“Can’t help what I overhear.”
“So did you overhear where they took her?”
Jeanne hesitated, but only for a couple of seconds. “Try the Van Nuys station on Sylmar Avenue. You better hurry. She won’t be there long.”
“I’m on my way.”
Chapter 94
I GOT RIGHT OVER to the Van Nuys station, but I was stonewalled: I was told to my face that Mary Wagner wasn’t being held there.
There was nothing I could do to budge LAPD: They had this woman, their suspect, and they weren’t sharing her. Even Ron Burns couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help me out.
I wasn’t able to see Mary until the next morning. By that time, LAPD had transferred her to a temporary holding facility downtown, where they kept her completely tied up in interrogation—without any real progress, as I had predicted.
One sympathetic detective described her to me as somewhere between despondent and catatonic, but I still needed to see Mary Wagner for myself.
When I arrived at the downtown facility, the assembled press corps mob was twice the size of anything we’d seen so far. Easily. For weeks, the Hollywood Stalker case had made national headlines, not just local ones. Mary Wagner’s mug shot was everywhere now, a blank-eyed, disheveled woman looking very much the part of a killer.
The last thing I heard before I switched off my car radio was ridiculous morning-talk-show banter and psychobabble about why she had committed murders against rich and famous women in Hollywood.
“How about Kathy Bates? She could play Mary. She’s a great actress,” one “concerned” caller asked the talk show host, who was all too glad to play along.
“Too old. Besides, she already did Misery. I say you get Nicky Kidman, get her to slap on another fake nose, wig, thirty pounds, and you’re good to go,” replied the DJ. “Or maybe Meryl Streep. Emma Thompson? Kate Winslet would be strong.”
My check-in at the station house took almost forty-five minutes. I had to speak with four different personnel and show my ID half a dozen times just to reach the small interrogation room where they were going to bring Mary Wagner to me. Eventually—in their own sweet time.
When I finally saw her, my first reaction, surprisingly, was pity.
Mary looked as though she hadn’t slept, with bruise-colored half-moons under her eyes and a drooping, shuffling walk. The pink hotel uniform was gone. She now wore shapeless gray sweatpants and an old UCLA sweatshirt flecked with pale yellow paint the same color as her kitchen.
Vague recognition flickered in her eyes when she saw me. I was reminded of some of the Alzheimer’s patients I regularly visited at St. Anthony’s in D.C.
I told the guard to remove her cuffs and wait outside.
“I’ll be okay with her. We’re friends.”
“Friends,” Mary repeated as she stared deeply into my eyes.
Chapter 95
“MARY, DO YOU REMEMBER ME from yesterday?” I asked as soon as the guard was back out in the hallway. I had pulled up a chair and sat across from her. The plain four-by-eight table between us was bolted to the floor. It was chilly in the small room, with a draft from somewhere.
“You’re Mister Cross,” she said dully. “FBI Agent Cross. Excuse me, I’m sorry.”
“Good memory. Do you know why you’re here?”
She tensed, though it was barely discernible from her otherwise flat affect. “They think I’m that woman. They’re accusing me of murder.” Her gaze fell to the floor. “Murders. More than one. All those Hollywood people. They think I did it.”
I was actually glad she said “they.” It meant I could still be a potential ally in her mind. Maybe she’d tell me some of her secrets after all, and maybe not.
“We don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want to,” I said.
She blinked once, and seemed to focus a little. She squinted her eyes at me, then looked down at the floor.
“Would you like anything? Are you thirsty?” I asked. I wanted her to feel as comfortable as possible with me, but I was also feeling an urge to help this woman. She looked and sounded so terrible, possibly impaired.
Now she looked up, her eyes searching mine. “Could I have a cup of coffee? Would it be too much trouble?”
The coffee arrived, and Mary held the paper cup with her fingertips and sipped at it with an unexpected kind of delicacy. The coffee seemed to revive her a little, too.
She kept sneaking glances at me, and she absently smoothed her hair against her head. “Thanks.” Her eyes were a little brighter, and I saw a shade of the friendly woman from the day before.
“Mary, do you have any questions about what’s going on? I’m sure you must.”
Immediately, a pall came over her. Her emotions were palpably fragile. Suddenly, tears welled up in her eyes, and she nodded without speaking.
“What is it, Mary?”
She looked up to the corner of the ceiling, where a camera was watching us. I knew that at least a half-dozen law enforcement personnel and psychiatric specialists were tucked away less than ten feet from where we sat.
Mary seemed to guess as much. When she did speak, it was in a whisper.
“They won’t tell me anything about my children.” Her face contorted as she fought back more tears.
Chapter 96
“YOUR CHILDREN?” I asked, somewhat confused, but going along with what she’d said.
“Do you know where they are?” Her voice was wavery, but her energy had increased quite a bit already.
“No, I don’t,” I answered truthfully. “I can look into it. I’ll need some more information from you.”
“Go ahead. I’ll tell you what you need to know. They’re too young to be on their own.”
“How many children do you have?” I asked her.
She seemed dumbfounded by the question. “Three. Don’t you already know?”
I took out my pad. “How old are they, Mary?”
