Mary, Mary (15 page)
I FOLLOWED KARL PAGE’S DIRECTIONS
toward the Ramada in West Hollywood and deliberately left my phone in the car when I got there. I didn’t want to be reached by anybody at the Bureau right now, not even Director Burns’s office.
The stark Art Deco lobby was quiet and depressing. Dreary, dried-up palms loomed over rows of boxy chocolate-brown couches, all of them empty. Two elderly women at the front desk were the only customers in sight.
Whoever was in charge here—Jeanne Galletta, I hoped—had gotten a good cap on the scene. The only indication that a major investigation was under way one story up was the two officers stationed at the elevator. I took the stairs to the murder scene, two at a time.
The second-floor hallway was thick with LAPD personnel. Several of them wore gloves, white booties, and “Crime Scene Unit” polo shirts. The faces were all stressed and drawn.
A uniformed officer gave me the once-over. “Who are you?” he asked. His tag said Sandhausen. I flashed him my creds without comment and kept moving past him. “Hey!” he called out.
“Hey yourself,” I called back, and kept going.
When I got to room 223, the door was wide open.
A row of cartoonish stickers, Mary Smith’s calling card, was affixed to the outside—two glittery-winged fairies and another unicorn, which was stuck right over the peephole.
Two stickers were marked with an
A,
the other with a
B
.
A maid’s cart stood parked off to the side.
“Is Jeanne Galletta around?” I asked another young officer as she pushed past me into the hall. The sheer number of people coming and going here was disconcerting.
The female officer gave me a petulant look. “I think she’s downstairs in the office. I don’t know.”
“Find out,” I said, suddenly losing my patience. “Let her know Alex Cross is looking for her. I’ll be in here.”
I steeled myself before I stepped inside the hotel room. There’s a necessary detachment at any murder scene, and I can feel it like a second skin that I put on. But there’s a necessary balance, too. I never wanted to forget that this was about human beings, not just bodies, not just vics. If I ever got immune to that, I’d know it was time to look for another career. Maybe it was time anyway.
What I found was a scene just as predictably brutal as I had come to expect from Mary Smith.
Plus a couple of nasty surprises that I wasn’t prepared for.
THE BATHROOM WAS A HORROR.
Mariah Alexander, the nineteen-year-old hotel maid, lay collapsed backward in the tub, her head at a nearly impossible angle to her torso. Her throat was torn open where a bullet had erased any possibility of a scream. Her long, curly black hair was streaked with her blood. It looked as though the girl’s carotid artery had been nicked, which would explain the blood spurts that extended all the way up the wall.
A heavy set of keys lay on the tile floor near the dead girl’s dangling feet. My first guess was that Mary Smith had pulled a gun on the young woman, forced her to unlock the hotel-room door, then backed her up into the bathroom and shot her—all in quick succession.
Susan Cartoulis and Mr. Conver would likely have been in the bedroom at that point, just a short hallway away.
Someone—probably Conver—had come to see what was going on.
If the bloodstains on the carpet were any indication, Mary Smith had intercepted Conver halfway between the bedroom and bathroom.
His body, however, was now arranged on the bed next to Susan Cartoulis. The lovers lay faceup, side by side, on top of the covers.
Both of them were nude—another first for Mary Smith—although it was likely they were undressed when she got there.
Pillowcases were draped across the two victims’ hips and over Ms. Cartoulis’s chest, in an odd suggestion of modesty.
Man, this was a wacky and confusing killer. The inconsistencies boggled the mind, mine anyway.
It got even stranger.
The king-size bed was perfectly made
. It was possible that Cartoulis and Conver hadn’t used the bed while having sex, but soft drinks and a condom wrapper on the nightstand indicated otherwise.
Did Mary Smith actually make the bed after she murdered three people? If so, she was good at it. Nana had long ago made sure I knew the difference between a real hospital corner and a lazy one. Mary Smith knew the difference as well.
The tidily arranged covers were soaked with blood, particularly around Ms. Cartoulis. Both victims had sustained gunshot wounds to the head, but Cartoulis’s face had also been brutalized with a blade—in Mary Smith’s usual manner, and as promised in the e-mail. I could just about make out Conver’s last, strained expression of terror, but Cartoulis’s face had so many cuts it looked like a single open wound.
It reminded me of the murders at Antonia Schifman’s house—neat
and
sloppy at the same time.
One killer, two completely different impulses.
What the hell had she been thinking? What did she want out of this?
The most disturbing new wrinkle came a few minutes later. A yellow leather Coach wallet with Susan Cartoulis’s driver’s license and credit cards lay open on a chair near the bed.
As I looked through the wallet, I saw that it was neatly filled with one thing and another, but that there were several empty plastic sleeves. The empty spaces sent tension up and down my spine. “Goddammit,” I said out loud. “Photographs.”
One of the Crime Scene Unit staff turned to me. “What’s up? You find something?”
“Do we know where Susan Cartoulis’s husband is?” I asked.
“He’s supposed to be on a plane, coming home from Florida. Why?”
“I need to know if this woman carried family photos in her wallet.”
