Herrera was tall and solidly built, with tattoos all over his arms. So far, he hadn’t been a lot of help, even though he’d rolled over every bit as easily as Allen had hoped when she dangled leniency on the grand theft auto charge in front of him.
“I swear, man, the dude just left it there. Keys in the fuckin’ ignition. We didn’t even do nothin’ to him.” Herrera’s eyes were wide, his voice imploring, as though he worried they’d never believe that someone would just walk away from a hundred-thousand-dollar car.
Allen reminded him that, just because somebody leaves their car unlocked, it isn’t necessarily an invitation to take it—although privately she knew that in this case it absolutely was—and then pressed him for a description of the driver.
Herrera had looked sheepish. “It was a . . . white guy?”
“You don’t sound sure,” Allen suggested.
“I’d, uh . . . I’d had a little to drink and . . .” Herrera had screwed up his face. “Hat, maybe? A ball cap?”
“Color?” she prompted. “Was there a team logo on it? Lakers? Kings?”
Herrera wriggled for a few more seconds before asking them straight out: “What kind of guy do you want me to have seen?”
Bar the formalities, that was the end of that.
She left the interview room and walked down the corridor to an adjacent room, which was empty. The windows on this side looked out on the
LA Times
building across the street. She stepped inside, took her phone out, and scrolled through her directory until she found a number she’d added very recently. She paused for a second, her thumb over the little telephone icon, thinking the next action through. And then she pressed it.
The call took a couple of seconds to engage; there were three rings of the electronic dial tone, and then a male voice answered.
“Detective Allen.”
“Why don’t you come on in, Mr. Blake? I think we can find some things to talk about.”
The new headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department on West First Street was a shiny mission statement that the department had moved past its historical problems and into a bright, new twenty-first-century future. The angular ten-story building looked almost inviting, with its wide expanses of glass and the open plaza out front.
I checked in at the desk and was escorted through a metal detector and into the building proper. The elevator took me to the fourth floor, and I was led across the expansive Robbery Homicide squad room. A few faces looked up at me with suspicion as I passed through their inner sanctum. My escort pointed out Detective Allen’s position in the maze of desks and cubicles. She was at the far end of the room, standing with her arms folded. She had on a similar outfit to the one she’d worn yesterday: a gray suit with a lavender blouse; but today she’d swept her shoulder-length blond hair back into a ponytail. From our brief meeting earlier, and the other information I’d gleaned on her, I didn’t think she was the type of person to waste a lot of time fixing her hair in the course of the day.
We shook hands. She smiled, but without warmth.
“Mr. Blake, thanks for coming in.” She glanced at the clock on the wall. “You made it here fast.”
“I was close by,” I said.
She told me to follow her, and we walked through a set of doors and down a corridor with doors down one side. We stopped at one of the doors, and she put her hand on the door knob to open it, stopping at the sound of a loud voice from down the corridor.
“Allen.”
We both turned to see a tall, solidly built guy in his mid-forties approach. I heard Allen sigh, loud enough that I could tell she didn’t care if he heard it. He wore a gray suit and tie, but just from the way he moved, I got the feeling he’d be more at home in fatigues of some kind. I guessed SWAT.
“Who’s this guy?” His tone was confrontational, and he was looking at me even though the question was addressed to Allen.
“This is Carter Blake. He’s helping us on the Samaritan. Blake, this is Captain Don McCall of our Special Investigation Section.”
I held out my hand, which was ignored. I hadn’t been far off when I guessed McCall was SWAT. I knew a little about the LAPD’s SIS team, mostly from reading news stories about accusations of excessive force. SIS was the department’s tactical surveillance unit, and they had a reputation for justifying their controversial methods by getting results on tough cases. Sometimes fatal results, for the suspect.
“So who is he? You’re not FBI.”
“I’m not FBI.”
“He’s freelance. You got a problem with that, McCall?”
McCall stared at me for a few seconds, but I didn’t react. He turned back to Allen, dismissing me. “I wanted to catch you, Allen. When you get a suspect on this thing, you come to me first, before the feds, okay? We can keep our own house in order.” He glanced at me again as he said that.
“You’ll be the first to know, McCall.” Allen’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. She really wasn’t attempting to hide her feelings.
McCall moved his head sharply toward her, aggressively invading her personal space. I had to fight an urge to put a hand on his chest and push him back, but Allen didn’t flinch.
McCall smiled and shook his head. “Whatever you say, Fixer.”
He glanced at me again and shook his head before moving on down the corridor.
“Sorry about that,” Allen said when he’d gone. “He gets grumpy when he hasn’t shot anyone in a while.”
Allen opened the door and showed me into a small meeting room with floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out on Spring Street. There was a boardroom table that was slightly too big for the space. There was an iPad and an open laptop on the table—no paper. She walked around the table and sat down with her back to the window. I took the seat opposite.
“I take it your partner doesn’t approve of this idea, either?”
“He’s looking into something else right now. But I don’t know if either of us is entirely comfortable with this.”
“I just want to help. I take it you looked into my references?”
She nodded. “I talked to your FBI contact. Detective Mazzucco had a look at the North Carolina connection.”
“And?”
“And we’re looking into it.”
I got the point. I had my foot in the door, but genuine cooperation was going to take a lot more work.
Allen continued. “We also had a look elsewhere. Due diligence and all that. Not that you gave us much to go on. Your cell number is unregistered, no contract. I kind of expected that. There’s not a lot else to go on, though, which is funny. You don’t seem to leave much of a footprint.”
I shrugged as though there were nothing to it. “I value my privacy.”
“So it would seem,” she said. “The driver’s license is genuine, but there’s nothing else behind it. No employment or medical history. The address is in New York City; looks like an office building.”
