by Cross, Mason
There was still a quarter of a tank left, which was more than enough to get him where he wanted to go, with enough left over for the car’s onward trip.
The clock on the dash read a few minutes to five, which meant he still had almost an hour until daybreak. As he neared his destination, he was careful not to let up his guard, keeping a watchful eye on the occasional cars that appeared ahead of him and in the rearview mirror.
People who do not live in Los Angeles like to complain that it all looks identical: an endless sprawl of street after street after street, all looking much the same. Not true. Just tonight, he’d driven past gated communities and through peaceful suburban picket-fence neighborhoods. He’d encountered architectural marvels and the gray utilitarian concrete of 1960s apartment buildings. And now the geography changed once more. Overgrown yards, broken fences, gang graffiti. Apartment blocks enclosed by steel fences—gated communities of a different kind. Ageing duplexes with the street numbers spray-painted on the front. Here and there, the man saw properties that were better maintained, that had neat lawns and freshly painted doors. He knew most people would wonder why they bothered, but he understood. The simple pleasure of taking pride in yourself and your work while everything else went to hell.
The specific character of the neighborhood was a momentary distraction, and his eyes remained firmly on the road. If he was to be stopped by a traffic cop anywhere on the journey, it would most likely be here. The silver Porsche stuck out like a Michelangelo sculpture in a landfill. But that was exactly why he’d brought it here. It was how he’d be able to make the car disappear for a while.
He saw a short line of retail units—a couple of easy credit places, a vacant unit, and a liquor store. Two Hispanic men in their twenties were facing each other on the sidewalk. They looked drunk and were engaged in what was either a spirited debate or the beginnings of a fistfight. The bigger one wore a sleeveless shirt and his arms were coated with tattoos.
The man in the baseball cap pulled the Porsche over and put the brake on. He took a last look around the interior. The leather seats were spotless, nothing in the footwells, nothing in the glove compartment.
Leaving the keys in the ignition and the engine still running, he opened the door and got out. The two men had noticed him now, the incongruity of the Porsche and its driver distracting them from their disagreement.
“Hey, man,” the one with the tattoos said. “Nice car.” He said it as though he was weighing up whether or not he wanted the statement to be a threat.
The man in the baseball cap made no acknowledgment, other than to tug the brim a little further down over his face. As he walked past the two men, the tattooed one moved to intercept, grabbing his arm.
“I’m talking to you, man.”
The man in the baseball cap stopped, looked down at the fingers curled around his forearm, and then raised his head again so that his eyes met those of the tattooed man. The guy blinked and his fingers snapped open as though spring-loaded.
He kept staring at him, unblinking.
The tattooed guy looked at the Porsche, with its engine running, and then his eyes moved all around, as if to say, Look at this place. “You’re just going to leave that? Here? Are you nuts?”
“Luis, what the fuck, man?” the older one said, keeping his distance from the pair.
The man turned away from the two drunks and started to walk again, his strides carrying him along at a steady four miles an hour. He had taken less than two dozen paces before he heard the door of the Porsche slam shut and the idling engine roar to life again. He kept walking as he heard the tires peel away on the damp surface, turning and heading in the opposite direction. He kept walking as the sound of the powerful flat-6 engine built and then faded and then vanished into thin air.
The man in the baseball cap walked ten blocks north as the sky began to reveal the first hints of light on the horizon. Another mile or so and he would catch a bus and sit anonymously among the luckless Sunday-morning shift workers. He’d alight a mile or so from the house and make the rest of the trip on foot.
And then? A shower, perhaps something to eat, and then sleep. It would be good to get some rest. It had been another busy night.
5
LOS ANGELES
A Sunday-morning homicide and a hangover: never a good combination, Detective Jessica Allen thought. How did the Johnny Cash song go? Something about there not being a way to hold your head that didn’t hurt.
Going to Denny’s friend’s birthday party had been a bad idea, but drinking as much as she had had been a much worse idea. This wasn’t like her, but she realized it had happened a couple of times recently. It would be easy to blame the job, and she knew plenty who did just that, but she knew that wasn’t it. She was drinking a little more because spending sober time with her boyfriend was beginning to feel like a drag. Probably not a good sign. She resolved to make some changes—easy to do with the headache as an incentive.
God, it was a bad one. Her head was throbbing so painfully that, perversely, catching a body dump out in the Santa Monica Mountains qualified as a break. It meant fresh air and a cool breeze instead of staring at a computer monitor for the next few hours.
Or at least, it would mean that, as soon as they got out of the damn car.
The sun had almost finished burning off the morning mist, and it was already clear and warm. Allen was pretending to look out the window as they drove north through relatively light—for LA—traffic on the 405. What she was actually doing was resting her eyes behind her sunglasses. She started to feel the welcoming pull of sleep and reluctantly fought against it, turning her head to look at her partner in the driver’s seat.
