim. You showed up within hours of the story hitting the news. That tells me you wanted in on this badly.”

  I kept my mouth shut. The first rule when you’re in a hole: stop digging.

  “I parked my suspicions, though, because it seemed like you were on the level about doing this for a living, and your references checked out. I thought you could help us. The clincher was last night.”

  “The tow truck driver?” I asked.

  She nodded. “You knew Gryski wasn’t the Samaritan the second you looked at him. How did you know that? He fit the profile and he resisted arrest using deadly force. Exactly like a cornered killer would behave. But you knew it wasn’t him as soon as you saw his face. Call it a cop’s instinct, but I knew right away—your body language changed as soon as you didn’t see the face you were looking for. Which means you know who we’re looking for, don’t you?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Make it simple.”

  I felt like smacking myself in the head in the hope it might knock some sense into me. Twice in the last twenty-four hours I had painfully underestimated the people I was dealing with. Crozier first, and now Allen. Brute force and luck had gotten me out of the first tight spot, but I didn’t think either could rescue me from this situation. Only some level of mutual trust could do that.

  “You said you checked me out after we first spoke,” I said.

  “I tried to. I didn’t come up with a whole lot, besides your FBI friend.”

  “That’s right. And no offense, but you could have a lot higher clearance than you do and you’d get the same results. I’m a free agent now, but that wasn’t always the case.”

  “I figured,” she said. “So what? CIA, NSA, something like that?”

  I shook my head. “Smaller than that. I worked for a very secret, very well-funded group that carried out difficult work in places the United States wasn’t always supposed to be.”

  “You mean some kind of black ops? Deniable assassinations, that kind of thing?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “It fits with the blank slate, I guess. Is Blake even your real name?”

  “It is now.”

  “Don’t get cute.” She hit the cancel button on the phone and replaced it on the shelf, lowering the gun again. “So what’s your connection with our mystery man? You obviously know his face and his methods. Was he on some kind of kill list? Was he the one that got away?”

  “Nobody got away, Allen. And I’m afraid it’s much worse than that.”

  She looked puzzled for a moment, and then she understood. “He was one of yours.”

  “His name was Dean Crozier. I don’t know what he’s calling himself now, obviously. He tended to work at the business end of our operation. He enjoyed his work a little too much.”

  “Do I want to know the details?”

  “Probably not. He wasn’t the only one who enjoyed killing, but he was the one who seemed to want it more than anything else in the world. You want to know what brought me into this, Allen? The same thing that brought you in. I recognized his signature: the torture marks, the ragged wounds.”

  “He was using the same knife back then?”

  “Yeah. It’s called a Kris. Your people would have found one in the warehouse. I don’t think it’s his only one.”

  Allen put the gun down on the coffee table and sat down next to me. “Anything else?”

  “He’s from LA originally. That was the other reason I knew it was him. His family was murdered back in the mid-nineties. The case was never closed. He used a plain old hunting knife for that one. He joined the army after that and found his way into our little club a few years later. By the time he was cut loose, he’d served his apprenticeship. That’s when the killings started stateside.”

  “What was the first one?”

  “Fort Bragg. The very first murder was a sergeant who’d pissed him off in basic training.”

  “Peterson, right?” Allen asked. “The name you gave us. That matches up. The feds identified a couple of cases earlier than that, which they thought could be connected, but Fort Bragg is the first one with the ragged wounds, on the body they did find. Maybe he was worried the sergeant could be traced back to him, so he killed the other guy to make it look more random.”

  I shook my head. “He couldn’t be traced. He wasn’t worried about that. Crozier wants to kill, period. Peterson just gave him a place to start that was as good as any.”

  We sat in silence for a couple of minutes before another question occurred to me—one I’d been thinking about earlier. “Did you identify the second victim from last night? The one at the warehouse?”

  Mazzucco had brought her up to speed back at the house. They’d ID’d the victim after her roommate had reported her missing and her car had been found parked near the warehouse. “Yeah. Erica Dane, she lived half a mile from the warehouse. She worked nearby, never made it home last night.” Allen stopped and thought something over. “Three bodies out in the hills: Boden, Morrow, and Burnett. Two last night: Castillo in the alley and Dane in the warehouse. That makes five killings in this cycle.”

  “Five that we know of.”

  “Exactly. That’s what I’m worried about. What if he’s done with LA, Blake? You’ve read the report from the feds on the other ones. Hell, you probably knew most if it before they did. The average victim total in each area was usually five or six.”

  The thought had crossed my mind. If we were judging the Samaritan’s behavior purely on his track record to date, it would be a concern: that he’d vanish once again, only to pop up someplace else six months or a year from now, probably being cautious enough that no one would know it was him until he’d moved on again. But this wasn’t like the other cases: there were a couple of key differences.

  “He’ll stay a while longer. He’s not done yet.”

