by Cross, Mason
He walked across the cavernous foyer and through a twelve-foot archway that gave onto another vast room. Allen glanced at Mazzucco. He stared back, the look on his face saying, Be careful. Allen didn’t know whether he was warning her to take care not to upset an emotional relative, or to take care not to piss off a rich and influential businessman. Probably both.
Dutton returned carrying a framed eight-by-ten photograph. He bypassed Allen without looking at her, handed it to Mazzucco. Mazzucco studied it, holding it in both hands. Keeping his eyes on the picture, he moved to Allen’s side, so she could examine it, too. The frame was silver in color, probably real silver, and the photograph showed a confident, pretty young brunette wearing a gown and a square academic cap. She had blue eyes and was displaying two perfect rows of teeth. She looked a lot like the body they’d viewed an hour before. But then she also looked like a lot of other girls that age. Allen raised her eyes from the photograph to meet Mazzucco’s, conscious of Dutton’s expectant gaze on the two of them.
He didn’t look sure, either.
Dutton cleared his throat. When he spoke, his voice was almost steady. Almost but not quite. “Tell me.”
Allen opened her mouth, but Mazzucco tapped her on the forearm, indicating he wanted her to let him take the lead.
“We recovered the body of a young woman, not far from here,” he said.
“It’s her, isn’t it? What happened to her? You guys are Homicide, so that means some son of a bitch killed her, right? Was it that Josh kid? That little . . .”
Mazzucco was shaking his head. “Now, hold on. The body was . . . We did not find any identification on the deceased. What time did you last see your daughter?”
“Last night, must have been six . . . no five o’clock. She was headed down to Santa Monica. Some birthday party, I think. I was going out, too.”
“You mentioned a guy named Josh?”
“Her boyfriend, apparently. I’m sure he’d have been there.”
“We’ll want to speak to him,” Allen said. “What time did you expect her home last night?”
Dutton blinked and thought about it. “I got home around one thirty a.m. Her car wasn’t in the driveway or the garage. Her curfew is eleven thirty.”
“Her curfew?” Allen repeated, unable to keep her incredulity at bay.
Dutton’s eyes flared up. “That’s right, Detective. She has a curfew. While she lives in my house, she obeys my rules. Is that quite all right with you?”
“I’m sorry,” Allen said, though she wasn’t sure why she should be. Dutton’s daughter was twenty-two. Old enough to stay up past midnight.
“What kind of car does she drive?” Mazzucco asked quickly, as much to defuse the tension as because it was the natural follow-up question.
“A Porsche 911 Carrera Cabriolet. Silver. I bought it last December, for her birthday.”
Allen felt the vibration of her phone in her pocket. A repeated, sustained pulse, which meant it was a call. She ignored it.
Mazzucco nodded and noted the information on the car down. “We’re going to need the license plate.”
“Of course,” Dutton said, seeming to settle down again. “Your colleagues in the Missing Persons Unit already have it, but if it will help things along . . .” He looked down at the marble floor and seemed to gather himself. When he looked back at Mazzucco, his voice was steady. “I’ve been calling her all night. Straight to voicemail every time. You think it’s her, Detective?”
Allen remembered the tattoo. “Mr. Dutton, does your daughter have any identifying marks? Like piercings, or a tattoo, perhaps?”
He shrugged. “Sure. What kid doesn’t, these days? Some kind of Chinese symbol, on her left shoulder.” The way Walter Dutton said it, Allen could tell just how happy the old man was about that one. And then she processed what he had said and what it meant. She looked at Mazzucco, then back to Dutton. “She doesn’t have any others? Like a butterfly maybe?”
Dutton’s eyes narrowed. “Not that I know of.” Then they widened again as a thought occurred to him. “A butterfly? On the small of her back?”
Allen nodded.
“It’s not her,” Dutton said, a complicated look on his face. A look caught between relief and shock. “It’s not Sarah.”