Jonathan Mazzucco was a little older than she was; probably in his early forties, though she’d never gotten around to asking. He looked good, as he always did. Better than the father of a three-month-old had any right to, give or take some dark shadows under his eyes. Never a crease on his suit, never the hint of stubble on his unblemished face. His hair never seemed to get longer or shorter. It just stayed in its no-nonsense crew cut. Allen liked to joke about it; she’d ask him how the commute was from the fifties, but he never seemed to mind, or feel the need to respond in kind.
Mazzucco was smiling behind his own sunglasses. Either in amusement at Allen’s fragile condition, or simply because he was enjoying being allowed to drive without his partner putting up a fight, for once.
“You take some aspirin?” he asked, without looking back at her.
Allen nodded. “Four.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to take four at a time.”
“Trust me, I needed four. How much farther?”
They’d left the freeway and the city proper behind them now and were winding their way north up Mandeville Canyon Road. Mazzucco made a mental calculation. “Ten minutes. Can you hang on?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look fine.”
“Fuck you.”
Mazzucco laughed.
Allen turned back to the window so that he wouldn’t see her smiling too. She liked Mazzucco. He was one of the few she did like after six long months. Six months, and DC to LA was proving to be a more difficult transition than that simple exchange of initials would suggest. It wasn’t that the other guys in Robbery Homicide were unpleasant, exactly. Joe Coleman aside, most of them were fine. But it was almost as though there were some kind of invisible force field that kept her separate from the rest of them.
Or perhaps it was more like a firewall, something that allowed the other detectives to interact with her and work with her but without letting anything extraneous through. At first this hadn’t surprised her—it was the standard team response to a new recruit. It was even more to be expected with cops, who were more suspicious than average by profession. But as the weeks became months, she began to wonder if the frostiness was exacerbated by the fact that she’d arrived in the department with more baggage than most. There were times when she’d wanted to a
sk Mazzucco about it, about whether or not the other guys actively disliked her. And each time she’d realized how pathetically high school that sounded and dismissed the idea.
The road took an unexpected dip and shunted office politics to the back of Allen’s mind once more. The wave of nausea rose and retreated, leaving an unpleasant thought in her mind like driftwood on a beach.
“This isn’t a decomp, is it?”
“Nope. Day or two at the most, they said. And if it’s one day, we might even have an idea of who it is.”
“Yeah?”
Mazzucco nodded. “Sarah Dutton. Reported missing last night; lives up on Mulholland.”
“How long was she gone before they reported her?”
“Since last night.”
“So why do we know about it already?” Allen was curious. Contrary to popular belief, there was no official waiting period of twenty-four hours before you could report somebody missing, but that was generally still how it worked in practice.
“I guess Dad made sure it was on the fast track.”
“Ah,” Allen said. “She lives on Mulholland. So who’s the father? Movie producer or something?”
“I don’t think he’s in the business,” Mazzucco said. “Although I heard he lives in Marlon Brando’s old house.”
“That’s novel. I was beginning to think there was nobody in this town who wasn’t either a cop or an out-of-work actor.”
Mazzucco grinned. “And how is the new boyfriend? Dave, is it?”
“Denny.” She sighed. “I’m sure he’s fine.”
“Ohhh-kay.” Mazzucco’s eyebrows rose behind his sunglasses.
“No, really. Denny’s great.”
“But . . .”
“But I think he’d prefer it if I were an out-of-work actor rather than a cop, you know?”
“Allen, there are some days I’d prefer to be an out-of-work actor rather than a cop. A lot of days.”
Allen smiled and tucked a stray lock of blond hair behind her ear. The headache was way too intense to wear it in her usual ponytail. “How’s Julia?” she asked after a minute. She asked only out of politeness, because he’d made the effort to ask about Denny. From the way Mazzucco’s wife had sized her up the one time they’d met, she was pretty sure they weren’t ever going to be getting together on a social basis.
“She’s great,” Mazzucco said quickly, unconsciously mirroring her lukewarm endorsement of Denny. Allen could always tell when Mazzucco and his wife had been fighting the day before. He was always a little quieter, less chatty. She guessed a cop’s marriage was stressful enough—throw a new baby into the mix and it wasn’t surprising things were a little tense. All of a sudden, Allen was grateful that most of her off-duty problems could be solved with aspirin.
Mazzucco slowed and took the turnoff for the fire road. The surface was rough and pitted for the initial stretch. A minute later, they saw a uniformed cop standing in front of the open gate at the point where the road turned into a narrow dirt track. He waved them down. The narrow-eyed stare told Allen that he was reasonably convinced of who they were by the make and model of their car but wasn’t taking any chances. He approached the driver’s window, which was already rolled down, and Mazzucco badged him.
“Detective Mazzucco, Detective Allen, RHD.”
The uniform nodded and told them his name was McComb, out of West LA Division, and waved them through.
Mazzucco slowed to ten miles an hour or so as they passed through the gateway and onto the dirt track.
The scene was another half mile along the fire road. Two more marked cars and a coroner’s van were jammed at the edge of the track in single file. The hill rose up from the road at a shallow gradient, and the focus of activity was about fifty yards up the slope. Mazzucco parked on the dirt shoulder and they got out and started the ascent. The earth was still damp from the rains the previous night as they picked their way up through the rocks and brush.
