Alex Cross 11 - Mary, Mary

by Patterson, James

  right now"

  I couldn't believe the words were coming out of my mouth, even as they did.

  I had been on the phone with Fred Van Allsburg for less than a couple of minutes, and my response was pretty much automatic, almost as if I'd been programmed to answer in a certain way. What was this, The Manchurian Candidate? What part was I playing? Good guy? Bad guy? Somewhere in between?

  I was definitely eager to meet with Mary Wagner again, drawn by curiosity, almost as much as by obligation. The LAPD hadn't been able to get her to talk to them, apparently not for days. So they wanted me to come back to California to consult. And 1 needed to do it - something still bothered me about the murder case, even if Mary was as guilty as she appeared to be.

  Of course, I wanted the trip to be as short as possible. In fact, I left everything packed except my toothbrush when I got to the hotel in L.A. It probably helped me feel as though the trip was more temporary.

  Anyway, my interview with Mary Wagner was scheduled for ten o'clock the following morning. I thought about callingjamilla, but decided against it, and right then I knew that it was completely over between us. A sad thought, but a true one, and I was sure that we both knew it. Whose fault was it? I didn't know Was it useful or important to try to place blame? Probably not, thought Dr. Cross.

  I spent the night going over the past week's reports and transcripts, which Van Allsburg had messengered over to me. According to everything I read, the three children - Brendan, Ashley, and Adam - seemed to be the only thing on Mary's mind.

  It made my direction pretty clear. If the children were all that Mary could think about, that's where we'd begin tomorrow morning.

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter 1 04

  ______ AT 8:45 IN THE MORNING, I found myself in a different but identical-looking room to the one where I had last interviewed Mary Wagner.

  The guard escorted her in exactly on time - almost to the second. I could see right away that several days of interrogation had taken a toll.

  She wouldn't look at me, and sat stoically while the officer cuffed her to the table.

  He then took a position inside the room, next to the door.

  Not my first choice, but I didn't argue it. Maybe if there was a second interview, I'd try to loosen things up.

  “Good morning, Mary.”

  “Hello.”

  Her voice was neutral, a minimal show of following the rules. Still no eye contact though.

  I wondered if she had served time before. And if she had, for what?

  “Let me tell you why I'm here,” I said. “Mary, are you listening to me?”

  No response from her. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, staring at a single point on the wall. I sensed that she was listening but trying not to show it.

  “You already know that there's a significant amount of evidence against you. And I think you also know that there are still some doubts about your children.”

  She finally looked up, and her eyes burned into my skull.

  “Then there's nothing to talk about.”

  “Actually, there is.”

  I pulled out my pen and laid a blank piece of paper on the table. “I thought you might like to write a letter to Brendan, Ashley, and Adam.”

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter 105

  MARY CHANGED IN A BEAT, just the way I'd seen her do before. She looked up at me again, her eyes and mouth noticeably softer. A familiar vulnerability showed across her features. When she was like this, it was hard not to feel something for Mary Wagner, no matter what she had done.

  “I'm not allowed to remove your handcuffs,” I said, “but you can tell me what you'd like to say I'll write it for you, word for word.”

  “Is this a trick?” she asked, and she was practically pleading for it not to be. “This is some kind of trick, isn't it?”

  I had to choose my words carefully “No trick. It's just a chance for you to say whatever you want to say to your kids.”

  “Are the police going to read it? Will you tell me? I want to know if they are.”

  Her responses fascinated me, a mix of high emotion and control.

  “All of your conversations in here are recorded,” I reminded her. “You don't have to do this if you don't want to. It's up to you. Your choice, Mary”

  “You came to my house.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I liked you.”

  “Mary I like you, too.”

  “Are you on my side?”

  “Yes. I am on your side.”

  “The side ofjustice, right?”

  “I hope so, Mary.”

  She looked around the room, either weighing her options or searching for the right words, I didn't know which. Then she turned back. Her eyes locked onto the piece of paper between us.

  “Dear Brendan,” she said in a whisper.

  “Just Brendan?”

  “Yes. Please read this to your brother and sister, because you're the big boy in the family”

  I took it down verbatim, writing fast to keep up with her.

  "Mommy has to be away from you for a while, but it won't be long, I promise. Promise.

  “Wherever you are now, I know they are taking good care of you. And if you get lonely, or want to cry, that's okay, too. Crying can help let the sadness out. Everyone does it sometimes, even Mommy, but only because I miss you so much.”

  Mary paused, and a pleased look came over her, as if she had just seen something sweet.

  Her eyes were fixed on the far wall, and she had an almost heartbreaking smile on her face.

  She continued, "When we're all together again, we'll go for a picnic, your favorite. We'll get whatever we want to eat and drive out somewhere pretty and spend the whole day Maybe we'll go swimming, too. Whatever you want, sweetie pie. I'm already looking forward to it.

  "And guess what? You have a guardian angel watching over you all the time. That's me.

  I give you good-night kisses in your dreams when you go to sleep at night. You don't have to be afraid because I'm right there with you. And you're right here with me."

