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: agriner@latimes.com 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. Huffing up a single flight?
I could see that you're out of shape, Arnold.