Allen shook her head. “Another dead end.”
“I hadn’t finished yet, Jess. After I told him about the body, I asked if he was sure he hadn’t been down there recently. He remembered that he’d been there briefly about six months ago, to show a prospective buyer around.”
“And?”
“And he can’t recall too much. I get the feeling this guy would have trouble describing last night’s dinner. All he remembers is it was a guy and he seemed kind of interested, but that he never heard back from him afterward.”
“I don’t suppose he could recall a name?”
“Even better. He was drawing a blank, but I kept at him, kept saying we’d really appreciate it if he could give us something. He went and had a look at the notepad he keeps by the phone. Luckily, he hadn’t had too many calls in the past year. The phone number was still there. There was a name too—Dean—though that doesn’t exactly narrow it down.”
“Cell or landline?” Allen asked, praying for the latter.
She could hear the smile in his voice as he answered. “Landline. It’s registered to an address in Santa Monica.” He paused, teasing her. “I guess you don’t really need to know this, you being on suspension and all . . .”
Allen grinned. “Just give me the address, you jerk.”
Mazzucco was parked curbside a few numbers down from the address in Santa Monica when Allen got there. She parked behind him and they got out simultaneously. The houses were fairly uniform: single-story detached units with spacious front yards. The only variations were in the paint jobs—white or pastel shades—and the yards—immaculate or scruffy.
It was an unusually crisp morning, the sun straight ahead of them, low and bright. They kept their sunglasses on, and no words were exchanged between the two as they approached number 2224. It didn’t look abandoned, not exactly.
It didn’t look much different from the other houses. This one was a pastel blue, in need of retouching. The yard was overgrown, the white picket fence out front in dire need of being torn down and replaced. The only reason Allen didn’t assume it had been left to rot was the fact the windows weren’t boarded up. The blinds were all closed, however. She felt a shiver as she looked at the house. Something about it felt wrong. Which, perversely, meant it felt right as a piece of the puzzle. Maybe the biggest piece so far.
She looked at Mazzucco. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to. It would be difficult to explain to a civilian, but something had clicked into place. All of a sudden a lead they’d been careful not to get too excited about had started to look very good indeed.
The gate was virtually off its hinges, but somebody had made sure to close and latch it the last time they’d left or entered the property. Mazzucco unlatched it and had to lift the gate clear of the ground to get it to open. He led the way up the flagstones leading to the glass-paneled front door. Allen kept her eyes on the windows, looking for a twitch of the blinds.
When they reached the door, Mazzucco hesitated before knocking. Allen knew what he was thinking, and opened her coat to show him her empty holster. Mazzucco shrugged and withdrew his gun. He raised his left hand and knocked three times, hard and loud. A cop knock, impossible to ignore. They waited a minute. Two minutes. Allen watched the windows.
Mazzucco raised his hand to knock again and let it hang there as they heard the noise of a car approaching, the engine decelerating. They turned around and looked in the direction of the noise. There was an overgrown bush on that side of the yard, its leaves so thick and wide that it would obscure the whole yard if you were approaching from that direction. A green Dodge appeared from behind the bush, clearly halfway into the maneuver of swinging in to the curb to park in front of the house. The driver, like them, was wearing sunglasses against the glare. As soon as he spotted the two figures at the door, he corrected, swinging back into the road and easing off the brake for a split second as he took a closer look.
Allen started moving back toward the gate, her free hand automatically reaching for her badge before she remembered she didn’t have that either. As she did, the driver of the green Dodge made up his mind and floored the accelerator, kicking the vehicle back up to speed with a screech of tires.
She yelled out “Stop!” as the car vanished out of her field of vision. She raced out to the curb, but by the time she made it through the gate, all she could see was the back of the Dodge disappearing around the corner a hundred yards up the street.
“Shit!”
Mazzucco was beside her. “You get the plate?”
She shook her head. It was no good running back to their own cars; the driver of the Dodge could be a mile away by the time they could get turned around and as far as that corner.
