Mary, Mary (19 page)
“WHAT DO WE THINK
about this?” Van Allsburg asked the room, and then he stared directly at me. “You have more cases like this one than anyone else here. What’s going on? What is she up to now?”
I just went ahead and said it. “She wants to be caught.”
I felt I needed to stand to address the group. “Most likely, this is a person who feels completely isolated. The reaction to eliminate the people she fixates on is paradoxical. She, he, or it destroys what she can’t have. Over time, it’s making her feel worse. Some part of Mary may know that, and doesn’t want to do this anymore, but she lacks the self-control to stop on her own.”
“And the latest e-mail?” Fred asked.
“Another sign that the killer is conflicted. Maybe the conscious mind believes it’s taunting the authorities while the subconscious is drawing a map for us to follow. That’s the only thing I can come up with that makes sense of what’s happened, and I’m not even sure if it makes sense.”
“What about the counterpossibility?” asked David Fujishiro. “That she’s trying to deliberately mislead us, throw us off with fiction.”
“You’re right. That is a real possibility,” I said. “And what it leaves us with is every conceivable outcome
except
what’s in the e-mail. I think we have an obligation to take the message at face value first, and consider the alternatives second. But David has just stated the other logical possibility. Of course, we don’t know if she’s logical.”
Several agents, including my buddy Page, scribbled notes while I spoke. I was aware of my stature here, if not exactly comfortable with it.
“Do we know what LAPD’s doing with this? I’m talking about the latest threat,” asked an agent in the back, one of several faces I had never seen before. I looked over to Van Allsburg for a response.
“They’ve got a very large internal task force up and running. That much we know for sure. They’re working on a database of potential targets. But you take every name-above-the-title actress in this town, even just sticking to the ones with families, and you’ve got a long list on your hands.
“Plus, LAPD’s going to be a little trigger shy about the panic factor. Outside of increased patrols and some awareness-raising, there’s not a hell of a lot they can do for all of these women and their families—except keep after Mary Smith. Someone has to catch her. And you know what? I want it to be us, not LAPD.”
DISNEYLAND WAS CHOCK-FULL
of ironies for any good mother. “The Happiest Place on Earth,” the brochures called it, and maybe it could be, but with the large, electric crowds, it also had to be one of the easiest places to lose a child.
Mary tried not to give in to her worry.
Worrying just makes bad things happen. Worrywarts are the saddest people in the world. I should know
.
Besides, this day was supposed to be about fun and family. Brendan and Ashley had been looking forward to it—for like forever and a day. Even little Adam was bucking up and down in his stroller, squealing with a wordless excitement.
Mary kept close watch on her older two as they led the way along Main Street USA, with its candy-colored shops and other attractions. Each of them held one side of a park map. This was adorable, since neither of them knew what they were looking at. Ever since Adam was born, they liked to play at being older.
“What do you want to do first, my three little pumpkins?” she asked them. “We’re
here
. We’re finally at Disney, just like I promised.”
“Everything,”
Ashley said breathlessly. She watched slack-jawed as Goofy, the real
Goofy,
went ambling past on Main Street.
Brendan pointed to a little boy about his own age wearing Mickey Mouse ears with
Matthew
embroidered across the brim.
“Can we get those?” he asked hopefully. “Can we please, please, please?”
“No, I’m sorry, sweetie. Mommy doesn’t have enough money for that. Not this trip. Next time for sure.”
She wondered suddenly why she hadn’t thought to pack sandwiches. The trip to Disney was going to cost far more than she could afford. If something went wrong at home between now and her next paycheck, she’d be in deep doo-doo.
But that was just more to worry about.
Stop. Stop. Not today. Don’t ruin everything, Marsey-doats
.
“I know just what we should do,” she said gently, taking the map from their hands.
Shortly, they were floating through the It’s a Small World boat ride, something Mary hadn’t done since she was Brendan’s age.
But it was still the same, and that was comforting. The cool and the dark were as soothing as she remembered, and she still loved all the smiling animatronic faces that never changed. There was something reassuring about the ride, about Disneyland. She loved being here with the kids, and she’d kept her promise.
“Look at
that!
” Brendan squealed, pointing to a jolly-looking Eskimo family, waving from their snow-covered home.
Brendan and Ashley probably didn’t even remember snow, she realized, and Adam had never seen it at all. The gray and the endless cold from back home were like another world now, like the black-and-white part of
The Wizard of Oz
. Except Dorothy went back, and Mary never would. Never again. No more snow-covered mountains. It was all a million miles away, right where it belonged. From now on it was going to be nothing but California sunshine—and smiling Eskimos, and Goofy.
