by Cross, Mason
Allen opened her mouth to reply, but Mazzucco cleared his throat and spoke first. “We found out about the other cases a couple of hours ago, when we got—”
Lawrence raised his voice subtly as he cut him off. “The question wasn’t addressed to you, Detective, and that didn’t answer it in any case. Allen, when did you first suspect this?”
Allen swallowed. “Yesterday, sir. When we saw the first body.”
“Yesterday.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lawrence consulted his watch. “So you sat on this for more than thirty hours.”
“I couldn’t . . .”
Lawrence silenced her with a hand wave. “Explain. What got your attention about the body?”
“The wounds on the Boden girl. They were . . . unusual. I’d seen similar marks on a body in Washington, DC, a couple of years back.”
“Then a similar blade was used. So what?”
Allen shook her head. “I’ve never seen a wound pattern like this. And anyway, it wasn’t just the wounds. A lot about the two cases felt similar, even with all of the differences. I called one of my contacts back in Washington, asked him to do a little research. Meantime, I checked out Metro PD’s open and unsolved cases online and came up with another couple of murders that fit right in with the pattern.”
Mazzucco spoke up again. “We agreed that it would be best to make sure of our suspicions before taking it to you.”
Lawrence turned his head to Mazzucco. “You went along with this?”
“Yes, sir.”
He turned to Allen. “That true?”
Allen glanced at Mazzucco. His eyes were saying, Go with it. She couldn’t. “It’s not true, sir. Detective Mazzucco had no idea about this until a couple of hours ago.”
“I thought not. So then you accessed NCIC without authorization and turned up . . . what?”
“Another fourteen potential victims across six states.”
Lawrence sighed. “And these had not been connected before?”
“Two of them had been, but there was nothing concrete to link the cases: no fingerprints or DNA evidence. A reasonably diverse MO, except for the unique wound patterns. It’s not the kind of thing you can query a database on; it needed the same eyes on more than one victim. It needed instinct, not number-crunching.”
“So our three-time LA killer has in actuality bagged more than a dozen victims across the country. That is what you’re telling me, Detective Allen, isn’t it?”
“Possibly more. We have no way of knowing when or where he got started. Not without more manpower on this.”
“Which is the only reason you’ve brought it to me now.”
“I didn’t want to—”
“Detective Allen, I already told your partner to spare me the bullshit. You didn’t want to lose the case to the FBI.”
She was silent for a moment. “I wanted to make some headway before they took the whole thing away from us.”
“That’s not your call to make, Allen. The potential number of victims alone makes this a federal case, never mind the multistate element. We call them in immediately, and they’re not going to be happy when they find out you’ve burned a day of the investigation already.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“No, you’re not. You’ve done exactly what you intended to do. Wrapped yourself so closely in this case that you think you can’t be taken off it.”
Mazzucco glanced at Allen and back at Lawrence. “Come on, Lieutenant. She’s made good progress on this already. Even if she’d come to you yesterday, I doubt we’d be any further forward. She had nothing concrete yesterday. With all due respect, we have to stay involved.”
Lawrence glared back at him. “With all due respect, I don’t have to do a goddamn thing I don’t want to.” He stared at Mazzucco for a moment to make his point and then looked back to Allen. “You’ve been with us six months, Allen, is that right?”
“That’s right.”
“You came here with some baggage. A reputation for insubordination, not to mention cutting a few corners.”
Allen suppressed a wince. It was the first time Lawrence had referenced her past since she’d been here.
“You probably came here with a lot of ideas about the LAPD, about how we do things. You probably thought you’d fit right in.”
“Not exactly.”
“I didn’t ask you to comment. I didn’t think I needed to say this, but clearly I was wrong. This crap won’t play, Allen. Not in this division and not on any case I’m involved with.”
Allen opened her mouth to apologize again and then thought better of it.
“If you have suspicions that a case is bigger than it appears, you come to me first. You don’t go cowboying on your own. I decide what we do and when. Is that clear?”
Allen nodded. “Yes, sir.”
Lawrence looked back at her for an uncomfortably long time and then gave Mazzucco the same treatment.
“That’ll be all.”
The two detectives exchanged a chastened glance and turned to leave the office, and the case. They stopped in their tracks as Lawrence spoke again.
“One more thing.”
They turned and waited for him to continue.
“Keep your phones on. I’ll need you back in here when I speak to the FBI. Which will probably be soon.”
Allen’s face brightened. “Does that mean—”
“That’ll be all.”
The two turned to leave again. Allen was unable to keep the smile from her face. Mazzucco looked exasperated with her, but she thought she saw the hint of a relieved smile around the corner of his mouth, too.
33
Briefing Lawrence had taken priority, but Allen and Mazzucco knew what they’d be checking out as soon as they got back to their desks, neither of them happy with themselves for wanting to do it. Carter Blake was an unknown quantity, but with the FBI moving in, Allen thought it might not hurt to have an ally that was a little removed from the investigation. On the other hand, she knew she had to be very careful here. What kind of cop would she be if she wasn’t suspicious of a guy who appeared from out of nowhere with highly specific information about a series of murders?
