The Samaritan (13 page)
She went back to the Metro PD unsolved website and checked the reward flyers for her two victims. As she’d anticipated, they’d been investigated by different teams in different homicide branches. Finally, she used her personal email account to send links to the Hendrick and Baker cases over to Mike Sanding with a brief explanation of what she wanted. With some smooth talking, he’d probably be able to access the autopsy reports on both victims and run them by the coroner, who would by now have no illusions that he was being asked to judge whether they were looking at the work of a serial killer. That was okay, though, as long as he assumed this was a dormant killer who’d operated in DC two years before and didn’t tie it to the case out here in LA.
After hitting send on the email to Sanding, Allen looked at the clock at the bottom right-hand corner of her screen for the first time and was surprised to see she’d been working for more than four hours. She sat back and massaged her eyeballs. It wasn’t just a theory anymore. She had three victims of the same killer out here in LA. She’d now identified four similar killings back in Washington, all falling within a period of four weeks in late 2012. She couldn’t be 100 percent sure it was the work of the same man, but all of the instincts she’d honed over the past twelve years as a cop told her it was. And she was betting when Sanding’s coroner compared the idiosyncratic wound patterns from 2012 with those from LA, they’d have a match.
What the hell did she have here?
Leave aside the tiny remaining element of doubt for a moment. Say the four murders in DC and the three in LA were definitely committed by the same man, what did that say? For a start, it said that this killer was unusual in a number of ways. Serial killers tended to keep to one patch: a familiar city or location. Occasionally, they roamed farther, killing along the route of a particular highway or train track. But this would be something rarer: a killer who struck quickly and lethally in one city and then disappeared, only to turn up in a different city, on the other side of the country and after a gap of more than two years.
It was easy to see how the similarities would likely have been missed had it not been for the coincidence of Allen happening to work two of those apparently unrelated homicides. It was evidence of a smart, calculating murderer. Choosing a range of victim types, varying the exact cause of death and method of disposal, and yet unable to resist using his signature weapon on each one. If it was the same guy, he’d adopted a different approach for the murders in Los Angeles: relying on concealment of the bodies to allow him to carry out his work. And had it not been for the landslide that revealed them, she would not be sitting here now, having made these connections.
She wondered about the two-and-a-half-year gap. Again, from experience, it was rare—although not unheard of—that a killer would be able to stop himself from killing for so long a period once he’d gotten started. Serial killers tended to work themselves into a frenzy, allowing a smaller window of time between each victim until they were caught or stopped in some other way. The easiest explanation was that he’d been in jail. That he’d been arrested on some other, lesser charge and been safely locked away for the past thirty months. That theory could definitely provide a viable lead, if they could come up with recently released convicts fitting the profile.
But it didn’t explain why the killer had moved to LA.
As Allen thought it over, a new, more worrying thought occurred to her. Four killings in Washington, DC, followed by a gap of two and a half years, and then three more killings in Los Angeles—that was the theory she’d been working on. But what if that was wrong? What if it hadn’t been four killings in one city and then three in a second city? What if there had been more killings, more cities?
What if there hadn’t been a gap?
After landing at LAX, I passed through security and stopped to withdraw some cash. Again, force of habit. If anyone had the interest or wherewithal to monitor activity on the bank account I’d used, it wouldn’t lead anywhere too specific, just to an ATM at the sixth busiest airport in the world. I didn’t use credit cards when it could be avoided, so I always made sure I had enough paper money with me to last me for a day or two.
The bodies had been discovered off a fire road near Mandeville Canyon, close to San Vicente Mountain. That meant Encino or Sherman Oaks would be the closest parts of town in which to base myself. I happened to know a suitable hotel in Sherman Oaks from my sole previous visit to the City of Angels.
The taxi driver was a tall man of Indian descent. He didn’t talk much after taking my destination, and I was just fine with that. The cabdrivers I’d encountered on my first trip to LA had all made a point of complaining at length about the traffic, as though it were somehow a unique feature of the city. In its own way, I supposed it was, if only in its indelible effect on the day-to-day life of everyone who lived here or visited. The freeway wasn’t quiet, not even at this time of night, but the trip from the airport took only half an hour or so on the 405. The lack of chitchat allowed me to think some more, to decide on the initial moves I had to make in the morning.
