“'Cause I know you don't live around here,” he said. His expression shifted, and hardened again. The others laughed at the joke. “This your car?”
Fear and confusion locked Alicia into subservience, which she hated. All she could think to do was answer his question. “It's my parents'.”
The guy in blue rubbed his chin whiskers as if considering her answer. “Lotta people looking for a car just like this one,“ he said. ”Don't you read the papers? Watch TV?”
“I'm just trying to get to Westwood. For an audition. A TV movie. I got off the highway before I was supposed to -”
He howled with laughter, turning away from the car to his group, and then back again.
His rnovements were casual and slow "She's trying to get to Westwood to be in a movie.
A film. Darnn, that's about exactly what I expected. 'Cause I know you ain't got no interest in anything or anybody 'round here."
“Nah, man,” said one of the other boys. “She do her killing in the rich neighborhoods.”
“I got no problem with that,” said another “Kill the rich, eat the rich, whatever”
“What are you saying?” She looked at each of them now, desperate for any kind of clarity, a clue about what she should say or do to get out of there. Her wild-eyed gaze fell on the rearview mirror. Could I back out of here? Fast? Really, really fast? Pedal-to-the- metal kind of thing?
The kid at her window lifted his jacket to show a pistol tucked into the waistband of his jeans. “You don't want to do that,” he said.
The idea that she could be murdered before she had her morning coffee came over Alicia with an ugly reck- oning. “Please, I just ... please. D-don't h-hurt me,” she stammered.
She could hear the helplessness in her own voice. It was like listening to someone else, someone pathetic. God, she was supposed to be an actress.
The man in blue nodded slowly, in a way she couldn't de cipher. Then he stepped back from the car and put out his hand to let her pass.
“Highway's that way,” he said. The other two moved off to the side, too.
Alicia felt as if she might faint from relief. She gave the men a watery smile. “Thank you. I'm so sorry” she said again.
Her hands were shaking on the steering wheel, but at least she was safe.
The Suburban had barely inched forward when, with a sickening crack, the front windshield shattered into a spider- web of about a million glass pieces.
An instant later, a heavy metal pipe smashed through the driver's-side window.
Paralysis overtook Alicia. Her arms and legs wouldn't function. She couldn't even scream.
The impulse to floor the accelerator got to her brain a mo ment too late - about a second after her car door flew open and large, powerful hands dragged her out onto the street. Alicia landed on her back, the air rushing out of her lungs in a gasp.
“What kind of stupid are you?” she heard someone say - and then she felt a shock of pain on the side of her head.
Then she saw a pipe rise up high and come down really fast, a blur aimed right at the center of her forehead.
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 w
ay,” 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.
Mary, Mary
Part Four
THE BLUE SUBURBAN
Mary, Mary
Chapter 72
I HAD BARELY BEGUN walking the crime scene when I met up with Maddux Fielding, LAPD's deputy chief in charge of the Detective Bureau and also Jeanne Galletta's replacement on the case. With his shock of silver-gray hair and the same deep- brown eyes as Jeanne's, Fielding looked as though he could have beenJeanne's father.
He struck me as professional and focused from the start. He also seemed to be something of an asshole.
“Agent Cross,” he said, shaking my hand. “I've heard a lot about your work in D.C.”
Something in the way he said it didn't exactly sound like a compliment.
“This is Special Agent Page,” I said. “He's been assisting me while I'm in L.A.”
Fielding made no response at all, so I pushed on.
“What do you make of all this?” I asked him. “I know you're just getting started with the case, but I'm assuming you're up to speed on the priors.”
The last part wasn't intended as a dig, but it hung in the air as if it were one. Fielding turned down the corners of his mouth and looked at me over the tops of heavy-rimmed bifocals. “This isn't my first serial case. I'm good to go.”
He took a self-important deep breath. “Now, as to your question, I'm prepared to believe this is Mary Smiths work and not some copycat. I have to wonder if she didn't want Arnold Griner dead from day one. I believe she did. The questions, of course, would be why and how this motive is related to the previous incidents.”
Everything he said made some sense, especially that Griner might have been a target from the start. I turned to Page. “How about you?”
I was beginning to wonder what he thought, which he may or may not have recognized as a mark of my growing confidence in him.
“Griner and Washington just moved in,” Page said, flipping through a small notebook.
“Three days ago, in fact. I know Griner changed all his info and kept everything unlisted, so Mary would have had to go to at least a little trouble to keep up with him. That's consistent with the stalking aspect, right? And even though Griner doesn't fit the victim profile, he's been part of Mary Smith's landscape all along. She started with him, and now, I don't know, maybe she's ending with him. Maybe this represents some kind of closure for her. Maybe her story is over.”
