The Samaritan (7 page)

After that, the conversation was sparser than was usual for most of the drive back downtown. They barely exchanged a word for the first ten minutes, each of them lost in thought. When Mazzucco grimaced and shifted in the passenger seat, Allen gratefully seized the chance for a break from the subject.

“
Tauruses
,” she growled, in a passable imitation of her partner’s voice.

The Ford Taurus was the department’s anointed replacement for the old Crown Victoria, a venerable warhorse that had finally been put out to pasture. Mazzucco, at six two, was no fan of the reduced legroom in the new cars.

“Clue’s in the name,” he said, not for the first time. “
Los Angeles
Police Department. We spend half the shift in the car, so you’d think they coulda given a little more consideration to comfort.”

“You’re right. Maybe they’ll go for limos next time they change the contract.”

They reached the office of the LA County medical examiner just before three o’clock. The Medical Examiner was a very thin, very bald man in his sixties named Burke. He wore a white coat that was probably in the slimmest size available, but it looked baggy on him. On his hands were heavy rubber gloves with the cuffs turned up. He ushered Allen and Mazzucco into the mortuary where Kelly and the other two, still officially unidentified, women lay. The room was cold, in temperature and in color: a polar blue. Harsh fluorescent lighting bleached every shadow.

Burke located the correct drawers by their locker numbers and pulled them out. The three bodies, covered with thin green sheets, lay on sloping metal tables within each drawer. Burke ambled past the three drawers, unceremoniously whipping back the shroud from each corpse. Allen winced as she saw the most decomposed body, the one they’d yet to identify. The yawning tear in her throat that had practically decapitated her.

“Any further forward in identifying our victims, Detective Mazzucco?” Burke asked in a bored tone of voice that implied he didn’t much care either way. He didn’t look at either detective, but as usual, favored Mazzucco over Allen if he had to address one of them. Allen wasn’t sure if he had a particular problem with her, but decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was just a sexist prick.

Mazzucco smiled and said nothing, deferring to Allen because it irritated him, too.

“As a matter of fact, yes,” Allen said. She looked at the most recent of the three victims. “Kelly Boden. She was a waitress, worked at a pancake joint over on Sepulveda. We just came from talking to her father.”

Burke shrugged. “One out of three isn’t bad, I guess.”

“It isn’t bad at all,” Mazzucco interjected, “considering the three of them came out of the ground a couple of hours ago. And as a matter of fact, we think we have an ID for this one, too. So I guess it’s over to you, Doc.”

Burke didn’t flinch at the rebuke, but he did turn to look at them. “I daresay I’ll have more to offer after the autopsies, but at the moment . . .” He waved a hand at the three decimated bodies before them. “What you see is what you get.”

“Meaning?” Allen prompted.

“Meaning you have three white women of roughly similar age. They’ve all been tortured with knives.” He paused and let his dull, colorless eyes run over the three forms. “Minimum of five different types of blade, I’d say. The killer has a tool kit. Signature wounds on the cheeks make it clear that he is attempting to make some sort of statement . . .”

“Attempting?”
Mazzucco repeated, raising an eyebrow.

If Burke heard him, he didn’t acknowledge it, just continued unabated. “And, of course, it looks like the cause of death is identical in all three cases. Throat opened in a single stroke, severing of the carotid artery. Exsanguination ensued; death would have been pretty much instantaneous.”

Allen eyed the multitude of cuts on each of the women and wondered how instantaneous it would have felt to any of them after they’d been in this bastard’s hands for a few hours, or however long it took him to do all this.

“Any doubt these are all the work of the same man?” she asked.

Burke shook his head in a way that implied he thought the question ridiculous. “No doubt whatsoever, Detective. It’s not just the similarities in the wounds inflicted on these victims; it’s the
way
they’ve been inflicted.” He reached out and touched a gloved finger to the ragged edge of the throat wound of the nearest body. In the corner of her eye, Allen saw Mazzucco wince and swallow. She resisted the urge to do likewise.

