The Samaritan

by Cross, Mason

  Visibility was worse than ever now. I could barely make out my own shoes. I bore close to the side of the corridor, tracing my hand along the wall and marking the doors as I passed by. I was starting to think it was about time I picked one of the doors when I heard a yell from some unknown distance behind me.

  “Freeze!”

  I didn’t stop to think. I was alongside one of the partitions that happened to have a bare doorframe. I ducked inside the box before the voice could follow up with further instructions. There was no gunfire. I wondered if the yell had been a bluff. Perhaps he’d seen something, a whisper of movement, but he couldn’t possibly have gotten a clear view of me and my position from any distance, not in this smoke. I looked around my newest box. It was harder to see in here, the absence of a door meant the flow of the smoke had not been restricted the way it had elsewhere. Still, visibility was far better than it had been in the corridor. This box had been an office. There were shelves on the wall and a steel file cabinet with the drawers removed. There was a desk along one wall, and a broken swivel chair had rolled into the center of the room.

  The voice rang out again from outside. The same voice, I was pretty sure. A clear, commanding tone, just like the one he’d been trained to use.

  “Come out with your hands on your head. I will shoot you.”

  I decided it probably was a bluff, but an informed one. The guy out there had seen something; he just wasn’t sure what. If the something had been a someone, it was a safe bet that someone was hiding in one of these rooms. My hunch was backed up when I heard a door being kicked in, maybe four boxes down. Twenty seconds later, I heard another one. He’d be taking the methodical approach. Room by room. I heard the voice again, lower this time, conversational. Talking to one of the others over his headset, I guessed. More bad news.

  A lull and then another door kicked in. Next door, I was certain of it. This guy wasn’t waiting on his backup, probably wanted to nail the bad guy all by his lonesome. I expected there’d be another one or two along soon, but probably not all of them, not yet. I was betting one of the teams had ventured upstairs. I wondered how long it would take them to discover the body.

  It hadn’t taken him long to clear each room, so I knew I was down to seconds. I stepped up onto the desk, being careful not to make any noise, and listened. I heard scuffing of boots, something small being knocked over in the next unit, probably with the barrel of a rifle. I waited to hear the retreating steps. I gave him time to get back out into the corridor, and then I grasped the top of the walls and lifted myself up and over, trying to balance speed with making as little noise as I could manage. A simple maneuver, under normal circumstances—up, over, and drop. I landed in the adjacent box, making sure to touch down on my right foot. Immediately, I moved to the door, which my pursuer had helpfully left opened. I moved into the corridor and waited.

  Five seconds later, the guy appeared at the adjacent door, his head turned slightly in his planned direction of travel: the opposite direction from me. He was decked out in standard tactical dress: a black uniform, body armor over the chest, a black helmet and visor. I hit him in the throat with the blade of my right hand. It took absolute precision—I had to make sure I struck in the narrow gap afforded by the body armor and the visor, and I had to hit him hard enough to stun him immediately. But the real precision was in judging how hard to hit for a stun, rather than a killing blow.

  The cop made a gagging noise and dropped to the floor, his helmet smacking off the concrete with a crack, his Bushmaster M4 clattering on the ground. I crouched beside him and touched the same hand to his neck, this time checking for a pulse. I found it and wasted a couple seconds to make certain he was still breathing, and then I stripped his sidearm out of its holster. It was a Beretta. I checked the safety and tucked it into the back of my waistband, and then I took off down the corridor.

  There was one last door at the end of the corridor. I opened it and found myself in a narrow corridor, this one defined by the last wall of the partition block and the brick wall of the warehouse itself. I’d been hoping for a fire exit that had been missed in the rush to surround the place. What I found was a large split-door hatch in the floor. The hatch was locked, too, with a rusting padlock that looked reassuringly old. Reassuring because it didn’t feel like I was following the Samaritan’s script this time: he would have used a fresh padlock. This lock was worth spending a little time on. It was old and cheap enough that I knew I could have simply shot it off, but I wanted to avoid signaling my location while my pursuers still had an entire warehouse to search. I got my wallet out again and took out a couple of the smaller picks, testing one, then the other. The second one I tried was the right size. Out of habit, I counted off the time in my head as I worked the lock. Six seconds. Not exactly world-beating, but it would do.