Mazzucco took his phone out and quickly called it in, giving their location and asking for a rush on the bulletin—a green Dodge Charger driven by a lone male, probably white or Hispanic.
“Let’s see if we get lucky,” he said as he finished the call.
“Doubtful,” Allen said. “Guy looked like he knew how to make a clean exit.” She looked back at the house. “I’m more interested to see if we get lucky with what’s inside.”
Mazzucco hesitated a second and then followed her back to the front door. He folded his arms as Allen picked the basic lock on the front door. She glanced up at him as the catch clicked back and saw a smile playing at the edge of his lips.
“Aren’t you going to say something disapproving, at least?”
Mazzucco shook his head. “I think we passed that point when I gave you the address, didn’t we?”
Allen smiled and nodded.
“Anyway,” he continued, “depending on what we find in there, we can leave everything untouched and come back when we can get a warrant.”
“You’ve been spending too much time with me. What happened to by the book?”
Mazzucco reached forward and pushed the door handle down with the back of his hand, swinging the door open. “If this is his place, he could be keeping somebody inside. I want to make sure before we do anything else.”
Allen held out her hand in an
after you
gesture and watched him step over the threshold. She liked that about Mazzucco—he was all about the rules right up until the point they got in the way of doing the right thing.
It was dim inside; no lights had been left on. Even so, the blinds were thin enough and cheap enough that there was no problem seeing around. It smelled a little damp and musty, but the stench of decomp Allen had been bracing herself for was absent. That was a good sign, but it didn’t necessarily mean they weren’t going to find a body. Back in DC, Allen had been involved with a homicide investigation involving a corpse that had been double-wrapped in plastic shower curtains and hidden beneath the floorboards of a bedroom closet for three years, unbeknownst to the unfortunate current owner of the house.
There was a short hallway with four doors on either side. They checked them methodically: living room, kitchen, bedroom one, bedroom two. At the far end was another door with a frosted glass pane—the bathroom. It didn’t take them long to make a cursory search to confirm there was nobody in the house—held against their will or otherwise. In fact, other than the fact that the bed in one of the bedrooms was made up and there was some food in the refrigerator, there was very little evidence that
anyone
was living here. And yet someone was. Someone who drove a green Dodge Charger, most likely.
Allen eyed the phone on the bedside table, likely the one used in the call to the warehouse owner. A slipup, for sure, but an understandable one. If the occupant of the house really was the Samaritan, he probably hadn’t counted on his number being remembered all these months later, even if the police ever had cause to look into it. She got the feeling that this morning’s framing of Blake had been an improvisation—a deliberate attempt to throw the authorities off the scent, but not necessarily one that had been planned very far in advance.
She noticed that something was trapped under the base of the phone. The edge of something flat, like a flyer or a business card. She pulled the sleeve of her jacket over her hand and moved the phone back an inch, revealing the edge of a photograph. She weighed the risks, decided
screw it
, and moved the phone the rest of the way. She picked up the photograph, being careful only to touch the edges.
It was a real photograph. Meaning, not a digital pic printed on glossy paper, but a picture taken by a real camera and developed from real film. It was obvious not just from the feel of the paper and quality of the image, but from the fact that it was clearly a decade or two old. The colors had faded a little in the intervening years, and there were scuffs and marks on it, as though it had been taken out and looked at regularly, perhaps moved around from place to place.
It showed two teenagers sitting on a fence: a boy and a girl. Neither looked much older than sixteen, and if Allen had had to guess, she’d have said the girl was older than the boy.
The boy looked tall for his age. He had short dirty-blond hair, and his thin, angular face looked as though it was a couple of years away from needing to shave more than once a week. He wore sunglasses, a white T-shirt, and khaki shorts that came down to his knees. The strap of a backpack was slung over his right shoulder.