Mazzucco and Allen exchanged glances as Dutton hurried back through the archway and returned with another photograph, this one showing two young women, bathed in different shades of neon. This was a more natural, candid image, taken in a bar or a club. Sarah Dutton was on the right, recognizable from the graduation photograph they’d just seen. The girl on the left was recognizable too. There was no doubt about it this time. Allen had been looking at her face less than an hour before.
“Kelly,” Dutton said. “Her name is Kelly Boden.”
Dutton talked quickly. Their initial victim was one of his daughter’s friends. Best friend, in fact. Like his own daughter, Sarah, Kelly was twenty-two years old, five six, slim build, with dark hair. He didn’t blame them for the mix-up given the circumstances. He said he’d mistaken one for the other more than once with their backs to him.
As she was listening, Allen’s phone buzzed again in her pocket. Just a single pulse this time. She took it out and read the three-word text message.
Two more bodies.
9
The second and third bodies had been in the earth longer than Kelly Boden, but neither for more than a week or two at most. The coroner investigator said he was fairly sure of that. Decomposition was more advanced in both bodies, but they were both still relatively fresh. There was a strong possibility that one of them was only a few days’ dead. On that one, they found a couple of small twine fibers on the insides of the wrists, indicating she’d been tied up.
There was no doubt that both were the work of the same killer.
Both of the new bodies were nude, had been tortured, and had had their throats cut with the same ragged pattern. Both had similar cuts on their bodies, and both had the distinctive tear-patterned lacerations to the cheeks. The signature of the killer was unmistakable. The clincher was the profile—both were young, Caucasian brunettes of a similar build to Boden.
To Allen’s surprise, neither looked like they could be Sarah Dutton, beyond those physical similarities. Which meant they still had one missing person and one missing car. She hoped it was a coincidence, but grim experience suggested differently.
They’d assured Walter Dutton that they’d find his daughter, but from the brief time they’d spent with the man, she knew he’d be on the phone to her superiors before they’d pulled out of the driveway. They had people interviewing her friends, speaking to the staff at the bar, and trying to establish when she was last seen. One point of interest: they hadn’t been able to locate her boyfriend, Josh, as yet. But again, that could be a bad sign as easily as it could be a good one.
She watched as the two new body bags were loaded into the coroner’s van. They slammed the doors, and the van bumped slowly back along the track toward the main road, its destination the medical examiner’s office. She heard a rustle of activity and the soft clicking of digital camera shutters from above. The reporters and the paparazzi had gathered on a parallel dirt road overlooking the slope, and a helicopter liveried with the branding of the local Fox affiliate hovered overhead. A slightly overweight uniform in his early fifties shook his head as he watched the van disappear around the bend in the fire road.
“This guy’s been a busy little critter, huh?”
Allen was about to respond, but stopped as she heard Mazzucco’s voice calling out her name. She turned and saw him approach, replacing his phone in his jacket pocket.
“I got something.”
“A detailed confession from a viable suspect?” Allen asked.
Mazzucco flashed a humorless smile in response. “A possible on one of the new bodies. We have to get a positive ID, but . . .”
The cop standing beside Allen raised a hand to get Mazzucco’s attention, stopping him mid
-flow. “Maz, how’s tricks?”
“Federmeyer,” Mazzucco said, acknowledging the man with neither warmth nor antagonism.
“I know this guy from way back,” the uniform said, turning to Allen. “He never writes; he never calls . . . How’s Homicide, slick?”
“Busy,” Mazzucco said, and stared at Federmeyer until he got the message and grudgingly stepped away from the pair.
Allen looked at Mazzucco with amusement and told him to continue.
“A missing persons report that looks very good. Carrie Burnett.”
“When did she go missing?”
“A week ago. Sunday night. You recognize the name?”
“Should I?”
Mazzucco smiled. “Me either. Apparently, she’s on a reality show about some pop singer. BFF of the star.”
