Mary, Mary (21 page)
MARY DROPPED THE WATER GLASS,
but I didn’t even hear it break. Suddenly the kitchen was filled with loud shouting, as well as Mary’s frightened screaming.
“Get out of my house! I didn’t do anything! Get away from me, please! Why are you here?”
I held up my badge in front of me, unsure if the LAPD assault team even knew who I was.
“Get down on the floor!” The lead officer’s pistol was pointed at Mary’s chest. “Get down.
Now!
On the floor!”
In a matter of seconds, Mary Wagner was a total wreck. Her eyes were unfocused, and she didn’t even seem to hear the officer shouting at her.
“Get down!” he shouted again.
She backed up, still screaming, with her arms and shoulders in a hunched, defensive position.
I could only watch as her bare foot came down on a piece of the broken water glass. She yelped pitifully, then jerked to one side as if she’d been slapped.
Her free foot slipped in the water, and twisted under her. With a fast pinwheeling of arms, she went down hard.
The police assault team was on her in a second. Two officers rolled Mary over and handcuffed her from behind. Another one read her rights, the words probably coming too fast for her to understand.
Someone took my elbow and spoke in my ear. “Sir, could you come with me, please?”
I ignored whoever it was.
“Sir?”
The officer grabbed at me again, and I angrily shook him off.
“She needs first aid.” But no one seemed to hear me, or if they did, pay any attention.
“Ma’am, do you understand everything I’ve told you?” the arresting officer asked. She nodded shakily, still facedown on the floor. I was fairly certain she didn’t understand any of this.
“Ma’am, I need you to say yes or no. Do you understand everything I’ve told you?”
“Yes.” It came out as a gasp. Her breathing was ragged. “I understand. You think I did something bad.”
That was enough. I pushed my way through the cops and knelt down next to her.
“Mary, it’s me. Agent Cross. Are you all right? Mary? Do you really understand what’s happening now?”
She was still panicked but not dissociated. I made sure the shard was out of her foot, then wrapped it in a dish towel and helped her sit up.
She looked around, wide-eyed, as if scanning the room for anything familiar.
“Mary, they’re placing you under arrest. You need to go with them now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“All right, we got it.” A cop maybe half my age stepped in.
“Just give me a second here,” I said.
“No, sir,” he answered. “We are to take the suspect into immediate custody.”
I turned away from Mary and kept my voice low. “What do you think I’m trying to help you do here?”
“Sir, my instructions are clear, and unequivocal. Please step away. This is our arrest.”
My only alternative to giving in was a truly ugly scene. I thought seriously about it, but knew my argument wasn’t with the arresting officers—it was with their boss. Anyway, the damage was already done.
Within seconds, they had Mary Wagner on her feet and were pushing her out the door. The stained dish towel lay crumpled on the floor, where a long red smudge marked the linoleum.
“First aid!” I yelled after them, not that they could hear me anymore, not that they gave a damn about what I had to say.
I swear, I wanted to hit someone. My frustration and anger boiled over, and I knew where to take it; I wheeled on the nearest sergeant.
“Where the hell is Maddux Fielding?” I shouted at the top of my voice. “Where is he?”
“BACK OFF, CROSS!”
Fielding said it before I even reached him. He was out on the sidewalk in front of Mary Wagner’s house, conferring with one of his arresting officers.
The block had been transformed from suburban normalcy into the kind of police scene most people never see, or want to.
A dozen or more black-and-whites clogged the street, most of them with their flashers still rolling.
Bright-yellow crime scene tape was being strung across the chain-link fence, and a barrier of sawhorses bracketed the property, holding back a fast-growing crowd of lookyloos who wanted to see a little true-crime history in the making.
Mary Smith lived right in that house. Can you imagine? In our neighborhood?
I saw that a couple of news vans were already on site as well. I wondered if Maddux Fielding had prearranged a little coverage for his Big Get, and it made me even angrier.
“What was the purpose of that?” I yelled at him.
All I could see was his smug expression as he grudgingly turned to look at me.
“You compromised a key interview, not to mention her personal safety and mine. Both unnecessarily. I could have been shot. She could have been shot. You made a carnival out of this arrest. You’re a disgrace to the LAPD.”
I didn’t know or care who was listening in; I just hoped it was embarrassing to Fielding. Maybe this was a language that he spoke. His face remained inscrutable.
“Agent Cross—”
“Do you know what you may have just done to your chances for a confession?”
“I don’t need one!”
he finally shouted over me. “I don’t need one because I have something better.”
“What are you talking about?”
He nodded condescendingly. Information was the valuable currency here, and he had it. What the hell was he holding back?
“You can probably see I’m busy,” he told me. “I’ll make my report available to the Federal Bureau—as soon as it’s ready.”
I couldn’t walk away. “You gave me time for this interview. I had your word!”
He had already turned away but now pivoted back on me. “I said if anything changed, it was over. That’s precisely what I said to you.”
“So what changed, goddammit?”
He took a beat. “Fuck you, Agent Cross. I don’t have to give you answers.”
I lunged at him, and it was probably exactly what he wanted. Two of his monkeys stepped between us and pulled me back. Just as well, but it would have felt good to erase that cynical sneer off his face, even better to briefly rearrange some of his features. I shook off the two officers and walked away.
Before I’d even begun to calm down, though, I was dialing my cell phone.
“Jeanne Galletta.”
“It’s Alex Cross. Do you know anything about the Mary Wagner arrest?”
“Fine, thanks. How are you?”
“Sorry. But do you, Jeanne? I’m at her house right now. It’s an incredible mess. You wouldn’t believe how it went down.”
Jeanne paused. “I’m not on that case anymore.”
“Would I get a different answer in person?”
“You might.”
“Then give me a break. Please, Jeanne. I need your help. I don’t have time to run around.”
Her voice finally softened. “What happened out there? You sound really upset.”
“I am upset. Everything blew up. I was right in the middle of interviewing her when LAPD burst in like a damn clown car at the circus. It was ridiculous, Jeanne, and unnecessary. Fielding knows something, and he won’t say what.”
“I’ll save you a step,” Jeanne said. “She’s the one. She did those murders, Alex.”
“How do you know? How does LAPD know? What is going on?”
“You remember the hair that was found at the movie theater when Patrice Bennett was killed? Well, they pulled one off Mary Wagner’s sweater from her locker at the hotel. The results just came through. It’s the same hair. Fielding ran with it.”
My mind raced, placing this new bit of information alongside everything else. “I see you’re doing a good job staying off the case,” I finally said.
“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.”
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.
“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.
“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.