“Look at the three fatal wounds,” Burke continued. “Absolutely no hesitation, no practice strokes, just one quick, deep cut, right to left. We get a few slit throats every year, but never this . . . practiced. Last time I saw anything like this was in Vietnam.”

“What are you saying? That this guy could be military?” Mazzucco asked.

Burke shook his head. “Not necessarily. I’m saying it’s somebody who’s done it before. Somebody who knows exactly how to cut a throat without screwing it up.”

Somebody who’s done it before.
Allen’s eyes jerked across to look at the ragged cut across Kelly Boden’s throat again. “You ever see wounds exactly like that before, Doc? Even in Vietnam?”

Burke paused and looked at the three bodies again, the bored demeanor evaporating for a moment. “As I said, the skill and resolve that went into these killing strokes, I’ve seen on the battlefield. But you’re talking about the ragged pattern, aren’t you?” He shook his head. “That is unusual. A cut like this—a quick, single stroke of the kind I described—should have relatively clean edges. These are ragged, as though the blade had a particularly pronounced serration, or the blade itself curved in multiple places.”

Allen’s brow creased. “Would you be able to give us an idea of what the blade would have looked like? Could make it easier to find a match.”

The ME nodded, looking surprised to have stumbled upon two police officers with the capacity for independent thought. “Yes, given some more time. I’ve cleared my dance card for the three autopsies today, Detective. I hear this case is becoming quite the hot ticket.”

12

“What do you think?” Mazzucco said as they stepped out into the fresh air.

“I think spending most of your time around dead people probably has an adverse effect on interpersonal skills,” Allen said.

Mazzucco shot her a sarcastic glance and said nothing else until they’d gotten into the car.

“What do you think about our perp?” he clarified as Allen started the engine and pulled out onto North Mission, headed southwest back toward the Police Administration Building.

Allen pressed the button to roll down the window before she answered. She savored the breeze on her face after the olfactory cocktail of formaldehyde and bodily fluids.

“He’s a sick son of a bitch. Burke’s right, though. He’s definitely done this before, and he’ll do it again.”

“And he’s working on a pretty fast cycle, too,” Mazzucco added. “Three victims in a couple of weeks, if the estimates are right. Three that we know of. So what next?”

“Next, we nail down the identification on Burnett and see if we can work out who number three might be. Maybe we’ll get lucky on the prints, or maybe we need to look at missing persons again. She’s been dead two weeks; somebody has to have missed her. I mean, she didn’t look like a transient or a junkie or anything.”

Mazzucco shrugged. “Difficult to tell for sure, the way he left them. No clothes, no personal effects, nothing to identify them beyond the tattoo on the Boden girl.”

“And he’s smart about DNA. The coroner investigator got jack at the scene: no foreign hairs, no skin under the fingernails. He’s being careful.”

“I think it’s more than that. It’s like he wanted to strip them of their identities, of everything that made them individuals. Like they belong to him now.”

Allen narrowed her eyes and gave him a sidelong glance. “You sound like a goddamn shrink, Mazzucco.”

He laughed. “We’ll be dealing with the real thing soon enough; you know that. Serials equal payday to those guys.”

“Great. So we pay eight hundred bucks an hour for some pen pusher to tell us we’re looking for a white male between twenty and forty-five with a history of violent relationships.”

The new Police Administration Building was only a couple of miles from the County Coroner’s Office. Allen went along with the habit of calling it the
new
building, even though, of course, it was the only headquarters she’d known in this town. The LAPD had been based out of Parker Center for more than fifty years, and she expected it would take a decade or so for the new place a couple of blocks over on West First Street to feel like home, as far as cop folk memory was concerned.

She didn’t have access to one of the rare and coveted basement parking spots beneath the PAB, so she parked in a more spacious lot a couple of blocks over. A lot of cops parked there, which had a drawback: people could wait around for you to show up. As she pulled past the barrier, she saw her partner’s head snap around as they passed a familiar face on the sidewalk outside. The two exited the car, and she followed his gaze back up the ramp to where the man they’d seen stood. He was a little taller than average, and fairly slim. He wore a vintage T-shirt displaying the poster for the original
Evil Dead
movie, under a flannel shirt. He wore a skull cap, and a camera dangled from a strap around his neck.

