The Samaritan (35 page)
The involvement of the man who now called himself Carter Blake had been by far the most dangerous development. Blake had already caused him real problems, and would certainly cause him more, assuming he managed to continue to elude the police. He hadn’t been surprised in the least that Blake had managed to escape his little trap, but the primary objective of shifting the focus of suspicion to Blake had been accomplished. It had been the only logical course of action, turning Blake’s greatest advantage—the similarities between the two men—into a liability for him.
But the necessity for quick action had caused him to make his first unforced error, unwittingly sacrificing the house in Santa Monica. He assumed the cops had located it through his viewing of the warehouse. He’d considered several similar properties upon returning to the city, but that one had been the best prospect for his purposes until he’d decided on a more suitable base. It was only after he’d set things in motion with Blake that he remembered he’d used the landline to make the appointment with the warehouse owner. He’d thought it unlikely that the owner kept much of a filing system, but it seemed he had been mistaken.
Had this been any other time and place, Blake’s involvement alone would have been enough to make him cut his losses and leave. But he couldn’t do that, not just yet.
He’d been careful to keep his eyes on the door to the stairwell as he thought things over, and he brought his full attention back to the here and now as he heard the sound of a woman’s shoes clacking on the concrete stairway behind the door. He settled back into the shadows as the door opened and Detective Allen appeared from within. She was putting her phone back inside her jacket, evidently having just completed a call. She let the door swing shut behind her and started walking across the basement parking lot to where her car was parked. The Samaritan watched her, being careful not to move. She looked preoccupied, in a hurry. He saw the slight raise in her jacket on the left side and knew she was carrying. He glanced at her pant legs and saw undisturbed lines on both—she wasn’t carrying a backup piece strapped to either calf. As she passed within ten feet of him, he stepped forward and said her name.
Allen stopped with a jerk and her eyes darted to his face. Her expression relaxed a moment later.
“What are you doing here?”
The Samaritan widened his lips in an approximation of a smile. It always felt strange, unnatural. “I was worried about you.”
“Worried? About me?” Suspicion in her voice. He wasn’t surprised by that.
He nodded, changing his expression to adopt a serious, earnest look. “That’s right. It’s this Blake guy. It’s all over the news now. I started to think he might come after you.”
Allen nodded, as though thinking this over. “Okay. Thanks, I guess. I’m fine, though. Blake probably left town already.”
He took a step forward. She began to back away, and he saw her eyes darting to the security of her car, only feet away. Did she suspect? Had he overplayed his hand?
“You’re sure? You’re really okay?”
“I’ll catch up with you later,” she said. “Gotta run.”
He said nothing as she turned and hurried toward her parked car, unlocking it with the remote as she walked. The Samaritan’s eyes made a quick surveillance of the deserted subterranean space as she retreated. If she did suspect, it would be better to take Allen out of the picture right now. It would be easy enough to close the distance between them as she stopped to open the door and get in. He could move very, very quietly. He’d be on top of her before she knew anything. He could touch the steel of his blade to the soft pink flesh of her throat and force her to climb into her own trunk. Or he could kill her right here and leave her to bleed out and be discovered by the next resident who drove in.
Allen reached the door and fumbled with the handle. She cast a glance back toward him and got in.
No. The Samaritan fought back the building urge. He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, out through his mouth. He’d already created problems by acting impulsively. An impromptu abduction or murder, without laying the groundwork first, would be foolish. Particularly when he knew he would be satisfying the urge soon enough.
He relaxed his body and simply watched as Allen started the car, pulled out of the space, and drove toward the exit ramp, out of harm’s way. For the moment.
I sat on the couch and watched Allen’s television for a little longer while I gathered my thoughts. I wasn’t really paying much attention to what was being said, but I absorbed the important stuff. It was being emphasized that the FBI were searching for a man named Carter Blake who had been identified leaving the scene of an ongoing investigation in Inglewood. By the looks of things, they’d only just released the information that another body had been discovered in the warehouse and it was being tied to the ongoing Samaritan investigation. The FBI guy, Channing, had addressed the press and refused to be drawn when asked directly if he could confirm the man they were currently hunting was the Samaritan.
“I can say he’s a person of interest, ladies and gentlemen. You’ll draw your own conclusions.”
Wonderful. The more I saw of Channing, the less I liked him. I got the feeling he was the type of guy who wouldn’t worry too much about trifling concerns like guilt and innocence if it meant he could close a big case and bask in the glory. I knew they’d never be able to prove I’d committed any of the murders—because I hadn’t—but I’d been around enough manhunts to know that the suspect sometimes doesn’t live long enough to get to that point. Allen had been right: the safest place for me to stay was right here.
I shut off the TV and found Allen’s computer at the other side of the living room. The girl in the photograph was important. Not because she looked like the three victims in the hills, but because they looked like her.
Staring at the picture, I knew that she was the reason those women had been chosen. From the start, I’d wondered what had brought Crozier back to his home turf after all this time. When his MO had shifted subtly from random murders to a far more consistent victim profile, I’d known on some level he was rehearsing, maybe building up to a specific person. The choice of Castillo and Dane as the latest victims—both of them diverging a little from that profile—had reinforced that suspicion the same way the locations of their deaths had told me he was trying to shift attention away from the dump site in the hills. The Samaritan was trying to distract my attention like a three-card monte sharp. Don’t look there; look over here.
But the photograph gave the lie to that. The girl in the picture shared a mild likeness with Crozier. A cousin, perhaps, or a half sister. The clincher was the fact he’d kept it so long. It was important.
It hadn’t occurred to me to check if Crozier had any other family in LA. The articles I’d been able to dig up had all reported that the entire family, minus him, had been killed.