When Mazzucco went on to relay the name of the star and the show, Allen realized she was dimly aware of this. She shrugged it off. It would be another angle for the media, a unique selling point for the story of the killings, but it made no difference to their job. A victim was a victim, and it changed nothing about what they had to do.
Only, that wasn’t quite true. Because it opened up another potential line of investigation.
“Could the killer have targeted her from the show?” she suggested. “Some kind of stalker angle?”
Mazzucco shrugged. “I don’t know. Stalkers are focused. Who are these other victims? Kelly Boden wasn’t on any TV show.” He shook his head. “Gut instinct, no. These women all look alike. Same victim profile. That’s the link.”
“Maybe Kelly knew Burnett. Rich kids and celebrities mingle.”
“Sarah Dutton’s the rich kid. Kelly wasn’t, going by her address.”
“Where the hell is Dutton?” she said, going back to square one.
Mazzucco nodded along with her frustration. Too many tangents, too little evidence. And the clock was ticking. “This one is a bitch. Sorry, Jess.”
For now, they had to assume the two girls had been abducted together. If Dutton wasn’t here, that meant she was possibly being held somewhere. Maybe at the murder scene itself. That made finding Dutton the immediate priority, but so far there was no sign of her or the Porsche.
Allen sighed and came back to the reality show star. “Okay, tell me what we know about Carrie Burnett. Last Sunday would fit with what the coroner investigator said. Where was she last seen?”
“That’s where it gets interesting,” Mazzucco said. “She was last seen outside a club in West Hollywood, getting into her car with the intention of driving home. She was alone, it was nighttime, and she lives in Studio City. No sign of her since then. Or her car.”
Allen felt an adrenaline jolt. The similar circumstances suggested a link that could well be borne out once they were able to trace Kelly Boden’s last minutes. It did more than that: it suggested an MO. She started to work through the scenarios, conscious that Mazzucco had a couple of minutes’ head start on her.
“What do you think? A hitchhiker?” As soon as the words were out, she knew it wasn’t that. No female driver would stop for a random hitcher at night. Not in this century.
Mazzucco was shaking his head. “I don’t think so. There’s one other thing: the last person to hear from her wasn’t a friend or family member. It was a dispatcher at Triple A.”
“She had a breakdown?”
Her partner nodded. “Somewhere on Laurel Canyon Boulevard. No sign of her or her vehicle by the time the tow truck appeared.”
“He’s picking them up. Somehow he’s finding female drivers in trouble and he’s showing up like some kind of . . .”
“Good Samaritan?”
Allen raised her eyebrows. “More like a bad one. Can we get an ID on the Triple A driver?”
“I’m on it.” Mazzucco took his phone out again and scanned an email. “Kelly Boden’s father lives down in Reseda; somebody’s with him. You want to go there now?”
Allen nodded at the suggestion, registering that Mazzucco was making a point of deferring to her as the primary, even though he’d made all of the breakthroughs so far. “Yeah, let’s go talk to them. I’ll drive.”
They got into the Ford, Allen in the driver’s seat this time, and pulled out onto the road. Seeing the two new bodies had crystallized one thing in her mind: she’d seen this killer’s work before.
1996
It was a Wednesday, the last day of July. The midsummer morning sun was already high in the blue sky over Los Angeles, burning determinedly through the haze of smog. Though it was barely seven o’clock in the morning, the roof of the black Buick Century was already getting hot to the touch. He rested both palms on it, enjoying the sensation. He looked north, toward the Santa Monica Mountains, and thought about the day to come.
He heard Kimberley coming up behind him from the direction of the front door, trying to sneak up. He played along, pretended to be startled when she grabbed his shoulders and yelled, “Wakey-wakey.”
He turned to look at her. She was wearing cutoff jeans shorts and a black Nirvana T-shirt. Her long black hair was tied back, the ponytail fed through the strap at the back of the Dodgers baseball cap she wore. The brim shaded her brown eyes but could not mask her excitement at the adventure ahead.