“Shrinks ain’t the worst we’ll be dealing with,” Mazzucco said as they approached the man. “These bastards bring it all out of the woodwork.”

“Smith.” Allen sighed. “Thought you’d be out in the hills,” she stated as they drew level with him.

The man grinned and shook his head. “Got all I could use already. There’s only so many shots you can take of guys digging, you know? Thought I’d try my luck with you, get myself a fresh angle.”

Allen sighed. Eddie Smith was as bad as the rest of them, maybe worse, but she owed him one. That didn’t mean, of course, that she couldn’t be selective in how she repaid that favor.

“There’s no angle, Smith. Just an unexplained death.”

Smith angled his head. “Nice try. I got there just before they found the other two. So tell me, is this a new killer, or somebody who’s already on your radar?”

“No comment,” Mazzucco said, brushing past.

“What he said,” Allen added.

They left Smith standing on the sidewalk, staring after them like he knew something they didn’t.

“Fucking new mutation,” Mazzucco said under his breath as they reached the doors.

“Huh?” Allen asked, wondering if she’d misheard.

“Symptom of the modern world,” he said, jerking his head back in Smith’s general direction. “Used to be there was a dividing line between the paps and the on-the-payroll journalists. You could almost trust some of the traditional guys. Ever since print media started circling the drain, everybody’s gone freelance, doing a little bit of everything. I don’t know how to deal with this new hybrid.”

“Kids today,” Allen said, mocking only gently.

Smith ran his own crime blog, operating like a one-man news network. He linked to AP stories around the Greater Los Angeles area and cherry-picked the most sensational for featured articles. He’d built up a good network of sources and was reliably among the first responders to a big story, whether it was a celebrity overdose or a gang shooting.

After his path had crossed with Allen’s a couple of times, she’d visited his website out of curiosity. His copywriting was okay, maybe good enough to be a staffer at a provincial newspaper, but his photography was the real deal. His fundamentals were solid in terms of light, composition, and all the rest of it; but more important, he had a war reporter’s talent for capturing the aftermath of violence. He prided himself on showing images that the legitimate news outlets shied away from, and that was why his site racked up more page views than many a larger operation.
If it bleeds, it leads
was unspoken policy at most news organizations, but Smith actually used it as a banner tagline on his site. Allen didn’t know exactly how paid advertising on websites worked, but Smith certainly seemed to be doing all right.

Most of the cops who knew of Smith hated him. They hated him because he was good at his job, and that meant sometimes he got in the way of their jobs. He’d got talking to Allen in her first couple of weeks in the department, at the scene of a supposed suicide: a lawyer who’d fallen sixty feet from a bridge crossing a dry river bed. Perhaps Smith had sensed a similar, if lesser, isolation in her when they met.

They’d exchanged pleasantries, and then Smith had casually dropped in that he’d noticed from his zoom shots of the body before it was covered up that there were scratches on the wrists. Not the kind that would suggest a different kind of suicide attempt, but the kind you get from being bound or handcuffed. Inconsistent with an open-and-shut suicide. Allen had caught this already, of course, but she warned him not to spread that around, whereupon he’d smilingly reminded her that it was a free country and a free press. No stranger to negotiating with journalists back in DC, Allen realized that a different approach would pay dividends. She’d asked him—nicely—to sit on this particular detail until they’d had enough time to look into the lawyer’s background. Twelve hours later, they had the lawyer’s wife in custody following a full confession, and Smith got to be first with the story anyway. Allen assumed that the gruesome pictures of the lawyer’s body got him a lot of hits, or clicks, or whatever.

Allen shook her head in wonder as she remembered the case. The wife had doped the lawyer up with sleeping pills before tying him up and driving him out to the bridge. Every cop who’d come near the investigation had been openly skeptical at first, that a relatively slight woman would have been capable of leveraging her husband’s two-hundred-pound frame over the barrier. Then they’d been just as openly impressed when the woman explained, proudly showing off her toned arm muscles. Pole-dancing classes, apparently. What a city.