  I unhitched the padlock and opened one wing of the hatch. Below, it was pitch-black. No ladder. How deep could the basement floor be? Not too deep, I hoped. There was a rung on the underside of the hatch door, which would allow me to close it behind me. I positioned myself on the edge of the drop, then grabbed the rung and pulled the door most of the way closed, allowing myself space to slip through the gap. I gripped the edge with one hand and kept ahold of the rung with the other as I shuffled my body into the drop. Just before the hatch door slammed shut on my fingers, I let go of the edge and reached my hand up to join the other one holding the rung. My feet dangled in the air as I hung suspended from the underside of the closed hatch. I’m six feet even, and my arms are about thirty inches, shoulder to fingertip. That meant the drop had to be at least eight feet. I tried to raise my left foot a little higher than my right, and hoped to hell it wasn’t too big a drop as I let go.

  The good news was that my feet hit solid earth a heartbeat later. The bad news was I didn’t manage to protect my injured ankle. A fierce stab of pain shot up my leg and I dropped onto my back, grabbing the ankle. I rubbed it for a few seconds until the pain dulled. The ground felt uneven and dusty beneath me. I got my phone out and hit the flashlight app, directing it upward at the closed hatch to confirm I’d fallen only a matter of inches.

  After the past twenty minutes of darkness and smoke, it was like staring into the sun. I blinked the glare of the light out of my eyes and cast the beam around me. I was in the foundations of the warehouse. The ceiling was about ten feet above me; the giant slabs of concrete supported by steel crossbeams. The brick walls came all the way down here to the foundations, and the floor was hard-packed dirt. Any illusion I’d had about this warehouse being the Samaritan’s primary workshop were dispelled, because this would have been a far better location than the second floor. Light and sound would be well contained; day and night would appear the same to a prisoner. But there were no shackles, no bloodstains.

  I hadn’t been meant to find my way into this part of the warehouse. If the Samaritan had taken the time to look down here, he’d have made sure there was no escape for someone who made it this far. I played my flashlight beam across the nearest wall again. There was a gap where some of the bricks were missing. I walked closer and confirmed my hope—I could see the basement of the neighboring building through the hole. I tugged at one of the bricks at the side of the gap. It was loose. I hit it with the heel of my hand and it moved an inch or two. Much looser now, it took almost no effort at all to work it free of the wall. I heard another burst of gunfire from above as one of the tactical guys opened up on a pigeon or a threatening shadow. I heard footsteps on the concrete floor a little way off.

  I started working at the other bricks at the edge of the gap.

  59

  It was almost an hour after the initial incursion by McCall’s team before the warehouse was finally cleared for Allen and Mazzucco to enter. The sun began to rise in the pale blue sky, bathing the streets in a golden glow.

  A lot had happened in that time. Ray Falco, one of McCall’s men, had been found unconscious but otherwise unharmed in a corridor within the maze of office
units in the building. McCall’s team had followed the trail to find the point where their suspect had made his escape: a rupture in the wall that led through to the adjoining basement. By the time it had been discovered, their quarry was long gone. Finally, the second team had made a more grisly discovery: the mutilated body of a young woman.

  Like Alejandra Castillo, this one didn’t match the physical type of the bodies they’d uncovered on Sunday, but the handiwork was unmistakable. And this time the Samaritan had left behind some of the tools of his trade. Perhaps he’d been interrupted, Allen thought. Or perhaps that was just what he wanted them to think.

  Her gloved fingers held the knife carefully by the guard that separated the blade from the hilt. The wickedly sharp, curving blade glinted in the light. With her other hand, she took out the sketch the ME had come up with based on the earlier wound patterns and compared them. The blade was a dead match.

