“So I should be home tonight instead of Monday, which would be nice. Maybe play a little golf this week? Wiatt finally invited me to Riviera.”
“Mm-hm.”
“How’s the little dude?”
“He’s right here. Hang on.”
Suzie surrendered the phone to the backseat. “It’s Daddy. Be nice.”
She was already rearranging today’s schedule in her head. Get someone else to cover the mayor’s press conference on the ongoing murders. Have the housekeeper pick up Zach after tennis practice. Call Brian, see if he can get away; then call the Ramada and ask for an early check-in. Get laid properly once more before her all-business-all-of-the-time husband got back to town.
Make it an afternoon to remember.
Chapter 60
To:
[email protected] From: Mary Smith
To: Suzie Cartoulis:
People in Los Angeles watch you on television every day, reporting the news, acting like you really know what’s going on. That’s what you do so well. Acting, pretending, faking it with flair. But today will be a little different, Suze. Today you will be the news.
They’ll say that Suzie Cartoulis and her handsome, former-beach-volleyball-champ lover were found slain in a hotel room. That’s how you people talk, isn’t it? Slain? But no matter what they say on the news, no one will ever know just how you looked at me when I killed you. The incredible fear, the confusion, and what I took to be respect.
It was different this morning outside your fancy house in Pacific Palisades. You almost bumped into me with your highly polished silver Merc wagon, and you looked right through me. You did, Suze. Trust me on that. I remember these kinds of things.
Then, just like the others, you went on with your day like I wasn’t even there. I had a feeling today might be the last one for you. Then I was sure of it.
First I watched you say good-bye to your darling little boy for the last time. He probably can’t appreciate everything you do for him—all the sacrifices—but he’ll think about it later, when someone else has to take him to school or to practice the next time he goes. You’re right about one thing though, you should have made more time in your life for Zachary. Coulda, shoulda.
Then I followed you to the hotel in West Hollywood. At first I didn’t know why you went there, but I figured out pretty quickly that you weren’t going to die alone. That delicious-looking blond man you met—you two were perfect for each other. Central casting all the way.
I could tell just by looking that he’s the kind of somebody you are. Am I right? He went to the Olympics, after all. He’s an exec at your network. Another fast-tracker. And now you have another thing in common. You’re both dead somebodies. Killed by a nobody you couldn’t even see when you looked right at her.
I gave you two some quality time before I came up there for you. Enough time to feel safe in your little cocoon of deceit. Maybe even enough to do what you had in mind for your sneaky little rendezvous. Then, when I came in, I saw him first. That was a bit of good luck. Know why? I wanted you to see him die. It put the fear of God on your face before I shot you—and then I got to cut that fear away, one piece at a time, until you weren’t afraid anymore.
You weren’t anything anymore.
You were nothing, Suzie Cartoulis.
Just like me.
Chapter 61
I WAS STILL ON THE ROAD when word came about Mary Smith’s latest—a triple homicide this time, the killer’s deadliest strike to date, at least as far as we knew for certain. I was still chasing down leads on the triple homicide in New York, but progress was slow, and suddenly I was off to another crime scene.
Susan Cartoulis, a prizewinning newscaster, had been found dead, along with her lover, in a room at the Ramada Plaza Suites in West Hollywood.
The dead man was Brian Conver, a sports producer at the same network where Ms. Cartoulis worked. A second woman, Mariah Alexander, a college student who attended Southern Cal, had also been killed. What was that all about?
I asked Agent Page to read Mary Smith’s latest e-mail message over the phone while I drove. The text made clear that the newswoman had been the primary target. Mr. Conver was never mentioned by name, and there was no reference whatsoever to any Mariah Alexander.
“What do we know about Susan Cartoulis?” I asked Page. “Does she fit the MO?”
“Basically, yeah. She fits right into the puzzle. Married with one son, good-looking woman, high profile in the city. She was a ten-o’clock anchor for a local affiliate. Also the honorary chair of the Cedars-Sinai pediatric burn unit capital campaign. Nine-year-old son. Another perfect mom.”
“With a boyfriend on the side.”
“Well, I guess nobody’s perfect. Is that what Mary’s trying to tell us?”
“Maybe,” I said.
The press was going to eat up this one, as if they weren’t already overfed. It made me feel even sorrier for Susan Cartoulis’s husband and her young son. Her murder and infidelity would be trotted out for the public in great detail.
“Do you think that has anything to do with it?” Page asked. “Perfect mothers who aren’t so perfect after all? Hypocrisy on the home front? Something as simple as that?”
“If that’s Mary Smith’s point, she’s being pretty murky about it. Especially for someone who’s so deliberate in getting her message out there in her e-mails. Plus, as far as we know, most of the murdered women actually live up to their reputations.”
“As far as we know,” said Page. “Stay tuned on that one, yeah?”
“All right, why don’t you do a little digging around about the others. See if you can find any dirty little secrets we missed. Try Arnold Griner. I’ll bet he has an inside line or two. That’s his job, right?”
“The forensics of gossip, huh?” Page said, and laughed. “I’ll see what I can do. See if I can get Griner to talk about anything besides himself.”
“Who was the other victim? Mariah Alexander.”
“Yeah, that really sucks. She was a maid at the hotel. College kid. We think Mary got in the room with her passkey.”
“One other thing,” I said. “If anyone asks, you haven’t heard from me and you don’t know where I am.”
Page paused on the line. “I’m not going to lie if someone asks me, but I won’t volunteer anything. Anyway, I’m on my way out of the office.”
“Good enough. By the way, you’re doing a terrific job.”
“For a surfer boy, huh?”
“Exactly, dude.”
Chapter 62
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.
Chapter 63
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.
Chapter 64
“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?
Chapter 65
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. Actual
ly, 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.”