Fifteen years ago, I could never have found what I was looking for in anything less than two days, probably involving a dozen phone calls and a trip to the Hall of Records. Now I could do better sitting in somebody’s living room and tapping on a keyboard for a while.
Within five minutes, I’d mapped the key points in Crozier’s life from birth to six months after the murders of his parents. None of that directly gave me what I needed, but it did tell me where he went to high school. Thirty seconds on the school’s home page gave me the archived yearbooks for the last half century. I flicked through the relevant years, easily finding pictures of Crozier and his sister, Terri, each time. Then I went back and looked more closely, hoping for a break. In the ninety-six edition, I got it. The girl from the photograph. The hair was tied back, but the eyes and cheekbones and smile were all the same. There was a name—Kimberley Frank—and a quote:
Better to burn out than fade away
. The posed nihilism was at odds with the beaming picture. Given the date, I was betting the Neil Young reference came by way of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note. It fit with the Nirvana T-shirt in Allen’s picture.
Five minutes later, I had the connection. Kimberley Frank was Crozier’s half sister on the paternal side. David Crozier had fathered her with another woman around eighteen months before his son was born. Her mother had died when she was two, and she’d spent the next twelve years in foster care before winding up in a group home called Blackstones. While there, she’d enrolled in Crozier’s high school in 1996, and—I guessed—somehow they’d discovered their connection. A connection that meant that Kimberley Frank was the sole blood relation to have survived the family massacre in ninety-seven.
Five minutes after that, I had everything else I needed, including an address in Los Angeles. In Santa Monica.
The street running parallel to the one where Allen had found the safe house.
That final detail turned an urgent search into a critical one. I took my phone out and called Allen’s number. It went to voicemail, and I left a short message without identifying myself.
“Allen. Regarding the picture, you might want to look up a Kimberley Frank. Quickly.”
I gave the address, hung up, and considered my next move. Allen had been right about me lying low, I thought again. Without a doubt, the safest thing for me to do was to stay put.
Yeah, right.
I switched the computer off and walked through to the bathroom. I looked in the mirror to compare what I saw there against the driver’s license photo I’d seen a few minutes before on the television screen.
The driver’s license was the only identification I had. If I could get away with it, I wouldn’t have even that. It was the bare minimum official documentation I had to have in order to move reasonably freely.
The guidelines for the photograph are pretty stringent, aimed at ensuring consistency for facial recognition software, but even so, you can manipulate those guidelines to make sure the resulting image is of as little use as possible. Ironically, the requirement to keep a neutral expression helps you to look a lot less like you. A smiling face is far more characteristic than the kind of blank, dead-eyed stare that I was only too happy to provide. I’d also prepared for the photograph by letting my hair grow a little longer than I usually keep it and cultivating a four-day growth of stubble. In contrast to my usual dress habit of a jacket and a shirt, I’d worn a faded black T-shirt under a hoodie. Throw into the mix the fact that I’d aged three years since registering the license, and I was already well on my way to looking like a different man than the one in the picture.
I found a box of disposable razors in the bathroom cabinet and some rose-scented shaving gel—the type that comes in a pink can and costs double what they charge for the men’s version, despite it being exactly the same product. In another couple of minutes I was clean shaven and had brushed my hair back neatly. At worst, I looked like the accountant big brother of the guy in the driver’s license photo. You’d have to look close to see even that resemblance, I hoped.
I thought about leaving the way I’d come in, through the parking area beneath the building, where I could borrow one of the parked cars. Reluctantly, I decided against it. On balance, stealing a car was more risky than taking a cab. I put my sunglasses on and took the elevator down to the ground floor, where I left by the street entrance. I started walking. Just being a pedestrian in LA made me stick out, and I started to feel more and more exposed. I wondered if it wouldn’t have been better to risk stealing the car. A red Ford passed by me a little too slowly and I had the sense of the driver glancing at me. I hoped it was idle curiosity rather than recognition.
A minute later, a taxi appeared with its hire light on. Gratefully, I stuck a hand out and got in the back. I gave the cabbie the directions and hunched down in the seat, watching the deserted sidewalks as we crawled through the late-afternoon traffic.
The 101 was moving relatively smoothly for a change, and it was a few minutes before the traffic bunched up and Allen had the time to glance at the screen and see the missed call from Blake. She dialed into her voicemail, listened to the short message, and hung up. She thought about the weird encounter in the parking garage a few minutes before. If she hadn’t been so worried about someone finding Blake in her apartment, she’d have been more forthright, told her concerned visitor not to hang around her place like that. Putting the incident out of her mind, she dialed Mazzucco’s desk number again, hoping she’d catch him before he left.
It rang five times, and Allen was about to give up when the call was answered. But the voice was not Mazzucco’s. It belonged to one of the last people Allen wanted to hear from: Joe Coleman, the squad-room comedian.
“Allen,” he said, and she could hear the smirk in his voice. “I heard you’d been a bad girl.”
“I don’t have time for this shit, Coleman. Do you want to help me out, or do you want to hang the fuck up and forget I called?”
There was a pause, and then he spoke again, sounding chastened but curious. “What do you need?”
Allen talked quickly, told him to access the DMV record for a Kimberley Frank of Santa Monica and to email the details through to her. She hung up without waiting for a response, immediately wondering if she’d made a mistake by trusting Coleman even this far. But then a minute or two later, her phone pinged for a new email. She tapped into her emails by touch, keeping her eyes on the road, and then glanced down at the screen.
The email contained a picture of an older but easily recognizable face. No question about it. It was her—the girl from the Samaritan’s photograph. And then the picture vanished and Blake’s number flashed up again.
“Allen?” There was echo and muted traffic noise in the background, like he was in a car.
“I’m here. I told you to stay in the apartment. You’re too—”
“Forget about that right now. Did you check out Kimberley Frank?”