They sat down across from each other, and there was a silence that required filling as their respective computers woke from their slumbers.
“No,” Mazzucco said, shaking his head. “I don’t like him.”
“Neither do I,” Allen said breezily.
“Good.”
“Great.”
There was a pause, and then Mazzucco said, “I’ll check out North Carolina?”
Allen sighed and nodded. “I’ll take the feds. I guess I’m going to need the practice.”
Ten minutes later, Allen was on hold to her third department of the FBI’s Chicago office, trying to reach Agent Banner. As she listened to the canned Mozart, she began to regret her earlier words. So far, she’d managed to confirm that Banner existed, at least, and that she had indeed been involved with the race to stem Wardell’s murderous rampage in Chicago and the Midwest. In fact, it turned out that she was the very agent who’d stopped him permanently.
She caught the occasional murmur from her partner’s side of the desk. Half of the time it was him making the attempt to keep her in the loop, the other half just talking to himself as he worked. By the sounds of it, it looked as though the North Carolina connection was also proving to be worthy of further investigation. Of course, if they did turn up another potential Samaritan case, they’d be turning it over to the boys from the Bureau before they could get anywhere.
Mazzucco looked up. “This Sergeant Peterson is down as a missing person, technically. Missing in the final sense, is what I’m getting. There’s at least one other unidentified body in the same neck of the woods, too.”
“Anything stick out about it?”
Mazzucco’s brow creased. “Nothing to say for sure either way. Probably why you didn’t find it. I’m going to give the local chief a call.
Guy’s name is Harding.”
“I hope you have better luck than I’m having.”
He grinned and picked up the phone. He dialed a number, looking from the screen to the buttons to check he had it right. He finished and sat back, waiting for the call to connect. As he waited, his eyes found Allen’s again.
“You know what I’m thinking?”
“That he’s wasting our time?”
He shook his head. “The opposite. But I can think of one very good hypothesis as to why this guy Blake knows the North Carolina case and the Samaritan are connected.”
Allen took her time answering. “That occurred to me, too.”
Mazzucco’s call was picked up, and he turned away, introducing himself to his fellow officer in the Old North State. The tone quickly became conversational, friendly. How different from the brief, cold conversations Allen was having on her own line. She didn’t have time to dwell on the thought, though, as the hold music was abruptly cut off midstream and a voice said, “Special Agent Banner.”
The sound was tinny, the background noise high—cell phone. Allen, caught by surprise, cleared her throat before introducing herself.
“LAPD, huh?” the woman said. Even with the static, Allen caught the mild, almost disinterested undercurrent of hostility.
“That’s right,” she replied, taking care to speak with the same tone. “I thought they said you weren’t available right now.”
“I’m not. But the name you mentioned bought you a couple minutes of my time.”
Allen felt a familiar tingle in the base of her stomach. It was the sensation she always got when she could sense a line of inquiry starting to develop—for better or worse.
“I met him an hour ago,” she said.
“In LA?”
“In LA.”
There was a pause as the person on the other end of the line processed that. “I take it you’re working the Samaritan case. Who’s our liaison on that?”
Allen cleared her throat. “I don’t know yet.”
There was an uneasy pause, because neither of them really wanted to be pleasantly shooting the breeze here. Allen ended it by bringing the discussion back around to the subject at hand. “This guy, Blake. He says he wants to help us. I made it clear I had some reservations. He told me to ask you about the Wardell manhunt.”
Agent Banner answered quickly and with authority, as though dismissing a subordinate. “If he’s offering to help, I suggest you take him up on it, Detective.”
“Suggestion noted, Agent,” Allen shot back.
“Glad I could be of assistance,” Banner said. “Good aft—”
“Wait a second.” There was a pause, and Allen could still hear the echo and background noise. “Can I trust this guy?”
More silence on Banner’s end. If it hadn’t been for the crackle, Allen would have assumed a hang-up. Finally, she spoke again.
“I don’t really trust anybody, not anymore. But I’d trust Carter Blake with my life.”
Banner quickly said she had to go and hung up before Allen could thank her. Her partner had already completed his own call and was looking at her over the partition.
“North Carolina looks solid: cut throat, ragged edges. But that wasn’t released to the press.”
Allen’s phone began to ring again. She hit the button to send it to voicemail.
“You talked to the chief out there?”
Mazzucco grunted in the affirmative. “Apparently, I’m not the first person to call him about it today. No prizes for guessing who beat me to it.” He stopped and looked down at his notepad. “Harding investigated Peterson’s disappearance and is as satisfied it was a murder as you can be without a body. Then there’s the other victim they found—they thought it was Peterson himself at first. Harding told me if he had the resources, he’d have a team of guys digging up those woods, because dollars to doughnuts, there are more bodies out there.”
“He may get his wish soon.”
“He may indeed. I didn’t say anything, but I guess the feds will be speaking to them later on. Harding’s convinced that what happened out there five years ago was an undiscovered serial killer at work. He’s had nothing concrete up until now. Which only makes me question how the hell Sherlock Holmes back there knows about it.”
