Mary, Mary (10 page)
“SHE NEVER KNEW
what she wanted, Sugar, and maybe she still doesn’t. I liked Christine, but she was never the same after what happened in Jamaica. She has to move on, and so do you.”
Sampson and I were holed up at Zinny’s, a favorite neighborhood dive. B.B. King’s “I Done Got Wise” was wailing on the jukebox. Nothing but the blues would do tonight, not for me anyway.
What the place lacked in cheeriness, it made up for in Raphael, a bartender who knew us by name and had a heavy pour. I contemplated the Scotch in front of me. I was trying to recall if it was my third or fourth. Man, I was feeling tired. I remembered a line from one of the Indiana Jones movies: “It’s not the years, honey. It’s the mileage.”
“Christine’s not the point, though, is she, John?” I looked sideways at Sampson. “The point is Little Alex. Ali. That’s how he calls himself. He’s already his own person.”
He patted me on the top of my head. “The
point
is right here on your skull, Sugar. Now you listen to me.”
He waited until I sat up and gave him my full attention. Then his gaze slowly drifted up to the ceiling. He shut his eyes and grimaced. “Shit. I forgot what I was going to say. Too bad, too. I was going to make you feel a whole lot better.”
I laughed in spite of myself. Sampson always knew when to go light with me. It had been like that since we were ten years old and growing up in D.C. together.
“Well, next best thing then,” he said. He motioned to Raphael for two more.
“You never know what’s going to happen,” I said, partly to myself. “When you’re in love. There’s no guarantee.”
“Truth,” Sampson said. “If you’d told me I’d have a kid, ever, I would have laughed. Now here I am with a three-month-old. It’s crazy. And at the same time, it could all change again, just like
that
.” He snapped his fingers hard, the sound popping in my ears. Sampson has the biggest hands of anyone I know. I’m six-three, not exactly chiseled, but not too shabby, and he makes me look slight.
“Billie and I are good together, no question about it,” he went on, rambling but making sense in his way. “That doesn’t mean it can’t all go crazy someday. For all I know, ten years from now, she’ll be throwing my clothes out on the lawn. You never know. Nah—my girl wouldn’t do that to me. Not my Billie,” Sampson said, and we both laughed.
We sat and drank in silence for a few minutes. Even without conversation, the mood darkened.
“When are you going to see Little Alex again?” he asked, his voice softer. “
Ali
. I like that.”
“Next week, John. I’ll be out in Seattle. We’ve got to finalize the visitation agreement.”
I hated that word.
Visitation
. That’s what I had with my own son? Every time I talked about it out loud, I wanted to punch something. A lamp, a window, glass.
“How the hell am I going to do this?” I asked Sampson. “Seriously. How can I face Christine—face Alex—and act like everything’s okay? Every time I see him now, my heart’s going to be aching. Even if I can pull it off and seem okay, that’s no way to be with your kids.”
“He’s going to be fine,” Sampson said insistently. “Alex, no
way
you’re going to raise messed-up kids. Besides, look at us. You feel like you turned out okay? You feel like I turned out okay?”
I smiled at him. “You got a better example to use?”
Sampson ignored the joke. “You and I didn’t exactly have every advantage, and we’re just fine. Last I checked, you don’t shoot up, you don’t disappear, and you don’t lay a finger on your kids. I dealt with all that, and I ended up the second-finest cop on the D.C. force.” He stopped and smacked his head. “Oh,
wait
. You’re a lame-ass federal desk-humper now. I guess that makes me D.C.’s finest.”
Suddenly I felt overwhelmed by how much I missed Little Alex, but also by John’s friendship. “Thanks for being here,” I said.
He put an arm around my shoulders and jostled me hard. “Where else am I gonna be?”
I WOKE UP SUDDENLY
to a slightly bemused flight attendant staring down at me. I remembered that it was the next morning and I was on a United jet back to L.A. Her curious expression indicated she had just asked a question.
“I’m sorry?” I said.
“Could you please put up your tray table? Put your seat forward. We’ll be landing in Los Angeles in just a few minutes.”
Before I had drifted off, I’d been thinking about James Truscott and how he’d suddenly appeared in my life. Coincidence? I tended not to believe in it. So I’d called a researcher and friend at Quantico, and asked her to get me some more information on Truscott. Monnie Donnelley had promised that soon I’d know more about Truscott than even I wanted to know.