One of my quickest conclusions was that Crozier had not suddenly made the decision to start killing people after a well-earned break. He’d left our common employer a little while before I had made my own exit, which made it just over five years ago. As was the norm, there had been no warning and no notice period. People didn’t just leave Winterlong. In my time in the unit, I saw a few depart—either becoming too old or too burnt out. Those people didn’t exactly leave. They were just retired from active service. And then, of course, there were those who were killed in action. But Crozier hadn’t been phased out and he hadn’t been killed in action. He’d just disappeared. Inasmuch as I’d thought about it, I’d suspected Drakakis had finally come to the conclusion that Crozier was too crazy in a way that could no longer be safely harnessed. He’d either been rotated out and into some other team . . . or he’d been dealt with permanently. Unfortunately, I now had a pretty good idea that the second possibility hadn’t happened.
So I had a five-year gap where I couldn’t account for Crozier’s movements, ending with yesterday’s discovery of the recently buried bodies of three murder victims that looked very likely to be his work. There was no way he’d been sitting around for the past five years playing
World of Warcraft
, so that meant I had to assume there were more bodies buried out there in LA . . . or somewhere else.
We arrived at the hotel, a four-story art-deco place just off Ventura Boulevard.
“You sure you wanna stay here?” the cabbie had asked. “It’s old. I can take you to a nicer place a block away.”
“No, thanks,” I said, shaking my head and handing over cash for the ride. I liked the place, even if it was old. I always prefer old hotels, and not just for aesthetic reasons. There are always fewer security cameras. Fewer ways to leave a trace. Force of habit or superstition again. I checked in as Gil Kane of San Francisco and took the key for my room on the second floor. The hotel might have been old, but it had dipped enough of a toe into the twenty-first century to provide WiFi in its rooms. I wanted to get some sleep before morning, to make sure I was rested up for hitting a few locations I wanted to check, but first I wanted to see if I could find evidence of Crozier’s work before yesterday’s exhumation.
I opened my laptop and went to the LAPD’s website. For a city of Los Angeles’s size and reputation, there were relatively few unsolved murders over the preceding five years that I wasn’t able to eliminate right away. A lot of gang shootings, a lot of cases where the motive was clear, even if no suspect had been tracked down. That worried me. It meant Crozier had been careful—either by concealing his victims, or by operating somewhere else entirely. If it was the former, there wasn’t much I could do about it. I could check the numerous resources for missing persons in the Los Angeles area, but without a confirmed cause of death, I was nowhere.
I didn’t even think it would be possible to narrow down possible victim types, because I didn’t really believe that Crozier
had
a victim type. I guess he was already technically a serial killer by the time he left Winterlong, albeit in a professional capacity. But if he’d continued that profession on his own time, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t be a particularly discriminating killer. It was a rare personality type, but one I knew well: the kind of person who just enjoys the experience of killing. The thrill of taking a life. Therefore, opportunity would be more important than the appearance or age or gender of the victim.
For the moment, I was stalled. Except for one possibility . . . I already knew that Crozier was a native Angeleno, almost a rare breed in a city of transplants. The news story about the murdered family sharing his name I’d seen last night had confirmed that. But I remembered one other thing he’d mentioned, on one of the two occasions I’d had something approximating a conversation with him.
In any unit that was frequently deployed overseas, in inhospitable locations, it was common for the men to talk about the things they missed and the things they were looking forward to doing when they got home. Favorite girls or bars they wanted to visit when they got back, things like that. Crozier, as in all things, was a little different. Crozier talked about a guy he wanted to kill.
The individual in question was a sergeant who taught at the Q Course at Fort Bragg when Crozier was trying out for the Green Berets, a few years before our paths crossed for the first time. Crozier held the sergeant responsible for a training accident that resulted in Crozier breaking his arm.
I couldn’t remember the name of the sergeant, or if Crozier had even told me it, but I had a location and a rough time frame. I could look for murders or fatal accidents involving army personnel occurring in the vicinity of Fort Bragg within the last five years. I just had to hope that if Crozier had acted on his impulse for revenge, he had done it within the North Carolina state boundary.
