The Samaritan (32 page)
She remembered the photograph and held it out to him, being careful not to touch the surface. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
He examined the picture and looked back at her expectantly. “The girl fits with the profile.” He nodded.
“It looks like he’s been keeping this around,” she said. “What do you think it means?”
Mazzucco shrugged. “Could mean a lot of things. Maybe they’re both victims. Maybe the kid in the picture is him. There isn’t a lot to go on here.”
“You recognize the location?”
Mazzucco looked again and shook his head. “Should I?”
“I don’t know. I was thinking it could be somewhere around here. The light and the colors are right for Southern California. There’s something familiar about it. I just can’t put my finger on it.”
“It could be around here,” Mazzucco agreed. “Then again, you get blue skies and dust in a lot of other places. Could be Brisbane, Australia, for all I know. Are you going to put it back?”
“Okay. Okay.” Allen took her phone out and snapped a couple pictures of the original before replacing it on the bedside table. Then the two of them went back outside, closed the door, and called it in.
The warrant didn’t take long to come through. Being part of an ongoing federal investigation had its benefits after all.
Only, Allen wasn’t officially part of the investigation anymore, so she made a strategic retreat to her car, leaving Mazzucco waiting at the house. Before long, the unassuming dwelling was crawling with LAPD and federal agents. Not too long after that, the first of the news helicopters arrived overhead, attracted by the activity like flies to a fresh piece of carrion. Allen sat in the car and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, frustrated not to be able to be inside. She thought about what they’d found in there, about the man in the green Dodge. Occasionally, she thought about her conversation with Mazzucco. She hadn’t intended to tell him about it. She hadn’t intended to tell anyone about it, ever. And yet it felt like a weight had been removed from her shoulders. Mazzucco had told her she’d done the right thing, and for the first time, she’d allowed herself to give that idea some credence.
She wondered why it was she could never meet a guy like Mazzucco in her personal life. Instead, she seemed to be stuck with one long line of Dennys.
At around eleven thirty, Mazzucco appeared on the street and headed toward her.
“Got a minute?” he asked.
Allen leaned over and opened the passenger door, and he got in and started bringing her up to speed.
The torture kit had been quickly found, along with an unregistered Smith & Wesson SD40 pistol and a dozen or so boxes of ammunition. On a work desk in the second bedroom, they’d found the cannibalized remains of some electronic devices, along with a full complement of miniature tools for working on them. Mazzucco said that one of the techs had identified some of the parts as belonging to some high-end bugging and tracking devices. In the wastepaper basket beneath the desk, they’d discovered pages from recent editions of the
LA Times
, with rectangular holes where pictures and articles had been cut out of them, as though for a scrapbook. It didn’t take long to confirm that the missing clippings were from articles about the Samaritan. But the scrapbook, if there was one, was nowhere to be found in the house. Evidently, he was keeping these clippings at his other place. That summed up the bad news: they were still missing the primary crime scene; there was no sign that anyone had been killed or even held in the house.
The good news was that there were plenty of recent, usable prints all over the domicile, suggesting that the Samaritan had not expected this hideout to be blown. A perfect set of prints had already been lifted from a fresh carton of milk in the fridge and was even now being rushed to the lab. The FBI guys wanted to run the prints, and Mazzucco hadn’t argued. The result would come back a whole lot quicker, and given that the Samaritan had been operating nationwide, it was as likely they’d get a match from some other state as one from a Los Angeles crime scene.
Mazzucco had stuck around long enough to be satisfied the techs were doing a good job and had left them to it. He had paperwork to file downtown, and besides, he’d heard Agent Channing was on his way over. He got out of Allen’s car and said he would give her a call if anything came of the BOLO on the Dodge.
Allen watched him leave and then considered her options. It was pointless to stick around here without being able to officially take part in the investigation, but she wasn’t sure where else to go either. The focus was here.
