Watching the recording, Allen kept her face impassive but winced inside as her image on TV began to speak. She hated seeing herself on video, and the knowledge that this piece of footage was being broadcast across the country and around the world did not help with that.
“Good evening,” she said onscreen, reading from the prepared statement in her hands. She was pleased to see that the shaking of her hands was not perceptible onscreen. “As you are aware, officers of the Los Angeles Police Department, acting on a report from a member of the public, discovered the bodies of three murder victims buried at a location in the Santa Monica Mountains yesterday morning around eight o’clock. We have subsequently identified the victims as Kelly Boden, Carrie Elaine Burnett, and Rachel Anne Morrow.”
Background chatter broke out around the mention of Burnett’s name: the TV star. That was why Allen had sandwiched her between the other two vics and read the names as quickly as possible.
“Preliminary forensics indicates that all three women were likely killed by the same individual. Further investigation has uncovered additional cases that we think may be related in”—she paused here and looked up from the statement to meet the camera—“seven different states, dating back as far as 2010.”
Theatrical gasps and yelled questions from the assembled pack of journalists. Allen looked back down again and raised her voice over the hubbub.
“The LAPD is now liaising with the Federal Bureau of Investigation on this case. We are pursuing a number of active leads, and we believe the individual is still at large within the Los Angeles area. One of our lines of inquiry suggests the individual is currently targeting lone female drivers, particularly at night. It’s possible that he’s offering his help to drivers who have broken down in isolated areas. The advice is simple, folks: try not to drive alone at night unless it’s absolutely necessary. Make sure you have a full tank of gas, and lock your car when you’re filling up. Keep your doors locked at all times, and do not stop for anyone unless it’s a marked police car. We urge all citizens to be vigilant and report any suspicious behavior to the telephone number or the email address you can see on your screen.”
Allen finished with a “thank you” to indicate she was ready for the questions. The first one out of the pack was predictably stupid.
“Detective Allen, is the Samaritan targeting celebrities?”
Allen watched her face on the screen as she heard the question and was pleased to see she’d kept her irritation under wraps pretty successfully, just making eye contact with the speaker and shaking her head as soon as he’d finished. “We have no evidence to suggest that, no. If you’re referring to Ms. Burnett, we don’t know that the killer was necessarily aware she was a television personality.”
Which would make two of us
, Allen had thought but did not say.
Another disembodied voice piped up from behind the camera’s line of sight. That one was Jennifer Quan from KABC: “The related murders in the other states, did they all have the same MO?”
Allen had needed a second to think, so she had asked Quan to repeat the question.
“Were they all lone female drivers, too? And if so, how has he managed to operate undetected for this long?”
Allen cleared her throat, not wanting to give the little information she had on the additional murders away so freely. “I’m afraid I don’t have that information for you right now.”
“You mean you don’t know, or—”
“Next question.”
As Allen watched herself fielding questions on the screen, she started to think about that MO again. If the cases in the other states varied so much, could there be earlier cases in LA that also diverged from this, apparently new, “Samaritan” modus operandi? Cases that did not involve kidnaps from vehicles? Her brief brush with the media had just given her the idea of someone she could approach about this.
Onscreen, she took another question.
“Is the FBI taking over the case? If so, when can we talk to them?”
Allen shot a brief, sarcastic smile at the questioner. Looking back on it onscreen thirty minutes later, she was pleased to see the implicit
fuck you
had come across. Beside her, she heard Coleman snort in amusement at the look.
“You heard the chief,” she said, nodding at her superior. “We’re working closely with the Bureau on a coordinated investigation with the aim of getting this individual into custody as quickly as possible. The FBI will be coordinating the multistate investigation and assisting the LAPD with the current investigation here in Los Angeles.”
That was the party line, and again, Allen was reasonably pleased with the conviction with which she’d sold it. The feds had gotten much more diplomatic over the past couple of decades, and they were touchy about being seen to swoop in and take over every aspect of the big cases. These days, it was all cross-agency task forces, coordinated mixed scenes, and joint communication strategies. That meant that on paper, Allen would keep the three LA murders, with close assistance from the feds. In reality, it was the same old story: the government boys were taking this case, and Allen was welcome to tag along just as long as she played by their rulebook.
The questions went on for another couple of minutes before the chief wound things up and reminded the viewers that they could keep up to date by monitoring the department’s Twitter feed. Watching again onscreen, Allen noticed the visible discomfort with which he said that last line.
Mazzucco turned the screen off and turned to face Allen, giving her four loud claps. “Couldn’t have done it any better myself.” He smiled.
“Come on, Jon, you hate this shit even more than I do.”
“That’s what I just said, isn’t it?”
Allen smiled. “What time are we meeting with our cooperative coordinated colleagues again?”
“Fuckin’ feds,” Coleman muttered under his breath as he looked back down at his own, less glamorous case: a seventy-two-year-old woman shot to death during a burglary in Compton.
“Eight-thirty tomorrow morning,” Mazzucco answered.
“They were too busy to speak to us today, huh?” Allen mused.
“I offered this evening, but they were fine with the agent’s phone conversation with Lawrence. Apparently, they can start moving on this before they need to speak to us. They want to sit in on the psych briefing, and then they’ll catch up with us.”
“I bet they can start moving without us. They’re sending us a message. Me a message.”
Mazzucco nodded and smiled. “Don’t worry; it is
us
. Same as always. As far as they’re concerned, the
us
is not just you and me. It’s the whole department.”
Allen turned back to the screen, where they were showing helicopter footage from earlier in the day. Mazzucco was right. Us and them. They’d gotten off on a worse footing than necessary, thanks to Allen’s reticence, and it wasn’t as though the relationship between the two agencies was lacking in friction as it was. She was lucky to still be as involved as she was, and she knew that was down to Lawrence giving her a break. But Lawrence wouldn’t be running the show for much longer. She’d be intrigued to find out how involved she’d feel after tomorrow morning’s meeting with the FBI liaison.
