The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  Five minutes later, I had the connection. Kimberley Frank was Crozier’s half sister on the paternal side. David Crozier had fathered her with another woman around eighteen months before his son was born. Her mother had died when she was two, and she’d spent the next twelve years in foster care before winding up in a group home called Blackstones. While there, she’d enrolled in Crozier’s high school in 1996, and—I guessed—somehow they’d discovered their connection. A connection that meant that Kimberley Frank was the sole blood relation to have survived the family massacre in ninety-seven.

  Five minutes after that, I had everything else I needed, including an address in Los Angeles. In Santa Monica.

  The street running parallel to the one where Allen had found the safe house.

  That final detail turned an urgent search into a critical one. I took my phone out and called Allen’s number. It went to voicemail, and I left a short message without identifying myself.

  “Allen. Regarding the picture, you might want to look up a Kimberley Frank. Quickly.”

  I gave the address, hung up, and considered my next move. Allen had been right about me lying low, I thought again. Without a doubt, the safest thing for me to do was to stay put.

  Yeah, right.

  I switched the computer off and walked through to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror to compare what I saw there against the driver’s license photo I’d seen a few minutes before on the television screen.

  The driver’s license was the only identification I had. If I could get away with it, I wouldn’t have even that. It was the bare minimum official documentation I had to have in order to move reasonably freely.

  The guidelines for the photograph are pretty stringent, aimed at ensuring consistency for facial recognition software, but even so, you can manipulate those guidelines to make sure the resulting image is of as little use as possible. Ironically, the requirement to keep a neutral expression helps you to look a lot less like you. A smiling face is far more characteristic than the kind of blank, dead-eyed stare that I was only too happy to provide. I’d also prepared for the photograph by letting my hair grow a little longer than I usually keep it and cultivating a four-day growth of stubble. In contrast to my usual dress habit of a jacket and a shirt, I’d worn a faded black T-shirt under a hoodie. Throw into the mix the fact that I’d aged three years since registering the license, and I was already well on my way to looking like a different man than the one in the picture.

  I found a box of disposable razors in the bathroom cabinet and some rose-scented shaving gel—the type that comes in a pink can and costs double what they charge for the men’s version, despite it being exactly the same product. In another couple of minutes I was clean shaven and had brushed my hair back neatly. At worst, I looked like the accountant big brother of the guy in the driver’s license photo. You’d have to look close to see even that resemblance, I hoped.

  I thought about leaving the way I’d come in, through the parking area beneath the building, where I could borrow one of the parked cars. Reluctantly, I decided against it. On balance, stealing a car was more risky than taking a cab. I put my sunglasses on and took the elevator down to the ground floor, where I left by the street entrance. I started walking. Just being a pedestrian in LA made me stick out, and I started to feel more and more exposed. I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to risk stealing the car. A red Ford passed by me a little too slowly and I had the sense of the driver glancing at me. I hoped it was idle curiosity rather than recognition.

  A minute later, a taxi appeared with its hire light on. Gratefully, I stuck a hand out and got in the back. I gave the cabbie the directions and hunched down in the seat, watching the deserted sidewalks as we crawled through the late-afternoon traffic.

  73

  The 101 was moving relatively smoothly for a change, and it was a few minutes before the traffic bunched up and Allen had the time to glance at the screen and see the missed call from Blake. She dialed into her voicemail, listened to the short message, and hung up. She thought about the weird encounter in the parking garage a few minutes before. If she hadn’t been so worried about someone finding Blake in her apartment, she’d have been more forthright, told her concerned visitor not to hang around her place like that. Putting the incident out of her mind, she dialed Mazzucco’s desk number again, hoping she’d catch him before he left.

  It rang five times, and Allen was about to give up when the call was answered. But the voice was not Mazzucco’s. It belonged to one of the last people Allen wanted to hear from: Joe Coleman, the squad-room comedian.

  “Allen,” he said, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. “I heard you’d been a bad girl.”

  “I don’t have time for this shit, Coleman. Do you want to help me out, or do you want to hang the fuck up and forget I called?”

  There was a pause, and then he spoke again, sounding chastened but curious. “What do you need?”

  Allen talked quickly, told him to access the DMV record for a Kimberley Frank of Santa Monica and to email the details through to her. She hung up without waiting for a response, immediately wondering if she’d made a mistake by trusting Coleman even this far. But then a minute or two later, her phone pinged for a new email. She tapped into her emails by touch, keeping her eyes on the road, and then glanced down at the screen.

  The email contained a picture of an older but easily recognizable face. No question about it. It was her—the girl from the Samaritan’s photograph. And then the picture vanished and Blake’s number flashed up again.

  “Allen?” There was echo and muted traffic noise in the background, like he was in a car.

  “I’m here. I told you to stay in the apartment. You’re too—”

  “Forget about that right now. Did you check out Kimberley Frank?”

  “Yeah, looks like the girl from the picture, all right. But how do we know Crozier even has this woman on his radar? Okay, the photograph shows they’ve met, but so what?”

  “She’s his sister, Allen. His half sister.”

