by Cross, Mason
The door opened and Mazzucco walked in, carrying his phone. He took one look at the scene, the group of detectives staring in fascination at the screen, and looked at Allen. “What?”
She didn’t take her eyes away from the screen.
“Tell me you have some good news.”
“Depends how you define good,” Mazzucco said, bouncing the phone in his hand. Then he looked back up at the screen, reading the ticker. “Ah, shit.”
“Some . . .” Allen cleared her throat and composed herself. “Someone has talked to the media.” She looked at Mazzucco, waving a hand at the screen. “Not just talked. Sounds like they have every goddamned detail. Burnett, Boden’s name and picture, the number of bodies, even the goddamned wound pattern.” Her eyes widened in disbelief as the graphic changed to display the line: LAPD INVESTIGATES SO-CALLED SAMARITAN SLAYINGS. “Jesus!”
“The Samaritan,” a voice across the room intoned in a deep, movie-trailer voice. “Your boy’s a star.”
“Shut the fuck up, Coleman,” Mazzucco said without giving him the dignity of a glance. He turned back to Allen. “Who was it?”
Allen said. “This is guy-on-the-scene stuff, I’m guessing. One of the uniforms, maybe even one of the coroner investigators.”
“There could be a silver lining,” Mazzucco said as Sarah Dutton’s picture flashed up on the screen. They’d already been working with the media to publicize the search for Sarah, but if nothing else, that part of the investigation had just gotten a major ratings boost.
The blonde on TV continued. “Unconfirmed reports suggest that the search for this woman, Sarah Dutton, is related to the ongoing investigation. Anyone who knows the whereabouts of Sarah is urged to call . . .”
Allen shook her head. “It’s not worth it. We’re not going to find her, are we? Not alive.”
For the last couple of hours, they’d been chasing leads. Silver Porsches were being routinely stopped, regardless of license plate, leading to a lot of pissed-off rich people. AAA had come back with a list of no-shows for the past month, but all of the callers had been accounted for. They’d worked the phones and batted theories back and forth over too many cups of coffee. Allen liked to push Mazzucco to think outside of the box, Mazzucco tried to keep Allen focused on the sparse facts they had at their disposal. It was a relatively new professional relationship, and they were both still feeling their way, learning how to play to each other’s strengths. Allen appreciated the back-and-forth, but she suspected they were both glad of the respite when Mazzucco had gone outside for a cigarette.
He was back now, though, and she realized he was holding his phone up for her to look at the screen. Another carefree social media profile picture of a brunette, slightly older than the others, but probably still in her twenties. She looked a lot like their remaining unidentified victim.
Allen’s eyes flicked from the phone screen to Mazzucco’s expectant face. “Well? Are you going to keep me in suspense?”
“Rachel Morrow, twenty-eight years old.”
Allen’s brow creased. “She’s not famous as well, is she?”
Her partner shook his head.
“Rich?”
“Nope. I mean, she’s an accountant—was an accountant, I mean—so she was doing okay, but not exactly rich and definitely not famous.”
“We didn’t get a hit off her prints, I’m assuming.”
“Correct. This is from MPU. We’d have matched her earlier today, but the missing persons report was only filed yesterday. Her husband was out of the country for more than a week. Got back yesterday to find an empty home.”
Allen was incredulous. “He didn’t speak to his wife on the phone for a week? How solid is his alibi?”
Mazzucco shrugged. “I’ve heard stranger things, and yeah. He was in Finland at some conference. Speaking slots every day. He’s in the clear, unless . . .”
“Unless he paid somebody else to do it.”
“Right, but why the collateral damage? The other two vics, I mean.”
The rest of the office was still watching the news. Allen sat back down in her chair and mulled over the new information. “So if the husband’s been out of the picture, who was the last person to see her before she went missing?”
“She went for a drink after work on the tenth with some people from her office. She had only one, and then she drove home. Apparently, she had a headache. That was the last anyone saw of her. She was on vacation the following week, so she wasn’t missed at work.”
“Any idea if she made it home?”
Mazzucco shrugged. “Hard to tell. A patrol unit visited the house yesterday when the husband called it in. He said the house was locked up. No car in the garage, but none of her clothes or possessions were gone, and there was food rotting in the refrigerator. He checked their joint account and there were no withdrawals after the tenth.”
“So she could have been snatched en route after the work thing.”
“Sounds likely. That’s the Samaritan’s MO, right?”
“Stop it,” Allen said, knowing she was fighting a losing battle against the moniker. “I take it there’s no sign of the car.”
“It’s a blue Honda Civic and we have another bulletin out.”
“We need to find the cars. We do that, maybe we get a line on our killer.”
Allen’s phone rang. She picked up and said her name. She tensed as she listened to the voice on the other end. Mazzucco was staring at her intently when she hung up.
“We found Sarah Dutton. Alive.”
16
Fort Lauderdale
They’d come up with a catchy name for him already. Of course they had. The Samaritan, because apparently he was preying on lone female drivers who’d broken down at night. Sometimes I wondered if the cops and the reporters got together in a room to come up with these nicknames. After all, it was in their mutual interest to create an attention-grabbing stage name. The news didn’t give me much else to go on, but the mention of the ragged wound pattern, together with the location being LA, had been plenty.
