The Samaritan (12 page)
Because of this, I tended not to tag along on the bulk of the shooter operations, except where the job called for it. It was on those sporadic occasions that I came into Crozier’s orbit. I guessed I’d been alone with him on no more than two occasions, been involved with him on maybe half a dozen operations. The last of those ops was the catalyst that had started me thinking about leaving.
I changed planes at Fort Worth just after eleven p.m. Pacific: a quick layover, and thankfully both planes were on time. I had no checked baggage to transfer, and my photographic ID caused no problems. The onward flight to Los Angeles was a short one. I spent it looking out of the window, down on the dark patches of landscape and the pincushions of light. I thought about how the LAPD had so much more on its hands than a simple serial killer. I thought about the last time I saw Crozier and then about my own final deployment in Karachi. Mostly, I thought about Crozier’s dead-eyed stare and the whispered rumors, and I wondered why the past wouldn’t leave me alone.
The sun had long since set and the light that intruded through the blinds was the dirty sodium yellow of streetlights, but he felt no need to switch on the lamp.
He had left the house for a couple of hours earlier on, but now he was back and watching the live news broadcasts with an interest that almost made him feel ashamed. This had not been part of the plan, not yet. And yet he’d known deep down that it was an inevitability sooner or later.
He actually liked the name they’d conjured up for him this time. He’d had other names in other places: names like
the Woodsman
,
the Attendant
. It was nothing to be proud of, not really. It only meant he’d been noticed in those places, that he hadn’t been careful enough. Most times, he’d completed his task quietly and moved on without a ripple, leaving only questions in his wake. An unexplained disappearance, a random isolated act of violence.
Feeling as though he’d gorged himself on something that was not good for him, he switched the television off and walked across the narrow hall to the other room. He lay down on top of the sheets and knitted his fingers together behind his head. He stared at the ceiling as he thought about the first time. Ninety-six. Three of them had hiked up there, into the mountains, but only two had come back.
The howl of a police siren approaching snapped him out of his thoughts and back to the present. He got off the bed and went to the window, standing at the gap in the blinds until he saw the cruiser flash by without slowing, on its way to some nameless emergency. After the lights disappeared and the noise of the siren faded, he stood there watching the empty street for a minute, wondering about how effective the police would be here in Los Angeles. There was no real danger of them finding him before it was time to move on again, but perhaps it would be prudent to change his approach a little.
The Samaritan lay back down on the bed and knitted his fingers behind his head once again. He wondered how long it would take them to find out about the others.
1996
They’d left the Buick parked at a wide spot in the road just before they reached the track. He let Kimberley take the lead, with himself in the middle and Robbie bringing up the rear. Eighty-plus degrees, but the heat didn’t bother him. It didn’t seem to bother Kimberley, either. Robbie, however, was flagging.
“Screw this,” Robbie declared a half hour into the trek. “We’re never going to find it. Hey, man, give me the water again.”
He hadn’t liked Robbie to begin with. He was liking him less and less as the day progressed.
But he shrugged his backpack off anyway, reached into it, and handed Robbie his bottle of water. They had one pack between them, and he’d volunteered to carry it. He supposed Robbie would assume he was doing that to impress Kimberley, and maybe even Kimberley thought that, too. But the truth was he liked to push himself. The hike wasn’t enough. The heat wasn’t enough. It was always good to push further. Besides, there was another, more practical reason to be the one to carry the pack.
Kimberley stopped and turned around, looking at Robbie with disdain. She was holding a thick branch, using it as a makeshift hiking stick, though in truth it was too short and too thick to be of much real use. “It’s up here. I’m telling you.” Then she looked straight at him. “How about you? You’re not gonna quit on me now, are you?”
He shook his head. “Let’s keep going.”
Kimberley flashed a wide grin at him, and her chocolate-brown eyes danced. “Didn’t I tell you we’d have fun together?”
He nodded slowly and then looked back to Robbie. Robbie was taking another deep slug from his water bottle. Asshole. There would be none left for the return trip at that rate.
By the time Robbie handed the bottle back to him, Kimberley had set off again. She was already twenty yards ahead of them, swinging her branch as she walked. He stowed the bottle in the pack, slung it back over his shoulders, and started walking again. Had he made up his mind to go through with it at that point, as he watched Kimberley stride ahead, masking her own obvious fatigue? He supposed he had. He had already decided this was a day for pushing boundaries.
After ordering food, Allen called Mike Sanding back. He’d left the office already, but she managed to talk the desk into giving her his cell number.
“I talked to the ME,” he said as soon as he answered the phone. “We pulled the files of those two unsolveds we talked about. He actually performed the autopsy on the snitch. We looked at the transcripts, photographs of the wounds. In his opinion, they could have been made by the same weapon in both cases.”
“Profile on the weapon?”
“Short knife or dagger, maybe six inches long. A curved, jagged pattern on both sides of the blade.”
Allen considered this. “Sounds like what they said here—maybe some kind of ceremonial dagger.”
“Yeah, I saw the news—they’re saying some kind of black magic shit?”
“Don’t remind me. Can I ask a favor?”
“You want to send me the pics of the wounds in LA, see if our guy thinks they’re a match, too? No problem, Jess. I already said I might have more to show him.”
“That’s not the favor. I want you to do what you just said, yes, but I don’t want anyone to know about it.”
Sanding paused, and she heard him suck air through his teeth. “He’s gonna ask.”
“I know, Mike. Make something up. Tell him you’re working another case and it’s need-to-know.” The suggestion came out sounding as lame as it was. If the coroner had been paying attention to the news, he would put two and two together.