My question was a formality; I was almost certain I knew the answer. This would be the second time in as many incidents that Mary Smith had been interested in family photos. She’d gone from leaving the children entirely alone to either destroying or stealing their photographs. Meanwhile, her methodology was increasingly erratic, and her e-mails seemed more confident than ever.
How slippery a slope was this going to be from here on? And where was it taking me?
I didn’t think I could live with myself if Mary Smith started turning on kids before we caught up to her. But that’s what I was afraid might happen next.
“CAN I SEE YOU
for a minute, Dr. Cross? We need to talk.”
I looked up to see Detective Jeanne Galletta standing in the door. Her expression was strained; I thought that she looked older than the last time we met, and thinner, as if she’d lost ten pounds she hadn’t needed to shed.
We went out into the hall. “What’s going on? Don’t tell me something else has happened.”
“I don’t want to go wide with this yet,” she said in a low, tired voice, “but there’s a woman who saw a blue Suburban leaving the hotel parking lot in a big hurry. Happened around two o’clock. She didn’t notice much else. I wonder if you could interview her, and then we could compare notes. Before I do anything with this.”
It was a good move on her part. I’m pretty sure she was thinking the same thing I was: The D.C. sniper case in 2002 had included a massive public search for what turned out to be the wrong vehicle, a white van with black lettering. It was an investigative and public-relations nightmare, exactly the kind of mistake LAPD wouldn’t want to make now.
“And could you do it right now? That would be helpful. I’d appreciate it,” she added. “If I’m going to run with this, I don’t want to wait.”
I hated to leave the crime scene. There was a lot of work to be done. If Jeanne weren’t wearing her stress so plainly, maybe I would have said no.
“Give me five minutes to finish up here,” I told her. “I’ll be right down.”
Meanwhile, I asked Jeanne to do me a favor and follow up with Giovanni Cartoulis about the missing photos in his wife’s wallet. There was frustratingly little we could do with the information from him, but it was important to know if Mary Smith had stolen family pictures. Also, Giovanni Cartoulis needed to be eliminated as a suspect, as all the previous husbands had been. Jeanne and her people had been handling this, but I was satisfied with the reports. The LAPD was doing a good job.
“What?” Jeanne asked, standing very still in the hallway and staring at me. “What are you thinking? Tell me. I can handle it. I
think
.”
“Take a deep breath. Don’t give in to this crap. You’re running the case as well as anyone possibly could, but you look like hell right now.”
She knitted her eyebrows. “Um . . . thanks?”
“You look good, just not as good as usual. You’re pale, Jeanne. It’s the stress. Nobody understands that until they get hit with it.”
Jeanne finally smiled. “I look like a fucking raccoon. Big dark smears around my eyes.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ve got to run.”
I thought about her earlier dinner invitation and my clumsy decline. If we had stood there a few seconds longer, maybe I would have reciprocated the invitation for later, but Jeanne—and the moment—was already gone.
And I had an interview to do.
A blue Suburban, right?
IT WASN’T THE FOOT-LONG SERPENTINE
tattoos up and down both of Bettina Rodgers’s arms, or the half-dozen piercings on her face that made me doubt what she had just told me. Actually, Bettina was as good a witness as you get. It was more the fact that eyewitness accounts are notoriously sketchy and unreliable. FBI research has shown them to hover around 50-percent accuracy, even just a few minutes after an incident—and this was at least two hours later.
That said, Bettina’s confidence in what she had seen was unwavering.
“I was in the parking lot, starting my car,” she told me for the third time. “And the Suburban tore out behind me, over that way, toward Santa Monica Boulevard. I turned around to look ’cause it was going so fast.
“I know for sure it was dark blue, and I know it was a Suburban ’cause my mom used to have one. I’ve ridden in it a million times. I remember thinking it was kind of funny, ’cause it was like my mom was driving crazy like that.”
She paused. “The Suburban took a sharp left out of the parking lot. That’s all I know. Can I fucking go now?”
That was about as much as Jeanne Galletta had gotten out of her, but I pressed on with a few more questions of my own.
“Any markings on the car?” I asked. “Bumper stickers, dents, anything at all?”
She shrugged. “I mostly just saw it from the side, and like I said—it flew by super fast. For a Suburban. I didn’t see the license plate or anything.”
“How about the driver? Anything you noticed? Was there anyone else in the car? More than one person?”
She fiddled absently with one of the thick silver rings in her eyebrow while she thought about that. Her makeup was heavy and mostly black, except for the pale white cast of her face powder. I didn’t know too much about Bettina, but she put me in mind of the urban vampire culture I’d investigated a few years back on a case. One thing I’d learned then was how sharp some of these people were despite the goth-slacker stereotype.
Finally, Bettina shook her head. “I want to say it was a woman, ’cause that would make sense, right? I mean,
Jesus shit,
we’re talking about that fucked-up Hollywood Stalker wench, aren’t we? Don’t bother to lie, I
know
it’s her. One of the other cops told me already.”
I didn’t respond, letting her think some more until she shrugged again. “Blue Suburban goin’ like a bat out of hell, left turn, that’s all I really know for sure. That’s my final answer.”