It took me less than five minutes to find what I was looking for. It wasn’t an unsolved murder. Actually, it wasn’t a confirmed murder of any kind, as far as anybody knew. I sat back and looked at the square-jawed face staring back at me from the screen: a service photograph above a news story. Sergeant Willis Peterson, a decorated veteran of Vietnam and one of the best-regarded instructors on the Special Forces program. He’d disappeared en route to work sometime after eight a.m. on Tuesday November 10, 2010, and neither he nor his car had ever been seen again. I found another mention of his name in 2013, when investigators had linked him to a decomposed body found in the woods along his route, but DNA testing had ruled out the match. Suicides were hardly rare among military personnel adjusting to civilian life, or the quasi-civilian life of an instructor, and I got the feeling that all concerned with investigating the disappearance had quietly chalked Peterson’s disappearance up to a case of undiagnosed PTSD.
I had another theory, and what’s more, I didn’t think the second body they’d found nearby was unrelated at all.
In another minute, I had the phone number of Cole Harding, the detective who’d been investigating the body in the woods. The number put me through to his voicemail. I found the number for his squad, dialed it, and found out that he’d be back on shift in the morning. They asked if I wanted to leave a message, and I declined, saying I’d speak to him later on.
It was three in the morning now, local time. Six a.m. by my body clock. I felt frustrated by the little progress I’d made so far. Crozier was out there, maybe getting ready to kill someone else tonight, and I was no further forward.
I decided there was nothing I could do about that for now. The best I could do was to get some rest and recharge my batteries. It looked like I had a start point and an end point for Crozier’s movements since 2010. I could build on that tomorrow. I had a phone call to make and a couple of places to visit in the morning. I set the alarm on my phone for seven. Then I lay down on top of the sheets in a hotel room that was three thousand miles away from the one in which I’d expected to spend the night and closed my eyes.
I called again just after seven, using the burner I’d brought with me, and got Detective Harding this time. I told him I’d known Sergeant Peterson from training under him at Fort Bragg. That I’d looked him up on a whim and been shocked to find out he’d disappeared. Harding asked me a couple of innocent-sounding questions to see if he could catch me out, but I dealt with them easily enough. He knew full well he was operating at an information deficit: with all the men that passed through Bragg over the course of a decade, there was no way for a lowly cop to know for sure if I was who I said I was. Besides, I got the feeling he was curious about why someone was calling him out of the blue about a case that was so cold it could give you freezer burn.
“Peterson had a lot of friends, a nice stable family,” he said. “Although I guess you would know that.”
“You don’t think it was a suicide, then?” I asked, avoiding committing to any more than I needed to.
“Well, I would never rule it out, Mr. Blake. You know how it is. A person can seem to be hunky-dory, and then one day they jump in front of an express train. You never can tell. Especially with you military types. No offense.”
“None taken. I guess you must have a lot of cases tied to the base, right?”
“We get our share. Nothing quite like Peterson, though.”
“How so?”
Harding paused, and I could sense him hesitating. I waited him out. Eventually, he sighed. “You’ll appreciate I can’t go into the specifics of the investigation, particularly for someone who’s not a family member.”
“Of course.”
“But I’ve been in this job for going on thirty years. Homicide doesn’t just mean homicide; it means any suspicious or unattended deaths, and disappearances that could be deaths, too. You start to get a feel for things. For certain patterns.”
He paused, and I said nothing, relying on his frustration with the problem to keep him talking.
“A lot of people around here decided that Sergeant Peterson drove into the woods and ate a bullet. Maybe even his family decided that was the explanation. But I never believed it. Not for a second.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“I am sure. Oh, I guess I could rationalize it, talk about how he had a vacation booked and paid for, about how his daughter was expecting his first grandchild, about how he never left a note or gave any indication of wanting to put his affairs in order. But it’s more intangible than those things.”
“You had a feel for it.”
“That’s right.”
I paused, considering whether to risk the next question. I decided to go all in. I had all the hard facts I could expect to get. If I could get Harding to betray his suspicions, it would be a shortcut to confirmation of my theory.
“You really thought the body you found in those woods a couple of years back was Peterson, didn’t you?”
He didn’t speak for a moment, and when he did, his voice sounded guarded. Like I’d lulled him into candor over the last couple of minutes, but now the shields were back up. “Did you see that when you were looking him up? I guess you would have.”
“I saw it in the news reports, that’s right. But it only said the DNA didn’t match. It didn’t say if that other body was a suicide.”
Silence on the end of the line. I could still hear the office chatter in the background, which was the only reason I knew he hadn’t hung up.
“You think there are others out there, too, don’t you, Detective Harding?”
