The Samaritan (4 page)

“She was tortured,” Mazzucco said.

“For sure.”

“Sexual assault?” Allen inquired.

“We’ll do a rape kit at the morgue. Until then there’s no way to be sure. No preliminary physical evidence, though.”

“Okay,” Allen said. “Can you turn her over?”

The coroner investigator waved at one of the uniforms for an assist. The two of them moved the body from its front onto its back, performing the maneuver with respect and care, as though moving a living person who was merely unconscious.

The body was smeared with dirt on the front, too. There were puncture wounds and cuts all over her abdomen, many of them plugged with dirt. A pair of perfectly symmetrical diagonal cuts crossed her cheeks, as though tracing the paths of tears. The eyes were open, staring sightlessly up at the cohort of intruders. Allen thought they were gray, or a washed-out blue. Either way, they matched the drained colorlessness of the rest of her. The throat was cut deeply, from ear to ear. With one stroke, by the looks of it. No way was this a first timer. And yet the cut had strangely ragged edges to it, unlike the marks on the face and body. Allen had seen cut throats before, more than she cared to remember, but this one looked different somehow.

Mazzucco gestured at the dirt streaking the body. “Was she buried when she was found? Partially buried, maybe?”

The uniform who’d helped to turn the body pointed up the hill to where there was a fluorescent marker staked in the earth. From that point to this, they could see evidence of slippage, of overturned earth.

“The grave was up there,” he said. “You can go have a look if you like. All of the rain caused a pretty good landslide. You see that shit last night? Insane.”

“Insane,” Allen repeated, eyes still on the ragged gash in the girl’s throat, which was somehow less out of the ordinary in this town than inclement weather.

“It was actually a good grave,” he continued, in the tone of a connoisseur of such things. “Half of the goddamn hillside came down last night; otherwise she would have been one of the ones we don’t find.”

Mazzucco was nodding. The Santa Monica Mountains probably played host to more unofficial burial plots than anywhere else in the United States. With the exception of the desert outside of Vegas, of course.

Allen, who’d been crouched down, examining the dirt-filled wounds in the body, stood up and looked around, headache forgotten for the moment.

“This isn’t the primary crime scene, is it?”

The coroner investigator was already shaking his head in sympathy. Body dumps, particularly in an environment like this, were the toughest cases to clear. They left no crime scene and no trail. “Again, difficult to be sure. But no. I think it’s the disposal site only.”

Allen nodded. “Because it’s a good dump site. Easy to reach, but a couple miles from the nearest homes. A closed gate, but no real security. Good visibility in both directions, lots of notice if anyone does decide to drive past. Let’s get some more people out here to keep digging.”

“You think there’s more?” Mazzucco said. “More from this guy, I mean.”

Allen was looking at the ragged gash in the victim’s throat again.

“I guarantee it.”

6

Allen swigged from a bottle of tepid water as she sat on the hood of the gray department-issue Ford Taurus and watched them digging on the hillside. They’d been out here almost three hours now, and it was a little after noon. She was thinking about details. About how funny it was how you could still remember so many details about something you’d seen years ago, assuming that something left enough of an impact on you.

“Something on your mind?”

She started at the voice. Mazzucco was behind her, his jacket removed, arms folded on top of the roof of the car.

She screwed the lid back on the bottle and swallowed the last gulp. “What do you mean?”

“You think they’re going to find more bodies up there? Courtesy of this guy?”

“Yeah, I do. Don’t you?”

“Why?”

“Why do you think? It’s an optimum dump site, and that wasn’t the work of a first timer. A rookie could see that, Jon.”

It was true. Everything they’d seen so far pointed to the body being the latest victim in a series, not a one-off killing. The torture wounds showed patience, deliberation, confidence. Restraint, even, if that wasn’t an oxymoron. He’d been careful to keep the girl alive for a while. The killing stroke had been delivered with experience and with absolute resolve in one attempt. More than one person had commented on the professionalism of the grave. Luck was the only reason this body had been discovered. Add it all up and everything pointed to this being the work of an experienced killer.

