The Samaritan (18 page)
Allen sighed and nodded. “I’ll take the feds. I guess I’m going to need the practice.”
Ten minutes later, Allen was on hold to her third department of the FBI’s Chicago office, trying to reach Agent Banner. As she listened to the canned Mozart, she began to regret her earlier words. So far, she’d managed to confirm that Banner existed, at least, and that she had indeed been involved with the race to stem Wardell’s murderous rampage in Chicago and the Midwest. In fact, it turned out that she was the very agent who’d stopped him permanently.
She caught the occasional murmur from her partner’s side of the desk. Half of the time it was him making the attempt to keep her in the loop, the other half just talking to himself as he worked. By the sounds of it, it looked as though the North Carolina connection was also proving to be worthy of further investigation. Of course, if they did turn up another potential Samaritan case, they’d be turning it over to the boys from the Bureau before they could get anywhere.
Mazzucco looked up. “This Sergeant Peterson is down as a missing person, technically. Missing in the final sense, is what I’m getting. There’s at least one other unidentified body in the same neck of the woods, too.”
“Anything stick out about it?”
Mazzucco’s brow creased. “Nothing to say for sure either way. Probably why you didn’t find it. I’m going to give the local chief a call. Guy’s name is Harding.”
“I hope you have better luck than I’m having.”
He grinned and picked up the phone. He dialed a number, looking from the screen to the buttons to check he had it right. He finished and sat back, waiting for the call to connect. As he waited, his eyes found Allen’s again.
“You know what I’m thinking?”
“That he’s wasting our time?”
He shook his head. “The opposite. But I can think of one very good hypothesis as to why this guy Blake knows the North Carolina case and the Samaritan are connected.”
Allen took her time answering. “That occurred to me, too.”
Mazzucco’s call was picked up, and he turned away, introducing himself to his fellow officer in the Old North State. The tone quickly became conversational, friendly. How different from the brief, cold conversations Allen was having on her own line. She didn’t have time to dwell on the thought, though, as the hold music was abruptly cut off midstream and a voice said, “Special Agent Banner.”
The sound was tinny, the background noise high—cell phone. Allen, caught by surprise, cleared her throat before introducing herself.
“LAPD, huh?” the woman said. Even with the static, Allen caught the mild, almost disinterested undercurrent of hostility.
“That’s right,” she replied, taking care to speak with the same tone. “I thought they said you weren’t available right now.”
“I’m not. But the name you mentioned bought you a couple minutes of my time.”
Allen felt a familiar tingle in the base of her stomach. It was the sensation she always got when she could sense a line of inquiry starting to develop—for better or worse.
“I met him an hour ago,” she said.
“In LA?”
“In LA.”
There was a pause as the person on the other end of the line processed that. “I take it you’re working the Samaritan case. Who’s our liaison on that?”
Allen cleared her throat. “I don’t know yet.”
There was an uneasy pause, because neither of them really wanted to be pleasantly shooting the breeze here. Allen ended it by bringing the discussion back around to the subject at hand. “This guy, Blake. He says he wants to help us. I made it clear I had some reservations. He told me to ask you about the Wardell manhunt.”
Agent Banner answered quickly and with authority, as though dismissing a subordinate. “If he’s offering to help, I suggest you take him up on it, Detective.”
“
Suggestion
noted, Agent,” Allen shot back.
“Glad I could be of assistance,” Banner said. “Good aft—”
“Wait a second.” There was a pause, and Allen could still hear the echo and background noise. “Can I trust this guy?”
More silence on Banner’s end. If it hadn’t been for the crackle, Allen would have assumed a hang-up. Finally, she spoke again.
“I don’t really trust anybody, not anymore. But I’d trust Carter Blake with my life.”
Banner quickly said she had to go and hung up before Allen could thank her. Her partner had already completed his own call and was looking at her over the partition.
“North Carolina looks solid: cut throat, ragged edges. But that wasn’t released to the press.”