Harding’s voice was quiet when he finally spoke. “When did you say you were at Fort Bragg again, Mr. Blake? I think maybe we need to meet in person.”
“Thanks for your help, Detective,” I said, and ended the call. I switched the phone off and removed the battery. I could dump it in the trash later on.
I closed my eyes and pictured a map of the country. North Carolina was almost as far from California as Florida was. It sounded as though Crozier had killed more people than just Willis Peterson there, and he’d had a lot of time and a lot of space to kill many more since then. A man who did not technically exist would have utter freedom to act on his homicidal impulses, as long as he was careful and could rely on a certain amount of luck. Crozier had been careful, all right, but his luck had run out yesterday morning.
Now it was time to curtail his freedom.
I dressed quickly, in the dark suit I’d brought with me and a fresh shirt. I left the usual telltales in the hotel room, locked up, went downstairs, and left through the main door. I walked to Ventura Boulevard. I turned right and walked until I reached the second-closest car rental place to the hotel.
I didn’t spend too long making my decision, choosing a dark blue 2013 Chevrolet Malibu because it wouldn’t be too remarkable. I gave the car a quick look over before signing the paperwork. As I’d expected, there were no stickers or plate modifications that identified this as a rental—a legacy of the rash of tourist carjackings that had plagued the city in the nineties. The rental clerk barely glanced at my driver’s license, as was usual. It was one of the places that leaves about a quarter of a gallon of gas in the tank, rather than providing a full tank up front. I’d noticed the latter type was almost an extinct breed: a sign of the times.
I was still formulating a plan of action. Crozier would be very difficult to find, even for me. He could be borderline impossible to find, in fact, without either some help or another breakthrough of some kind. Quite apart from his background, he had expert local knowledge of Los Angeles. The murder of his parents and sister—still officially open and unsolved—had taken place in ninety-seven, when Crozier would have been sixteen or seventeen. That meant he had sixteen or seventeen more years of experience of this town than I did, plus however long he’d spent here recently. The first order of business, then, was to start orienting myself, and this was one town in which the only way to do that was by car. The logical place to start was the one place I knew my quarry had been within the last forty-eight hours: the body dump site in the hills.
I filled the tank at the gas station next door to the rental place and scanned the front pages of the newspapers. The
LA Times
carried social media–culled pictures of the three victims discovered in the mountains. The similarity in the three faces was striking and caused me to reconsider my earlier thoughts about Crozier being indiscriminate. He may have been to begin with, but these latest killings suggested he’d developed a type: young, white females with dark hair. I wondered why that was and if it would be unique to LA.
I paid for the gas and a copy of the
Times
and then drove back toward the 405. At first I chalked the morning mayhem up to rush hour before reminding myself that there was no such thing in LA, a town where no one was able to rush at any hour. Eventually, I saw the exit for Sunset and took it, following the route until I reached Mandeville Canyon Road. As I’d hoped, the traffic thinned. Freed from having to focus on moderating gas and brake so that I didn’t ram a vehicle in front, or let one behind hit me, my thoughts returned to Crozier.
My conversation with Detective Harding had confirmed my suspicions. The veteran investigator had probably started out investigating the disappearance of Sergeant Peterson open to the possibility it was a simple suicide, or even desertion. But he’d quickly intuited that the sergeant had not disappeared by choice, even if he couldn’t prove it. In the absence of evidence of an accident, that left two probabilities: kidnap or murder. The lack of a ransom demand, or any other communication, narrowed that down to one probability.
That was why, when a decomposed corpse of similar characteristics and vintage had been discovered in the woods around Fort Bragg, Harding’s instinct had been that the body was his missing person. It wasn’t, though. It was some other missing person, perhaps yet to be identified, who’d disappeared around the same time and in the same area as Peterson. I knew how the thought process would work for a veteran cop: the non-match against Peterson’s DNA didn’t make it any less likely that Peterson himself had been murdered. On the contrary, the fact of another dead body in the same neck of the woods made that conclusion even more likely. Harding would have assumed, as did I, that Peterson’s body was out there somewhere, and that if there were two bodies, there might well be three, or more. It wasn’t about evidence; it was about experience and balance of probability. Patterns, as Harding had admitted to me on the phone.
In the same way, I knew the killer hadn’t confined himself to these killings. There would be more out there, waiting to be connected. Maybe a lot more.