“Brendan’s eight, Ashley’s five, and Adam’s eleven months.” She spoke haltingly while I wrote it all down.
Eleven months?
It was certainly possible she had given birth a year ago, but somehow, I doubted it very much.
I checked the ages to be sure about what she’d said. “Eight, five, eleven months?”
Mary nodded. “That’s right.”
“And how old are you, Mary?”
For the first time, I saw anger show on her face. She balled her hands into hard fists, closed her eyes, and struggled to compose herself. What was this all about?
“I’m twenty-six, for God’s sake. What difference does that make? Can we get back to my kids now?”
Twenty-six? Not even close. Wow. There it was. The first opening.
I looked at my notes; then I decided to take a little leap with her. “So Brendan, Ashley, and Adam live at home with you. Is that right?”
She nodded again. When I got something right, it seemed to calm her down tremendously. Relief spread over her face, then seemed to continue down into her body.
“And were they home yesterday when I was there?”
She looked confused now, and the anger that had ebbed away edged back. “You know they were, Agent Cross. You were right there. Why are you doing this?”
Her voice rose as she spoke. Her breath had gone shallow. “What have you people done with my children? Where are they right now? I need to see them. Right now.”
The door opened, and I held my hand up to the guard without taking my eyes off of Mary. It was obvious her pulse had quickened as the agitation seemed to take hold.
I took a calculated risk with her.
“Mary,” I said gently, “there were no children in the house yesterday.”
Her response was immediate, and extreme.
She sat bolt upright and screamed at me, her neck muscles straining. “Tell me what you’ve done with my children! Answer me this instant! Where are my kids? Where are my kids?”
Steps sounded on the floor behind me, and I stood
up so I could be the first one to reach her.
She was raving now, screaming over and over.
“Tell me! Why won’t you tell me?” Now she had started to sob, and I felt sorry for her.
I slowly walked around the table. “Mary!” I shouted her name, but she was completely unresponsive to the sound of my voice, even to my movement toward her.
“Tell me where my kids are! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! This instant!”
“Mary—”
I leaned over and took her by the shoulders, as gently as I could under the circumstances.
“Tell me!”
“Mary, look at me! Please.”
That’s when she went for my gun.
Chapter 97
SHE MUST HAVE SEEN THE HOLSTER tucked inside my jacket. In a split second, she reached up and her hand was on the butt of my Glock.
“No!” I yelled. “Mary!”
I instinctively knocked her back into her chair, but the gun wrenched free from the holster and she had it. I caught a flash of her eyes, which were glazed and crazy.
I dove at her, grabbing her wrist with one hand and the gun with the other. I continued to yell her name.
Next, the two of us fell over the chair as it went down with a loud crack.
I was vaguely aware of people scrambling all around us. My focus stayed on her.
She strained, red-faced, slamming my side with her free fist. I now had a knee on her chest and one hand still on her wrist, pinning the gun to the ground, but she was as strong as she looked.
And her finger was already wrapped around the Glock’s trigger. She squirmed hard, turning the barrel of the gun toward herself—and tilting her head to meet it. She knew exactly what she was doing.
“No! Mary!”
With a rush of adrenaline, fighting an equal surge of resistance from her, I managed to lift her gun hand toward the ceiling. Then I smashed it back down, very hard, against the floor.
The Glock fired once into the wall of the interrogation room, even as it fell out of her grasp. I snatched it up, the shot still ringing in my ears, the side of my face numb.
There was a brief, suspended moment of near silence.
Mary stopped struggling immediately, and then, in an unbelievable echo of the previous day’s events, the police descended on her like a small army. They picked her up as she flailed once again, arms and legs whipping crazily.
I could hear her unchecked sobs as they carried her away.
“My babies, my babies, my poor babies . . . Where are my children? Oh, where? Oh, where? What have you done with my children?”
Her voice receded down the hall until a heavy door slammed with great finality, and she was gone. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the chance for another interview.
To make matters worse, if that was possible, I saw James Truscott as I left the building about an hour later. He was among the throng of reporters gathered outside waiting for any tidbit of news.
He yelled at me, “How did she get your gun, Dr. Cross? How’d that happen?” Somehow, Truscott had already gotten the story.
Chapter 98
I COULD ONLY WONDER about the causes and the full extent of Mary Wagner’s mental illness and the obvious torment and stress it was putting on her. There certainly hadn’t been any time for a meaningful psych evaluation, and my part in the investigation was coming to an end now, whether I liked it or not. And, to be honest, I had mixed feelings.
By early that afternoon, Mary’s state of mind was a moot point. LAPD’s search of her house had turned up a holy trinity of evidence.
A Walther PPK, discovered under a blanket in her attic crawl space, had already shown a preliminary ballistic match to the weapon used in the murders.
CSI had also found half-a-dozen sheets of children’s stickers and, most significant, stolen family photographs from Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s office and Suzie Cartoulis’s purse. Both Michael Bell and Giovanni Cartoulis had positively identified the photos as having belonged to their murdered wives.
