Mary, Mary (20 page)
“HEY!
TRUSCOTT!
Stop right there! I said
stop
.” I got out of the car as I saw the writer and his photographer approaching Mary Wagner’s house. What in hell were they doing here?
We were about the same distance from the bungalow, and suddenly Truscott started to run for it.
So did I, and I was a lot faster than the reporter, and maybe faster than he thought I might be. He gave me no other choice—so I tackled him before he got to the front door. I hit him at the waist, and Truscott went down hard, grunting in pain.
That was the good part, hitting him. What a mess, though, a complete disaster! Mary Wagner was sure to hear us and come out to look, and then we’d be blown. Everything was going to unravel in a hurry now. There wasn’t much I could do about it.
I dragged the reporter by his feet until we were out of sight from the Wagner house, and hopefully out of sound.
“I have every right to be here. I’ll sue you for everything you have, Cross.”
“Fine, sue me.”
Because Truscott had started to scream at me, and his photographer was still snapping pictures, I put him in a hammerlock, and I ran him even farther up the street.
“You can’t do this! You have no right!”
“Get her! Take that camera away!” I called to the other agents coming up from the rear.
“I’m gonna sue your ass! I’ll sue you and the Bureau back to the Dark Ages, Cross!” Truscott was still shouting as three of us finally carried him around the first corner we reached. Then I cuffed James Truscott and shoved the writer into one of our sedans.
“Get him out of here!” I told an agent. “The camerawoman, too.”
I took one last look into the backseat before Truscott was hauled away. “Sue me, sue the FBI. You’re still under arrest for obstruction. Take this lunatic the hell out of here!”
A few minutes later, the narrow side street was quiet again, thank God.
Frankly, I was amazed—stunned—Mary Wagner, this supposedly careful and clever murderess, seemed not to have noticed.
MARY WAGNER GOT A LOT MORE SLEEP
that night than any of the rest of us. James Truscott spent the night in jail, but I was sure he’d be out in the morning. His magazine had already put in a complaint. He hadn’t missed much of anything, though. There was nothing new to report when the relief team finally came at 4:00
A.M.
That gave me enough time to get to my hotel for a two-hour nap and a shower before I was back on the road again.
I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel just past 7:00. Mary Wagner’s work shift started at 7:30.
This was definitely getting interesting now, and also weirder by the minute.
The luxury hotel, a pink stucco landmark in Hollywood, sat nearly obscured behind a wall of palms and banana trees on Sunset Boulevard. The inside echoed the outside, with its pink-everything lobby and ubiquitous banana-leaf wallpaper.
I found the security chief, Andre Perkins, in his office on the lower level. I had deliberately arranged for only one contact at the hotel.
Perkins was a former Bureau agent himself. He had two copies of Mary Wagner’s file on his desk when I got there.
“She pretty much reads like a model employee,” he told me. “Shows up on time, keeps up with the work. As far as I can gather, she just seems to come in, do her thing, and leave. I can ask around some more. Should I?”
“Don’t do it yet, thanks. What about her background? Anything for me there?”
He pulled out Wagner’s original application and a couple of pages of notes.
“She’s been here almost eight months. It looks like she was legitimately laid off from a Marriott downtown before that. But I made some calls on the earlier stuff, and it’s all wrong numbers or disconnected. Her social security number’s a fake, too. Not all that unusual for a maid or porter.”
“Is there anyone who can say for sure that she was actually on the premises during all of her shifts?” I asked.
Perkins shook his head. “Just the cleaning records.”
He looked over his papers again.
“She definitely keeps up with her quotas, which she wouldn’t be able to do if she was ducking out a lot. And her comment cards are fine. She’s doing a good job. Mary Wagner is an above-average employee here.”
PERKINS LET ME USE HIS FAX MACHINE
to send copies of Mary Wagner’s time sheets over to the Bureau for cross-referencing. Then he set me up with a maintenance uniform and a name tag that said “Bill.”
Bill stationed himself in the basement, within sight of the stocking area where housekeeping loaded up on paper products and cleaning materials. Just after 7:30, the new shift filtered in.
