“When the feds knock on his door, you mean?” Allen’s partner nodded. “We’re one, maybe two more victims from that happening, I guess. But Lawrence has no love for the Bureau. He won’t give it up without a fight. Why?”
“No reason.”
Mazzucco smiled and started to get into the car. Then he remembered something, reached into his jacket pocket. He handed her a folded piece of paper.
“Almost forgot. Burke came through with the sketch of the knife.”
Allen looked down at the piece of paper in her hand: a printout of a scan of a detailed pencil drawing. The drawing showed a knife about six inches long, the blade curved back and forth along its length. More like a dagger, in fact. Allen suppressed a shiver as she remembered the wounds that this knife had made.
Mazzucco got in the car and looked up at her through the open window as he turned the keys in the ignition. “Don’t work too late.”
“Right back at you,” she said as he drove off.
As she watched the taillights disappear around the corner, Allen gave Lawrence and the FBI some more thought. Putting up a fight was one thing when the bodies all fell within your jurisdiction, because there was a gray area around exactly when the FBI had to get involved with a serial killer investigation and because the LAPD had more experience in that area than most departments in the country. But a case that crossed state lines? That removed all of that ambiguity with one stroke.
Allen swiped her security pass and entered the front door of her apartment building, her body on autopilot as her mind cycled through the known facts of the case. On a normal night, she liked to unwind after a shift by watching a movie: rom coms or westerns or action flicks, she wasn’t picky. A nice, tidy fictional plot with all the loose ends tied up was an effective palate cleanser after the frustrations and unanswered questions of even a good day at work. She liked watching movies because they always had a definite ending; it didn’t even need to be a happy one.
But she knew there would be no time for a DVD tonight. Tonight would be a necessary overspill of the day’s work. As she climbed the four flights of stairs to her floor, she realized she’d left her phone on silent after interviewing Sarah Dutton. She took it from her inside pocket and smiled as she saw a missed call from a 202 area code—Washington, DC.
It was now just before ten thirty, and the missed call had been logged at 9:47, so she hoped Sanding would still be around. She hurried up the remaining steps, taking her key from her bag. She opened her apartment door and entered.
And stopped dead in her tracks at the threshold.
The door led into a short hallway: bedroom on the right, living room on the left, bathroom straight ahead. The door to the living room was ajar, and she could see the light was on in there. She thought back to this morning. Had she left the light on? Why would she, in daylight? Then she heard the noise of movement in the living room. Somebody walking across the creaking floorboard on the approach to the window and then the squeak of her venetian blinds being prized apart for a better view to the street.
Allen slipped her shoes off and began to move down the hall barefoot, taking care to avoid the other creaking floorboard outside of the bathroom. She took out her gun, slid the safety off, and cocked it carefully, so as not to make a noise. Then she held her breath and shouldered the door open, holding the gun in a two-handed grip, covering the small living room in a wide arc as she brought the gun to bear on the figure standing by the window.
“Hands on your head,” she said, calm and clear, the four words issuing before she recognized the man skulking around her apartment.
“Jesus, Jessica! What the fuck?”
Allen sighed and lowered her gun as she glared at the tall, dark-haired man at the window wearing a dark suit. “I don’t remember giving you a key, Denny.”
“I used the spare, the one you keep behind the picture in the hall. You know, for a cop, your idea of security is lacking.”
“Thanks for the advice.”
“I was watching for you,” he said, nodding at the window.
“I left the car at home today. Mazzucco dropped me off. What’s up?”
Denny’s eyes widened in surprise at that, and he just looked at her until it clicked.
“Shit,” she said. “Dinner, right?”
“Yeah. Dinner.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, although she didn’t really mean it. She was still too pissed at him for using the spare to get in. “We caught a big one today—three bodies buried out in the hills.”
“Yeah, I saw that on the news. You’re on that, huh?” Denny’s statement of interest was about as sincere as Allen’s of apology. In the three months they’d been dating, he’d consistently demonstrated a complete lack of curiosity about her job. Not that Allen would necessarily have wanted him to be too inquisitive, but most people she’d met seemed interested in the job, even if they just wanted to hear some horror stories. Denny, however, seemed to regard the work of a Homicide detective as no more interesting than if she’d been an assistant manager at a suburban McDonald’s. The funny thing was, he loved talking about his own work. Whenever he actually got work, that was.
“I’m on that, yeah. It looks like it’s going to be a tough one. I completely forgot about tonight.”
Denny cocked his head insouciantly and sauntered across the floor to her. “That’s okay, babe,” he said, encircling her waist and resting his palms on her butt. “I can think of some ways you can make it up to me.”
Their lips met, and Allen put her arms around his neck and then pulled her head back, smiling. “Rain check? I actually have a lot still to do tonight.”
He stared back at her for a second, an amused look on his face that turned to shock as he realized she was serious. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Allen’s hands snapped down and she stepped back. “No, I’m not kidding. I’m looking for a psycho who tortured and murdered three women, and I have calls to make.”
He shook his head. “Well, please accept my apologies for thinking I could spend time with my girlfriend when she’s
off-fucking-duty
.”
Allen rolled her eyes and turned away from him, walking across the room to the small galley kitchen where she kept the phone and the Chinese menu. “That’s not how it works, Denny. We’ve done this before.”
She heard a snort. “You’re damned right we’ve done this before. How many times is this? You care about these fucking cases more than you care about us.”
More than you care about
me,
you mean
, she thought. “I’m not gonna be much fun to be around tonight, Denny,” she said, scanning the menu. She read through the options every time, although she always wound up ordering the same thing. “Why don’t I call you tomorrow? We’ll do whatever it was you wanted to do tonight.”