Sanding thought about it for another couple of seconds and agreed. Hanging up, she knew he had a pretty good idea of what she was worried about. From the hesitation, she had the idea he didn’t entirely approve, but he’d go along with it just the same. Mike was a good man, and he’d been as good as his word on her last day with the department—
Anything you need, give me a call
. He’d given her everything he could on this, but she would be on her own for the next part, because there was no one else back in Washington whom she trusted enough to ask the same questions.
The Chinese food arrived at her door fifteen minutes later, and she ate it in front of her computer with a Coke from the refrigerator. She ignored the beers that were in there, still feeling the residual effects from the previous night.
If she was right about the link between the bodies in the hills and the two victims she’d discussed with Sanding, it was likely there would be more Washington, DC victims, probably among the pile of unsolved murders for that year. In the absence of a direct contact from one of those investigations, what she really needed was access to the national crime database. But that would mean leaving an audit trail on the system, and she didn’t want to do that if she didn’t have to.
Instead, she navigated to the website of the MPDC, realizing the irony of the fact that this was her first visit, despite being a former serving officer with Metro PD. The website hosted a section listing unsolved homicides going back as far as the early fifties. By making the information available to the public and offering rewards, they left the door open for the occasional thousand-to-one chance that someone would come forward with useful information on a cold case.
The older cases were grouped by decade, but each year since the millennium had its own page. She scrolled down a long list of around sixty victims: the year she was interested in had its share of people getting away with murder in the nation’s capital.
The list had a name, and usually a photograph, for each victim, along with date and location of death. Each entry could be clicked on for more information about the crime. As Allen scanned the list, she couldn’t help but notice how many of the faces were black. Sure, the inner city was more than 60 percent African American, but this roll call of the dead and yet to be avenged was more like 90 percent. She reminded herself that she wasn’t carrying out a sociological exercise here and started narrowing her search to the months between August and December. The cases were arranged alphabetically by victim name, and there was no way of sorting, so she had to resort to a pen and paper.
Keeping it to this date range narrowed the search down to a dozen names. She spent time clicking into each one for more information. In most cases, there wasn’t too much more detail. Information about the date and time the crime was committed, or the body discovered, along with very basic details of the cause of death. Each record contained a link to a PDF flyer containing the same information and promising a reward of up to twenty-five thousand dollars for information leading to a conviction. The reward flyer also included cell and desk numbers for the investigating detectives, as well as the direct number for their homicide branch.
Twenty-five fairly depressing minutes later, Allen had narrowed the list down to five candidates by eliminating the victims whose cause of death was something other than bladed trauma: mostly gunshot wounds, hit-and-run deaths, even one poisoning. She’d eliminated one of those five—Michael Antonio—because he’d been found alive with stab wounds and had died in the hospital three days later. She was interested only in the victims who’d been killed outright. The Samaritan didn’t make mistakes when he decided to kill.
Allen took a break, made herself a pot of coffee, and then sat down with her four names: Randy Solomon, September twelfth, found at 2:31 a.m. with stab wounds in the 700 block of Delafield Place. James Willis Hendrick, September thirtieth, found with head trauma—nonspecific—in Lamont Park. Audra Baker, October fifth, stab wounds, inside the Fourth Street deli where she worked. Bennett Davis, October seventeenth, stab wounds, the 1200 block of Sixth Street.
The individual summaries on the website hadn’t provided much more than the bare bones of information. She knew from experience that there could be a world of difference between two murders recorded under the same cause of death:
head trauma
, for example, covered everything from an accidental concussion that resulted in death all the way up to decapitation. She went back over the four names, typing each into Google in order to cross-reference the dry, factual information on the unsolved site with the reliably lurid accounts in the press or the crime blogs.
It didn’t take her long to eliminate two more names. Randy Solomon had been stabbed in the chest following an altercation in a bar, and although there had been witnesses to the killing, the suspect was never found. Bennett Davis had been found facedown in an alley with his wallet missing. There had been only one stab wound—unluckily for Davis, to the femoral artery. He’d bled out in the alley following what looked like a cut-and-dried mugging-turned-homicide. In both cases, the victims had been killed quickly—perhaps even unintentionally—and left where they fell. A different brand of murder entirely from the victims in LA, or the ones she’d discussed with Sanding.
That left James Hendrick, the park victim, and Audra Baker, the deli worker. Other than geography and the manner of their untimely deaths, the two didn’t seem to have much in common: Hendrick was a white male office manager in his late forties, Baker a seventeen-year-old black female with a minimum-wage job. But once you got beyond age and race, the similarities soon began to mount up. Even before you took anything else into consideration, the two cases had one important thing in common: the bodies were found in secluded, quiet locations. Locations that were ideal for dumping the bodies of victims who had been killed elsewhere. Or alternatively, they allowed a killer time to work on his victim.
That common thread made these two victims the best candidates from the original list of sixty. The additional details Allen had found in the news reports practically sealed the deal. Both were discovered in the morning, having been dead for hours. Both showed evidence of torture; both had had their throats cut. The reports didn’t specify a ragged wound pattern, but that was exactly the type of detail that would not be released to the media. It was why she was so pissed about the leak here in LA. It was sound practice: withholding the fine detail so that it could be used to weed out the cranks and to validate confessions. But having spent the best part of a couple of hours tracking down this pair of needles in a haystack, Allen saw it for the first time as a potential disadvantage. The number of homicides annually in Washington had been steadily falling from a peak of nearly four hundred a year in the early nineties, but the numbers were still considerable, and the resources to investigate them finite. With different personnel on separate cases, it was easy for patterns to be missed, particularly when the victim profile was so divergent. And knife murders weren’t like gunshot murders—there were no ballistics to precisely match any two killings to a single weapon. The best you could do was to say that two people had been killed by the same
type
of bladed weapon, unless you had the knife itself.