She paused, giving me an opportunity to confirm or deny. I said nothing and waited for her to continue, to get this dance out of the way.
“I guess you only have a license because you absolutely have to, these days,” she said after a minute. “Not just to drive, but for photographic ID. Difficult to fly or rent a car without that. That’s how I knew I could expect to find your name on passenger manifests on inbound flights to LA.”
I couldn’t help but smile, impressed. Also because this helped to resolve a potential problem for us both.
“It took a little time, but I eventually got a Carter Blake flying into LAX on Sunday night from Fort Lauderdale. I was pleased to find that piece of information.”
“I’m glad you did,” I said. A look passed between us, and I knew we didn’t have to spell it out. The flight records meant that she now had a fair degree of certainty that I had been three thousand miles from LA on the night the Samaritan had last struck. It meant we were getting off to a good start.
Allen moved the laptop to one side and put her hands on the table. “Okay. Before we go any further, I just want to know one thing.”
“That sounds fair,” I said.
“Why are you offering your services for free?”
I had anticipated the question, of course. The simple answer—because I wanted to catch him—wouldn’t satisfy a cop with an inquiring mind, which was to say any cop worth his or her salt. The complex answer, the answer that explained not just why I wanted to catch him, but how I was in a unique position to do so, was out of the question. With that in mind, I had a couple of different rationales for my apparent generosity. Depending on how suspicious Detective Allen was, the first one might be enough. It wasn’t even a distortion of the truth, not really. If Allen wanted to, she’d be able to check it out easily enough.
“Bottom line, I’m interested in the case,” I said. “Interested enough to come over here and find out more. And yes, I’ll be honest with you. I did think about offering my services on a professional basis.”
“What changed?” she prompted, watching me carefully.
I hesitated, as though I didn’t want to go further. “I drove out to the graves yesterday, just to take a look around. I ran into somebody there. Richard Boden, father of one of the victims. You know that, of course.”
Allen didn’t say anything. Her face gave nothing away.
I continued. “He was hostile at first, thought maybe I was a reporter, or maybe just a rubbernecker. We talked a while and I explained why I was there. He offered to hire me. I turned him down. I told him this one was pro bono.”
Allen smiled, and immediately I knew I’d need to exploit the other angle. “So you’re offering to provide your services for nothing, because you wanted to help. Heartwarming.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I don’t believe anybody would fly across the country to pitch for business and then do the job for free. Not without a better reason than that.”
I sighed and lifted my hands up:
You got me
. “Okay, it’s not just that.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
“I do want to catch this guy, and I did talk to Boden. But I’m not being purely altruistic here, either. If I help you catch the Samaritan, it’s . . . You could say it’s good for my résumé.”
She nodded, although I could still see skepticism. “Like a hotshot lawyer taking on a high-profile case for free, huh? So you can charge the next paying customer a lot more?”
She paused and looked at me across the desk. I looked back at her, saying nothing.
“Okay,” she said eventually. “Let’s see if you can help.”
I got up, put my hand on the back of my chair, and dragged it around to her side of the desk.
“First off,” I said, “we should let the FBI do the work on the historic cases. Forget about them for now. We need to focus on now, on Los Angeles.”
She looked a little relieved, like I’d taken a weight off her shoulders. “So where do you want to start?”
“Only one place to start,” I said. “With the victims.”
“The first one to be buried—the first that we know of—was named Rachel Morrow.”
Allen called up the relevant file on the iPad and enlarged the picture—a standard head shot—with a swipe of her fingers. They’d almost certainly gotten the picture from the DMV. It looked like most of those kinds of pictures—a true enough representation of an individual’s general appearance, their race, gender, age, hair color, and all the rest of it, but somehow failing to capture the essence of the person. I’d read something a long time ago about why that was. Something about the combination of the harsh lighting and the low-level pressure of knowing that this picture was going to be on an official document for the next five or ten years.
“The accountant,” I said.
“Ten out of ten. How’d you know that?”
“The news.”
She snorted at that.
“That was an unusual move, by the way,” I said. “Releasing the information about the wound patterns to the media.”
“It wasn’t my move. When I find out whose move it was, I’m going to make sure it’s very difficult for them to move without the aid of crutches for a few weeks.”
“Got my attention, anyway.”
I touched the screen to minimize the picture, looking for the personal background information. It took me about five times as long as it would have done to turn a page in a file.
“I hate these things,” I said. “You don’t use hard copy murder books anymore?”
Allen smiled and shook her head. “You mean those blue binders that took up half the office? Some of the older guys are still attached to them. You know, the ones who are out of touch with the modern age.”
I shrugged off the dig and handed the tablet to her. “New doesn’t always mean better. I like to lay everything out in front of me.”
“You’re older than your years, Blake.”
Allen called up the rest of the information I was looking for with a couple of deft swipes and gave it back to me so I could scan the rest of the file. The background information on the victim, details of her last-known whereabouts, her car, the last people to see her alive. I read the autopsy report. I examined a few of the pictures, focusing on that strange ragged wound pattern. If I’d needed any more confirmation after the news reports, after the cemetery, then here it was. I’d seen those wounds before. I’d seen the weapon that made them. I flipped back to the missing persons report and looked at the date.
“She wasn’t even reported missing for a week,” I said.
“That’s right. Husband was out of town, no kids. Last to see her were the people from work.”
“Alibi?”
“Finland.”
I nodded, closed the Morrow file, and tapped on the file folder beside it. The name on the folder was Carrie Elaine Burnett. The reality TV star. I scanned through this one. It covered similar ground. Background, last-seen, autopsy. I knew that the three files would all follow the same grim narrative. And the trail for all three victims stopped at the same place: they were all last seen getting into a car at night, and from then it was as though they’d vanished off the face of the earth. Until their bodies were discovered.