The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

Mazzucco had been at his desk for ten minutes and was in the process of pulling all of the information he could find on any and all Dean Croziers in LA City and County when his phone rang, displaying Allen’s cell number. He picked up, eyes on the screen in front of him.

  “I was just about to call you. Where are you?”

  “I’m at my apartment,” she said. There was something a little odd in her voice, an artificial brightness, maybe. Another person wouldn’t have caught it, but that was the advantage of working with someone day and night for six months straight.

  “Are you with someone?” Mazzucco asked.

  There was a very short pause before Allen answered in the negative, but it was enough to confirm she was lying. She was with Blake. Mazzucco knew he wasn’t the killer, but he also knew harboring him could end Allen’s career. He put it out of his mind for the moment.

  “Listen, Channing’s people put a rush on the prints from the house. You’re not gonna believe this.”

  “Try me.”

  “The prints came back flagged by Homeland Security—God knows what that’s about. Anyway, they used the FBI golden ticket and got a hit. Only it came back saying the prints belong to a dead man.”

  There was a pause, and Allen’s voice sounded a little strange again. Hesitant. “What was the name?”

  “Crozier. Dean Crozier.”

  Allen said nothing. Mazzucco continued. “I’m checking him out right now. Guy was in the military, which fits the profile. Killed in action, in fact. But these were recent prints, Allen. They took a set off the fucking milk in the refrigerator. I mean—”

  “What else do you have on him?”

  “Well, get this. His family was killed in ninety-seven. Murdered. Crozier was the prime suspect, but he walked. No evidence.”

  “Son of a bitch,” she said quietly.

  “Allen, are you listening to me? The guy we’re looking for’s been dead for eleven years. Only somebody forgot to tell him that. What gives?” He remembered that Allen had called him and asked her if she had anything new on her end. He was expecting her to say she’d heard from Blake, but what she said took him by surprise.

  “Actually, I do have something. A lead on the photograph.”

  It took him a second to remember. “The one from the house this morning?”

  “Yeah. I know where it was taken, Jon.”

  He listened as she explained about recognizing the building from an old movie, about how she knew they sometimes left old sets standing out there in the mountains.

  It sounded promising. “We’re still looking for a primary crime scene within reach of the dump site,” Mazzucco said thoughtfully. “Probably somewhere secluded and out of the way. That would fit.”

  “That’s where he is, Jon. I know it.”

  “We need to go to Lawrence with this,” he said before another thought occurred and he grunted with displeasure. “Shit, we probably have to bring Channing in on it, too.”

  “And tell him what? That we need to send a SWAT team down to some old derelict building because it reminds me of something I saw in a movie?”

  “You have the photograph from Crozier’s safe house.”

  “No, I don’t. The FBI has it, remember? Because you and I did not jump the warrant and carry out an illegal search.”

  “Jesus . . .”

  “And besides, they still don’t know who was in the house. They’re still focused on Blake.”

  Mazzucco sighed with frustration. He couldn’t argue that point, but again he felt himself getting sucked into Allen’s favored course of action against his will. “So what’s your alternative?”

  “We check it out ourselves first. The only problem is, these places aren’t on maps. They aren’t real places at all. So I thought if you happened to know someone we could ask . . .”

  “I can do better than that,” Mazzucco said, not without reluctance. “I might be able to talk to somebody. Somebody who would know where to look.”

  “Sounds like a plan, partner.”

  “Don’t push it, partner. As soon as I get anything like confirmation our boy has been hiding out up there, I bring everybody else in. We can work out what our excuse for being there was later.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Mazzucco snorted at that and told Allen he’d call her back. He scrolled through the numbers in his phone, looking for a man he’d known back when he worked in West LA. Darrick Bromley had been a twenty-five-year veteran with the department and had taken on a lucrative consultancy gig in his retirement: providing advice to movies and TV shows. He dialed Bromley’s cell and spent a minute or so on pleasantries before getting down to business. He described what he was looking for, the rough area where he thought it might be and the name of the movie Allen had mentioned.

  “You know, there are a lot of these old sets out there, Jon,” Bromley said after a long pause.

  “I understand,” Mazzucco said, his heart sinking. Plan B was to start looking at satellite images and checking off potential locations one by one. But then Bromley laughed.

  “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Yeah, I know the one you’re talking about. I’ve been there, in fact. It was still around as of a couple of years back. It’s not far from a hiking trail.” He thought for a minute. “You know where the old missile sites are?”

  Mazzucco was confused for a second before realizing that Bromley was talking about the decommissioned cold war–era missile defenses that circled LA. “I know some of them. There’s one up there at San Vicente Mountain, right?”

  “That’s the one. You go all the way to the end of Mulholland and bam, you’re there.”

  Mazzucco felt a jolt of electricity. Mulholland. Allen was right: this was it. Bromley gave him rough directions from the decommissioned missile site to the old set, and Mazzucco told him he owed him a beer and hung up. Two minutes later, he’d zeroed the position using the satellite view on Google Maps. It was a couple of miles from the missile site. Straight along one of the fire roads and then down a half-mile of dirt trail. Within easy reach of both Mulholland Drive and, by using an off-road vehicle, the dump site.