The fact that she wasn’t inclined to fill in details actually boosted my confidence in her. It’s incredible how many people do the opposite, sometimes just to please the interviewer. A few minutes later, I thanked Bettina for her time and help, and let her go.
Then I found Jeanne Galletta to tell her my thoughts. We met in an unused guest room on the second floor. Jeanne told me that another hotel patron had corroborated the story.
“Around two o’clock, he saw a large, dark-blue SUV tearing out of the parking lot from his room on the third floor. He couldn’t see too much, but he said it might have been a woman driver.”
“That doesn’t mean it was Mary Smith,” I said. “But if it was, this would be huge for us. At least two people saw the same vehicle leaving in a hurry.”
Jeanne nodded silently, weighing the idea. “So then the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question remains: How big do we go with this?”
There were risks either way, and I puzzled it out loud, partly for her and partly for myself.
“Time’s not on our side. Mary Smith hasn’t shown any signs of slowing down. Just the opposite, in fact. She seems to be evolving. This is a chance to use the press to our advantage and speed up the search—if that’s what you want.
“On the other hand, people are already scared, and they’re going to react to every blue Suburban they see, probably to every blue SUV. If this blows up in your face, then it’s one more reason for the public not to trust the Department. But if it gets you Mary Smith, then everything’s okay and you’re a hero.”
“Russian roulette,” she said dryly.
“Name of the game,” I said.
“By the way, I don’t want to be a hero.”
“Goes with the territory.”
She finally smiled. “America’s Sherlock Holmes. Didn’t I read that somewhere about you?”
“Don’t believe everything you read.”
I could almost hear the clock ticking inside Jeanne’s head, but maybe it was her heartbeat.
“All right,” she said, looking at her watch. “Let’s do it up. I’m going to have to clear this with the Department, but if I go now, we can get in a press conference before the early news.”
She paused at the door. “Jesus, I hope this isn’t a mistake I’m making.”
“Just go,” I said.
“Come with me, Alex. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. “In spite of the Sherlock Holmes remark.”
THIS WAS BIG,
no doubt about that, anyway. Even James Truscott was on hand. The news conference on the blue Suburban got covered by everybody and their big brother, and was sure to be the lead item on every report until something else even more dramatic turned up on the L.A. murder case. Hopefully, it would be the capture of the Suburban, and then Mary Smith, male or female.
I didn’t appear in the small group on camera with Detective Jeanne Galletta, but I met up with her minutes afterward. She was getting attagirls all around, but she broke away to come over and see me.
“Thanks for the help. The wise counsel,” she said. “So did I look like a fricking raccoon on national TV?”
“No, you didn’t. Well, yeah, you did.” Then I smiled. “I remember you saying one time,
you have to eat, right?
You still interested?”
Jeanne’s worried look returned suddenly. “Oh, Alex, not tonight.” Then she winked and grinned. “Gotcha. Yeah, we could eat, I guess. What are you in the mood for? Actually, I’m starving now. Italian sound good?”
“Italian always sounds good to me.”
Jeanne’s apartment was on the way to the restaurant, and she insisted we stop. “I need to check out my face in my own mirror, with lighting I trust and know,” she explained. “This will only take five minutes, maybe seven minutes tops. Come up. I won’t jump your bones, I promise.”
I laughed and followed her into a redbrick building somewhere off of Santa Monica.
“Maybe I
will
jump your bones,” she said as we walked up the stairs to her apartment.
Which is exactly what happened as soon as she shut the door behind us. She spun around fast, grabbed me, kissed me, and then let me go again.
“Hmmm. That was kind of nice. But I’m just messing with you,
Doctor
. Ten minutes, just like I promised.”
“Seven.”
And then Jeanne scooted down the hall to her bedroom and the lighting she could trust. I’d never seen her so loose and lively; it was almost as if she was a different person away from the job.
It took her a little more than seven minutes, but the wait was worth it, the transformation kind of startling, actually. She’d always struck me as attractive, but she looked kind of tough at work, and definitely all-business. Now she wore a silk T-shirt with jeans and sandals, her hair was still wet from a quick shower, and Detective Jeanne Galletta seemed softer, another side of her revealed.
“I know, I know, I look like hell,” she said, only we both knew different.
She hit her forehead with the palm of her hand. “I forgot to offer you a drink. Oh, God, what is it with me?”
“We only had five minutes,” I said.
“Right. Good point. You always,
usually,
say just the right thing. Okay then, let’s go. The night awaits us.”
The thing of it was, I could still feel the impression of Jeanne’s body against mine, and her lips. Also, I was unattached now, wasn’t I?
Was I?
To be honest, I was starting to get a little confused myself. But she was herding me out the door into the hallway—and then Jeanne whirled around on me again. This time I was ready for her and took her in my arms. We kissed, and it was longer and more satisfying than the first time. She smelled terrific, felt even better, and her brown eyes were beautiful up close like this.
Jeanne took my hand, and she started to pull me back into her apartment.
I stopped her. “You just got dressed to go out.”
She shook her head. “No, I got dressed for you.”
But then I gathered it together, got hold of my senses, and said, “Let’s go eat, Jeanne.”
She smiled and said, “Okay, let’s eat,
Alex
.”