Allen’s phone began to ring again. She hit the button to send it to voicemail.
“You talked to the chief out there?”
Mazzucco grunted in the affirmative. “Apparently, I’m not the first person to call him about it today. No prizes for guessing who beat me to it.” He stopped and looked down at his notepad. “Harding investigated Peterson’s disappearance and is as satisfied it was a murder as you can be without a body. Then there’s the other victim they found—they thought it was Peterson himself at first. Harding told me if he had the resources, he’d have a team of guys digging up those woods, because dollars to doughnuts, there are more bodies out there.”
“He may get his wish soon.”
“He may indeed. I didn’t say anything, but I guess the feds will be speaking to them later on. Harding’s convinced that what happened out there five years ago was an undiscovered serial killer at work. He’s had nothing concrete up until now. Which only makes me question how the hell Sherlock Holmes back there knows about it.”
Allen chewed it over, thinking about Mazzucco’s suspicions—which she shared—but also thinking about what Agent Banner had said at the end and the way the tone of her voice had utterly changed when she’d said it.
“He keeps his cards pretty close to his chest,” she agreed.
Mazzucco stared back at her, then shook his head. “No. This is a bad idea. I mean, keep tabs on him? Absolutely. As far as I’m concerned, he’s a person of interest. But let him in? Work with him? Hell no.”
“He gave us a lead. He didn’t need to do that.”
“He’s playing with us, Jess.”
“Agent Banner says he’s okay.”
“Oh, you’re bowing to the wisdom of the FBI now? That’s quite a switch.”
She gave him a withering glance in reply.
“You think there’s any way Lawrence is going to go for this?” he asked.
He looked away for a moment, thinking, and she could tell he was being worn down.
“Let’s not bother him with this, not right now. We’re just following a promising lead.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Allen’s desk phone started to ring. She ignored it. She let Mazzucco’s question hang in the air and stared him out. He always blinked first when it came to this. When he looked away, she spoke. “Go with me on this. I think we have to talk to this guy.”
Before he could respond, his own phone began to ring. He said his name and listened, then said, “Yeah, she’s here. I’ll tell her,” and hung up.
“What?”
“The chief wants to speak to you before the press conference. We’ll talk about Blake after, okay?”
Evergreen Memorial Park and Crematory was the oldest burial ground in Los Angeles. It was situated in Boyle Heights, to the east of the city. I was still getting accustomed to driving in LA, and it took me a while to find the place, which was well off the tourist trail. It was a poor, mostly Mexican part of town, and the further east I got, the more Spanish-language billboards and store signs I saw. After today, I knew as much as I’d ever wanted to about the cemeteries of Los Angeles, after the research I’d had to do in order to track down the specific one that I wanted.
I knew, for example, that if you wanted to see the graves of dead movie stars, Evergreen was definitely not the place. You’d be far better off visiting Hollywood Forever, the opulent boneyard conveniently located just over the back wall of Paramount Studios. That one attracted the biggest and the best Tinseltown corpses, from Rudolph Valentino to Dee Dee Ramone. The high-end clientele meant that Hollywood Forever also attracted stargazers from all over the world, drawn to the one place where you could absolutely guarantee that the movie stars would stay still for pictures. They shot movies there; they even hosted rock concerts from time to time.
Evergreen Cemetery wasn’t like that. Its celebrities were of the minor and long-forgotten kind. Pioneers to Southern California, a few early LA politicians. No one of particular note had been buried there recently. If you went to Evergreen Cemetery, you did so because you wanted to visit a specific grave. Which was exactly why I was there.
The sky was darkening in the east as I entered via the wide sandstone gate on North Evergreen Avenue, slowing down to a respectful pace as I drove along the wide strips of asphalt that wound their ways through the seventy-acre necropolis. The first thing that struck me was that the name ‘Evergreen’ was a misnomer. There were palm trees dotted here and there, but the overriding color scheme was comprised of dusty browns and yellows. Irrigation was expensive, and these residents had no need of water. The tombstones were arranged in neat rows, following the twists of the access roads. They looked like gigantic lines of dominoes, ready to be pushed over.