  Mary stopped, shut her eyes, and sighed loudly “I love you very very much. Love, Mommy”

  By now, she was leaning much closer to the table than when we'd begun. She held on to the letter with her eyes - still speaking to me in a soft voice. A whisper.

  “Put three Xs and three 0's at the bottom. A kiss and a hug for each of my babies.”

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter 106

  THE MORE I HEARD, the more I doubted that Mary Wagner could have invented these three children entirely And I had a bad feeling about what might have happened to them.

  I spent the afternoon trying to track the children down.

  The Uniform Crime Report came back with a long list of child victims matched to female killers in recent decades. I've heard and read somewhere that shoplifting and the killing of one's own children are the only two crimes that American women commit in equal numbers to men.

  If that was true, then this thick, voluminous report only represented half of the child murders on record.

  I gritted my teeth, literally and figuratively and did an other run through the disturbing database.

  This time, I searched for multiple homicides only With that list compiled, I started wading through.

  A few of the more famous names jumped out right away: Susan Smith, who had drowned both her sons in 1994; Andrea Yates, who killed all five of her children after several years of struggling with psychosis and profound postpartum depression.

  The list went on and on. None of these female perpetrators could be considered the victims in their cases, but the dominance of severe mental-health issues was clear.

  Smith and Yates were both diagnosed with personality and clinical disorders. It was easy to imagine the same could be true of Mary Wagner, but a reliable diagnosis would take more time than we were likely to have together.

  That particular question was sidelined a few hours in
to my research.

  I clicked onto a new page and, sadly, found exactly what I was looking for.

  A triple homicide in Derby Line, Vermont, on August 2, 1983. All three victims were siblings: Beaulac, Brendan, 8 Beaulac, Ashley, 5 Constantine, Adam, 11 months.

  The killer, their mother, was a twenty-six-year-old woman, with the last name Constantine.

  First name, Mary.

  I cross-referenced the homicide report for local media coverage.

  It brought me to an article from a 1983 Caledonian-Record in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

  There was also a grainy black-and-white trial photo of Mary Constantine, seated at a defendant's table. Her face was thinner and younger, but the detached, stony expression was unmistakable, that look she had when she didn't want to feel something, or had felt too much. Jesus.

  The woman I knew as Mary Wagner had killed her own children more than twenty years ago, and as far as she was concerned, it had never happened.

  I pushed back my chair and took a deep breath.

  Here I was, finally, at the center of the labyrinth. Now it was time to start finding my way back out.

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter 1 07

  “NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE, HUH? Jeez, that's not even this century. All right, hang on a second. I'll try to help you out. If I can.”

  I sat through several minutes of tapping keys and riffling paper on the other end of the phone line.

  The tapper and riffler was an agent named Barry Medlar, of the Bureau's Albany field office. He was the coordinator of Albany's Crimes Against Children Unit. Every FBI office has a CAC unit, and Albany has oversight for Vermont. I wanted to get as close to the source as I possibly could.

  “Here we go,” Medlar said. "Hold on, here she is.

  “Constantine, Mary Triple homicide on August second, arrested on the tenth. Let me scroll the rest of this. Okay, here we go. Sentenced NGRI on February first of the following year, with a state-appointed attorney“ ”Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I muttered.

  So she hadn't been able to afford her own defense; no legal bells and whistles on her behalf. Not guilty by reason of insanity can be a tough plea to prove. It must have been a fairly clear-cut case for it to go that way “Where did she end up?” I asked.

  “Vermont State Hospital in Waterbury, probably I wouldn't have any transfer records here, but that ward isn't exactly overflowing. I can get you a name and number if you want to find out.”

  It was tempting to pull a little no-I-want-YOU-to-find-out attitude, but I preferred to make the calls myself anyway I took down the number for Vermont State Hospital.

  “What about Mary Constantine's MO?” I asked Medlar. “What have you got on the actual murders?”

  I heard more turning pages and then, “Unbelievable.”

  “What is it?”

  “Didn't your Mary Smith use a Walther PPK out there in L.A.?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Ditto here. Walther PPK, never recovered, either. She must have dog-boned it.”

  I was scribbling notes furiously the whole time he talked. To say the least, he had me riveted.

  "All right, Agent Medlar, here's what I need. Get me a contact for whatever Mary Constantine's local police department would have been. I also want everything you've got on file there. Send whatever's electronically available right now and fax the rest.

  “And I mean everything. I'm going to give you my cell number in case you find anything else worth mentioning. I'll be on the move.”

  I stuffed some papers into my briefcase while I was still talking to Medlar.

  “One other thing. 'What airlines fly to Vermont, anyway?”

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter '1 08

  EIGHTEEN HOURS AND THREE THOUSAND MILES later, I was sitting in the small, cozy living room of Madeline and former sheriff Claude Lapierre, just outside Derby Line, Vermont. It was a tiny village, as sweet as a calendar photo, and literally pressed up against the Canadian border. In fact, the local Haskell Free Library and Opera House had been ac t: cidentally built on the border, and guards were sometimes stationed inside to prevent illegal crossings.