A plaintive voice trickled out from the driver’s seat. “I’m gonna need gas money, you guys.”
He ducked his head to look inside the car, at the source of the whine. Robbie was a scrawny, red-haired kid. He wore baggy mesh basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt with the slogan The Truth Is Out There. He’d met Robbie for the first time a couple of days previously. Robbie didn’t go to their school; he was one of the other kids who lived with Kimberley, here at Blackstones. He wasn’t sure why she’d asked Robbie along on the trip, although he had a suspicion that it was because she wasn’t comfortable being alone with him just yet. He didn’t hold that against her. He was aware there were probably good reasons for people to feel that way about him.
“We heard you the first hundred times, kid.”
“Don’t call me that. I’m older than you. And Jason will be pissed if I return his car empty. Do you know what Jason will do to us if he’s pissed?”
He opened his mouth to respond to that but felt Kimberley’s hand on his shoulder again. Her face was tilted upward, the look in her eyes easy to read: Be nice.
“You’re the boss, Robbie,” he said, picking up his backpack by its strap and dumping it in the backseat.
Kimberley ran around the front of the car and got in the passenger side. “Are you ready? This is going to be great, I promise.”
He got into the backseat and closed the door behind him. He thought she was wrong. He thought it was going to be better than great.
10
He drifted into consciousness to the sound of distant screams.
His dreams had been fragmented and confused, as they always were. A little of the past, a little of the present, a little of what he thought was to come. He kept his eyes closed and savored the thick aftertaste of sleep. Memories of a long, hot summer two decades before, and of one day in particular. In the dream, images and sensations from that summer’s day had blurred and blended with more recent input. Last night. Darkness and rain and blood. Sunshine and a cool breeze and the creaking sound of an old sign hanging in front of an empty building. The kindred ways sunlight and moonlight glance off a blade
Dark hair and brown eyes. He knew he’d be seeing her again soon.
He opened his own eyes gradually, allowing them to adjust to the afternoon sunlight penetrating the narrow gaps between the blinds. Dust motes circled and whirled lazily in the light. As he allowed the world back in, he realized the far-off screams were not born of pain and terror, but of delight. Children playing in some backyard, or perhaps even out on the street.
He slid his legs off the bed and stood up. As was his routine, his hand reached for the photograph he kept beside him when he slept. He gazed at it for a few moments, the curve of a smile on his li
ps, and then replaced it on the table beside the bed.
He opened the door and walked naked across the narrow hallway to the opposite room. This had originally been the second bedroom, when the house had been a home, but now it was simply a place to work. It looked out on the backyard, which was enclosed on all sides by high bushes, providing quiet and privacy. There was a bed that had not been slept in in months or years, a squat two-drawer chest supporting an old-fashioned boxy television, and a desk set up in front of the window. On the desk were various tools and instruments and parts, grouped according to their uses. Some were of the digital and electronic variety and were new things, things that had been undreamed of in their compactness and intricacy even ten years before. Others were much more traditional and had not evolved or developed in a thousand years.
He had another kit to prepare, because he did not think it would be long until the next time. He sat down at the desk and started to lay out the tools and the parts he would need.
Before he got to work, he got up, walked back across the room, and switched on the television. He liked to have background noise while he worked. Music was his first preference, particularly oldies, but anything would do. Usually, he would switch the television or the stereo on, turn the sound down a little, and go back to the desk to work.
But today he didn’t move. Today he just watched the screen.
A helicopter view of the place in the mountains. His place. Cops in uniform and cops in suits and cops in overalls, digging up the earth in his place. Taking something that belonged to him.
He stood there for a long time, the task he’d begun forgotten for now.
11
Allen and Mazzucco left the home of Kelly Boden’s father with two things: confirmation of their hypothesis and an increased desire to catch the bastard who’d killed the three women buried in the hills.