“Excuse me, ma’am, please step out,” said an attendant, breaking her reverie.
“Mommy!”
Mary winced in frustration. She had missed out on half the ride, thinking about other things. What was the last part she remembered?
The Eskimo family. Snow. Oh, yes, snow
.
“Ma’am? Please. Others are waiting.”
Mary looked up at the uniformed worker, who gave her a look of utter politeness.
“Can we go around again?” she asked.
He smiled obligingly. “Sorry, but we’re not allowed to let people do that. You’ll have to get back in line.”
“Let’s go!” Brendan cried. “C’mon, Mommy. No scenes.
Please?
”
“All right, all right,” Mary said. Her voice was tense, and she was a little embarrassed.
She winked to the attendant. “Kids,” she said conspiratorially, then jogged across the platform to catch up with her crew, her lovies.
LUNCHTIME CAME QUICKLY,
and Mary was terribly disappointed to find she had only twelve dollars and change in her purse. A small pizza and a drink to share were going to have to be it for herself and the kids.
“There’s green stuff on it,” Ashley said as Mary set the food on the table.
“It doesn’t taste like anything,” she said. She wiped away the flecks of oregano with her napkin. “There. All the green’s gone, all gone now.”
“It’s
under
the cheese, too. I don’t want it, Mommy. I’m hungry, I’m really hungry!”
“Sweetie, this is lunch. There won’t be anything else until we get home.”
“I don’t care.”
“Ashley.”
“No!”
Mary took a deep breath and counted to five. She tried to get control of herself, tried so hard. “Look at your brother. He likes it. It’s so yummy.”
Brendan smiled and took another bite, the picture of obedience. Ashley only ducked her chin and completely avoided Mary’s eye contact.
Mary felt the tension building in her shoulders and neck. “Ash, honey, you have to have at least one bite. Ashley! You have to try it. Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
Mary knew with all her heart she should just let it go. Not eating was a self-correcting problem. Ashley’s problem, not hers. “Do you know how much this cost?” she said in spite of herself. “Do you know what
everything
costs here at
Fantasyland?
”
Brendan tried to intervene. “Mommy, don’t. Mommy, Mommy.”
“Do you?” she pressed. “Have any idea?”
“I don’t care,” Ashley fired back. The little bitch, the awful girl.
The tension took hold, shooting from her shoulders down into her arms and legs. Mary felt a sharp prickling in her muscles, and then all at once, a release.
Ashley didn’t want the food? Fine. Just fine.
Her hand swept across the table.
“Mommy!” Brendan cried out.
Paper plates and slices of pizza slid to the concrete patio floor. The one soda tipped over, its sudsy contents sloshing onto the open stroller where Adam was sitting. His shriek was almost instantaneous. It resonated with Mary’s own.
“Do you see what you’ve done? Do you?”
She barely heard any of it. Her voice was like something on the other side of a door, and the door was closed, and locked.
Oh, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She and the kids were at Disneyland for God’s sake. This was so wrong, so wrong. Everything she’d worked so hard for was going down the toilet. This was a nightmare. What else could possibly happen to spoil everything?
IF MARY SMITH’S LATEST E-MAIL
was to be believed, we were down to forty-eight hours or less to stop the next homicide.
To make the impossible situation even worse, we couldn’t be everywhere at once, not even with hundreds of agents and detectives on the case.
One lead in particular had emerged, and we were going to run with it. That’s all Fred Van Allsburg had told us. I wasn’t sure we needed another meeting to discuss it, but I showed up, and now I was glad I did.
We’d managed an end run around Maddux Fielding’s unofficial closed-door policy at LAPD. A member of their blue-Suburban detail was on the phone when I got there.
The LAPD detail consisted of two lead detectives, two-dozen field agents, and a clue coordinator, Merrill Snyder, who was on the line with us.
Snyder started with his overview of the search. His voice had a subtle touch of New England. “As you know, DMVs don’t track by color, which is the only specification we have on Mary Smith’s alleged Suburban,” he told the group.
“That’s left us with just over two thousand possible matches in Los Angeles County. As a matter of triage, we’ve been focusing on civilian call-ins. We’re still getting dozens every day—people who own a blue Suburban and don’t know what to do about it; or people who’ve seen one, or thought they might have seen one, or maybe just know someone who’s seen one. The hard part is recognizing the worthwhile point zero zero one percent of calls from the other ninety-nine point ninety-nine.”
“So why did this one spike?” I asked.
It was a combination of things, Snyder told us. Plenty of leads had some individual compelling detail to them, but this one had a convergence of suspicious factors.
“This guy called in about his neighbor, who’s also his tenant. She drives a blue Suburban, of course—and goes by the name Mary Wagner.”