  That brought her up short. If Crozier had killed his family, it made sense he’d want to finish the job. “But if he did kill his family out of some kind of grudge, why not take care of her back then?”

  “You’re forgetting something. He was a first timer back then, most likely. He’d planned the murders, and he was smart enough to get away with them, but he was still in the frame. You kill your own family and there’s no way to avoid that suspicion, no matter how smart you are. Even if he’d wanted to, he couldn’t have killed the sister back then, not while the heat was on. Three months later, he’d joined the army. Maybe everything up until now was just working his way back to this point. He’s come full circle.”

  As he spoke, Allen thought about the two pictures of Kimberley Frank, separated by more than a decade and a half but united by common details. Female, Caucasian, brunette. Appearance: twenties to early thirties. Just like Boden, Morrow, and Burnett.

  “He’s obsessed by her,” she said, as much to herself as to Blake. “That’s why the first three victims looked the way they did. He’s killing her over and over again.”

  Blake started speaking again, but Allen told him she’d call him back and hung up. She’d received a new text message while on the phone to Blake. It was from Mazzucco: Found the road. See you soon?

  Allen grimaced, weighing her options. The next exit was a mile away. She could drop off the 101 and backtrack toward Kimberley Frank’s address, but it would take her at least twenty minutes. And Mazzucco was already well on his way to the abandoned set. She couldn’t be in both places at once. She picked the phone up again, intending to call Dispatch before remembering that she wasn’t officially on the job right now. Instead she dialed Coleman’s number again. She told him to call it in and arrange for whichever patrol car was closest to go to Kimberley Frank’s house and bring her into protective custody. Then Allen changed her mind. She asked Coleman to tell the uniforms to hold Kimberley at t
he house until she arrived.

  She slowed and took the exit. Mazzucco could handle himself for a little longer. Kimberley Frank had just become the priority.

  74

  The taxi had almost reached Kimberley Frank’s address by the time I ended my conversation with Allen. I assumed she was arranging for a black-and-white to head straight here, so I knew I would have to move fast. I raised my voice and asked the cabbie to slow down, so we were coasting at fifteen miles an hour as we passed the house. I wanted to give the place the once-over before getting closer.

  No cars parked directly outside, no one in the front yard. I told the driver to let me out three doors up and handed over the fare, telling him to keep the change. He was a young, Middle Eastern guy in his early twenties who smiled and then looked more closely at me as he took the bills.

  “Are you famous or something? You look kind of familiar.”

  I pushed the sunglasses higher up on the bridge of my nose. “You got me. American Idol, a couple of years back.”

  He looked doubtful at first but then smiled again. “That must be it. Hey, is Simon Cowell really—”

  “Worse,” I said and made a hasty retreat out of the backseat. I slapped the side of the cab and waited for it to vanish around the next corner before I headed back along the street to Kimberley Frank’s house.

  As soon as I got within twenty feet of the front door, I felt a dull ache in the pit of my stomach. It was ajar. People didn’t deliberately leave their doors ajar in Los Angeles, even in a relatively safe neighborhood like this one. I got close, my senses attuned for noises and flashes of motion, and nudged the door open with my shoulder, being careful not to touch anything. It swung open with a creak and unveiled what looked like the aftermath of a violent struggle: furniture upended, a broken vase, a phone lying on the ground, its cable ripped out of the wall, a shattered cell phone on the ground not far from it. There was no sound from within.

  I was about to step over the threshold to make sure when I heard the sound of a police siren approaching fast. I backed away from the door and glanced around me. There was a path around the side of the house bordered by a low fence separating this lot from the next. I ducked down the side, vaulted the fence, and made my way into the neighboring backyard. Thankfully, it was empty. There was an old six-foot-high corrugated iron fence at the back. I scrambled up and over, into a narrow access road that ran between this street and the next one over. My feet landed on the opposite side just as I heard the police car come to rest outside the Frank house.

  I ran down the access road to where it came out on the street. I needed a car, fast. My eyes scanned the street for a good prospect. It was a reasonably affluent area, so there was no shortage of new and nearly new vehicles parked curbside. But that was the problem: newer cars had newer security features. They were a little more difficult to break into—a lot more difficult to hotwire. I needed something old. And then I saw it. A couple hundred yards from me, diagonally across the street. Not old—vintage. A 1973 Chevrolet Camaro Z28. Red with twin vertical black stripes down the hood. Under normal circumstances, way too nice a car for me to consider stealing. But I was in a hurry, and these were not normal circumstances.

  The Samaritan had taken his last victim, and there was only one place on earth he could be going.

  75

  The location of the abandoned town set wasn’t on any GPS, of course, because it wasn’t a real place. Nevertheless, by using Darrick Bromley’s directions together with Google’s satellite imaging, as well as a good old-fashioned map, Mazzucco had been able to plan out the route with a fair degree of accuracy. He’d even found pictures of the abandoned set on one of those Hidden LA websites, so he knew what it would look like on the ground. He had an LA road map in the car, the book open to the page he needed on the passenger seat.