All of them were women, all in the same pink uniform. Mary was the tallest in the group.
Big-boned,
that’s what some people would call her. And she was white, one of the few on the housekeeping staff.
She certainly looked strong enough for the physical work Mary Smith had done—manipulating Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s body in the swimming pool, moving Brian Conver from the hotel room floor to the bed.
Bill stood maybe twenty yards away from her, facing a fuse panel, his face partially hidden behind its door.
Wagner went about her work quietly and efficiently while the others chatted around her, most of them talking in Spanish. She stuck mostly to herself, just as Perkins had described. Hers was the first cart onto the freight elevator.
I didn’t follow her upstairs. The hotel corridors would offer no cover, and my priority was to interview her at home later, as myself. That meant a limited surveillance for Bill at the hotel.
My best opportunity came during the lunch hour, when the staff cafeteria was filled to capacity. Mary sat by herself at a table near the door, eating a tuna salad sandwich, writing in a clothbound book, presumably a journal of some kind. I wanted to see that journal. Her conversations with the people around her seemed to be little more than polite hellos and good-byes. The perfect employee.
I decided to pull myself out at that point, and went back to Perkins’s office in the basement. I gave him a courtesy debriefing. As we were talking, my beeper went off.
“Excuse me.” I got Karl Page in the crisis center.
“I thought you’d want to know right away—yeah, just a second, I’ll be there—her time sheets check out perfectly. Mary Wagner
wasn’t
at work for at least two hours before and two hours after every estimated time of death. No exceptions. Cha-ching!”
“Okay, thanks. I’m out of here. She’s working today.”
“When did you last see her?”
“About ten minutes ago. I have to go, Page.” Perkins was looking at me expectantly, and I didn’t want him asking too many questions. The receiver was halfway back to the cradle when I heard Page shout, “Wait!”
I gave Perkins a
sorry
with my eyebrows. Sometimes Agent Page could be a little exasperating, almost as if he was trying too hard.
“What, Karl?”
“Mary Smith’s last e-mail, Alex. The murder that’s supposed to happen by twelve tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I got it,” I said, and hung up the phone. I already knew what Page was trying to tell me.
Tomorrow was Mary Wagner’s day off.
I WAS ALREADY CONVINCED
it was crucial that I try to speak with Mary Wagner before the trauma of an arrest. That was my strong gut response on this strange case. I knew LAPD was going to be under a lot of pressure to move quickly, though. It meant I had to move even faster if I could.
I hurried back to the Bureau and found Van Allsburg in his office. “Don’t ask me. Not my call,” he said, after I’d made my case for the interview. “If Maddux Fielding wants to move in on her—”
“Then do me one favor,” I said.
Minutes later, we were on the phone in Fred’s office. I knew Maddux Fielding probably wouldn’t take my call, but Van Allsburg got patched through right away.
“Maddux, I’ve got Alex Cross here. He’s making a pretty good argument for holding off on Mary Wagner, just long enough to interview her.”
“How much more do you think we’re going to get on her?” Fielding asked. “It’s done. We’ve got plenty to take her in.”
“It’s all circumstantial,” I said into the speakerphone. “You’ll have to let her go.”
“Yeah, well I’m working on that.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, already starting to fume. “What aren’t you telling us, Maddux? What’s the point of shutting us out?”
He ignored my legitimate question with one of his trademark stony silences.
“Listen, between LAPD and the Bureau, she’s under constant surveillance; she hasn’t shown any sign of making a move. We know her timetable. Let me just talk to her at home. This could be a last chance to get her in a nondefensive state.” I hated the conciliatory tone of my voice, but I knew the interview with Mary could be important.
“Detective, I know you and I have our disagreements,” I said, “but we’re both going for a quick resolve here. This is what I do best. If you’ll just let me—”
“Be at her house by six,” he said suddenly. “I’m not making any promises to you though, Cross. If she doesn’t go home after work, or if anything else changes, that’s the end of it. We grab her.”
By the time I had arched my eyebrows, there was a click on the line and the call was over.