Allen chewed it over, thinking about Mazzucco’s suspicions—which she shared—but also thinking about what Agent Banner had said at the end and the way the tone of her voice had utterly changed when she’d said it.
“He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest,” she agreed.
Mazzucco stared back at her, then shook his head. “No. This is a bad idea. I mean, keep tabs on him? Absolutely. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a person of interest. But let him in? Work with him? Hell no.”
“He gave us a lead. He didn’t need to do that.”
“He’s playing with us, Jess.”
“Agent Banner says he’s okay.”
“Oh, you’re bowing to the wisdom of the FBI now? That’s quite a switch.”
She gave him a withering glance in reply.
“You think there’s any way Lawrence is going to go for this?” he asked.
He looked away for a moment, thinking, and she could tell he was being worn down.
“Let’s not bother him with this, not right now. We’re just following a promising lead.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Allen’s desk phone started to ring. She ignored it. She let Mazzucco’s question hang in the air and stared him out. He always blinked first when it came to this. When he looked away, she spoke. “Go with me on this. I think we have to talk to this guy.”
Before he could respond, his own phone began to ring. He said his name and listened, then said, “Yeah, she’s here. I’ll tell her,” and hung up.
“What?”
“The chief wants to speak to you before the press conference. We’ll talk about Blake after, okay?”
34
Evergreen Memorial Park and Crematory was the oldest burial ground in Los Angeles. It was situated in Boyle Heights, to the east of the city. I was still getting accustomed to driving in LA, and it took me a while to find the place, which was well off the tourist trail. It was a poor, mostly Mexican part of town, and the further east I got, the more Spanish-language billboards and store signs I saw. After today, I knew as much as I’d ever wanted to about the cemeteries of Los Angeles, after the research I’d had to do in order to track down the specific one that I wanted.
I knew, for example, that if you wanted to see the graves of dead movie stars, Evergreen was definitely not the place. You’d be far better off visiting Hollywood Forever, the opulent boneyard conveniently located just over the back wall of Paramount Studios. That one attracted the biggest and the best Tinseltown corpses, from Rudolph Valentino to Dee Dee Ramone. The high-end clientele meant that Hollywood Forever also attracted stargazers from all over the world, drawn to the one place where you could absolutely guarantee that the movie stars would stay still for pictures. They shot movies there; they even hosted rock concerts from time to time.
Evergreen Cemetery wasn’t like that. Its celebrities were of the minor and long-forgotten kind. Pioneers to Southern California, a few early LA politicians. No one of particular note had been buried there recently. If you went to Evergreen Cemetery, you did so because you wanted to visit a specific grave. Which was exactly why I was there.
The sky was darkening in the east as I entered via the wide sandstone gate on North Evergreen Avenue, slowing down to a respectful pace as I drove along the wide strips of asphalt that wound their ways through the seventy-acre necropolis. The first thing that struck me was that the name ‘Evergreen’ was a misnomer. There were palm trees dotted here and there, but the overriding color scheme was comprised of dusty browns and yellows. Irrigation was expensive, and these residents had no need of water. The tombstones were arranged in neat rows, following the twists of the access roads. They looked like gigantic
lines of dominoes, ready to be pushed over.
The area I was interested in was at the far side of the cemetery. A section that had originally been gifted to the city of Los Angeles by the original owners as a potter’s field. As the city grew and swelled, the patch of ground was taken over by the county, and when they ran out of space, they built a crematorium and started incinerating the unclaimed and unmourned indigent dead instead of burying them. With space at a premium, the cemetery bought the ground back from LA County in the mid-sixties, dumped eight feet of fresh dirt on top, and started burying the more recently departed on top of their forebears. The approach was striking in its unsentimental practicality.
When I found the approximate site I was looking for, I parked at the side of the road and got out. I’d passed a few other vehicles on my journey through the cemetery, and even one or two people on foot, but when I looked around, there was no one within sight. No one who was going to give me any problem, anyway. The sun was beginning to sink in the west and was already well below the tops of the palm trees. I started to feel a chill in the air and grabbed my jacket from the backseat before I set off.
It took me another fifteen minutes to find the row I was looking for, but when I did, my eyes homed in on the specific plot. Dusk was advancing by now, and it was difficult to read the dedications on the stones from more than a few feet away, but one grave in particular caught my eye. I glanced around me again, saw nothing and nobody. I looked back down the hill toward the blue Chevy. It was a dark shade of blue, but somehow in the dusk it suddenly seemed bright, out of place among the dust and the stone. I felt a strong sense of unease and chalked it partly up to the fact I’d almost had my head blown off the last time I’d been in a graveyard.
I walked along the row and stopped at the tenth marker from the start. It was a granite headstone, of good quality. Certainly more impressive than anything that would have been provided for any of the original inhabitants of this part of the cemetery. I crouched down to read the inscription. Three different first names: David, Martha, and Terri. All with the same last name: Crozier. Three different dates of birth, all with the same date of death.