Mary, Mary (25 page)
IT WAS HARD TO TEAR MYSELF AWAY
from Mary’s journals—her words, her ideas, and her anger.
For the first time, it seemed possible to me, even probable, that she had actually committed the series of murders in L.A.
When I looked at my watch, I was already half an hour late for a meeting with her lead therapist, Debra Shapiro.
Shit. I need to hustle over there
.
Dr. Shapiro was actually on her way out when I got to her office; I was full of apology. Shapiro stayed to speak with me but was perched on the edge of a couch with her briefcase on her lap.
“Mary was my patient for eight years,” she told me before I even asked.
“How would you characterize her?”
“Not as a killer—interestingly. I view the incident with her children as an aberration to the larger arena, if you will, of her mental illness. She’s a very sick woman, but any violent impulses were subjugated a long time ago. That’s part of what kept her here; she never moved through anything.”
“How can you be sure?” I asked Dr. Shapiro. “Especially given what’s happened.” Maybe Mary wasn’t the only person in denial around here.
“If I were testifying in court, I’d have to say I can’t. Beyond that, though, I think eight years of interaction is worth something, Dr. Cross. Don’t you?”
I did think so, of course. But only if the therapist showed me some insight.
“What about her children?” I asked. “I didn’t find any mention of them in her journals. But for the short time I’ve known Mary, they’ve been all she can think about. They’re very much alive in her mind now. She’s obsessed with them.”
Dr. Shapiro nodded while she looked at her watch. “That’s more difficult for me to reconcile. I could offer a theory, which is that maybe Mary’s therapy was finally actualizing. The memory of those children was slowly, slowly bubbling up.
“As the children came into her consciousness, one way to avoid processing twenty years of repressed guilt all at once would be to keep the children alive, as you put it. It could explain what drove her to escape when she did—to get back to her life with them. Which, to Mary’s experience, is exactly what happened.”
“And these murders in California?” I was going very quickly on purpose; Dr. Shapiro fidgeted as though she might jump up and leave at any moment.
She shrugged, clearly impatient with the interview. I wondered if her therapy sessions felt like this to her patients. “I just don’t see it. It’s hard to know what might have happened to Mary once she left here, but as for the woman that I knew?” She shook her head back and forth several times. “The only part of the story that makes sense is Los Angeles.”
“How so?” I asked.
“There was some interest in her story a few years ago. Some movie people came and went. Mary permitted the interviews, but as a state’s ward, she didn’t have the autonomy to grant any farther-reaching permission. Eventually they lost interest and went away. During her last couple of years here, I think they were the only visitors she had.”
“Who?” I took out my notebook, folded it open. “I need to know more about this. Are there records of the visits? Anything?”
“I don’t actually recall any names,” she said. “And beyond that, I’m a bit uncomfortable with the level of disclosure here. I might refer you back to Dr. Blaisdale if you want more specific information. He’d be the one to release it.”
I wondered if she was feeling protective of her patient, or maybe just late for something on her social calendar. The clock said 5:46.
I realized I might do better elsewhere, in which case, I had to get going as well. I thanked Dr. Shapiro for her time, and help, and headed back to the administration building.
I was running.
STILL AND ALL,
I was feeling like a real cop again, and it didn’t seem half bad to me. The wall clock in the administrative office said 5:52 when I slipped in.
I smiled across the counter at a young woman with pink-streaked blond hair and a lot of costume jewelry. She was draping a plastic cover over her typewriter.
“Hi, I’ve got a really quick request for you. Really quick. I need it, though.”
“Can it wait until tomorrow?” the woman asked, eyeing me up and down. “It can wait, right?”
“Actually, no. I just spoke with Doctor Shapiro, and she asked me to run down here and catch you. I need to see the women’s forensic ward visitor’s log for the last few years. Specifically for Mary Constantine. It’s really important. I wouldn’t bother you otherwise.”
The woman picked up her phone. “Doctor Shapiro sent you?”
“That’s right. She just left for the day, but she told me this wouldn’t be a problem.” I held up my ID. “I’m with the FBI, Dr. Alex Cross. This is part of an ongoing murder investigation.”
She didn’t hide her displeasure. “I just shut down the computer, and I have to pick up my daughter. I suppose I can get you the hard copy if you want.”
Without waiting for an answer, she disappeared into another room and came back with a small stack of three-ring binders.
“You can only stay as long as Beadsie’s here.” She waved to a woman in a goldfish-bowl office at the back. Then she left, without another word—to me, or to Beadsie.
The pages of the visitor’s log were divided into columns. I worked from the back of the most recent book, looking for Mary’s name under
Who Are You Here to See?