I gathered up my papers. It wasn’t a good idea to leave them out like that, and not like me; it was also unlike me to sleep on flights. Everything was a little upside down these days. Just a little, right?
My Mary Smith file had grown considerably thicker in just a few days. The recent false alarm was a conundrum. I wasn’t even sure that Mary Smith was behind that one.
Looking at the murder reports, I had a picture of someone who was growing more confident in her work, and definitely more aggressive. She was moving in on her targets—literally. The first site, the Patrice Bennett murder, was a public space. The next time was outside of Antonia Schifman’s home. Now, all indications were that Mary Smith had spent part of the night inside Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s house before eventually killing her in the pool.
Anyway, here I was back in L.A. again, getting off a plane, renting a car—even though I probably could have asked Agent Page to pick me up.
Looks-wise, the L.A. Bureau field office put D.C. headquarters to shame. Instead of the claustrophobic maze I was used to back East, this was nine stories of open floor plan, polished glass, and lots of natural light. From the cubicle they had assigned me on the fifteenth floor, I had a great view of the Getty Museum and beyond. At most field offices, I’d be lucky to get a chair and a desk.
Agent Page started hovering about ten minutes after I got there. I knew that Page was a sharp enough guy, very ambitious, and with some seasoning, he was going to make a good agent. But I just didn’t need somebody looking over my shoulder right now. It was bad enough to have Director Burns on me, not to mention the writer, James Truscott. My Boswell, right? Or was he something else?
Page asked if there was anything at all that I needed. I held up my file.
“This thing is
at least
twenty-four-hours cold. I want to know everything Detective Galletta has over at LAPD. I want to know
more
than Galletta has. Do you think you could—”
“On it,” he said, and was gone.
It wasn’t a bogus assignment I’d given him, though. I really did need to get current, and if that meant Page would be out of my hair for a while, all the better.
I pulled out a blank sheet of paper and scribbled a few questions I’d been pondering on the ride in from LAX.
M. Lowenstein-Bell—how did someone get inside the house?
Does this killer have some kind of hit list? An established order? Are there other less-obvious connections between the victims? Don’t there have to be?
The most common formula in my profession is this:
How plus why equals who
. If I wanted to know Mary Smith, I had to consider the similarities and differences—the combination of the two—from site to site on every one of the murders. That meant a stop at the Lowenstein-Bell residence.
I wrote,
E-mailer? / Perp?
I kept coming back to that point. How much intersection was there between the killer’s personality and the persona in the e-mails? How
honest,
for lack of a better word, was Mary Smith’s writing? And how much of it, if any, was misdirection?
Until I could figure that out, it was like chasing two suspects. If I was lucky, my next appointment would shed some light on the e-mails.
I wrote another note to myself.
Tool sets?
Most pattern killers had two sets of tools, as did Mary Smith.
First were the tools of the actual murder. The gun was a sure thing here. We knew she used the same one each time. We weren’t as sure about the knife.
And a car had to be considered. Any other way of getting in and out seemed unfeasible.
Then there were the “tools” that helped her satisfy her psychoemotional needs.
The children’s stickers marked
A
or
B,
and the e-mails themselves. Usually, these were more important to the killer than the actual weapons. They were her way of saying “I was here” or “This is me.”
Or, possibly, and this was the troubling part, “This is who I want you to think I am.”
In any case, it was a kind of taunting—something that could be taken as “Come and get me. If you can.”
I scribbled that last thought down, too.
Come and get me? If you can?
Then I wrote down something that kept sticking in my craw—
Truscott. Appeared six weeks ago. Who is James Truscott? What is his deal?
Suddenly I looked at my watch. It was time to leave the office if I didn’t want to be late for my first appointment. Requisitioning a Bureau vehicle would have meant one more person looking over my shoulder, and that’s exactly why I’d rented a car at the airport.
I left without telling anyone where I was headed. If I was going to be acting like a homicide detective again, I was going to do it right.
