“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.
Chapter 84
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?
Chapter 85
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.
Chapter 86
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.
Chapter 87
“HEY! TRUSCOTT! Stop right there! I said stop.” I got out of the car as I saw the writer and his photographer approaching Mary Wagner’s house. What in hell were they doing here?
We were about the same distance from the bungalow, and suddenly Truscott started to run for it.
So did I, and I was a lot faster than the reporter, and maybe faster than he thought I might be. He gave me no other choice—so I tackled him before he got to the front door. I hit him at the waist, and Truscott went down hard, grunting in pain.
That was the good part, hitting him. What a mess, though, a complete disaster! Mary Wagner was sure to hear us and come out to look, and then we’d be blown. Everything was going to unravel in a hurry now. There wasn’t much I could do about it.
I dragged the reporter by his feet until we were out of sight from the Wagner house, and hopefully out of sound.
“I have every right to be here. I’ll sue you for everything you have, Cross.”
“Fine, sue me.”
Because Truscott had started to scream at me, and his photographer was still snapping pictures, I put him in a hammerlock, and I ran him even farther up the street.
“You can’t do this! You have no right!”
“Get her! Take that camera away!” I called to the other agents coming up from the rear.
“I’m gonna sue your ass! I’ll sue you and the Bureau back to the Dark Ages, Cross!” Truscott was still shouting as three of us finally carried him around the first corner we reached. Then I cuffed James Truscott and shoved the writer into one of our sedans.
“Get him out of here!” I told an agent. “The camerawoman, too.”
I took one last look into the backseat before Truscott was hauled away. “Sue me, sue the FBI. You’re still under arrest for obstruction. Take this lunatic the hell out of here!”
A few minutes later, the narrow side street was quiet again, thank God.
Frankly, I was amazed—stunned—Mary Wagner, this supposedly careful and clever murderess, seemed not to have noticed.
Chapter 88
MARY WAGNER GOT A LOT MORE SLEEP that night than any of the rest of us. James Truscott spent the night in jail, but I was sure he’d be out in the morning. His magazine had already put in a complaint. He hadn’t missed much of anything, though. There was nothing new to report when the relief team finally came at 4:00 A.M.
That gave me enough time to get to my hotel for a two-hour nap and a shower before I was back on the road again.
I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel just past 7:00. Mary Wagner’s work shift started at 7:30.
This was definitely getting interesting now, and also weirder by the minute.
The luxury hotel, a pink stucco landmark in Hollywood, sat nearly obscured behind a wall of palms and banana trees on Sunset Boulevard. The inside echoed the outside, with its pink-everything lobby and ubiquitous banana-leaf wallpaper.
I found the security chief, Andre Perkins, in his office on the lower level. I had deliberately arranged for only one contact at the hotel.
Perkins was a former Bureau agent himself. He had two copies of Mary Wagner’s file on his desk when I got there.
“She pretty much reads like a
model employee,” he told me. “Shows up on time, keeps up with the work. As far as I can gather, she just seems to come in, do her thing, and leave. I can ask around some more. Should I?”
“Don’t do it yet, thanks. What about her background? Anything for me there?”
He pulled out Wagner’s original application and a couple of pages of notes.
“She’s been here almost eight months. It looks like she was legitimately laid off from a Marriott downtown before that. But I made some calls on the earlier stuff, and it’s all wrong numbers or disconnected. Her social security number’s a fake, too. Not all that unusual for a maid or porter.”
“Is there anyone who can say for sure that she was actually on the premises during all of her shifts?” I asked.
Perkins shook his head. “Just the cleaning records.”
He looked over his papers again.
“She definitely keeps up with her quotas, which she wouldn’t be able to do if she was ducking out a lot. And her comment cards are fine. She’s doing a good job. Mary Wagner is an above-average employee here.”
Chapter 89
PERKINS LET ME USE HIS FAX MACHINE to send copies of Mary Wagner’s time sheets over to the Bureau for cross-referencing. Then he set me up with a maintenance uniform and a name tag that said “Bill.”
Bill stationed himself in the basement, within sight of the stocking area where housekeeping loaded up on paper products and cleaning materials. Just after 7:30, the new shift filtered in.
All of them were women, all in the same pink uniform. Mary was the tallest in the group. Big-boned, that’s what some people would call her. And she was white, one of the few on the housekeeping staff.
She certainly looked strong enough for the physical work Mary Smith had done—manipulating Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s body in the swimming pool, moving Brian Conver from the hotel room floor to the bed.
Bill stood maybe twenty yards away from her, facing a fuse panel, his face partially hidden behind its door.