When it became clear the news was moving comfortably back into regurgitation mode, I sat back down at the hotel writing desk and my fingers hit the keyboard of my laptop. I killed the browser window I’d had open and went to the website of the Los Angeles Times. Naturally, they were leading with the Samaritan story. The tone of the article was a little more sober than the reporter still emoting away on camera on the hotel’s television screen, but the speculation was identical. They made sure to hedge their journalistic bets by prefacing it all with News outlets are quoting unconfirmed sources . . . , but the details were the same. Three dead women: tortured, murdered, and disposed of. All with a unique, ragged slash wound to the throat.
If I closed my eyes, I thought I could picture exactly what that ragged slash would look like. I could picture the blade that made it.
Rationally, I knew that all this didn’t necessarily mean what I feared it did. Just because the wound was the same didn’t mean the killer was. There were only so many ways to kill a person, after all, and only so many weapons. Add to that the fact I’d been thinking about the past only moments before I saw the news report, and the reassuring, comforting explanation was that this was nothing more than a disconcerting echo, an unwelcome synchronicity. Like hearing a song on the radio that reminds you of an old flame at the same moment somebody says her name.
But the pattern fit: abduction, torture, murder. And it wasn’t just that; it was Los Angeles. LA was home turf for him. However I explained it, only one thing mattered: the story on the news had tripped the silent alarm at the back of my head, the one that won’t let me sleep until I’ve investigated further. Call it a sixth sense; call it intuition—either way, I’ve learned not to ignore it.
I opened up a second browser window and navigated to Google. I typed in two words—a name. As I hit return, I didn’t know whether I truly wanted to find anything or not. I didn’t really expect to get anything useful on just the nam
e, so I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t. Some images showing half a dozen unfamiliar faces, presumably belonging to men who shared the name. An invitation to view the profiles of individuals of that name on LinkedIn. Even the website of a writer by that name, who apparently specialized in sensual erotica. I was pretty sure none of these links would give me what I was looking for.
I left the name in the search field and added Los Angeles. Fewer results, but none of them any use. Again, I wasn’t surprised. The type of person I was looking for wouldn’t be much of a social media animal. The type of person I was looking for would try to leave as little trace of himself as possible. Not so different from me, if only in that respect.
I retrieved my beer and took a long pull. I looked out of the floor-to-ceiling window at the black void of the ocean. I thought about the distance from here to California. It was the better part of three thousand miles. About as far away as you could get without leaving the continental United States. I thought some more, and then my hands returned to the keyboard. I deleted the first name and left everything else in the search field: just the last name and Los Angeles.
I got some more Facebooks and the website of a performing arts theater and some more random grains of sand from the Sahara of the Internet . . . and one news article, second from the bottom of the first page. A news article about an event that occurred in the late nineties.
I heard an echo in my head from long ago. It’s the truth.
I clicked on the link, and the alarm in the back of my head picked up in intensity.
17
Los Angeles
Sarah Dutton had been found. Not a dead body, but a living, breathing potential witness. Sarah hadn’t exactly been living under a rock for the previous twenty-four hours, but it seemed she’d been similarly cut off from the real world—ensconced in a three-thousand-dollar-a-night penthouse suite in the Chateau Marmont.
Expensive room or not, she was still in the twenty-first century. She’d made it to two p.m. before learning she was feared murdered and the subject of a statewide search, but she’d laid low for another few hours anyway. Allen didn’t think that was particularly odd. She’d never been in that precise situation herself, of course, but she decided it might easily provoke panic in your average young lady. And besides, reading between the lines, Allen decided the fact that she had not been occupying the expensive hotel room alone might explain her hesitation.
The sun was all the way down by the time they got underway, and the evening traffic was typically sluggish. She and Mazzucco made slow progress on the drive back to the palace on Mulholland Drive. The house looked somehow bigger in the dark, the high walls lit from ground level by floodlights.
Walter Dutton was a changed man from their first encounter. Where before he’d looked unkempt and shaken, now he looked rejuvenated. He was dressed in a suit that Allen suspected wouldn’t leave much change out of her monthly paycheck. From the moment he opened the door to them, he seemed impatient. Allen wondered if he was overcompensating, embarrassed about his earlier show of vulnerability.
He ushered them back into the big living room, where there were two other people waiting. The first was another suited man with a silk tie and gray hair at his temples. Allen’s time in DC had attuned her to certain indigenous character types, and she would bet that meager paycheck on this man being Dutton’s senior corporate lawyer.
The other person in the room was easy to place without a detective’s instincts—Dutton’s twenty-two-year-old daughter, Sarah. She sat huddled in a stiff-backed antique chair, cradling her forearms. She was dressed simply, in contrast to the men, just a lavender blouse, jeans, bare feet. Her eyes were red, and she looked almost relieved to see two Homicide cops. A rarity in itself.
Dutton didn’t offer the two of them coffee, didn’t ask them to sit down.