She checked her phone for missed calls, half expecting some kind of message from Blake, but the screen was blank. She’d just put her key in the ignition when a knuckle tapped softly on the window. She started and looked up to see Jim Channing staring back at her, a vaguely amused look in his eyes. She had an urge to turn the key and drive away, but she resisted it. Instead, she turned the engine off again and got out of the car.
“I heard you were . . .” Channing began.
“I am,” Allen said. “But it’s a free country, and I can take a drive wherever I like.”
Channing shrugged. “Anyway. This was good work, Detective. You got a look at the suspect?”
“Excuse me?”
Channing broke out the disarming smile again. “My mistake. What I meant to ask was, did Detective Mazzucco see anything and relay that information to you?”
Allen cleared her throat. If Channing was holding her link with Blake against her, he wasn’t showing it. Not yet, anyway. And why should he? She’d basically done him a favor, effectively highlighting the professionalism of the FBI’s conduct in comparison to her own.
“Not much of one. Male, Caucasian, probably. Dark glasses and a hat. There’s a BOLO out on the car; it was a green Dodge Charger. So far, nada. Not exactly a surprise. This guy’s made cars disappear a couple of times before.”
Channing, who had been gazing along the street toward the house, looked back at her.
“So you think this guy could be an accomplice?”
“An accomplice?”
“Working with Blake.”
She thought about going along with it for a quiet life. Not for the first time, she chose the path of greater resistance. “Blake isn’t our guy. I think he was set up.”
Channing looked back at her for a minute, refusing to take the bait by reacting too quickly. “Then where is he?”
“Where would you be, if half the cops in the city were looking for you and your face was on the morning news for something you didn’t do?”
He didn’t hesitate this time. “I’d be turning myself in. I’d be trusting in the LAPD to hear me out and establish my innocence, so they could move on to other lines of inquiry.”
“Goddamn, Channing. And you can say that with a straight face, too. I’m impressed.”
“Come on, Detective. He was caught in his den with a body. Dead to rights.”
“In response to a suspiciously well-informed tip from an as yet unknown person. A person I suspect may have been the guy living in this house. And anyway, if it was his den, why did they find evidence of only the one murder? We still need to find out where he took the others.”
“He has multiple safe houses. Maybe this is one, too. Maybe the prints we’re running at the moment are Carter Blake’s. Maybe the guy in the green Dodge was Blake. Can you rule it out? Tell me honestly.”
Allen felt bile rising in her throat. Channing had let the good-humored mask slip a little there, had slipped too easily into condescension on that last shot. She took a deep breath and said, “I’ve got somewhere else to be.”
She opened the car door again, got back in, and started the engine. She didn’t look up when Channing rested his arm on the windowsill and said, “You certainly do, Detective.”
She didn’t want him to see her face. Didn’t want him to see that he’d hit a nerve. Because she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t swear that the guy in the shades and the hat could not have been Blake.
As she drove away from the Samaritan’s safe house, Allen suddenly realized how fried she felt. With everything that had happened since Mazzucco’s early-morning phone call, it felt like she’d pulled a full shift already.
Since she’d be unwelcome at headquarters anyway, she decided to stop off at her apartment to make some coffee and something quick to eat. She spent the journey trying to shake the doubts Channing had put in her head. If Blake really was the Samaritan, if he had killed the victim in the warehouse, then who had called in the tip? Added to that, she knew from the flight details that Blake physically could not have killed Kelly Boden. But that didn’t rule him out for any of the other murders. Not even the girl in the alley last night. Maybe he could have killed her before meeting Mazzucco and her at Gryski’s apartment. It would be ballsy, but that was one attribute this killer certainly had in spades.
So perhaps Channing’s idea of an accomplice was on the money. Two men carrying out the murders, allowing Blake to be in Florida while his colleague murdered Boden. It wouldn’t be the first such setup.
And yet it felt wrong. It was ridiculous, but she felt as though she knew Blake already. Even more ridiculous, she trusted him.