For two years’ worth of entries, there was nothing at all. It was obvious how alone Mary Constantine had been in this place.
Then, suddenly, a rash of names cropped up on the log. Here was the flurry of interest that Dr. Shapiro mentioned. It lasted over the course of about a month and a half.
I slowed down and perused the visitors’ names. Most were unfamiliar to me.
One of them, I recognized.
MY CELL PHONE
and Vermont seemed to hate each other. Apparently, this was the Land of No Signal.
I found a pay phone instead, called Agent Page in Los Angeles, and had him patch in LAPD. A minute later we had Maddux Fielding’s office on the line, but no Fielding. What a surprise.
“You know what?” I said to the nameless lieutenant on the line. “Screw it. Transfer us over to Detective Jeanne Galletta.”
“What’s going on?” Page asked me again, while we were on hold with LAPD.
Then I heard another voice on the line. “Jeanne Galletta. Is this Alex?”
“Jeanne, it’s Alex all right. Karl Page from the L.A. Bureau office is on the line, too. I’m in Vermont. I think I have important news on the Mary Smith case.”
“I think I may have another connection for you—a murder in Vancouver,” Jeanne said. “What are you doing all the way up in Vermont?”
“Hold that thought about Vancouver. Please find Fielding. Or do whatever you have to do, but someone needs to pick up Michael Bell for questioning. Michael Bell.
Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s husband
.”
“What?” Jeanne sounded incredulous. Then Page swore, obviously muffling the receiver.
I gave them a very quick rundown of my last two days up here, then finally the names on the visitor log at the state hospital.
“He knows Mary Constantine. He’s visited her here in Vermont before. Several times, actually.”
“And what? He’s been setting her up? How would he even know she was in L.A.?”
“I don’t know everything yet. Maybe she looked him up when she got there; maybe they corresponded. If he wanted her story, it would have been worth something. I think he
did
want it, just not for a movie.”
“You think it was a cover, maybe to kill his own wife? That’s a big-ass coverup, Alex.”
“Sure is. It’s an incredible story, too. Page, are you getting this?”
“Got it. And I like it. Finally, something makes some sense to me.”
“Good. Then do a direct cross-reference—Michael Bell and anyone else connected to this case. I wonder if he had a bigger agenda than just his wife. Find out anything you can, surfer boy. All we need for now is enough to justify holding him once LAPD gets him into custody.
“Jeanne, listen, please. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong. I say figure it out later and get a cruiser over to Michael Bell’s house. Now. And, Jeanne.”
“What?”
“Don’t go over there by yourself. I’m pretty sure that Bell is our killer.”
SUDDENLY THE WHOLE CASE
was on fire again.
About ten miles from the hospital, I pulled over at the first gas station I saw, an ancient Texaco with a flying
A
over the roof. A Ford F-150 pulled in after me, but the only other building in sight was a darkened sugarhouse in a field directly across the road. I could see a couple of Holsteins grazing in the field.
I called Karl Page again from another pay phone. I needed to hear what he’d found out about Michael Bell.
At this late hour, catching a flight out of Burlington seemed unlikely; I wanted to stay updated all the same, and was concerned for Page and Jeanne Galletta. Who knew what Bell was up to in L.A.?
“What have you got so far?” I asked him.
“Amazing what you find when you look in the right place,” he said. “Before she died, Marti Lowenstein-Bell had just sold her own show to HBO. She was hotter than a fifty-dollar pistol. On the other hand, Michael Bell’s last three solo projects went nowhere. His only big successes had been with her, and it looked like she was checking out. She was divorcing him, Alex. They hadn’t yet filed, but a friend of hers knew it was coming.”
“What did you say to me once? Cha-ching?”
“Yeah, and the hits keep coming. LAPD checked Bell’s alibis all right, but they all revolved around his being seen at work, or occasionally at home. Alex, the alibis aren’t going to hold up. And listen to this, Arnold Griner seriously trashed more than one of Bell’s movies when he wrote for
Variety
. Griner actually called him ‘Michael Bomb’ in one column, that kind of thing. Of course, in Griner’s case it might be justifiable homicide. Antonia Schifman? She backed out of a project that Bell was financing himself last year. Apparently
after
she gave him a verbal promise, which seems to mean next to nothing out here. The whole thing fell apart, and he lost a half million in development.”
I could hear the adrenaline in Page’s voice. He was like a greyhound at the gate. “I’ll bet anything there’s more,” he said. “Bell’s career was headed down the crapper, and he was going to bring everyone down with him.”