But it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth required more consideration before she let anyone in on it, even the man she trusted most in the department. All she knew was that there would be more.

“You’re right,” Mazzucco admitted. “I’d have told them to keep digging myself. I don’t think they’d have needed to be told, to be honest. But the way you said it, the way you were staring at the body . . . It wasn’t just an educated guess. It was like you
know
.”

Allen smiled and shook her head, feeling guilty as she did so. “Headache’s making me pessimistic. Maybe they won’t find anything.”

“Maybe,” he repeated, looking unconvinced.

Allen, uncomfortable with the expression on Mazzucco’s face, turned away to gaze back up at the hill. The body was still in place, covered with a sheet. Soon it would be transported to the Los Angeles Coroner’s Office for postmortem.

“The missing girl,” Allen said. “Sarah Dutton, wasn’t it?”

“Sarah Dutton.”

“You think it’s her?”

“I haven’t seen a picture, but she fits: slim, white, brunette, twenty-two years old.”

“Mulholland’s close by,” Allen said, drawing on her limited knowledge of LA geography. She pointed roughly north: “It’s over there, right?”

Mazzucco smiled as though she was doing okay for a fresh transplant. “Sure, but we have to go around the long way. Mandeville dead-ends just before you get to Mulholland.”

“Okay. Let’s go talk to the father.”

7

FORT LAUDERDALE

If I’m looking for you, it could be for any one of a hundred reasons.

Perhaps you’ve done something you shouldn’t have, or are planning to. Perhaps you took something that didn’t belong to you. Perhaps you haven’t done anything wrong, but someone would like to know you’re okay. The one constant is that I find the subject—the subject doesn’t find me.

The job Conrad Church had asked me to do had been a straightforward proposition at the outset. Almost too straightforward for me to take an interest, in fact. The problems of rich guys and their spoiled, wayward rich kids aren’t usually my area of expertise. I’m at my best when I’m playing for higher stakes than that.

However, not having anything else going on, I agreed to take the job when it was offered to me. As happens from time to time, a straightforward assignment had turned complicated. Church had been looking for a professional to find his daughter. Caroline was the wayward type but had never disappeared as effectively or for as long as she had this time, and he was starting to worry that something had happened to her. I met with Church and decided that he was on the level: he just wanted to make sure his kid was alive and safe. I gave him the usual terms: no interference, no questions, half up front, half on completion. He’d agreed readily and I’d gotten to work, appreciating the novelty of looking for someone who wasn’t likely to be armed and dangerous.

It was early spring and still cold in Massachusetts, which to my instincts made it more than likely she’d gone south. It hadn’t taken me long to identify a trail that confirmed that direction of travel, and as it turned out, she’d gone all the way south, to Florida. Church wanted to travel down with me. I reminded him of my terms but told him he was free to make his own arrangements, which he did.

I narrowed the location to Lauderdale and within twenty-four hours, I’d tracked her as far as the hotel and the guy who’d sold her the used Audi for two grand cash. Then it was a simple matter of cutting down the possibilities. It was a Saturday night, and there were only so many dive bars and only one of them had a red Audi parked nearby. Everything had gone smoothly, right up until the bar and the complication of Caroline’s erstwhile boyfriend.

After reuniting her with her father, I had taken a walk down to a quiet section of the beach. There I’d wiped the two HK45s down and thrown them as far as I could out into the ocean, one after the other. I didn’t worry too much about them washing up on the beach; they weren’t mine, after all. Then I drove the Audi to a long-term parking lot serving the airport and parked as deep into the compound as I could get. I wiped down all the surfaces in the car and the touch surfaces on the exterior too, not forgetting the spot where Zoran’s man had slapped the roof. I checked the trunk, the glove box, and beneath the seats, finding only a used lip gloss stick. Plus fifteen thousand dollars that I’d managed to forget all about. I removed both and locked the car, dropping the keys and the lip gloss in a trash can on my way out of the lot.

