The conversation so far had focused on Griner’s background: Yale, followed by an internship at Variety, where he proofed copy and ran coffee for entertainment reporters. He had earned a staff position quickly, and famously, when he managed to interview Tom Cruise on the record at an industry party. Two years ago, the L.A. Times had wooed him away with an offer for his own column, “Behind the Screens.” His reputation in the business, he told me, was for “insider” Hollywood stories and “edgy” reviews. He obviously had a very high opinion of himself.
I hadn’t found any further links between Griner and either of the murders outside of the movie-industry connection. Still, I wasn’t prepared to believe that he’d been randomly selected to receive Mary Smith’s e-mails.
Griner didn’t seem inclined to believe it either. His focus was all over the place, though, and he’d been peppering me with questions since we started.
I finally sat down close to him. “Mr. Griner—will you relax? Please.”
“Pretty easy for you to say,” he shot back, and then almost immediately said, “Sorry. Sorry.” He put two fingers to his forehead and rubbed between his eyes. “I’m high-strung to begin with. Ever since I was a kid growing up in Greenwich.”
I’d seen this kind of reaction—a mix of paranoia and anger that comes from getting blindsided the way Arnold Griner had been. When I spoke again, I kept my voice just low enough that he’d have to concentrate to hear me.
“I know you’ve already gone over this, but can you think of any reason you might be receiving these messages? Let’s start with any prior contact you’ve had with Patsy Bennett, Antonia Schifman, or even the limo driver, Bruno Capaletti.”
He shrugged, rolled his eyes, tried desperately to catch his breath. “We might have been at some of the same parties, at least the two women. I’ve certainly reviewed their movies. The last was one of Antonia’s, Canterbury Road, which I hated, I’m sorry to say, but I loved her in it and said so in the piece.
“Do you think that could be the connection? Maybe the killer reads my stuff. I mean, she must, right? This is so incredibly bizarre. How could I possibly fit into an insane murder scheme?”
Before I could say anything at all, he threw out another of his rapid-fire questions.
“Do you think Antonia’s driver was incidental? In the e-mail it seems like he was just . . . in the way.”
Griner was obviously hungry for information, both personally and professionally. He was a reporter, after all, and already reasonably powerful in Hollywood circles. So I gave him my stock reporter’s response.
“It’s too early to say. What about Patsy Bennett?” I asked. “Do you remember the last time you wrote about one of her films? Something she produced? She still produced films occasionally, right?”
Griner nodded; then he sighed loudly, almost theatrically. “Do you think I should discontinue my column for now? I should, shouldn’t I? Maybe I better.”
The interview was like a Ping-Pong match against a kid with ADD. I eventually managed to get through all my questions, but it took almost twice as long as I thought it would when I had arrived at the Times. Griner constantly needed reassurance, and I tried to give it to him without being completely dishonest. He was in danger, after all.
“One last thing,” Griner said just before I left him. “Do you think I should write a book about this? Is that a little sick?”
I didn’t bother to answer either question. He went to Yale—he should be able to figure it out.
Chapter 16
AFTER THE INTERVIEW, I slouched out to Arnold Griner’s desk to touch base with Paul Lebleau, the LAPD tech in charge of tracing Mary Smith’s e-mails.
He tapped away on the keyboard of Griner’s computer while he spoke to me in a rapid-fire patter. “Two e-mails came through two different proxy servers. First one originated from a cybercafe in Santa Monica. That means Mary Smith could be one of a few hundred people. She’s got two different addresses. So far. Both just generic Hotmail accounts, which tells us nothing really, except we do know that she signed up for the first one from the library at USC. Day before the first message.”
I had to concentrate just to follow Lebleau. Did everybody out here have ADD? “What about the second e-mail?” I asked him.
“Transmission didn’t originate in the same place as the first one. That much I can tell you.”
“Did it come from the L.A. area? Can you tell me that?”
“Don’t know yet.”
“When will you know?”
“Probably end of the day, not that it’s going to be much help.” He leaned forward and squinted at several lines of code on the screen. “Mary Smith knows what she’s doing.”
There it was again—she. I understood why everyone was using the pronoun. I was doing it, too—but only for the sake of convenience.
That didn’t mean I was convinced the killer was a woman, though. Not yet, anyway. The letters to Griner could represent some kind of persona. But whose?
Chapter 17
HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR VACATION so far, Alex? Having a lot of fun?
I took copies of both bizarre e-mails and headed out for a meeting with the LAPD. The detective bureau on North Los Angeles Street was only a quarter mile from the Times offices—a Los Angeles miracle, given the cliché that it takes forty-five minutes to get anywhere in the city.
Oh, the vacation’s great. I’m seeing all the sights. The kids are loving it, too. Nana is over the moon.
I walked slowly, rereading the two e-mails on my way to LAPD. Even if the writing was persona-based, it had come from the mind of the killer.
I started with the first one, which described the last moments of Patsy Bennett’s life. It was definitely chilling, this diary of a psychopath.
To:
[email protected] From: Mary Smith
To: Patrice Bennett:
I am the one who killed you.