“And best of all, most important anyway,” Fred Van Allsburg told the small group of agents assembled in his office, “twelve o’clock came and went today without incident. No new victim, no new e-mail. It’s over. I think I can safely say that.”
The mood was grimly congratulatory. Just about everyone was glad to leave this one behind, but the details of the case would haunt most of the team for some time, just as the D.C. sniper case still lingered in the J. Edgar Hoover Building back East. It’s an unsatisfying and unpleasant feeling, but also part of what drives us to do better.
“Alex, we owe you one on this.” Van Allsburg finally came over to me. “Your work on the case was invaluable. I have to say that. I see why Ron Burns likes you close to home.”
A few uneasy laughs went through the room. Agent Page reached from behind and patted my shoulder. He would go far in the Bureau, if he could keep his passion for solving crimes.
“I’d still like to take a peek at that final evidence LAPD found. And maybe get a real interview with Mary Wagner,” I said, diverting back to what I thought was most important.
Van Allsburg shook his head. “Not necessary.”
“There’s no reason for me not to stick around another day—” I started to say.
“Don’t worry about it. Page and Fujishiro are good for the details; I can back them up. And if we really need you again, there’s always frequent-flier miles, right?” His tone was artificially bright.
“Fred, Mary Wagner wouldn’t talk to anyone before I came. She trusts me.”
“At least, she did,” he said. “Probably not anymore.” It was a blunt statement, but not aggressive.
“I’m still the only person she’s opened up to. I hear LAPD is getting nowhere with her.”
“Like I said, you’re just a plane ride away if we need you back. I spoke about it with Director Burns and he agrees. Go home to your family. You have kids, right?”
“Yes, I have kids.”
Hours later, packing my bag at the hotel, I was struck hard with another kind of realization: Actually, I couldn’t wait to get home. It was a huge relief that I’d be back in D.C. again, with no immediate travel plans.
But—and the but was important—why had that fact been so far from my mind in Van Allsburg’s office? What were these blinders I wore, and how did I keep forgetting I had them on? What kind of dramatic wake-up call did I need before I got the message?
On the way to the airport I figured out another piece. It just hit me. The A’s and B’s on the children’s stickers at the crime scenes. I knew what the letters meant. Mary’s imaginary children’s names—Ashley, Adam, Brendan. Two A’s and a B.
I phoned it in on my way out of L.A.
Part Five
END OF STORY
Chapter 99
THE STORYTELLER WAS DONE KILLING. Fini. It was over, and no one would ever know the whole truth about what had happened. End of story.
So he threw himself a party with some of his best buddies from Beverly Hills.
He told them he’d just gotten a gig writing a screenplay for an A-list director, a big, dopey thriller based on a dopey bestseller. He’d been given license to change anything he didn’t like, but that was all he could say about it right now. The director was paranoid—so what’s new? But a big party was definitely in order.
His friends thought they understood what was going down, which gave him some idea how little they knew him. His best friends in the world—and hell, none of them knew him at all. None of them suspected he could be a killer. How fricking unbelievably crazy was that? No one knew him.
The party was at the Snake Pit Ale House, a bar on Melrose where they’d held a fantasy football league during his early days in L.A., soon after he’d arrived from Brown University to act, and maybe dabble at writing scripts—serious, worthy stuff, not box-office crap.
“The order of the night is free beer,” he said as each of his buds arrived at the bar, “and wine for the wussie
s among you. So I guess it’s vino all around?”
Nobody drank wine, not one of the fourteen pals who came to the bash. They were all glad to see him out and about, and also about his new gig—though some of the more honest ones admitted they were jealous. Everybody started calling him “A-list.”
He and David and Johnboy and Frankie were still at the bar when it closed at a little past two. They were overanalyzing a movie called We Don’t Live Here Anymore. They finally more or less stumbled outside and exchanged Hollywood hugs on the street next to Johnny’s fucking Bentley—talk about A-list—the spoils of the last movie he’d produced, a 400-million-dollar grosser worldwide, which made all the rest of them sick because all he’d done was buy a dipshit graphic novel for fifty thousand then sign up the Rock for ten mil. Genius, right? Yep—’cause it worked.
“Love ya, man. You’re the best, you sick, obnoxious, ostentatious bastard. You too, Davey!” he yelled as the silver Bentley pulled away from the curb and sped west.
“I know—I’m just a bastard right now,” David yelled back. “But I have dreams of being sick, obnoxious, and ostentatious, too. And talented—which is what’s holding me back in this town.”
“Hey, man—I hear you, I feel ya,” he yelled.
“Seeya, A-list! Ya hack!”
“I’m just a storyteller!” he yelled back.
Then he was kind of floating down a side street to his own car, a seven-year-old Beamer. Not a Suburban. He was definitely three sheets to the wind. Happy as a pig out of a blanket—humming Jimi Hendrix’s “The Wind Cries Mary.” An in-joke that only he would get.
Until suddenly he began to sob, and he couldn’t make himself stop, not even when he was sitting on the lawn of some grungy apartment building with his head down between his legs, bawling like a baby.
And he was thinking, Just one more, just one.
One more kill and I’ll be good.
Chapter 100
Mary, Mary Page 19