  The first part of the journey was straightforward: along the entire length of Mulholland, past the last clutch of houses, and on to where the road entered the San Vicente Mountain Park. Mazzucco took a left turn onto the West Mandeville Fire Road, which took him past the LA-96 Nike Missile site. He followed the curving road for about a mile, looking for the next turn on the left. When he found it, it took him onto a narrow road that led upward. He slowed down and hit the trip meter under the odometer as he took the turn. There would be no signposts for the next part of the journey: all he had to go on were Bromley’s directions and the photographs from the website. By cross-referencing with the satellite images, he had worked out that the dirt track leading to his destination was situated at approximately two and a half miles along the length of this road.

  As the trip meter clocked up toward 2.5 in tenth-of-a-mile increments, Mazzucco began to slow down, watching the right-hand side of the road for evidence of pathways. At 2.6, he saw it. A tight dirt track, unsurfaced and almost obscured by bushes. If Mazzucco hadn’t been going so slowly and hadn’t been on the lookout for exactly this, he’d have passed right by and been none the wiser.

  He stopped the car and got out, examining the concealed entrance. There were multiple tire tracks, crisscrossing one another and traveling in both directions. The tracks looked reasonably fresh. Fresh enough to tell him somebody had used this road since the rain on Saturday night, anyway.

  He took his phone out and sent a text message to Allen. If she was coming straight from her apartment, she’d be here within another twenty minutes. The problem he had with waiting here for her was the same as the problem he’d had with waiting for the warrant: there could be somebody up there who needed his help now, not in twenty minutes’ time.

  His phone buzzed in his hand, and he tapped to open the message, expecting it to be Allen. Instead it was his wife, asking, ETA for dinner? X

  Mazzucco felt a twinge of guilt. He’d barely thought about Julia or Daisy all day. Quickly, he tapped out a reply, telling her not to wait for him. If Allen was right about the old set, they might be able to shut the Samaritan down today. Maybe then things would cool off a little and he could start getting home on time for a change. Maybe.

  He considered getting back in the car and driving onward along the track but decided against it after a moment’s thought. If he’d calculated right, the set was less than half a mile along the track. He could cover that on foot in a few minutes. That way, he wouldn’t risk alerting anyone who happened to be up there with the noise of the engine.

  He’d give the place a quick once-over and wait for Allen if it looked like he’d need the backup. Mazzucco took a second to check his gun, locked the car, and started walking up the rutted dirt road into the wilderness.

  76

  Allen was on Santa Monica Boulevard, about a mile from Kimberley Frank’s house, when her phone rang again. There was evidently some kind of holdup up ahead, because traffic had come to a dead stop instead of its usual jerking progress. As she checked the display and saw it was Blake again, she heard faint ambulance sirens behind her. Probably some kind of accident up ahead, then. She hoped it hadn’t prevented the black-and-white from getting to Kimberley Frank’s place. And then Blake’s first words to her made that academic.

  “He’s got her already.”

  “What?”

  “I was just at Kimberley Frank’s place. She’s gone, and it looks like she didn’t go quietly. We need to get out to the mountains. I’m on my way there right now.”

  “In whose car?” Allen asked, then quickly interrupted his answer. “I don’t want to know. Okay, Mazzucco’s out there now. We can catch up with him. I was on my way down to Frank’s house . . .”

  As Allen spoke, the ambulance passed by her in the other lane. When the blare of the siren dropped away again, she thought she could hear others approaching, too.

  “Where will I meet you?” she said when she could hear the sound of her own voice again.

  “Remember the old missile site we saw on the map?” Blake said after a second.

  “Sure. Make it twenty minutes.”

  She hit the button on the dash
to activate the light and siren and pulled out of the line of traffic, making a U-turn and putting her foot down.

  77

  Captain Don McCall was parked in the Universal City Overlook. He knew Allen was headed for the address in Santa Monica, but he was playing the odds by staying around Mulholland. He wasn’t really interested in Allen anyway, only Blake. Channing’s suspicion that Allen was still in contact with the fugitive had been dead-on, and his instinct that McCall was the best person to find out more had been similarly well founded. It was just a pity from Channing’s point of view that he’d never see the benefit. McCall’s cell rang again, displaying Rooker’s personal number. Both of the men he’d trusted enough to let in on this surveillance had been warned to keep things strictly off the grid. He picked it up and held it to his ear, not saying anything.

  “Captain? We got another call on the subject’s phone. She’s not headed to the address in Santa Monica anymore. It looks like she’s setting up a meet this time.”

  McCall smiled. “Same voice on the phone?”

  “Same unidentified male. They’re both headed out to the mountains.”

  “Where’s the rendezvous?”

  “Unconfirmed. They said something about a missile site, which I think could be . . .”

  “I know where they’re going.”

  “Do you want me to . . . ?”

  “Negative on that,” McCall said quickly. “I’m going to observe the meet personally. I want to tail them and see where they’re headed after this. If I need backup, I’ll call you.”

  There was a pause. “Captain . . .”

  “Did I ask you for an opinion?”