  He picked up the phone and tapped on Allen’s number in recent calls. In the pause while he waited for the line to connect and the dial tone to kick in, he thought about the hesitation in Allen’s voice when he asked if she was alone.

  70

  While Allen got ready to leave, I taped up my injured ankle with a bandage from her first aid box. It helped quite a bit, made it so it didn’t hurt so much to put weight on it. After that, I made a pot of coffee, all the while thinking more and more about the two teenagers in Allen’s photograph. Crozier and someone else. I thought she represented something important we’d all missed. Mazzucco called back less than ten minutes after Allen had hung up on her call to him. I was impressed. She wrote some notes down and gave him her personal email address so he could send a link over.

  “That has to be it,” she said firmly. I could hear the excitement in her voice. I knew that exact feeling intimately: the feeling when a promising lead opens up and you can feel the solution getting closer. “Yeah, I can find it. I’ll see you there soon.”

  She hung up and turned to me. “This is it, Blake. It’s in exactly the right place.” Without waiting for an answer, she moved over to the computer and, a minute later, we were looking at a perfect satellite view of a dusty plateau surrounded by ridges and with three groups of buildings. She was right. This had to be it.

  “When do we leave?” I asked.

  She was shaking her head before I’d finished the sentence. “Forget it. We don’t.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The remote for the TV was on the coffee table and within reach. By way of an answer, she picked it up and turned on the television. Rolling news again, only now the ticker was sliding past under a very familiar face. They’d used the picture from my driver’s license. Words like dangerous and wanted and manhunt jumped out at me from the scrolling red-on-white type. />
  “You’re an extremely wanted man, Blake. I don’t know how you made it this long without being caught, but you’re staying here until we get this guy.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but then I remembered there was something I could go to work on right here and backed off. “You’ll call me if you need me?”

  She hesitated. “Sure.”

  Before she left, I asked her to text me her phone picture of the photograph from the Samaritan’s house. I took a look at the pair of teenagers in the picture, focusing on the girl this time.

  I had a hunch the girl in the photograph might still be alive. And I had to find her before that changed.

  71

  The Samaritan didn’t mind waiting.

  He’d located his target’s car first and then found himself a position equidistant between it and the door to the stairwell, one that was situated in one of the blind spots of the two CCTV cameras in the underground lot.

  Over the last two decades, he’d become very accustomed to long periods of waiting followed by short, sudden bursts of action. Not only could he endure long waits without irritation, but he had grown to look forward to them as periods of reflection. He used them to reminisce over past exploits, to analyze every aspect of a recent kill. To identify mistakes and missed opportunities.

  The past few days had seen too many of both. The bodies of the three women being discovered had been unfortunate, but the involvement of the police hadn’t unduly concerned him. It had happened several times before: in Fort Bragg, in St. Louis, in Kansas City. The authorities hadn’t gotten close to him any of those times, although in KC they had forced the decision to cease his activities and move on. The problem here was a little more complex. For one, the LAPD was larger, better resourced, and more experienced at looking for people like him than any other police department in the country. And this was before the involvement of the FBI was taken into consideration. The Samaritan had never faced pursuers so blessed with resources and manpower before now. He wasn’t sure exactly how the connection had been made with his previous work, but it hadn’t truly surprised him. It had always been inevitable that someone would start to uncover the others, sooner or later.

  The involvement of the man who now called himself Carter Blake had been by far the most dangerous development. Blake had already caused him real problems, and would certainly cause him more, assuming he managed to continue to elude the police. He hadn’t been surprised in the least that Blake had managed to escape his little trap, but the primary objective of shifting the focus of suspicion to Blake had been accomplished. It had been the only logical course of action, turning Blake’s greatest advantage—the similarities between the two men—into a liability for him.

  But the necessity for quick action had caused him to make his first unforced error, unwittingly sacrificing the house in Santa Monica. He assumed the cops had located it through his viewing of the warehouse. He’d considered several similar properties upon returning to the city, but that one had been the best prospect for his purposes until he’d decided on a more suitable base. It was only after he’d set things in motion with Blake that he remembered he’d used the landline to make the appointment with the warehouse owner. He’d thought it unlikely that the owner kept much of a filing system, but it seemed he had been mistaken.

  Had this been any other time and place, Blake’s involvement alone would have been enough to make him cut his losses and leave. But he couldn’t do that, not just yet.

  He’d been careful to keep his eyes on the door to the stairwell as he thought things over, and he brought his full attention back to the here and now as he heard the sound of a woman’s shoes clacking on the concrete stairway behind the door. He settled back into the shadows as the door opened and Detective Allen appeared from within. She was putting her phone back inside her jacket, evidently having just completed a call. She let the door swing shut behind her and started walking across the basement parking lot to where her car was parked. The Samaritan watched her, being careful not to move. She looked preoccupied, in a hurry. He saw the slight raise in her jacket on the left side and knew she was carrying. He glanced at her pant legs and saw undisturbed lines on both—she wasn’t carrying a backup piece strapped to either calf. As she passed within ten feet of him, he stepped forward and said her name.