But before that, she had a call to make.
“Whoever this is, be warned I am extremely drunk.”
From the way the words on the end of the line hazed into one another and the bar music in the background, it sounded like the speaker might just be telling the truth. Allen cleared her throat. “Smith? This is Detective Allen.”
Allen heard some shuffling in the background and Eddie Smith’s voice returned, sounding a little more sober. “Well, this is an honor. What can I do for you, Detective?”
“I wondered if we could help each other out again.”
“I like the sound of that.” He sounded immediately interested, and Allen wondered if she was making a mistake. “I caught you on TV tonight. Looking good.”
“So people keep telling me. Can we cut the pleasantries?”
“By all means.”
“You saw the press conference, so you know about the other Samaritan killings.”
“Yep. Pretty impressive, if you’re right about all of these other cases.”
He actually did sound genuinely impressed, Allen thought. “That’s one word for it,” she said coldly. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about the latest killings out here in LA. It’s not public knowledge, but the three victims here . . .”
“All look alike,” he finished. “You don’t have to go to cop school to see that—those three women could be sisters, almost.”
“Right,” Allen said, caught off guard. She didn’t know why she should be surprised that Smith had thought this through. “Anyway, I got to thinking that maybe it’s not just the three out here. What if he’s killed other people in LA and we haven’t connected them?”
“You’d know about it before I would, Detective. Right?”
Allen wasn’t so sure about that, but he’d misunderstood her. “I just thought you could go back over your . . . portfolio. See if anything jumps out at you over the last year or so, anything we could have missed.”
“I know what you’re looking for. Distinctive ragged throat wounds, right?”
For the hundredth time, Allen cursed whoever had leaked that detail. “Like that, yes. I’ve checked on our end, but it’s not an exact science. I thought you could take a look at your old photographs.”
“Sorry, nothing like that.”
“Just like that? How can you be sure?”
“I keep them all with me. Up here.”
Allen pictured him jabbing a finger to his head and shuddered at what it would be like to be inside Eddie Smith’s mind.
“Right,” she said. His media-derived knowledge of the wound patterns reminded her of the other reason she’d called. “Smith, do you happen to know who leaked the details? We could have done without this.”
“I’ll give you what I have for free, because it ain’t much.”
“Shoot.”
“I heard it was a cop who talked to that reporter. One of the uniforms on the scene.”
“We thought so. Don’t suppose you ‘heard’ a name?”
She heard a low chuckle. “Allen, the MSM hates me almost as much as you guys do. Those guys don’t come near me if they can help it.”
“MSM?”
“Mainstream media.”
“What can I say, Smith? You seem such a likeable guy, too.”
“Ha-ha. I told you it wasn’t much. So when is it my turn to get helped?”
“Your day will come, Smith.”
“I feel used.”
“Sure you do. Night.”
Allen hung up and thought over the conversation. It had been a hunch that hadn’t played out, that there might have been other victims in LA that didn’t fit the profile of the three bodies in the mountains. Neither Allen nor the other detectives who’d been looking into this since earlier today had turned any up; so if Smith didn’t know of any others, it was starting to look very likely that the Samaritan had started work in Los Angeles only recently. But that still didn’t explain the new consistency in the type of victim.
The information they had so far suggested that in the other states, the killer had taken between four and six victims before moving on. That meant time was running out. The time they had to catch the Samaritan, and more important, the time they had before another young woman with dark hair and brown eyes was found in a shallow grave.
The Samaritan drove.
He went out driving most nights, not just on the ones on which he had made up his mind to hunt. It was a comforting routine, setting out before midnight, cruising the streets with the windows down, returning before the first of the morning commuters set out. He hated the days: the long, jammed freeways clogged like old arteries with metal and exhaust fumes and disgusting, sweating people. There was still traffic at night, of course, but one could move relatively freely around the monstrous, sprawling city in the dead hours between the late evening and the early morning. The cars moved efficiently and calmly on the freeways, the drivers less frantic at night, less in a hurry to get to wherever they were going. The surface streets were quieter still, and that was where the Samaritan liked to be.
The mountains, and the maze of twisting two-lane routes that skirted them, had served him well in the past two weeks. Both because of the sparsity of night traffic and the fact that isolation made the prey more uneasy when they broke down, more ready to accept an offer of assistance. That was a happy accident, of course. He had other practical reasons for taking his victims in that area. But he was keeping well away from there tonight, although he would certainly return the next time he had . . . company.
The police knew about some of the other killings now. He had not been overly worried when he’d seen the news and had it confirmed they were looking into his back catalog. He’d expected this from the moment he found out that the body from Saturday had been discovered. In truth, he’d been expecting it for far longer than that. He was amazed that his body of work had gone unconnected for such a very long time. Perhaps that had led him to be careless with the burials of these last victims, or perhaps it was merely the comfort of being home again. He’d always been careful not to leave physical evidence, never to use the same firearm twice when he did use one, and even now he knew there would be nothing concrete to forensically connect the cases to one another, still less to connect any of them to him. But then, that was just one of the benefits of being a man who did not exist.
He drove at the speed limit, not paying any more attention than was necessary to the road, watching his surroundings. The darkened storefronts sliding by, the occasional lit-up bar with its regulation huddle of smokers outside, and above it all the dirty yellow night sky, stained that color by light pollution reflecting off the other, more obdurate kind of pollution. And then there was a gap in the buildings and he saw the Hollywood sign shining back at him. He pulled over to the side of the road and turned the engine off. The street sounds from behind him seemed small, lost in the void between him and the hills. He put an arm on the windowsill and remembered the place in the mountains.