The girl was the one who drew Allen’s attention, because she had a very familiar look. Brown eyes and dark hair cut in a style that suggested to Allen that the picture had probably been taken in the nineties. Style aside, the hair and the eyes and the features reminded her of the three bodies they’d found in the Santa Monica Mountains. No way was this a coincidence.
She wore DIY jeans shorts cut off halfway down the thigh and a faded black T-shirt with a yellow smiley face with crossed-out eyes on it. Allen had seen rock kids wearing those shirts before and knew it probably related to some band.
It looked like a summer’s day somewhere reasonably warm. Could well have been California. But it could also have been a lot of places with a warm climate. There wasn’t much to see in the foreground, and the background was mostly obscured by the side of some kind of building. It looked like a bar or a diner, because the tubing from a neon sign was visible in the window, although it wasn’t switched on. She could make out the letters
S
,
T
,
E
and the start of something that looked like a
V
. Steve, maybe? Steve’s Diner? In the extreme left of the picture, she could make out scrubland and blue sky.
She heard her name called from another room and slipped the photograph into her pocket.
She found Mazzucco in the other bedroom, on his knees in front of a closet. He was wearing his gloves, and he’d carefully removed the lid of a medium-sized box that had evidently been sitting just inside the closet. Allen had seen boxes like this before in the files. Boxes that contained a specific combination of everyday objects that would only ever be collected in one place by a very specific type of person.
Mazzucco rattled off the inventory. “Plastic zip ties, duct tape, a knife, some gauze. For a blindfold, I guess.”
“A torture kit.”
Mazzucco nodded. Allen had been about to tell him about the photograph, but watching him kneeling by the closet, she found herself remembering an eerily similar scene, not so long ago. Another partner, another house belonging to a vicious criminal. She said Mazzucco’s name quietly.
He looked up at her. “What?”
“This thing could end up going the wrong way for me, depending on what happens. I just wanted to tell you something before . . .”
Mazzucco looked uneasy. “Before . . .” he prompted after a moment.
“Well, just in case. We might not be partners this time next week. I wanted to tell you about the thing in DC.”
“The Victor Lewis case? Allen, we don’t need to talk about this.”
“No, we do. Lewis was guilty as hell. You need to know that. Only we didn’t find what we expected to find in the house. Bratton—my partner—decided to change that. He planted the victim’s necklace in Lewis’s closet.”
Mazzucco said nothing, waited for her to continue.
“I didn’t know he’d done it at the time. I thought the bust was clean. Somehow, Lewis’s attorney found out what had happened. There was an investigation. Bratton and I were suspended. He came to my house and told me what he’d done, begged me to say I’d seen him find the necklace, fair and square.”
“But you didn’t,” Mazzucco said.
“How did you know that?” Allen asked, surprised.
Mazzucco shrugged. “Like I said, I’m a good judge of character.”
“I didn’t tell anyone that he’d confessed to me, but I didn’t back him up either. In the end, they’d have nailed him anyway. A rookie reported seeing the necklace in the victim’s home when we searched it after the murder. Only it never showed up on the inventory because Bratton took it.”
“You did the right thing, Allen.”
“Did I? I always thought, no matter what, you back up your partner’s play. And then when I was put in that situation, I . . . I just thought . . . we have to be better than them, you know?”
Mazzucco nodded. “Still, you could have made things easier on yourself by burning Bratton, but you didn’t.”
“Just because I wasn’t going to help him plant evidence doesn’t mean I wanted to help send a good cop down.” She gave a humorless laugh. “Turns out, half the cops in the department assumed I was in on it and got away with it; the other half assumed I threw my partner under a bus. So ninety-nine percent of my fellow cops ended up hating me anyway. I picked the worst option.”
“Not from where I’m standing, you didn’t.”
She said nothing for a minute. Then, “Thanks, Jon.”
“For what?”
“For being the one percent.”
“Always happy to be right,” he said, looking a little uncomfortable at the uncharacteristic display of emotion between the two. He looked back down at the torture kit. “Let’s put this back the way we found it and call it in.” He looked up at her. “You find anything?”