Isn’t that some sentence? I think so. Here’s another one that I like quite a lot.
Somebody, a total stranger, will find your body in the balcony at the Westwood Village Theater. You, Patrice Bennett.
Because that’s where you died today, watching your last movie, and not a very good one at that. The Village? What were you thinking? What could have brought you to the theater on this day, the day of your death, to see The Village?
You should have been home, Patsy. With your darling little children. That’s where a good mom belongs. Don’t you think so? Even if you spend much of your home time reading scripts and on the phone playing studio politics.
It took me a long time to get so close to you. You are a Big Somebody at your Studio, and I am just one of the nobodies who watches movies on video and Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. I couldn’t even get inside the big arched entrance at your Studio. No sirree.
All I could do was watch your dark-blue Aston Martin going in and out, day after day. But I’m a really patient person. I’ve learned how to wait for what I want.
Speaking of waiting, that incredible house of yours is hard to see from the street. I did spot your lovely children—a couple of times, actually. And I know with some time I could have found a way into the house. But then today, you changed everything.
You went to a movie, in the middle of the afternoon, just like you say you do in some of your interviews. Maybe you missed the smell of popcorn. Do you ever take your little girls to the movies, Patsy? You should have, you know. As they say, it all goes by in a blink.
It didn’t make sense to me at first. You’re such a busy little Big Shot. But then I figured it out. Movies are what you do. You must see them all the time, but you also have a family waiting for you every night. You’re supposed to be home for dinner with little Lynne and Laurie. How old are they now? Twelve and thirteen? They want you there, and you want to be there. That’s good, I suppose. Except that tonight, dinner is going to come and go without you. Kind of sad when you think about it, which is what I’m doing right now.
> Anyway, you sat in the balcony in the ninth row. I sat in the twelfth. I waited, and watched the back of your head, your brunette-from-a-bottle hair. That’s where the bullet was going to go. Or so I fantasized. Isn’t that what one is supposed to do at the movies? Escape? Get away from it all? Except that most movies are so dismal these days—dismally dumb or dismally dreary.
I didn’t actually pull out my gun until after the film started. I didn’t like how scared I felt. That was how scared you were supposed to be, Big Shot. But you didn’t know what was happening, not even that I was there. You were out of the loop.
I sat like that, holding the gun in my lap, pointing it at you for the longest time. Then I decided I wanted to be closer—right on top of you.
I needed to look in your eyes after you knew you’d been shot, knew that you would never see Lynne and Laurie again, never see another movie either, never green-light one, never again be a Big Shot.
But then seeing you wide-eyed and dead was a surprise. A shock to my nervous system, actually. What happened to that famed aristocratic bearing of yours? That’s why I had to leave the theater so quickly, and why I had to leave you undone.
Not that you really care anymore. How’s the weather where you are now, Patsy? Hot, I hope. Hot as Hades—isn’t that an expression?
Do you miss your children terribly? Have some regrets? I’ll bet you do. I would if I were you. But I’m no Big Shot, just one of the little people.
Chapter 18
NINE O’CLOCK, and all was not well, to put it mildly.
LAPD detective Jeanne Galletta’s handshake was surprisingly soft. She looked as though she could give out bone-crushers if she wanted to. Her orange short-sleeved turtleneck showed off her biceps. She was slim, though, with a strikingly angular face and the kind of piercing brown eyes that could make you stare.
I caught myself midstare, and glanced away.
“Agent Cross. Have I kept you waiting?” she asked.
“Not very long,” I told her. I’d been in Galletta’s position before. When you’re a lead investigator on a high-profile case, everyone wants a piece of your time. Besides, my day was almost over. Detective Galletta would probably be up all night. This case warranted it.
The mess had landed in her lap about twelve hours ago. It had originated at the West Bureau, in Hollywood, but serial cases were automatically transferred downtown, to the Special Homicide Unit. Technically, “Mary Smith” couldn’t be classified as a serial killer until there were at least four attributed murders, but LAPD had decided to err on the side of caution. I agreed with the decision, not that anyone had asked me for an opinion.
The media coverage on this one, and the subsequent pressure on the department, was already intense. It could go from intense to insane soon, if the e-mails to the Times got out.
Detective Galletta led me upstairs to a small conference room turned crisis room. It acted as a makeshift clearinghouse for all information related to the murders.
One entire wall was already covered with police reports, a map of the city, sketches of the two crime scenes, and dozens of photographs of the dead.
A wastebasket in the corner overflowed with empty cups and greasy restaurant takeout bags. Wendy’s seemed to be winning the battle of the burgers at this precinct.
Two detectives in shirtsleeves sat at a large wooden table, both of them bent over separate piles of paperwork. Familiar, depressing.
“We need this space,” Galletta said to the detectives. There was nothing overly aggressive about it. She had the kind of unassuming confidence that made bullying unnecessary. The two men cleared out without a word.
“Where do you want to start?” I asked her.
Galletta jumped right in. “What do you make of the sticker thing?” She pointed to an 81/2 x 11 black-and-white photo of the back of a movie seat. It had the same brand of kiddie stickers on it as the ones left on Antonia Schifman’s limo. Each sticker was marked either A or B.