  Not the kind of place you'd imagine would keep law en forcement very busy, though. Mary Constantine had lived there all her life - right up until she killed her three young children, a horrifying crime that had made national headlines twenty years ago.

  “What would you say you remember most about the case?” I asked Mr. Lapierre.

  “The knife. For sure the knife. The way she cut up that poor little girl's face, after she killed all three of them. I was Orleans County sheriff for twenty-seven years. It was the worst thing I ever saw By far, Agent Cross. By far.”

  “I actually felt kind of sorry for het” Mrs. Lapierre sat next to her husband on the couch, which was covered in a denim-blue fabric. "For Mary I mean. Nothing good ever happened to that poor woman. Not that it excuses what she did, but She waved her hand in front of her face instead of finishing the thought.

  “You knew her, Mrs. Lapierre?”

  “The way everybody knows everybody around here,” she said. “This is a community of neighbors. We all depend on one another.”

  “What can you tell me about Mary before all this happened?” I asked both of them.

  Claude Lapierre started. “Nice girl. Quiet, polite, loved boating. On Lake Memphremagog. Not a whole lot to tell, really She worked at the diner when she was in high school. Served me breakfast all the time. But so very quiet, like I said. Everyone was pretty surprised when she got pregnant.”

  “And even more surprised when the father stuck around,” Mrs. Lapierre said.

  “For a while, anyway,” her husband quickly added.

  “I assume that was Mr. Beaulac?”

  They both nodded.

  “He was ten years older than her, and she was all of seventeen. But they did make a go of it. Tried their best. Even had a second kid together.”

  “Ashley,” Mrs. Lapierre said. "Nobody was really bowled over when he finally took off.

  If anything, I would have expected it sooner."

  “George Beaulac was a real bum,” said Mrs. Lapierre. “look a lot of drugs.”

  “Do you know what happened to him? Did he see Mary or the kids again?”

  “Don't know,” said Claude, “but I'm inclined to doubt it. He was a bum.”

  “Well, I need to find him,” I muttered, more to myself than to either of them. “I really need to know where George Beaulac is now”

  “Up to no good for sure,” said Mrs. Lapierre.

  Mary, Mary

  Chapter 1 09

  I DIDN'T BOTHER TAKING NOTES after that. Whatever wasn't already written down, I wouldn't need. A whirring sound had been coming from the kitchen, and I finally asked Mrs. Lapierre about it. I never would have guessed what the sound was. Turned out she was making venison jerky in a dehydrator.

  “Where were Mary's parents during all of this?” I asked, moving back to more pertinent questions.

  Again, Mrs. Lapierre shook her head. She topped off my coffee cup while her husband continued.

  “Rita died when Mary was about five, I guess. Ted raised her, pretty much on his own, though he didn't seem to put a lot of effort into it. Nothing illegal, just real sad. And then he died, too, the year Brendan was born, I think.”

  “He smoked like a chimney,” Madeline said. “Lung cancer took him. That poor girl never got a break.”

  After George Beaulac left, Mary fell in with another local man, a part-time mechanic by the name ofJohn Constantine.

  “He started running around on her almost as soon as she got pregnant,” Madeline said. “It was no great secret. By the time Adam was six months old,John was gone for good, too.”

  Claude spoke now “If I had to guess, I'd say that's when she really went downhill, but who knows. You don't see someone for a while, you just assume they're busy or something. And then one day, boom. That was it. She must have snapped. It felt
sudden, but it probably wasn't. I'm sure it was building up over a long period.”

  I sipped my coffee and took a polite bite of scone, “I'd like to go back to the day of the murders now. What did Mary have to say when she was caught, Sheriff?”

  “This is more piecework than anything, just my memories. We never got a peep out of Mary about the murders after her arrest.”

  “Anything you can tell me would be helpful. Try to think, Sheriff.”

  Madeline took a deep breath and put a hand flat on top of her husband's on the couch cushion. They both had the solid quality of old farm stock, not unlike what I'd seen in Mary at times.

  "It looks like she took them for a picnic that day Drove way out in the woods. We found the spot later, just by luck. That's where she shot them. One, two, three, in the back of the head.

  “The ME thinks she laid them down, like maybe for a nap, and I'm guessing she did the older two first, since the baby couldn't run away”

  I waited patiently for him to go on. I knew that the passage of time didn't make this kind of thing any easier to remember and talk about.

  “She carefully wrapped them each in a blanket. I still remember those old army blankets she used. Terrible. Then it looks like she took them home and did the knife work on Ashley there. All over her face and just on her for some reason. I'll never forget it. I'd like to, but I can't.”

  “And were you the first one to find them?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Mary's boss called and said he hadn't seen Mary for days. Mary didn't have a phone at the time, so I said I'd go ovet I thought it was just a courtesy call. Mary came to the door like there was nothing going on, but I could smell it right away Literally She'd put them all in a trunk in the basement - in August - and just left them there. I guess she blocked that smell out like everything else. I still can't explain any of it. Not even now, after all these years.”