“Detectives Allen and Mazzarello, correct?”
“Mazzucco.”
“My apologies.” He nodded at the lawyer. “This is Jack Carnegie, one of my legal team. And, of course, my daughter, Sarah. I understand you’d like to ask Sarah some questions. We’d like to resolve this as quickly as possible.”
“We’ll try not to take up too much of your time, sir,” Mazzucco said. Allen was impressed: the sarcasm was so reserved, she doubted if it registered with any of the other three. “Perhaps it would be better if we could speak to Sarah alone.”
Carnegie was quick off the mark, just as Allen expected him to be. “That’s . . . not gonna happen, Detective. You can ask Sarah questions, but only in the presence of Mr. Dutton and myself.”
Allen looked at the daughter. “I think that would be Sarah’s decision.”
Dutton shot Allen a glare. Carnegie opened his mouth to object. Sarah cut him off. “It’s okay. I want them to stay.” Her voice sounded steady enough, but Allen caught the flicker of her eyes as they darted up to her father for approval.
Allen quieted the urge to escalate. It would only burn time, time they did not have. “Okay, Sarah, if you’re sure. We’re trying to catch the guy who did this to Kelly, okay? He killed some other people, too, and we’re pretty sure he’ll do it again. We need you to tell us everything you know, even if you don’t think you know anything important. The smallest detail can help us out, okay?”
Sarah nodded and sat up straighter in the chair.
“Why don’t you tell us about last night?” Mazzucco asked. “You were out with Kelly, right? Who else?”
The mention of the name of her murdered friend was enough to make the girl break into a sob. They waited for her to compose herself.
“Yeah. Just Kelly and me . . . and Josh.” Her eyes dropped to the floor as she sensed her father’s glare. Allen wondered if the curfew arrangement had been imposed not because of boys in general, but because of this boy in particular. “We had dinner at Mélisse, then a few drinks at Sloan’s. I was planning on being back here for eleven or so. But then Josh wanted to stay out longer, and he said he could drive me home. Kelly wasn’t feeling so good, so she offered to . . . I mean, she said she could take the . . .”
“Enough, Sarah,” Dutton said with an audible sigh. He turned to the detectives. “I believe what my daughter is trying to say is that she wanted to spend the night with this . . . Josh character, but she knew I would know she hadn’t returned home if I got back and saw that the Porsche was missing. In point of fact, that’s exactly how I did know she hadn’t returned and why I alerted the authorities.”
Mazzucco’s brow creased. “You wouldn’t have noticed she wasn’t here otherwise?”
“My daughter lives in the annex, down by the lower pool. She tends to sleep late on Sundays. Chances are I wouldn’t have noticed anything was amiss. She was counting on that, and that’s why I imagine she asked her friend to drive the Porsche home.”
Allen felt a shiver of electricity and exchanged a glance with Mazzucco. She could see he felt it, too. Kelly Boden now fit snugly into the pattern: lone women drivers at night.
“Is that what happened, Sarah?” Allen prompted. “We need to be very clear on this. Did you arrange with Kelly for her to drive the Porsche home?”
Sarah kept her eyes on the floor and nodded reluctantly. “That’s right.”
Mazzucco flipped a page back in his notebook. “This bar, Sloan’s. That’s on Santa Monica Boulevard, isn’t it?”
Sarah nodded.
“Was Kelly planning on driving straight back here?”
“She had to. She left around ten thirty. Right before it started raining. I remember being really worried about her. I tried calling her cell around midnight, just to check if she was okay, but it went straight to voicemail.”
Allen and Mazzucco shared a glance. The Samaritan had probably started killing her by midnight.
Allen glanced down at her notepad and ticked off another question. “Were you aware of any problems with the Porsche? Any faults, any reason it should break down?”
Sarah looked confused. “No. It was new. I mean, I was
low on gas, but I warned Kelly about it. I gave her a twenty to put some in the tank.”
Mazzucco raised an eyebrow and made a note on his own pad.
They talked to Sarah for another half hour, but she had nothing else usable to give them, given that she’d had no contact with Kelly after she left the bar. After they’d run through the details of Saturday evening a few times, they asked Sarah to give them chapter and verse on her own movements between then and now. It didn’t take long, and it was all easily checkable. One of the lower-priority tangents that could be checked out by one of the uniformed officers drafted in to help with what had already become a major investigation, along with an interview of the boyfriend. Allen didn’t expect that to be of much use either, since they already knew his alibi: an alibi that would be corroborated not just by his girlfriend but by the security cameras at the hotel.
The interruptions from Mr. Dutton and his lawyer grew more regular and more impatient as they began to go back over the ground already covered, and so they wound up the interview. It had been worth the trip, because the two pieces of information Sarah had confirmed right out of the gate were golden: Kelly Boden’s mode of transport and approximate whereabouts at the estimated time of her abduction. Dutton hustled them out the front door and moved quickly to shut it behind them, as though wanting to close the door on this whole episode. His haste irritated Allen, who couldn’t resist a parting shot.
“One other thing, Mr. Dutton?”