  “Is this your observer principle thing again?”

  “Yes, it is. By observing his methods, the ways he operates, we’ve changed them. He might have stopped, moved on, but he’s gone the other way. He’s stepped up the intensity. And now you know about the other thing: his connection with me. His plan last night worked pretty well, on the face of it—he has everybody looking for me instead of anywhere that might lead to him. But that won’t be enough for him, because he wanted me beaten and contained, and he didn’t quite manage either. He won’t leave until he resolves things between him and me. He knows I’m too dangerous to leave in the game. He’s been operating with impunity up until now. If he walks away from LA, he’ll be looking over his shoulder for me until I find him again. And I would find him again.”

  “You sound pretty sure of yourself.”

  “There’s one other thing, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think LA was different even before those bodies were discovered. I think he came back here for a reason. And I think the murders last night were meant to distract us from that.”

  68

  Allen thought about it for a second. “This is about what you said earlier, right? About this Crozier guy being from LA originally. You think there’s some kind of personal connection.”

  “I’m sure of it,” I said. “Something—or someone—brought him back here after all this time.” I saw a flicker in her eyes that told me she was matching what I was saying with some other information. She knew something I didn’t. “What is it?”

  She hesitated, and I thought she was going to hold it back, whatever it was. But then she changed her mind, maybe coming to the same conclusion I had a few minutes before: that we could get further by sharing what we
knew.

  “We found the owner of the warehouse. His alibi checked out, but he told us he remembered a guy looking the place over a few months ago. First potential buyer in a long time, so it stuck out for him. We went to talk to the guy, but he hightailed it when he saw us. The house was a foreclosure, but someone had been living there. Someone who kept a spare torture kit and some high-tech tracking equipment.”

  I was quiet for a second. “The house . . . was it in Santa Monica?”

  Allen nodded slowly and told me the name of the street.

  “That’s where Crozier lived twenty years ago.”

  Allen puffed her cheeks out and blew out as she processed it. “So what did you mean about the distraction? Besides pinning everything on you, I mean.”

  “I started thinking about it after I left. The victim in the alley—Castillo—was the first victim since the bodies in the hills were found. It was the first victim he left intending it to be found.”

  “So he was conscious of being observed on this one.”

  “More than that. He has an urge to kill; that’s a given. But I believe Castillo and Dane were more about sending us a message than satisfying a compulsion.”

  “Mazzucco said that, too; he was showing us he’s not scared.”

  “Not just that, though,” I said. “He made sure we’d know both of the murders were his. The MO with the abductions from vehicles, the ragged wound patterns. But last night I kept thinking about what was different, not what was the same.”

  “That’s easy: the first three were buried, and the last two he barely even attempted to conceal.”

  “What else?”

  “The first three were all held for a while and tortured before they were killed. He didn’t have time to do that with Castillo. It was rushed.”

  “That’s what we were meant to assume. But still, he took risks killing and dumping Castillo near so many people. Risks that he was careful to minimize when he dumped the first three bodies.”

  “By burying them up in the hills, where he knew he wouldn’t be disturbed. But he wanted the two bodies last night discovered, remember? To send us a message, and to frame you, in the case of Dane.”

  “It’s more than that. What’s been missing from the first three murders all along?”

  Allen paused for a second to think. “A primary crime scene.”

  “Exactly. The first three victims were all abducted in one place, tortured and killed in a second place, and dumped in a third. We’ve never seen the second place.”

  “I know where you’re going on this, Blake. I took a course on geographical profiling at the academy. It looks like Boden and Morrow were both abducted on Mulholland Drive, Burnett on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. All three within a five-mile radius of the dump site. Odds are . . .”

  “That he killed them someplace close by.”

  “And that’s why he made sure we found the last two victims miles across town: to distract us, like you said. When you look at it that way, it almost confirms it rather than hiding it.” Allen stopped and rubbed the side of her head. “We were already working on the assumption that he’s keeping a torture house within a few miles of the dump site. Only problem is narrowing it down.”

  “The place in Santa Monica would be close enough,” I said.

  She was shaking her head already. “It wasn’t that house. It was clean. That’s just where he’s been holed up.” She stopped, and I saw her shiver almost imperceptibly. “His . . . workshop is someplace else.”

  I massaged my knuckles, the frustration welling up inside of me. “And that could be anywhere within easy reach of the dump site. Could be another house. Could just be a hidden, sheltered place in the mountains. There are lots of old trails up there. A shack or a cave, maybe.”

  Allen went to her bookcase and dug out a map of the Greater Los Angeles area that she’d bought when she moved in. It only reinforced the scale of our task. There were a dozen separate neighborhoods within the general area in which we were looking. Some of the main hiking routes were marked out as well, but I knew there would be countless unmarked trails as well. As my eyes traced the thin, winding lines that snaked through the hills, I thought about other mountainous trails I’d seen, in locations worlds away from this one, in Waziristan and Kashmir and Peru. The more I looked at the map, the more I became convinced that Crozier’s bolt hole was somewhere in the hills. Somewhere it would be hard to find him, harder still to corner him. A place where he’d be in his element. I told Allen about my gut feeling and she groaned.