“Whatever . . .” Denny stopped and stared at her for a second. Then he made up his mind, turning and walking to the door. “You know what? I don’t need this shit. See you around, Jessica.”
He slammed the door to the living room, and Allen quickly called out his name.
The door opened again and his face appeared, scowling petulantly. “What?”
“The spare key?”
Denny shook his head once again, dug a hand into his pants pocket, and pulled the key out, throwing it at the coffee table. He slammed the door again, and a moment later there was a louder slam as the entrance door got the same treatment.
Allen’s eyes stayed on the door for a moment and then dropped to the phone in her hand as she considered her next move. It didn’t take her long to decide: spicy beef chow mein first and then Michael Sanding.
Fort Lauderdale
The name was Dean Crozier.
I’d worked alongside him. I’d seen bodies like the ones described in LA once before, and I’d heard about others. The clincher was the archived news story from the nineties: a husband, wife, and their seventeen-year-old daughter found butchered in their beds in their Santa Monica home. There was only one survivor: the sixteen-year-old son, who had apparently been across town at the time of the murder. The authorities had been very interested in him but had never been able to prove anything. The family’s name was Crozier.
The rumors had always been passed around the team in quiet voices: that Crozier had killed his family. None of the others seemed to take it particularly seriously, and I’d been inclined to agree at the time. I thought it was probably bullshit, that Crozier himself was most likely the source of the rumors and was simply burnishing his mad dog credentials. Or maybe I just wanted it to be bullshit, because otherwise I’d have to look a little more closely at what exactly I was doing in an outfit that saw fit to employ a man like Dean Crozier.
I’d traveled light on the way down to Florida, but the urgency of my trip to the West Coast meant I’d have to travel lighter still. Taking a gun was out of the question. Even if I could somehow get it through post–9/11 airport security at both ends of the trip, it would be a liability when I reached LA. Unsurprisingly, given its long history of gang violence, Los Angeles was one of the stricter cities in America when it came to owning, and particularly carrying, a handgun. If you were a resident with a spotless record, you might conceivably manage to swing a permit to carry a concealed weapon, but if not, forget about it. Instead, I packed my small case with a change of clothes, my laptop, and a couple of cell phones: my usual one plus a cheap prepay I carried in case I needed a burner.
As I’d expected, it was too late in the day to get a direct flight from Fort Lauderdale to Los Angeles. Instead, I had to settle for a trip via Fort Worth, Texas, scheduled to get into LAX around midnight local time.
I spent the first leg of the trip trying to recall the details of my every encounter with Crozier. It didn’t take that long, because there wasn’t much to recall: there hadn’t been many times we’d been together one-on-one. I hadn’t much liked the guy, even early on, and I’d gotten the idea the feeling was more than mutual. That wasn’t to say he’d been close to any of the other guys, either. In a company of loners, Crozier seemed to work hard at being the outcast.
Winterlong was not the official name for the operation. It was just one of a series of code names for an operation established in the late 1980s, when the cold war was coming to an end and smaller, more personal warfare was becoming the in thing. It was paid for out of a Pentagon slush fund and given a decoy official title so dull and administrative-sounding that you forgot it as soon as your eyes passed over it in a budget report. The code names were supposed to be refreshed once every eighteen months. They cycled through a few—Royal Blue, Silverlake, Olympia—before deciding that what they’d created was better off not having a name. It was too late, though, because Winterlong had stuck.
Mutual dislike aside, Crozier and I were separated within the team by our respective specialties. It was a small, elite unit, at any one time involving eighteen to twenty operators. Drakakis was the CO, and Grant was his second in command. Below that, the personnel was mostly distributed among three separate but complementary sections: the Signals Intelligence, or SigInt, guys worked communications, covert surveillance devices, hacking and tracking cell phones, breaking into secure web servers and databases. Human Intelligence, or HumInt, covered the people side of the equation: identifying and approaching potential assets and then handling them. SigInt and HumInt tended to lay the groundwork for the third group when it was needed: the shooters. Crozier was in this final group, the team that executed, often literally, the operations that came about through the intelligence gathering and planning of the other two sections. Winterlong ranged far and wide, not tied to any one region or officially designated conflict zone. Usually, we kept to our own activities, deploying and carrying out our operations without the need for cooperating with the CIA or the more visible special operations teams. The advantage was we could go into an area without any underlying intelligence infrastructure and quickly create our own. Occasionally, the Joint Special Operations Command would bring us in on an operation that was already in the planning stages but had been deemed by the brass to be unsuitable for the involvement of the Navy SEALs or Delta, and officially canceled. Too tough for the teams, was how they generally sold it to us. Closer to the truth would be that we were brought in for only two types of assignments: those that required the uniquely wide cross section of skill sets within an extremely compact team and those that required deniability beyond the standard requirements of black ops. The deniability was absolute: when a member of the unit was killed in action, nobody was ever told, not even their families. The dead of Winterlong just disappeared, as though they’d never existed. Perhaps that was why so few of the operators, myself included, had families. We never heard what happened to the badly injured, although I had my suspicions. The upside? The money was great and there was a lot of downtime between assignments.
If you weren’t a member of Winterlong, you didn’t know about Winterlong. Men trained for years and qualified for some of the most elite fighting teams in the world without ever hearing the name. At the very top of those units, you started to hear whispered rumors of a secret team that was beyond secret. When you were approached to join the unit, it was only after they’d confirmed two things: that you were the best of the best and that you’d accept the assignment.
I didn’t fit neatly into any of the three sections. I’d come in on HumInt, my specialty in locating hard-to-find targets, but had quickly developed my skills in the other two sections with Drakakis’s approval. There was one other man in the same position, and Drakakis called us his swingmen: we could handle the human and tech work with the best of them, but could also pick up a weapon and operate downstream when called to.