“It's under the cheese, too. I don't want it, Mommy I'm hungry, I'm really hungry!”
“Sweetie, this is lunch. There won't be anything else until we get home.”
“I don't care.”
“Ashley”
“No!”
Mary took a deep breath and counted to five. She tried to get control of herself, tried so hard. “Look at your brother. He likes it. It's so yummy”
Brendan smiled and took another bite, the picture of obedience. Ashley only ducked her chin and completely avoided Mary's eye contact.
Mary felt the tension building in her shoulders and neck. “Ash, honey, you have to have at least one bite. Ashley! You have to try it. Look at me when I'm speaking to you.”
Mary knew with all her heart she should just let it go. Not eating was a self-correcting problem. Ashley's problem, not hers. “Do you know how much this cost?” she said in spite of herself. “Do you know what everything costs here at Fantasy- land?”
Brendan tried to intervene. “Mommy, don't. Mommy, Mommy”
“Do you?” she pressed. “Have any idea?”
“I don't care,” Ashley fired back. The little bitch, the awful girl.
The tension took hold, shooting from her shoulders down into her arms and legs. Mary felt a sharp prickling in her muscles, and then all at once, a release.
Ashley didn't want the food? Fine.Just fine.
Her hand swept across the table.
“Mommy!” Brendan cried out.
Paper plates and slices of pizza slid to the concrete patio floor. The one soda tipped over, its sudsy contents sloshing onto the open stroller where Adam was sitting. His shriek was almost instantaneous. It resonated with Mary's own.
“Do you see what you've done? Do you?” She barely heard any of it. Her voice was like something on the other side of a door, and the door was closed, and locked.
Oh, this wasn't how it was supposed to be. She and the kids were at Disneyland for God's sake. This was so wrong, so wrong. Everything she'd worked so hard for was going down the toilet. This was a nightmare. What else could possibly happen to spoil everything?
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.
Mary, Mary
Chapter 86
AT 6:20 THAT NIGHT, I was parked up the block from Mary Wagner's house. This could definitely be something, our big break, and we all knew it. So far, we'd been able to keep the press away.
A second team was in the alley behind the house, and a third one had trailed Wagner from work at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They had just sent word that she'd stopped for groceries and was nearly home.
Sure enough, a blue Suburban, puffing smoke from the exhaust pipe, pulled into the driveway a couple of minutes later.
Ms. Wagner hoisted two plastic bags from the truck and went inside. She appeared to be a strong woman. It also looked as though she was talking to herself, but I couldn't tell for sure. Once she'd gone inside, we pulled down the street for a better view My partner for the evening was Manny Baker, an agent about my age. Manny had a good reputation, but his monosyllabic responses to polite conversation had long since dropped off to silence. So we settled in and watched the Wagner house in the gathering dusk.
Ms. Wagner's rented bungalow was in poor shape, even for a marginal neighborhood.
The gate on the chain-link fence was completely missing. The lawn overgrew what remained of the brick edging along the front walk.