  Allen stopped with a jerk and her eyes darted to his face. Her expression relaxed a moment later.

  “What are you doing here?”

  The Samaritan widened his lips in an approximation of a smile. It always felt strange, unnatural. “I was worried about you.”

  “Worried? About me?” Suspicion in her voice. He wasn’t surprised by that.

  He nodded, changing his expression to adopt a serious, earnest look. “That’s right. It’s this Blake guy. It’s all over the news now. I started to think he might come after you.”

  Allen nodded, as though thinking this over. “Okay. Thanks, I guess. I’m fine, though. Blake probably left town already.”

  He took a step forward. She began to back away, and he saw her eyes darting to the security of her car, only feet away. Did she suspect? Had he overplayed his hand?

  “You’re sure? You’re really okay?”

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” she said. “Gotta run.”

  He said nothing as she turned and hurried toward her parked car, unlocking it with the remote as she walked. The Samaritan’s eyes made a quick surveillance of the deserted subterranean space as she retreated. If she did suspect, it would be better to take Allen out of the picture right now. It would be easy enough to close the distance between them as she stopped to open the door and get in. He could move very, very quietly. He’d be on top of her before she knew anything. He could touch the steel of his blade to the soft pink flesh of her throat and force her to climb into her own trunk. Or he could kill her right here and leave her to bleed out and be discovered by the next resident who drove in.

  Allen reached the door and fumbled with the handle. She cast a glance back toward him and got in.

  No. The Samaritan fought back the building urge. He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. He’d already created problems by acting impulsively. An impromptu abduction or murder, without laying the groundwork first, would be foolish. Particularly when he knew he would be satisfying the urge soon enough.

  He relaxed his body and simply watched as Allen started the car, pulled out of the space, and drove toward the exit ramp, out of harm’s way. For the moment.

  72

  I sat on the couch and watched Allen’s television for a little longer while I gathered my thoughts. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what was being said, but I absorbed the important stuff. It was being emphasized that the FBI were searching for a man named Carter Blake who had been identified leaving the scene of an ongoing investigation in Inglewood. By the looks of things, they’d only just released the information that another body had been discovered in the warehouse and it was being tied to the ongoing Samaritan investigation. The FBI guy, Channing, had addressed the press and refused to be drawn when asked directly if he could confirm the man they were currently hunting was the Samaritan.

  “I can say he’s a person of interest, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll draw your own conclusions.”

  Wonderful. The more I saw of Channing, the less I liked him. I got the feeling he was the type of guy who wouldn’t worry too much about trifling concerns like guilt and innocence if it meant he could close a big case and bask in the glory. I knew they’d never be able to prove I’d committed any of the murders—because I hadn’t—but I’d been around enough manhunts to know that the suspect sometimes doesn’t live long enough to get to that point. Allen had been right: the safest place for me to stay was right here.

  I shut off the TV and found Allen’s computer at the other side of the living room. The girl in the photograph was important. Not because she looked like the three victims in the hills, but because they looked li
ke her.

  Staring at the picture, I knew that she was the reason those women had been chosen. From the start, I’d wondered what had brought Crozier back to his home turf after all this time. When his MO had shifted subtly from random murders to a far more consistent victim profile, I’d known on some level he was rehearsing, maybe building up to a specific person. The choice of Castillo and Dane as the latest victims—both of them diverging a little from that profile—had reinforced that suspicion the same way the locations of their deaths had told me he was trying to shift attention away from the dump site in the hills. The Samaritan was trying to distract my attention like a three-card monte sharp. Don’t look there; look over here.

  But the photograph gave the lie to that. The girl in the picture shared a mild likeness with Crozier. A cousin, perhaps, or a half sister. The clincher was the fact he’d kept it so long. It was important.

  It hadn’t occurred to me to check if Crozier had any other family in LA. The articles I’d been able to dig up had all reported that the entire family, minus him, had been killed.

  Fifteen years ago, I could never have found what I was looking for in anything less than two days, probably involving a dozen phone calls and a trip to the Hall of Records. Now I could do better sitting in somebody’s living room and tapping on a keyboard for a while.

  Within five minutes, I’d mapped the key points in Crozier’s life from birth to six months after the murders of his parents. None of that directly gave me what I needed, but it did tell me where he went to high school. Thirty seconds on the school’s home page gave me the archived yearbooks for the last half century. I flicked through the relevant years, easily finding pictures of Crozier and his sister, Terri, each time. Then I went back and looked more closely, hoping for a break. In the ninety-six edition, I got it. The girl from the photograph. The hair was tied back, but the eyes and cheekbones and smile were all the same. There was a name—Kimberley Frank—and a quote: Better to burn out than fade away. The posed nihilism was at odds with the beaming picture. Given the date, I was betting the Neil Young reference came by way of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. It fit with the Nirvana T-shirt in Allen’s picture.