“Doubtful,” Fielding said, without even looking at Page. "Too much anger expressed here. Too much rage in Griner's murder. Have you seen The Grudge? Not important.
Forget I said it."
“What about the blue Suburban?” I asked. “Any progress there?” As of that afternoon, LAPD hadn't turned up anything promising, which was a little surprising given the urgency Fielding pulled out a handkerchief, took off his glasses, and began to polish them before he spoke. “Nothing yet,” he finally said. “But as long as you brought it up, let me make one thing clear. I'm not Detective Galletta. I'm her boss, and I'm not going to be checking in with you at every turn. If the Bureau wants to take full jurisdiction on this case, they could argue for it. After the way things have gone around here, I'd almost welcome it. But until then, you just do your job and try not to screw up my investigation any more than you did Detective Galletta's. I hope we're clear.”
It was bald cop-to-cop loyalty Without asking a single question, he decided I had wasted the ease for Jeanne. I'd seen this kind of thing before, even understood it a little. But I couldn't keep quiet now “Little piece of advice,” I told him. “You should know what you're talking about before you start throwing accusations around. You're just going to make your own job harder.”
“I don't see how that's possible at this point,” he said curtly “Now I think we've covered everything. You know how to reach me if you have questions, or hell, even if you have something that will help us out.”
“Absolutely”
I could have punched him in the back of the head as he walked away It was maybe the only thing that could have taken our first meeting to a lower level.
“Great guy,” Page said. “Lots of personality, social skills, the whole package.”
“Yeah, I'm all warm and fuzzy inside.”
Instead of dwelling on it, I turned back to the work. If the lines of communication with LAPD were going to be strained further, we needed our own analysis more than ever.
Page didn't ask me to, but I walked him through my process. We worked in a spiral out from the bodies, as anyone else would, but much more slowly First we covered the condo, inch by inch; then we worked out to the hallway, front and back stairs, and then the grounds around the building.
I was curious to see how Page's patience held, or if everyone his age was too hurry-up to do this work right. Page did just fine. He was really into the case.
We were outside when we got word from the Bureau's electronic surveillance unit. At 5:30 that morning, another e-mail had shown up at Arnold Griner's L.A. Times address.
A letter from Mary Smith had arrived - written to the man she had just killed.
Mary, Mary
Chapter 73
To: [email protected] From: Mary Smith To: Arnold Griner: Guess what? I followed you home to your new apartment, after you had dinner with friends at that Asia de Cuba place on Sunset.
You parked under the building and took the Stairs up the back. Huffi
ng up a single flight?
I could see that you're out of shape, Arnold.
And out of time, I'm afraid.
I waited outside until your apartment lights came on, and then I followed. i wasn't as afraid anymore, not like I used to be. The gun used to feel strange and unwieldy in my hand. Now it's like I barely know it's there.
You haven't installed a dead bolt on your back door. Maybe you've been meaning to but you've been too busy with the move; or maybe you just felt a little safer in the new place so it didn't seem to matter. You'd be right about that last part. It doesn't matter-not anymore.
It was dark in the kitchen when I came in, but you had the lights and TV on in the living room. There was also a carving knife on the counter next to the sink, but I left it where it was.
I had my own, which is something you probably already knew about me - if you read my other e-mails.
I waited for as long as I could bear to in the kitchen, listening to you and your companion. I couldn't hear exactly what you were saying to each other, but I liked the sound of your voices. I even liked knowing that I'd be the last person to ever hear them.
Then the nervousness started to come back. It was just a little at first, but I knew it would get worse if I waited much longer.
I could have left the condo right then if I wanted to, and you'd never even have known I was there.
That's one way you're like the others. No one seems to know I'm around until their time comes. The Invisible Woman, that's me. That's a lot of us, actually.
When I waltzed into the living room, you both jumped up at the same time. I made sure you saw the gun, and you stayed still after that. I wanted to ask if you knew why I came for you, why you deserved to die, but I was afraid I wouldn't finish if I didn't do it right away.
I pulled the trigger, and you fell flat on your back. Your roommate screeched; then he tried to run. I couldn't imagine where he thought he was going to escape to.
I shot him, and I think he may have died immediately. You both seemed to just die. Not much fight in you, especially considering what a snippy, nasty little man you are.
Alex Cross 11 - Mary, Mary Page 14