  The coroner investigator was the same as the one who’d carried out the preliminary examinations on Sunday.

  “Looks like the same guy, all right,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. It wasn’t like anyone had much doubt of that. There were other speculations that were more disputed, however.

  “At least we know who it is now.”

  Allen looked up to see that Don McCall had joined them on the upper level. Evidently, he’d extracted himself from the heated discussion with the first two FBI agents on the scene. Channing wasn’t there, not yet, but Allen didn’t doubt he’d have something to say about being cut out of the loop. Join the club, she thought wryly. McCall had come up with a young-looking uniformed cop from outside. He sounded angry and defensive, as though daring someone to criticize his team for letting the suspect escape. Allen rolled her eyes and put the knife down on the table carefully before turning to face McCall.

  “I told you, it’s not Blake,” she said. “The Samaritan’s playing you, McCall. It must have been him who called in the tip. It’s way too convenient; even you have to get that.”

  “Oh yeah?” McCall said. “I just talked to Falco, and his description of the guy who sucker punched him sounds exactly like the guy I met downtown. With you. I gotta hand it to you, Allen. You got close to the perpetrator real quick. Pity you didn’t notice.”

  “That’s what you’re basing this on? That’s bullshit—”

  McCall cut her off. “That’s not all. Tell her what we just found, Officer.”

  He was addressing the cop on his left-hand side, though he kept his eyes on Allen. The cop was in his mid-twenties, still a little green around the gills. He cleared his throat. “Uh . . .”

  “Tell her about the car.”

  The young cop cleared his throat again. “Uh, that’s right, Detective. We found a blue Chevrolet Malibu parked one block over. It’s a rental. Rented in the name of Carter Blake two days ago.”

  McCall raised his eyebrows and opened his palms toward Allen in a satisfied? gesture.

  Mazzucco glanced at her but said nothing.

  Allen’s mind raced. It couldn’t have been Blake who’d killed this woman, but the circumstantial evidence was certainly starting to build up. Only it was built on a shaky foundation: an anonymous call that was way too on the money.

  “Maybe he was here,” she said after a minute. “It doesn’t mean he’s our guy.”

  McCall shook his head in amusement. “You don’t even know what you did, do you? You brought a fucking serial killer in to help the investigation into his own crimes. You’re done, Allen.”

  Mazzucco had kept quiet until now, observing the dialogue, but now he picked his moment to speak. “She’s right.”

  Allen felt a surge of gratitude, but the look on her partner’s face told her he wasn’t doing this out of loyalty to her—not just out of loyalty to her, anyway—but out of a gut instinct that all this was just a little too neat.

  Mazzucco had stepped forward, holding eye contact with McCall. “We get an anonymous call that tells you where to catch our killer in the act, and that doesn’t strike you as convenient? Not just ‘Hey, I saw something suspicious’ but an anonymous caller that happens to know the suspect’s name? What the hell did he do, ask Blake to fill in a survey? This is bullshit, McCall. You’re playing into his hands.”

  McCall got in even closer, the mask of amusement disappearing. “This killer fucked with the wrong people. We’ll get him before the day’s out. Dead or alive.”

  Allen shook her head. McCall had just revealed more than he’d intended to. Maybe he thought Blake was the Samaritan, maybe not. It didn’t matter. All that mattered was that Blake had hit one of McCall’s guys and added insult to injury by managing to escape. That was what mattered to McCall, and it meant he’d happily throw his weight behind an investigation that was about to career off on the wrong track, just to get even.

  “You asshole, McCall,” Allen said, letting her full contempt for him show for the first time. Her phone began to buzz, and she was only vaguely aware of McCall yelling something back at her as she looked at the screen. All of a sudden, McCall’s abuse didn’t seem to matter. Lieutenant Lawrence was calling.