She cast around for something else to occupy her mind and alighted on the picture she’d found at the house. She waited until the traffic inevitably bunched up and took advantage of the pause to look at the copy she’d taken on her phone. A boy and a girl and a building. Somewhere warm, a desert climate. Maybe LA, maybe the surface of Mars. What was the nagging feeling of familiarity about the picture, then? She looked again at the faces. Young, fresh-faced. Although the hair color was different, there was a mild similarity about the features, as though they could be related—brother and sister, cousins perhaps. Her smiling, him looking serious.
It was no use. Given the vintage of the image, there was no way the two people in this photograph still looked much like they did here. If they were even still alive. Given her physical similarity to the Samaritan’s first three LA victims, Allen thought that was particularly unlikely in her case.
A chorus of angry horns erupted behind her and she looked up to see the traffic had started to move again. She flipped the bird to the closest car almost automatically and put her foot down on the gas pedal again.
By the time she reached her apartment, she decided a hot shower would be more beneficial than the cup of coffee. First, though, she went into the bedroom and took the box containing her personal gun out from the drawer beside the bed. It was a Beretta 92FS, the same model as her department-issue weapon. She loaded it and slid it into the holster. That matter taken care of, she undressed, tossing her clothes carelessly on the bed, and walked back down the hall to the bathroom. She stepped into the shower cubicle, turned the water on, and stepped under the stream.
She closed her eyes and let the jets of water bounce off her face and cascade down her body. She saw the photograph again, as though it were projected against the backs of her eyelids. Where did the weird sense of familiarity originate? She was almost positive she’d never seen either of the kids in the picture before.
And then it hit her. It wasn’t the people; it was the building in the background. The neon sign that was switched off, or maybe broken: S-T-E something. She opened her eyes and wiped the water out of them with the thumb and index finger of her right hand. The rest of the word spelled out in the neon tubing did not read
Steve’s Place
or
Steve’s Diner
or Steve’s anything. It read
Stewarton’s
.
She knew this even though she’d never seen the building with her own eyes. She felt a twinge of doubt, wondering if this was a trick of memory, something she’d remembered almost correctly but subconsciously twisted to fit the sign in the photograph. No, she was 99 percent certain. And there was an easy way to make that a hundred.
Allen turned the shower off and stepped out of the cubicle, grabbing a towel and briskly wiping the moisture from her skin and hair. She wrapped it around herself and walked through the open bathroom door into the hallway. As she turned in the direction of the living room, she happened to glance at the front door.
Something wasn’t right.
She froze mid-stride and looked at the door until she worked out what it was: the lock. When she’d come in, she’d let the door close again on the latch, the way she always did. But she could see from the position of the handle on the latch that it hadn’t just clicked into place and stayed that way. The handle had been twisted around and, when she looked closely, she could see that the second dead bolt had been engaged. The door was double locked, and she hadn’t done it. She never double locked during the day, only at nighttime.
Her breath caught in her throat as she stood in the hallway, occasional drips of water from her still-wet body tapping softly on the wood flooring.
Someone had unlocked the door, entered the apartment, and then double locked the door again. You couldn’t engage the dead bolt from outside, so that meant that someone was still in the apartment, with Allen. And that someone would have known she was in the shower and would know she’d just turned the shower off.
She listened. There was no sound but the occasional drips on the floor and from within the shower cubicle. She glanced left and right down the hall. On her left was ten feet of hall and then the door to the bedroom. On the right, the kitchen on one side and the living room at the far end. She made her mind up quickly to head for the bedroom, for one very good reason: it was where she’d left her clothes, and with them, her gun.
She moved slowly. One foot and then another, alternating between looking straight ahead and casting furtive glances over her shoulder. She resisted the temptation to run, because she didn’t know if she’d be running into the arms of the intruder, if he’d decided to wait in the bedroom. A shiver traveled along the still-moist and suddenly cold flesh of her back as she thought about the implications of that: of the choice to lie in wait in her bedroom.