Allen breathed in and out through her nose, grateful to be out of the car at last. She decided the pulsing headache was at least as much to do with caffeine withdrawal as it was to do with the hangover, and she regretted not having had time to get a strong black coffee before leaving headquarters.
There were four more uniforms up here, arranged around a nude female body. She was about five six, slim, had dark brown hair, and was facedown and smeared from head to toe with dirt. The coroner investigator was on his knees by the body, scraping dirt from the victim’s fingernails into a plastic evidence bag. There was a small tattoo of a butterfly or a fairy or something in black ink at the base of her spine. Allen showed her ID this time and introduced herself and her partner. Then she opened her notebook and started jotting down the specifics of the scene for the report as the older of the four cops gave them the basics.
“Caucasian female, late teens to early twenties. No identification, obviously.”
“What about that?” Mazzucco said, pointing to the ink.
The cop snorted. “Yeah. That’ll narrow it down.”
“Preliminary cause of death?” Allen asked, addressing the coroner investigator this time.
He didn’t look up. “Slit throat, multiple stab wounds, partial strangulation. Some shallow lacerations to the face and upper body, too.”
“She was tortured,” Mazzucco said.
“For sure.”
“Sexual assault?” Allen inquired.
“We’ll do a rape kit at the morgue. Until then there’s no way to be sure. No preliminary physical evidence, though.”
“Okay,” Allen said. “Can you turn her over?”
The coroner investigator waved at one of the uniforms for an assist. The two of them moved the body from its front onto its back, performing the maneuver with respect and care, as though moving a living person who was merely unconscious.
The body was smeared with dirt on the front, too. There were puncture wounds and cuts all over her abdomen, many of them plugged with dirt. A pair of perfectly symmetrical diagonal cuts crossed her cheeks, as though tracing the paths of tears. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the cohort of intruders. Allen thought they were gray, or a washed-out blue. Either way, they matched the drained colorlessness of the rest of her. The throat was cut deeply, from ear to ear. With one stroke, by the looks of it. No way was this a first timer. And yet the cut had strangely ragged edges to it, unlike the marks on the face and body. Allen had seen cut throats before, more than she cared to remember, but this one looked different somehow.
Mazzucco gestured at the dirt streaking the body. “Was she buried when she was found? Partially buried, maybe?”
The uniform who’d helped to turn the body pointed up the hill to where there was a fluorescent marker staked in the earth. From that point to this, they could see evidence of slippage, of overturned earth.
“The grave was up there,” he said. “You can go have a look if you like. All of the rain caused a pretty good landslide. You see that shit last night? Insane.”
“Insane,” Allen repeated, eyes still on the ragged gash in the girl’s throat, which was somehow less out of the ordinary in this town than inclement weather.
“It was actually a good grave,” he continued, in the tone of a connoisseur of such things. “Half of the goddamn hillside came down last night; otherwise she would have been one of the ones we don’t find.”
Mazzucco was nodding. The Santa Monica Mountains probably played host to more unofficial burial plots than anywhere else in the United States. With the exception of the desert outside of Vegas, of course.
Allen, who’d been crouched down, examining the dirt-filled wounds in the body, stood up and looked around, headache forgotten for the moment.
“This isn’t the primary crime scene, is it?”
The coroner investigator was already shaking his head in sympathy. Body dumps, particularly in an environment like this, were the toughest cases to clear. They left no crime scene and no trail. “Again, difficult to be sure. But no.
I think it’s the disposal site only.”
Allen nodded. “Because it’s a good dump site. Easy to reach, but a couple miles from the nearest homes. A closed gate, but no real security. Good visibility in both directions, lots of notice if anyone does decide to drive past. Let’s get some more people out here to keep digging.”
“You think there’s more?” Mazzucco said. “More from this guy, I mean.”
Allen was looking at the ragged gash in the victim’s throat again.
“I guarantee it.”
6
Allen swigged from a bottle of tepid water as she sat on the hood of the gray department-issue Ford Taurus and watched them digging on the hillside. They’d been out here almost three hours now, and it was a little after noon. She was thinking about details. About how funny it was how you could still remember so many details about something you’d seen years ago, assuming that something left enough of an impact on you.
“Something on your mind?”
She started at the voice. Mazzucco was behind her, his jacket removed, arms folded on top of the roof of the car.
She screwed the lid back on the bottle and swallowed the last gulp. “What do you mean?”
“You think they’re going to find more bodies up there? Courtesy of this guy?”
“Yeah, I do. Don’t you?”
“Why?”
“Why do you think? It’s an optimum dump site, and that wasn’t the work of a first timer. A rookie could see that, Jon.”
It was true. Everything they’d seen so far pointed to the body being the latest victim in a series, not a one-off killing. The torture wounds showed patience, deliberation, confidence. Restraint, even, if that wasn’t an oxymoron. He’d been careful to keep the girl alive for a while. The killing stroke had been delivered with experience and with absolute resolve in one attempt. More than one person had commented on the professionalism of the grave. Luck was the only reason this body had been discovered. Add it all up and everything pointed to this being the work of an experienced killer.