The road forked ahead. I’d checked it out on the map beforehand and knew that a right turn would take me on the higher road. I bore right and climbed for about a mile. I’d worked out the approximate location of the dump site by cross-referencing the media coverage, but I realized I’d been wasting my time when I saw the news helicopter hanging in the sky about a mile ahead, like a giant floating signpost. Soon enough, I approached the scene I’d expected. Cars parked on the shoulder. A crowd of people standing at the thin steel crash barrier and looking down the hill. I parked at the end of the line of vehicles and got out. I’d been wearing sunglasses while driving and started to remove them because this side of the hill was in shadow. Then I took a closer look at the crowd at the crash barrier and decided to leave them on.
I looked over the barrier and down the hill and saw the body dump scene. It was easy to identify the three locations where bodies had been found from the concentration of activity around them: uniformed cops and crime scene techs were hovering over each spot. At the bottom of the hill was the road I’d have passed if I’d taken the left turn, only I wouldn’t have made it that far because it was blocked. There were two dark-colored vans, a couple of police cruisers, and an unmarked Ford Taurus parked across the road. Dotting the hillside were scars of earth where the ground had been dug up. I could tell the cops were winding down: in comparison to the manpower evident in the helicopter pictures on the news last night, they’d cut it back to a skeleton crew, and there seemed to be no new digging sites at all. One of the cops looked up, staring at the crowd of people thirty yards to my left before turning his head to me. He shook his head and looked down again. I examined the crowd: it was mainly comprised of men in their thirties and forties, most of them wielding cameras. Paparazzi. Again, far from a unique feature to Los Angeles, but one that the city seemed to do singularly well. A couple of them threw casual glances in my direction, but none of them made a move to take my picture. I was pleased, not to mention unsurprised that I didn’t warrant a photograph.
I looked back down the hill, taking in all the details that I couldn’t get from the text or still pictures or video I’d seen. There’s no substitute for visiting the scene of a crime. I could see immediately why Crozier had chosen the spot. It was easily accessible from two separate roads, but not exactly the kind of spot anyone would have any reason to stop and take a look around. The two back roads isolated it from any of the tracks that hikers used in the hills, so there was virtually no likelihood of anybody happening to cover that ground on foot. A dumping ground off of one of the footpaths might offer more seclusion, but it would also be more easily discovered, particularly by dogs. In contrast, there was the risk that a driver might see something while you were digging a shallow grave on the hillside, but again, that was less of a risk at night, particularly if you wore dark clothing and lay down when you heard a car coming.
The nearest of the graves was about fifty feet down from the barrier. The farthest one equidistant between the two roads. It looked like the killer had brought the bodies down from up here, rather than up from down there. Logical—it meant gravity worked with you.
“Getting a good view?”
The sharp voice came from behind me. I turned to see a balding man in his early fifties. He wore jeans and a plaid work shirt. The lack of either a camera or a baseball cap told me he wasn’t one of the paparazzi. His casual dress said he probably wasn’t one of the cops. I was less certain about the second conclusion. He projected a vibe that said he was used to some kind of authority. I guessed he might be recently retired from the kind of job that would give him that bearing. The thing about him that told me the most, however, wasn’t the way he was dressed. It was the look on his face. Angry, but the anger was covering something else.
I nodded down the hill at the police activity, then glanced at the paparazzi before I answered. “Good morning,” I said. “Just seeing what all the fuss is about.”
The man shook his head. “You’re a little late. They already took all the
bodies
away.”
The way he said
bodies
sealed it: grieving family member, understandably pissed at people like me and the gentlemen just along the road. People apparently intruding on his grief to make a quick buck or get a vicarious kick. He was fixing me with a full-beam glare. I met it and said nothing for a few seconds.
“I’m sorry. Did you know one of the victims?”
He didn’t answer right away. Seemed to size me up. I knew he was doing the same thing I’d done: taking in the way I was dressed, the way I carried myself. I’ve been mistaken for a cop myself before. It doesn’t always hurt. Eventually, he nodded, coming to the conclusion that I might be worthy of closer investigation. “That’s right. My kid, Kelly. They told her friend’s dad before me; you believe that? My only kid.” He looked down at the grave excavation site, and then his head snapped back up to look at me. “Who are you, anyway? You’re not one of those vultures, and you’re not a cop either.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“I was on the force for thirty years, retired last year.”
“LAPD?”