THIS WAS REAL POLICE WORK
at least, and I threw myself into it with renewed energy and enthusiasm. Actually, I was pumped up. Professor Deborah Papadakis had my full attention as she beckoned me into her book-lined office, number twenty-two, in the Rolfe Building at UCLA. She took a neatly piled stack of manuscripts from the only available chair and set them on the floor.
“I can see you’re busy, Professor. God, are you ever busy. Thank you for agreeing to meet,” I said.
“Happy to help if I can.” She motioned for me to sit. “I haven’t seen Los Angeles so preoccupied since, I don’t know, maybe since Rodney King. It’s kind of sad.”
Then she raised a hand and quickly added, “Although that’s not the same, is it? Anyway, this is a bit unusual for me. I’m more of a short-story and personal-essay kind of person. I don’t read true crime, or even mysteries for that matter. Well, I do read Walter Mosley, but he’s a closet sociologist.”
“Whatever you can do,” I said, and handed her copies of Mary Smith’s e-mails. “At the risk of repeating myself, we would appreciate your complete confidence on this.” That was for my own sake as well as the investigation’s. I hadn’t gotten official permission to share the e-mails with her or anyone else.
Professor Papadakis poured me a cup of coffee from an old percolator, and I waited while she read, then reread, the e-mails.
Her office seemed to be a bit of prime real estate at the university. It looked out to a courtyard and sculpture garden, where students wrote and soaked up the perfect Southern California weather. Most offices in the building faced out to the street. Ms. Papadakis, with her antique pine desk and O. Henry Award on the wall, gave the impression of someone who had long since paid her dues.
Except for the occasional “hm,” she was unresponsive while she read. Finally, she looked up and stared my way. A bit of the color was gone from her face.
“Well,” she said with a deep breath, “first impressions are important, so I’ll start there.”
She picked up a red pencil, and I stood up and came around to look over her shoulder.
“See here? And here? The openings are active. Things like ‘I am the one who killed you’ and ‘I watched you having dinner last night.’ They’re attention-grabbing, or at least they’re meant to be.”
“Do you draw any specific conclusion from that?” I had some of my own, but I was here for her perspective.
She bobbed her head side to side. “It’s engaging, but also less spontaneous. More crafted. This person is choosing her words carefully. It’s certainly not stream of consciousness.”
“May I ask what else you see in the writing? This is very helpful, Professor Papadakis.”
“Well, there’s a sense of . . . detachment, let’s say, from the character’s own violence.”
She looked up at me, as if for approval. I couldn’t imagine she was usually this tentative. Her air was otherwise so earthy and grounded. “Except, maybe, when she talks about the children.”
“Please, go on,” I said. “I’m interested in the children. What do you see, Professor?”
“When she describes what she’s done, it’s very declarative. Lots of simple sentences, almost staccato sometimes. It could just be a style choice, but it might also be a kind of avoidance. I see it all the time when writers are afraid of their material. If this were a student, I would tell her to pull at those threads a bit more, let them unravel.” The professor shrugged. “Of course, I’m not a psychiatrist.”
“Everything but, from the sound of it,” I told her. “I’m really impressed. You’ve added some clarity.”
She dismissed the compliment with a wave of her hand.
“Anything else I can do? Anything at all? Actually, this is fascinating. Morbid curiosity, I suppose.”
I watched her face as she weighed her thoughts, then opted not to continue.
“What is it?” I asked. “Please, just brainstorm. Don’t worry about it. No wrong answers.”
She set down her red pencil. “Well, the question here is whether you’re reading a person or a character. In other words, is the detachment that I see coming from the writer’s subconscious, or is it just as crafted as the sentences themselves? It’s hard to know for sure. That’s the big puzzle here, isn’t it?”
It was exactly the question I had asked myself several times. The professor wasn’t answering it for me, but she was certainly confirming that it was worth asking in the first place.
Suddenly she laughed nervously. “I certainly hope you aren’t giving my assessment any critical role in your investigation. I would hate to misguide you. This is too important.”
“Don’t worry about that,” I said. “This is just one of many factors we’re taking into account. It’s an incredible puzzle, though. Psychological, analytical, literary.”
“You must hate having to run all over the place for these tiny crumbs of information. I know I would.”
“Actually, this kind of interview is the easy part of the job,” I told her honestly.
It was my next appointment that was going to be bad.
