Mary, Mary

Chapter 69

EVERYTHING HAD CHANGED suddenly and dramatically on Mary Smith. Jeanne Galletta was out; she was completely off the case. She'd been reassigned.

I tried going to bat for her, but within hours of Alicia Pitt's murder, she was history on Mary Smith. That evening, Police Chief Shrewsbury announced that he would be personally overseeing the Hollywood Stalker murders, and that Detective Galletta was on temporary leave pending an investigation into the unfortunate murder of a young Las Vegas woman driving a blue Suburban.

Jeanne was inconsolable, but she was getting the full spectrum of experiences on the case, including a turn as sacrificial lamb. “The mayor of Las Vegas telling the mayor of L.A. to tell the chief of police how to run an investigation?“ she ranted to me. ”When did this stop being about professionals doing good work?“ ”Somewhere around the dawn of time,” I said.

The two of us met for a drink around 8:00 that night. She picked the spot, and said she wanted to make sure I had everything I needed from her on the murder investigation. Of course, she also wanted to vent.

“I know Alicia Pitt's my fault, but -”

“Jeanne, stop right there. You aren't responsible for what happened to that woman. It might have come as a result of a decision you made, but that's not the same thing. You made the best call you could. The rest is politics. You shouldn't have been taken off the case, either.”

She didn't speak for several seconds. “I don't know” she finally said. “That poor girl is dead.”

“Do you have any vacation time?” I asked her. “Maybe you should use it.”

“Yeah, like I'm going to leave town now,” she said. “I may be off the case, but-”

She didn't finish her sentence, but she didn't need to. I had been in her position before.

It's best not to say out loud that you're going to break the rules. Just go ahead and break them.

“Alex, I'm going to need my space,” she said. “That's why I wanted to meet you here.”

“I understand completely You know where to reach me,” I told her.

Jeanne finally cracked a half smile. “You're a really good guy,” she said. “For FBI.”

“You're okay for a cop. For LAPD.”

Then she reached across the table and put her hand on mine. But she quickly took her hand away “Awkward,” she said, and smiled again. “Sorry; if I'm being goofy.”

“You're being human, Jeanne. That's different, right? I wouldn't apologize for it.”

“All right, I won't apologize anymore. I have to go, though, before I cry or something incredibly embarrassing like that. You know where to reach me, if you need to.”

Then Jeanne got up from the table. She turned back before she got to the door. “I'm not off this case, though. I'll be around.”

Chapter7O WEIRD.

When I got back to my room that night, an envelope was waiting for me at the front desk.

It was from James Iruscott.

I opened it on my way to my room, and I couldn't stop reading the contents all the way there.

SUBJECT: WOMEN ON DEATH ROW IN CALIF There were fifteen at the moment, and Truscott included a brief write-up on each of them.

The first woman was Cynthia Coffman. In 1986, she and her boyfriend robbed and strangled four women. She'd been sentenced in 1989 and was still waiting. Cynthia Coffman was forty-two years old now.

At the end of the long note, Truscott said that he planned to visit some of the women in prison. I was welcome to tag along if I thought it might be useful.

After I finished reading the pages, I leafed through them a second time.

What was with James Truscott? And why did he want to be my Boswell? I wished he would just leave me alone, but that wasn't going to happen, was it?

Chapter_71 THE PHONE IN MY HOTEL ROOM woke me at just past 2:30 in the morning. I was having a dream about Little Alex and Christine, but I forgot most of it as soon as I heard the first ring.

My first coherent thought: James Truscott.

But it wasn't him.

Around 3:00 A.M. I was driving through an unfamiliar Hollywood neighborhood looking for the Hillside condo complex. I might have found it sooner in daylight, and if my mind hadn't been racing the whole way there.

Mary Smith game had changed again, and I was struggling to understand it. Why this murder? Why now? Why these two victims?

The condo complex, when I finally found it, looked to have been built in the seventies. The units were flat-roofed three-story structures in dark cedar, with fat columns for legs and open parking underneath. There was also parking on the street, I noticed, and that would offer an intruder privacy “Agent Cross! Alex!” I heard from across the lot.

I recognized Karl Page's voice from somewhere in the dark. My watch read 3:05.

He caught up with me under a streetlight. “Over this way,” he said.

“How'd you hear about it?” I asked him. Page was the one who had called me in my hotel room.

“I was still in the office.”

“When the hell do you sleep?”

“I'll sleep when it's over.”

I followed the young agent through a series of right and left turns, to where a square of buildings faced a common garden and pool area. Several residents, many of them in nightclothes, were gathered around one of the front doors. They were craning their necks and whispering among themselves.

Page pointed to a third-floor unit where the lights were on behind drawn curtains. “Up there,“ he said. ”That's where the bodies are.”

We made our way past the officers on duty and up the front stairs - one of two ways into the building.

“Check.” Page shorthanded his response to the stickers on the apartment door as we passed inside. Marked with two As and a B. This was Mary Smith all right. The stickers always made me think of that clown doll in Poltergeist - benign on the outside but completely ominous in context. Child's play turned inside out.

The door opened onto a good-size living room. It was crowded with cardboard moving boxes and haphazardly arranged furniture.

In the middle of the room, a man lay dead, facedown over a stack of fallen boxes. Several dozen books had spilled onto the sand-colored carpet, several of them streaked with blood. Copies of The Hours and Running with Scissors lay near the body “Philip Washington,” Page told me. "Thirty-five; an investment banker at Merrill Lynch.

Well-read, obviously"

“You too, I guess.”

There was no arranging the body this time, no artful tableau. The killer might have been in a hurry given all the neighbors so close by the lack of sufficient cover.

And Philip Washington wasn't the only target. Nearby, another body lay faceup on the floor.

This was the one I couldn't reconcile, the murder that would dog me.

The victim's left temple showed an ugly wound where the bullet had entered, and the face had been repeatedly slashed in Mary Smith's signature style. The flesh around the forehead and eyes was crisscrossed with knife marks, and the cheeks, constricted in a scream, had both been punctured.

I stared at the body, just beginning to piece together what had happened, and the events that had led up to it. Two questions burned in my mind. Did I have some hand in causing this murder? Should I have seen it coming?

Maybe the victim I was staring at had the answer - but L.A. Times writer Arnold Griner wouldn't be able to help us again on the Mary Smith case. Now Griner was one of the victims.