“Keep digging,” I said. “Great work, too. Any more word from LAPD? Jeanne?”
“A cruiser went by the Bell house. No answer.”
“Did they go inside?”
“No. But they were pretty sure nobody was home. The house is under surveillance.”
“All right. I’ll call when I stop again. Probably out near the airport. Unfortunately, I think I’m stuck here for the night.”
I didn’t want to spend the night in Vermont, especially now, but it didn’t look as though I had much of a choice. I thought about stopping into the small store at the gas station, buying something awful like chocolate cupcakes, or M&M’s with peanuts, but I mustered all of my willpower against it.
God, I am impressive occasionally.
I turned toward the rented car and started to walk with my head down against the wind. It was getting nippy up here. A few feet away from the car, I looked up and stopped dead in my tracks.
I had company.
James Truscott was sitting in the car’s passenger seat.
THIS MADE NO SENSE TO ME,
not at first anyway. What the hell was Truscott doing here? Obviously, he’d followed me again. But why?
I was seeing red as I yanked open the car door on his side. My mouth was open to start to yell, but nothing came out, not a word.
Truscott wasn’t here to cause me any trouble—at least not now. The writer was dead, propped up in the front seat like a statue.
“Just get in the car,” said a voice from behind me.
“Don’t cause a scene out here. Because then I’ll have to go in and shoot the nice old biddy who runs the country store, too. I really wouldn’t mind, y’know.”
I turned and saw Michael Bell.
Bell appeared haggard and disturbed, and he’d lost a lot of weight since I’d last seen him at his house. He looked like hell, actually. His light-blue eyes were badly bloodshot; with his ragged, bushy beard, he looked like a local woodsman.
“How long have you been following me?” I asked, trying to engage him if I could, feel him out, gain some kind of leverage.
“Just get in the car and drive, will you? Don’t talk to me. I see through you.”
We both got in, Bell in the back, and he pointed out to the road, the direction heading away from the interstate. I started the car and drove where he wanted me to, my mind racing backward and forward. My gun was in the trunk. How could I get to the trunk? Or how could I get inside his head in a hurry?
“What’s the plan, Michael?”
“The plan was for you to go back to Washington, and for everyone to go on with their pitiful lives. But that didn’t work out so well, did it? You should thank me for taking out the reporter, no? He begged and sobbed for his life, by the way. Great performance. I believed him. What a wimp he turned out to be.”
I was surprised he knew I was from D.C., and also about Truscott. But then, he was a watcher, a plotter. There was probably a lot that Bell knew.
“So what now?” I asked.
“What do you think? You’re supposed to be the expert, right? So, what happens now?”
“It doesn’t have to go like this.” I was just talking; saying anything that came into my mind.
“You gotta be kidding. What other way do you think it can go? Let me hear all of the choices. I can’t wait.”
Meantime, he had burrowed the barrel of his pistol into my neck. I leaned away, but only so far. I thought it was best if I knew exactly where his gun was. I wondered if he was executing a plan now, or if he was improvising at this point. Mary Smith had been known to do both.
And this was Mary Smith, wasn’t it? I’d finally met the real killer.
We drove for a few miles on an unlit secondary highway. “This looks good here,” he said suddenly. “Go that way. Make a left. Do it.”
I turned off the pavement onto a bumpy dirt road. It sloped upward, winding away into the woods. Eventually, the fir trees closed around the car like a tunnel. I was running out of time, and it didn’t look as if there was any way for me to escape. Mary Smith had me, just the way she’d gotten all the others and killed them without fail.
“Where are we going, Bell?”
“Somewhere they won’t find you right away. Or your pen pal, either.”
“You know, they’re already looking for you in L.A. I made a call.”
“Yeah, well, good luck to them. I’m not exactly in L.A., am I?”
“What about your girls, Michael? What about them?”
He pushed the gun barrel harder into my neck. “Not
my
fucking girls. Marti was a cheap little whore before I married her. Before I made her into something. I was a good father to those ungrateful kids, all for Marti. She was a runaround when I met her, and she stayed a runaround. Okay, pull over. This is good.”
This was definitely not good. The car headlights showed where the road dropped off to a wooded slope on the right. I had to be real careful not to go over the edge.
Then all at once, I thought the opposite.
If
I could force myself to do it—but I knew I had to. So I mashed the accelerator down and spun the steering wheel as sharply to the right as I could.
Bell screeched. “What the fuck are you doing? Stop the car.
Stop!
”
Three things happened, all at about the same time. Michael Bell’s gun went off; I felt a universe of pain explode in my right shoulder; and the car started to plummet—almost straight downhill.