A shuttle bus took me back into town, and I got off a couple of blocks from my hotel. There were three charity thrift stores right by the bus stop. I split the cash into four wads by feel: three bundles of roughly four grand each, and a slightly smaller bundle making up the difference. I slipped a bundle of each through each store’s mail slot and deposited the last one in the saxophone case of a late-night street musician. He didn’t notice, or if he did, it didn’t interrupt his interpretation of “Rhapsody in Blue.”

Ten hours and a restless night later, I was walking into a nondescript diner on the opposite side of South Atlantic Boulevard from the beach. Most of the customers seemed to be sitting outside at tables beneath red and blue parasols. I passed them by and took a seat inside next to one of the picture windows. I ordered a cup of coffee and drank it as I stared out at the ocean. An Otis Redding song played through the diner’s sound system. Not “Dock of the Bay,” which would have been appropriate, but one of the lesser-known ones.

I’d received a text from Church to let me know that he and Caroline were safely aboard the eight-a.m. flight to Logan. As long as she dyed her hair back to brunette and didn’t broadcast the details of her Florida adventure, I thought it was extremely unlikely they’d experience any trouble from Zoran.

It was funny: every time I let my mind wander, it drifted back to the look on his face as he realized I had the drop on him and that there was every likelihood he was about to die. A look of surprise. A look that said,
Wait a second. This isn’t supposed to happen to me. There’s been some terrible mistake.

I wondered if that would be the look on my face when it was my turn. Everybody thinks they’re invincible, until they’re not.

Absently, I let my fingers play over the knot of scar tissue on the right-hand side of my stomach. A reminder of Wardell and Chicago, when my turn had very nearly come around.

The Otis Redding song finished and was replaced by Percy Sledge. Outside, on the street, a figure caught my attention. A heavyset, tanned man in his fifties. He was walking stiffly, as though in mild pain. He wore mirrored shades, a blue T-shirt that was a little too small for him, and knee-length shorts that were at least two decades too young for him. He carried a battered brown leather briefcase, just to complete the ensemble. I pretended to keep my eyes on the view, watching out of the corner of my eye as the man paused at the doorway and entered the diner.

A shadow fell across my face and I heard a familiar voice. “Getting sloppy, Blake. I snuck right up on you.”

I kept my eyes on the view. “You’re limping, Coop. Rheumatism?”

He laughed. “I sprained it playing racquetball. I approve of the location, by the way.”

I looked up at last. “Easy commute for you,” I agreed. “Or did you mean this place?”

“No, this place could be better. They don’t serve liquor.”

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, Coop,” I pointed out. He shrugged. I waved a hand at the chair across from me and he sat down.

“So you found the prodigal daughter. Everything go okay?”

“Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

“So I hear.”

I smiled and said nothing. Nobody had died, and I didn’t think Zoran and his guys would be filing a police report anytime soon. There had been nothing on the news about an incident involving firearms in a dicey neighborhood. I wondered if Coop had heard something from another source, or if he was just being Coop.

“So, this is an honor,” Coop said, raising his bushy eyebrows. He was referring to how unusual it was for us to meet in person, the majority of our interactions being carried out over the phone or by secure email.

“It seemed silly not to meet up, since I was in the neighborhood.”

“And it means you can buy me a drink to thank me for everything I do for you.”

“They don’t sell alcohol, remember? Besides, don’t I thank you by paying you?”

“There is that.”

“So what do you have for me?”

He smiled. “Same old Blake—straight down to business.” He reached down and snapped the catches off the briefcase, withdrawing a thin plastic document wallet. “I got something.”

“Black, white, or gray?” I asked. The question was standard. I like to know up front how legitimate a prospective job is, and that usually comes down to the character of the employer. A black or gray job isn’t necessarily a barrier, but it’s good to go in with eyes open.

He wavered a second. “Off-white.”

“Off-white?” I repeated skeptically.

“It’s a big company. They operate out of New Jersey. Denncorp. They make semiconductors or something.”

“Who have they lost?”

“A senior accounts manager. They were cagey with the details. He jumped ship with some sensitive information, and they can’t find him to have a discussion.”