The Samaritan by Mason Cross Page A

How solid is his alibi?”
    Mazzucco shrugged. “I’ve heard stranger things, and yeah. He was in Finland at some conference. Speaking slots every day. He’s in the clear, unless . . .”
    “Unless he paid somebody else to do it.”
    “Right, but why the collateral damage? The other two vics, I mean.”
    The rest of the office was still watching the news. Allen sat back down in her chair and mulled over the new information. “So if the husband’s been out of the picture, who was the last person to see her before she went missing?”
    “She went for a drink after work on the tenth with some people from her office. She had only one, and then she drove home. Apparently, she had a headache. That was the last anyone saw of her. She was on vacation the following week, so she wasn’t missed at work.”
    “Any idea if she made it home?”
    Mazzucco shrugged. “Hard to tell. A patrol unit visited the house yesterday when the husband called it in. He said the house was locked up. No car in the garage, but none of her clothes or possessions were gone, and there was food rotting in the refrigerator. He checked their joint account and there were no withdrawals after the tenth.”
    “So she could have been snatched en route after the work thing.”
    “Sounds likely. That’s the Samaritan’s MO, right?”
    “Stop it,” Allen said, knowing she was fighting a losing battle against the moniker. “I take it there’s no sign of the car.”
    “It’s a blue Honda Civic and we have another bulletin out.”
    “We need to find the cars. We do that, maybe we get a line on our killer.”
    Allen’s phone rang. She picked up and said her name. She tensed as she listened to the voice on the other end. Mazzucco was staring at her intently when she hung up.
    “We found Sarah Dutton. Alive.”
     
16
     
Fort Lauderdale
     
    They’d come up with a catchy name for him already. Of course they had. The Samaritan , because apparently he was preying on lone female drivers who’d broken down at night. Sometimes I wondered if the cops and the reporters got together in a room to come up with these nicknames. After all, it was in their mutual interest to create an attention-grabbing stage name. The news didn’t give me much else to go on, but the mention of the ragged wound pattern, together with the location being LA, had been plenty.
    When it became clear the news was moving comfortably back into regurgitation mode, I sat back down at the hotel writing desk and my fingers hit the keyboard of my laptop. I killed the browser window I’d had open and went to the website of the Los Angeles Times . Naturally, they were leading with the Samaritan story. The tone of the article was a little more sober than the reporter still emoting away on camera on the hotel’s television screen, but the speculation was identical. They made sure to hedge their journalistic bets by prefacing it all with News outlets are quoting unconfirmed sources . . . , but the details were the same. Three dead women: tortured, murdered, and disposed of. All with a unique, ragged slash wound to the throat.
    If I closed my eyes, I thought I could picture exactly what that ragged slash would look like. I could picture the blade that made it.
    Rationally, I knew that all this didn’t necessarily mean what I feared it did. Just because the wound was the same didn’t mean the killer was. There were only so many ways to kill a person, after all, and only so many weapons. Add to that the fact I’d been thinking about the past only moments before I saw the news report, and the reassuring, comforting explanation was that this was nothing more than a disconcerting echo, an unwelcome synchronicity. Like hearing a song on the radio that reminds you of an old flame at the same moment somebody says her name.
    But the pattern fit: abduction, torture, murder. And it wasn’t just that; it was Los Angeles. LA was home turf for him. However I explained it, only one thing mattered: the