  “Needle in a damn haystack, then. You ever been to LA before now?”

  “Only once, and only for about a week.”

  “Great. Then we have less than a year’s experience of this town between the two of us. Beyond what we’ve seen in . . .” Allen trailed off before she could finish the thought.

  “What is it?”

  After a second of gathering her thoughts, she began to explain. She told me about the photograph she’d found in the Samaritan’s safe house in Santa Monica and showed me the copy she’d made on her phone. I examined it. The reproduction was pretty good. It showed a boy and a girl standing in front of a store or a bar with some scrubland in the background. But I wasn’t paying any attention to the background, not at first.

  “That’s him,” I said quietly.

  “Crozier? Are you sure?”

  “Not a shred of doubt. He’s younger here, but that’s him. He was a killer when this was taken, even if he hadn’t killed yet.” As I uttered the words, a grim thought surfaced. “Allen—who’s the girl? Have you identified her?”

  She shrugged. “I hadn’t even ID’d Crozier until you just told me. I thought they might be related. Could she be a family member?”

  “I don’t think so. He killed his parents and sister, but I’ve seen a picture of them. The sister had blond hair, green eyes. Not brunette with brown eyes like this one.”

  “Then who is she?”

  “I don’t know. But I think we should find out, because she—”

  “She matches the profile on the first three,” Allen finished. “We noticed that, too. You think maybe she was the first? That she’s the reason he’s picking women who look like that?”

  I didn’t say anything, but I thought Allen was probably on the right track. With an effort, I moved my focus from the two faces to the background of the photograph. The building and the landscape were fairly anonymous. Nothing stuck out to me. The partial read on the sign could be enough, if we were lucky. “It looks like it could be somewhere in the hills. We can narrow this down. Check if there are any businesses called Steve’s or anything else beginning with S-T-E in the vicinity. This is twenty years old, of course, but . . .” I broke off as I saw Allen was shaking her head.

  “I know this building, Blake.”

  “Then why didn’t you—”

  “I know it, but I don’t know exactly where it is.” Allen stopped and considered her words before continuing. “I remembered in the shower, was just coming to confirm it before you decided to scare the crap out of me. I’ve seen the building, but I’ve never been there.”

  Allen disappeared again and returned holding a colorful rectangular object. She tossed it to me and I caught it. It was a DVD case. Some obscure romantic comedy from the eighties that I’d never heard of. It starred one of the lesser members of the Brat Pack and an underwear model.

  I looked back up at Allen. “Seriously?”

  She nodded.

  Allen put the DVD in the player and we hunched down in front of the television screen. She hadn’t seen the movie in a few years, so she had to skip forward to find what she was looking for. About halfway into the picture, the visuals switched from a city setting to a more rural environment. The bickering hero and heroine, handcuffed together, were on the run from some drug dealers for some reason and had holed up in a small town. I recognized a lot of the establishing landscape shots even though I, like Allen, had never seen them with my own eyes. I recognized
them because they had been well-used shooting locations for television and movies for the best part of a century. They’d built sets for westerns and thrillers and Star Trek episodes out there. And 1980s romantic comedies. Allen found the scene she wanted and froze the picture. The underwear model was in the middle of an argument with the Brat Packer, her mouth open in suspended animation. In the background was the building from the photograph. The neon was illuminated here, and you could see the whole word: Stewarton’s. Not a V, a W.

  “A lot of times, they just abandon the sets once they’re done. It’s cheaper than tearing them down.”

  “Any idea where this exact one is, or was?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “But we can find someone who will.”

  “Allen, this investigation has more holes in it than a sieve. If you bring in the rest of the department and the feds, it’ll get back to the Samaritan. Maybe before we can get out there.”

  She smiled as though I’d made a joke.

  “What is it?” I asked, confused.

  “I couldn’t bring them in even if I wanted to. I’m on suspension.”

  “That’s on my account, I guess.”

  She nodded. “And now I’m compounding it by harboring a murder suspect.” She must have seen something in my face, because she frowned then and said, “You looked into me, didn’t you?”

  I shrugged. “You checked me out, didn’t you?”

  She had no answer to that, so she asked another question. “How come you didn’t ask me about the thing in DC?”

  “Because it wasn’t my business, and it has nothing to do with this case.”

  She looked at me for a long minute, and I thought she was going to talk more about it, but then she went back to the previous subject. “I wasn’t talking about taking out an ad in the paper about this; I was talking about going to my partner.”

  “Mazzucco? Can you trust him to keep his mouth shut?”

  “We don’t have to worry about that.”

  69