The area I was interested in was at the far side of the cemetery. A section that had originally been gifted to the city of Los Angeles by the original owners as a potter’s field. As the city grew and swelled, the patch of ground was taken over by the county, and when they ran out of space, they built a crematorium and started incinerating the unclaimed and unmourned indigent dead instead of burying them. With space at a premium, the cemetery bought the ground back from LA County in the mid-sixties, dumped eight feet of fresh dirt on top, and started burying the more recently departed on top of their forebears. The approach was striking in its unsentimental practicality.
When I found the approximate site I was looking for, I parked at the side of the road and got out. I’d passed a few other vehicles on my journey through the cemetery, and even one or two people on foot, but when I looked around, there was no one within sight. No one who was going to give me any problem, anyway. The sun was beginning to sink in the west and was already well below the tops of the palm trees. I started to feel a chill in the air and grabbed my jacket from the backseat before I set off.
It took me another fifteen minutes to find the row I was looking for, but when I did, my eyes homed in on the specific plot. Dusk was advancing by now, and it was difficult to read the dedications on the stones from more than a few feet away, but one grave in particular caught my eye. I glanced around me again, saw nothing and nobody. I looked back down the hill toward the blue Chevy. It was a dark shade of blue, but somehow in the dusk it suddenly seemed bright, out of place among the dust and the stone. I felt a strong sense of unease and chalked it partly up to the fact I’d almost had my head blown off the last time I’d been in a graveyard.
I walked along the row and stopped at the tenth marker from the start. It was a granite headstone, of good quality. Certainly more impressive than anything that would have been provided for any of the original inhabitants of this part of the cemetery. I crouched down to read the inscription. Three different first names: David, Martha, and Terri. All with the same last name: Crozier. Three different dates of birth, all with the same date of death.
January 4, 1997.
A Bible quotation below the names and the dates:
And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in Hell—MATTHEW 10:28
At the foot of the headstone was the thing that had attracted my attention from the start of the row: a single red rose, the petals folded in on themselves like a fist but still looking relatively fresh. I reached out to touch it, to check that it was as real as it looked. It was. I straightened up again and slowly turned three hundred and sixty degrees. Even in the half-light, the dry, dusty feel of the landscape was evident. The day had been relatively cool for the time of year, but even so, the rose couldn’t have been placed there more than a few hours before.
I looked around at the acres of orderly markers. A city of the dead. I still couldn’t see a soul, and yet I had the nagging sensation of being watched. Another of those feelings that’s difficult to explain but unwise to ignore. I took one last glance at the Crozier family marker and wondered who had picked the inscription. Then I turned and walked back down toward the Chevy, across two layers of corpses.
“Looking good, Allen.”
She didn’t look at Coleman. The ever-present undertone of insincerity was there in his voice, of course, but Allen didn’t know if it was deliberate this time or if that was just the way his voice always sounded. It was just the two of them and Mazzucco in the squad room. No one to show off to, so perhaps it really was intended as a compliment.
“Glad you approve.”
They were rewatching Allen’s segment of the press conference earlier that evening on Channel 7. They’d held it in the press room downstairs. Allen had met the LA chief of police for the first time ten minutes before they went on camera. The chief was a solid-built man of sixty, with a cop mustache and a permanently weary look in his eyes. He’d greeted Allen like a longtime friend, asked one or two perceptive questions, and called it good to go.
The chief had opened up the press conference and explained that they were now liaising with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on what had become a far more complex case than anyone could have anticipated. He spoke for five minutes, sounding authoritative and calm despite the fact they’d had to tear up the script a half hour before the cameras were switched on. The chief finished up, brushed off some shouted questions, and introduced the primary detective on the Samaritan case, Detective Jessica Allen.