Eyebrows bobbed around the room. This was the stuff coincidence was made of, but it wouldn’t have shocked me to know that our killer—with her penchant for public attention—was actually using her own first name.
“She’s a virtual Jane Doe,” Snyder went on. “No driver’s license here, or in any state for that matter. The plates on the car are California, but guess what?”
“They’re stolen,” someone muttered from the rear.
“They’re
stolen,
” said Snyder. “And they don’t track. She probably got them off an abandoned car somewhere.
“And then, lastly, there’s her address. Mammoth Avenue in Van Nuys. It’s only about ten blocks from that cybercafe where the one aborted e-mail was found.”
“What else do we know about the woman herself?” Van Allsburg asked Snyder. “Any surveillance on her?”
An agent in front tapped some keys on a laptop, and a slide came up on the conference room screen.
It showed a tall, middle-aged white woman, from a vantage point across a parking lot. She wore what looked like a pink maid’s uniform. Her body was neither thin nor fat; the uniform fit but still looked too small for her mannish frame. I put her age at about forty-five.
“This is from earlier this morning,” Fred said. “She works in housekeeping at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“Hang on.
Housekeeping?
Did you say housekeeping?”
Several heads turned to where Agent Page was sitting perched on the window ledge.
“What about it?” Van Allsburg asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe this sounds crazy—”
“Go ahead.”
“Actually, it was something in Dr. Cross’s report,” Page said. “At the hotel where Suzie Cartoulis and Brian Conver were found.
Someone made the bed
. Perfectly.” He shrugged. “It’s almost too neat, but . . . I don’t know. Hotel maid . . .”
The silence in the room seemed to intimidate him, and the young agent shut up. I imagined that with more experience, Page would come to recognize this kind of response as interest, not skepticism. Everyone took the theory in, and Van Allsburg moved on to the next slide.
A tight shot of Mary Wagner.
In close up, I could see the beginnings of gray in her dark, wiry hair, which was tamed at the nape of her neck in an unfashionable kind of bun. Her face was round and matronly, but her expression neutral and distant. She seemed to be somewhere else.
The mutterer from the rear spoke up again. “She sure doesn’t look like much.”
And she didn’t. She was no one you’d notice on the street.
Practically invisible.
AT 6:20 THAT NIGHT,
I was parked up the block from Mary Wagner’s house. This could definitely be something, our big break, and we all knew it. So far, we’d been able to keep the press away.
A second team was in the alley behind the house, and a third one had trailed Wagner from work at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They had just sent word that she’d stopped for groceries and was nearly home.
Sure enough, a blue Suburban, puffing smoke from the exhaust pipe, pulled into the driveway a couple of minutes later.
Ms. Wagner hoisted two plastic bags from the truck and went inside. She appeared to be a strong woman. It also looked as though she was talking to herself, but I couldn’t tell for sure.
Once she’d gone inside, we pulled down the street for a better view.
My partner for the evening was Manny Baker, an agent about my age. Manny had a good reputation, but his monosyllabic responses to polite conversation had long since dropped off to silence. So we settled in and watched the Wagner house in the gathering dusk.
Ms. Wagner’s rented bungalow was in poor shape, even for a marginal neighborhood. The gate on the chain-link fence was completely missing. The lawn overgrew what remained of the brick edging along the front walk.
The property was barely wider than the house itself, with just enough room for a driveway on the south side. The Suburban had nearly scraped the neighbor’s wall when she pulled in.
Jeremy Kilbourn, the man who had called in to us about the Suburban, lived next door and owned both houses. We’d learned from him that Ms. Wagner’s bungalow had belonged to his mother until she died fourteen months prior. Mary Wagner moved in shortly after that and had been paying cash rent, on time, ever since. Kilbourn thought she was “a weird chick” but friendly enough, and said she kept mostly to herself.
Tonight, his house was dark. He had taken his family to stay with relatives until Mary Wagner was checked out.
As dusk changed to night, it grew quiet and still on the street. Mary Wagner finally turned on a few lights and seemed to settle in. I couldn’t help thinking,
life of quiet desperation.
At one point, I got out my Maglite and my wallet, and I stole a glance at the pictures I had of Damon, Jannie, and Little Alex, wondering what they were doing right now. In the dark, I didn’t have to worry about the goofy grin it put on my face.
For the next several hours, I divided my attention between Mary Wagner’s unchanging house and a file of case notes in my lap. The notes were more of a prop than anything else. Everything there was to know about Mary Smith was already lodged in my head.
Then I saw something—
someone,
actually—and I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.
“Oh, no,” I said out loud. “Oh, Jesus!”
Poor Manny Baker almost jumped out of his seat.