One of the stickers showed a wide-eyed pony, and the other two a teddy bear on a swing. What was with the killer and children? And mothers?
“It feels awfully heavy-handed to me,” I told her. “Just like everything else so far. The overwrought e-mails. The shootings at close range. The knife work. Hell, the celebrities. Whoever’s doing this wants to go big. Very high-profile.”
“Yeah, definitely. But what about the kiddie stickers themselves? I mean, why stickers? Why that kind? What’s with the A’s and B’s? Must mean something.”
“She’s mentioned the victim’s kids both times. In the e-mails. Kids are a part of this puzzle, a piece. To be honest, I’ve never come across anything even remotely like it.”
Galletta bit her lip and looked at the floor. I waited to see what she would say next.
“We’ve got two threads here. It’s all film industry, Hollywood, at least so far. But there’s the mother thing. The kids. Never mentions the husbands in either e-mail.” She spoke slowly, mulling it over, the way I often did. “She’s either a mother herself or has a thing for mothers. Mommies.”
“You’re assuming Mary Smith is a woman?” I asked.
Chapter 19
DETECTIVE GALLETTA ROCKED back on the heels of her Nikes, and then she looked at me quizzically. “You don’t know about the hair? Who’s been briefing you, anyway?”
I felt a pang of frustration about my own time being wasted again. I sighed, then asked Galletta, “What hair?”
She went on to tell me LAPD had found a human hair under one of the stickers at the movie theater in Westwood. Testing indicated it was Caucasian female, and it was not Patrice Bennett’s. The fact that it was trapped on a smooth, vertical surface under the sticker gave it some pretty good weight as evidence, though certainly not ironclad.
I juggled this new information with what I already knew as I gave Galletta my own take on Mary Smith. It included my gut feeling that we shouldn’t rule out either sex just yet.
“But you should take everything I tell you with a grain of salt. I’m not an all-science kind of guy.”
She smirked, though the effect was pleasant enough. “I’ll take that into account, Agent Cross. Now, what else?”
“Do you have a media plan?”
I wanted to emphasize it as her plan, completely her show, which it was, of course. This was going to be my first and last day on the Mary Smith case. If I played it right, I wouldn’t even have to say that out loud. I would just walk away.
“Here’s my media plan.”
Jeanne Galletta reached up and flipped on a wall-mounted television. She punched through several channels, stopping wherever there was coverage of the two murders.
“The shocking double murder of actress Antonia Schifman and her driver . . .”
“We’re taking you live now to Beverly Hills . . .”
“Patrice Bennett’s former assistant on the line . . .”
Many of them were national broadcasts, everything from CNN to E! Entertainment Television.
Galletta pushed a button that muted the sound.
“This is the kind of crap that some reporters live for. I’ve got a twenty-four-hour detail on both crime scenes just to keep these assholes away, plus the damn paparazzi. It’s totally out of control, and it’s going to get much worse. You’ve been through it. You have any suggestions?”
Did I ever. We had all learned a few painful lessons about the double-edged sword of media coverage with the D.C. sniper case a few years back.
“Here’s my take on it—for what it’s worth, and I hope it’s something. Don’t try to control the coverage, because you never will,” I told her. “The only thing you can control is what crime-scene information gets out there. Put a gag order on everyone connected to the case. No interviews without specific permission from the department. And this might sound a little crazy, but get a couple of people onto a phone detail. Call every retired officer you can find. Tell them not to make any comments to the press, nothing at all. Retired cops can be on
e of your biggest problems. Some of them just love making up theories for the camera.”
She gave me another sly smile. “Not that you have an opinion about all this or anything.”
I shrugged. “Believe me, most of it was learned the hard way.”
While I spoke, Detective Galletta paced slowly in front of the big wall board. Absorbing the evidence. That’s the way to do it. Let the details gather in the corners of your mind, where they’ll be when you need them. I could already tell that she had good instincts. Healthy cynicism for sure, but she was also a listener. It was easy to see how she’d come into her position so young. Now, could she survive this?
I said, “Just one more thought. Mary Smith is probably going to be watching what you do. My suggestion is, don’t disparage her or her work publicly, at least not yet. She’s already playing it as a media game. Right?”
“Yeah, that’s true. I think so.”
Detective Galletta stopped and looked up at the silent TV images. “She’s probably eating this all up with a spoon.”
My thought, too. And this monster needed to be fed very, very carefully.
This lady monster?
Chapter 20
IT WAS JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT when I finally got back to the hotel at Disney and received some more bad news. It wasn’t just that Jamilla had flown back to San Francisco. I already knew that much and figured I was in the doghouse again with Jam.
When I entered the hotel room, I saw that Nana Mama was fast asleep on the sofa. A cluster of pale-blue crocheting was still wrapped around her fingers. She slept peacefully, like a child.
I didn’t want to disturb the poor girl, but she came awake on her own. It had always been that way with Nana. When I was little, all I had to do was stand next to her bed if I was sick or had a nightmare. She always said that she watched over me, even while she was sleeping. Had she been watching over me tonight?