Mary, Mary

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 virtualjane 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.