  60

  In a gray, windowless room on the other side of the country, a small but solidly built man named Davis put down his coffee and picked up the phone on his desk on the second ring. The voice at the end of the line sounded panicked, told him to get to a television or on the Internet.

  Davis was puzzled. “What’s happening?”

  The voice told him it would be easier for him to see for himself. Ten seconds later, looking at the website of the LA Times, he was forced to agree. He hung up without preamble and scanned the story. His eyes kept darting up to the picture at the top, as though he needed to reconfirm it for himself. This was bad. Potentially very bad. His guy on the West Coast had all but confirmed that it was Crozier killing people out there. Crozier was a problem, sure, but one that could be dealt with. This new development couldn’t help but complicate things.

  He had to speak to Faraday; that much was clear. He didn’t look forward to the conversation. Faraday was in New York this morning and would not appreciate the interruption. He dialed the number for the New York office, and the call was answered by a young-sounding female voice.

  “Director’s office,” came the mandatory greeting. No “Good morning,” no “How can I help you?” and certainly no named company or department. Davis identified himself and said he needed to speak to Faraday and that it was urgent. There was no acknowledgment. A click and thirty seconds of silence: no hold music, of course. When the line came back to life, Davis heard another female voice. This voice was a little more mature, more assured, and much colder.

  “I’m in the middle of something, Davis. This had better be good.”

  “It’s about Los Angeles.”

  A pause. “Arrangements are in hand, Davis. You kn—”

  “I’m not talking about Crozier. Not just him. The police have just released a picture of their suspect.”

  “Don’t keep me in suspense, Davis.”

  Davis closed his eyes and steeled himself. And then he said the name. Just two short words, but he knew they would change everything.

  61

  As she’d expected, the call was a summons. Allen left Mazzucco at the warehouse and headed back downtown, fighting the rush hour. Lawrence said nothing as she opened the door to his office. He didn’t invite her in, didn’t even nod in the direction of one of the chairs. He just stared at her until she came in and closed the door.

  Allen steeled herself and walked a couple of steps into the room. Lawrence kept the stare going.

  “Lieutenant—”

  Lawrence cut her off with a wave of his hand.

  “Save it. Just explain to me why you decided to bring a civilian in on the investigation into a series of murders that now appear to have been committed by that fucking civilian.” As he spoke, his voice, outwardly calm at first, rose to the point that he was practically yelling the last three words a
t her. Allen was taken aback. Before now, she hadn’t thought Lawrence capable of losing his temper like this.

  “Lieutenant, this is a setup. Blake isn’t the Samaritan.”

  It was Lawrence’s turn to look mildly taken aback.

  “So why did we find his rental car parked outside the damn torture chamber? Why did McCall’s man give a description that fit him like a wetsuit?”

  “I don’t know that yet. All I know is that it’s pretty convenient that we get an anonymous call to go to this address, saying it was the Samaritan. Who made the call? How did he know?”

  “That’s an interesting point, but in the meantime, I got a better one. Where the hell is Blake? If he’s innocent, where is he?”

  Good question, Allen thought. She’d tried calling his cell a couple of times, but it had gone to voicemail. If Blake was smart, and she knew he was, he’d have dumped the phone, or at least switched it off as soon as he exited the warehouse.

  “Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he doesn’t like that his name and description are being circulated as a person of interest in this case. Think about it, Lawrence. The Samaritan has been operating under the radar for years. We’ve finally got a lead on him, and he’s rattled. So he throws us a nice big distraction to keep us occupied. We won’t find a shred of DNA evidence on that body in the warehouse, just like the others.”

  “Why are you so convinced Blake is clean?”

  Allen sighed and related her attempts at due diligence: the call to Agent Banner, the flight times that proved Blake had been three thousand miles away when Kelly Boden was murdered. Lawrence looked less than convinced, but she knew that he wasn’t 100 percent convinced the other way, either. He couldn’t be: he was a good cop with thirty years’ experience. He knew better than she did that perfect tip-offs rarely came in without a reason.