The Samaritan (9 page)

Satisfied, I slid my jacket off and hung it up in the closet so it wouldn’t get creased. I took the remote from the bedside table and clicked the television on as I walked into the bathroom and turned the shower on. As I took off the rest of my clothes, I could hear the news drone away in the background beneath the sound of the water hitting the shower tray. Something about an upsurge of violence in Kashmir. I couldn’t help a grim smile at that. The more things change . . .

I closed my eyes as I stepped under the powerful jet of water. I half expected to see Zoran’s face again, the look of surprise on his face that had stayed with me, but instead my thoughts drifted much further back. The news report had drawn old memories to the surface. Memories of my own experience of Kashmir, a place where
sudden upsurge of violence
was just another term for everyday life. SSDD, Murphy had called it:
Same Shit, Different Day
. We’d accomplished what we’d set out to do in our brief sojourn there, but it had not gone smoothly. I’d begun to see things I didn’t like in some of the other men, like Dixon and Crozier. Especially Crozier. I’d never really thought about it before, but Kashmir had been the beginning of a long journey that had culminated in Winterlong and me going our separate ways.

Ten minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom, toweling my hair dry. The news was still on, but the story had changed, moved closer to home. Breaking News, the bar along the bottom of the screen said. Which usually translates as news that broke eight hours ago, which we’ve been regurgitating ever since, adding some wild speculation and unconfirmed reports along the way. Los Angeles. Some new serial killer, three confirmed victims so far.
Same Shit, Different Day
.

My eyes lingered on the screen for a second, taking in helicopter shots of a crime scene in what looked like the Santa Monica Mountains. Then I turned my attention to my laptop, checking my options for the journey home. Although calling it
home
seemed almost dishonest, given it was a place where I spent less than four months out of every year. Maybe it was time to change that.

Earlier, I’d told Coop I was thinking of driving back. I said that for two good reasons: first, it gave him nothing to go on, the way a flight time or a specific airport might. I liked Coop, but I wasn’t kidding when I told him the less he knew about me the better. I liked being at large in the world, as Neal Adams or Carter Blake or whoever. But I had good reasons to keep a barrier between all of that and the place I chose to hang my hat. When a job was over, I made sure the trail went cold long before it ever reached home.

The second reason was that I really hadn’t decided how I was traveling back home. The more I thought about it, though, the more driving appealed. It would take a couple of days at least, if I was in a hurry. But I wasn’t in a hurry. After all, what good was working for yourself if you couldn’t take a little time off? I decided to toast that thought, opening the minibar and taking out a cold bottle of Heineken. I took a swig and looked out at the lights of the traffic on North Atlantic Boulevard and the black ocean beyond that. I began to relax for the first time in days, or maybe longer than that.

That was the ticket. Rent a fast car in the morning, maybe a soft top. I could make a week of it, decompress gradually, and maybe by the time I made it home, I would have worked out who I was when I was off-duty. The beer went down smoothly and quickly, and I started to think about another. I barely registered the excitable voice from the news trailing another major development.

“. . . source within the LAPD has told this station that all
three
victims were murdered in
exactly
the same way: their throats
brutally
cut. What’s striking about these injuries is that they all seem to have been caused by the
same type of weapon
, which the police are speculating may be some kind of jagged, curved blade.”

I froze, the bottle neck still touching my lips, and my eyes moved to the television screen. The reporter was live on the scene in LA; a caption on the screen told me she was Jennifer Quan, from the local ABC affiliate. It was still light over there, at the other end of the continent. She was clutching her microphone and staring wide-eyed into the camera like an elementary school teacher telling a ghost story on Halloween.

“The source added that these killings seemed to be almost
ritualistic
in nature . . . Whether that means there could be some kind of cult or satanic connection to these murders, we can’t speculate at this time.”

I put the bottle down and swallowed the slug of beer that had lingered in my mouth. It tasted bitter all of a sudden.

It couldn’t be. It couldn’t be him.

15

Los Angeles

“Who the fuck talked to the press?”

It was just after seven p.m. Allen had been waiting on a callback from Mike Sanding in DC when Ed Simon stopped by her desk and directed her attention to the screen on the south wall of the vast RHD squad room, where a peroxide-blond reporter was gleefully spilling restricted information on Allen’s case all over the airwaves. Her reaction was instantaneous and loud enough to draw the attention of each of the half-dozen other cops in the room.

Most of them had the good sense to stay quiet. Joe Coleman, however, was not known for good sense. The pudgy, fiftyish detective displayed a broad smirk beneath his graying mustache. He turned his eyes away from the screen, and the smirk widened further still when he saw the anger in Allen’s face, his busy little brain obviously cueing up another wisecrack.

“What’s the matter, Allen? Don’t you—”

“Shut the fuck up, Coleman.” Allen stared him down until the smirk faded and he sat back down.

The idiot on TV was blabbing away, telling the world that one of the victims had just been identified as reality TV celebrity Carrie Burnett. Allen thought that was stretching the definition of celebrity, but she wasn’t surprised. Then the reporter went ahead and revealed that one of the other victims was Kelly Boden of Reseda. Jesus, they even had a picture of her. The standard type of social media selfie that always looks so inappropriate when plastered over TV screens and newspapers to illustrate violent death. The view switched to reporters camped outside Burnett’s house, and another, much smaller group outside Richard Boden’s place. Allen felt bad about that, but knew it was inevitable. At least she could take comfort from the knowledge that Boden would have no problem telling them where to go if he didn’t feel like talking to them.

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.