SHE DIDN’T BOTHER
to use the chain lock. I heard it rattle on the back of the front door as she opened it.
“Mary Wagner?”
“Yes?”
Her large feet were bare, but she still wore the pink maid’s uniform from the Beverly Hills Hotel. She smiled engagingly before she knew who I was.
“I’m Agent Cross with the FBI.” I held up my ID, which included my shield. “May I come in and ask you a few questions? It’s important.”
Her tired face sagged. “It’s about the car, isn’t it? Lord, I wish I could just paint that thing or trade it in or something. I’ve been getting all kinds of embarrassing looks—you wouldn’t believe.”
Her manner was more outgoing than anything I’d seen at the hotel, but she had the beleaguered, animated quality of a public-school kindergarten teacher with way too many students.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It is about the car. Just a formality; we’re following up on as many blue Suburbans as we can. May I come in? It won’t take long.”
“Of course. I don’t mean to be rude. Please, come on inside. Come.”
I waved to Baker on the curb.
“Five minutes,” I called out, mostly just to let Ms. Wagner know I wasn’t alone at her house. Hopefully, the unmarked LAPD units up and down the street were more invisible to her eyes than mine.
I stepped inside, and she closed the door behind me. Adrenaline shot through my body in an instant. Was this woman a killer, possibly an insane one? For some strange reason, I didn’t feel threatened by her.
The neatness of the house made a strong first impression on me. The floors were recently swept, and I saw no signs of clutter anywhere.
A wooden cutout hung in the front hallway. It was in the shape of a curtsying farm girl with the word
Welcome
stenciled across her skirt. The relative disrepair outside, I suddenly realized, was the landlord’s domain. This was hers.
“Please sit down,” she said.
Mary Wagner gestured me toward the living room through an archway to my right. A mismatched sofa and love seat took up most of the room.
Her television was on mute, and a can of Diet Pepsi and a half-eaten bowl of soup sat on the worn redwood coffee table.
“Am I interrupting your dinner?” I asked. “I’m real sorry about that.” Not that I was going to leave.
“Oh, no, no, not at all. I’m not much of an eater.” She quickly turned off the TV and cleared the food away.
I stayed in the hall and glanced around while she put the dishes on the kitchen counter in the back. Nothing looked out of place. Just a regular house that was almost too neat, uncluttered, spick-and-span clean.
“Would you like something to drink?” she called out from the other room.
“Nothing, thanks.”
“Water? Soda? Orange juice? It’s no bother, Agent Cross.”
“I’m fine.”
Her journal was probably here in the house, but nowhere that I could see. She’d been watching
Jeopardy!
on TV.
“Actually, I’m out of orange juice, anyway,” she said genially, coming back toward me. She was either completely comfortable or very good at faking it. Very odd. I followed her into the living room, and we both sat down.
“So, what can I do for you?” she asked in a kindly tone that was oddly unsettling. “I’d like to help, of course.”
I kept my own tone casual and nonthreatening. “First of all, are you the only driver for your car?”
“Just me.” She smiled as though the question was vaguely funny. I wondered why.
“Has it been outside of your supervision at any time in the past six weeks or so?”
“Well, when I sleep, of course. And when I’m at work. I do housekeeping at the Beverly Hills Hotel.”
“I see. So you need the car for transportation to work.”
She fingered the collar of her uniform and eyeballed the pad in my hand as though she wanted me to write that part down. On an impulse, I went ahead and did it.
“So I guess the answer is yes,” she went on. “Technically, it has been outside of my . . . whatever you said.
Supervision
.” Her laugh was a tiny bit coy. “My purview.”
I scribbled a few more notes of my own.
Eager to please? Busy hands. Wants me to know she’s intelligent.
As we continued, I watched her as much as I listened. Nothing she said was really out of the ordinary, though. What struck hardest was the way she concentrated on me. Her hands kept landing in different places, but her brown eyes didn’t travel very far from my own. I got the impression she was glad I was there.
When I stood up at the end of the interview, as if to leave, her face dropped.
“Could I bother you for that glass of water?” I asked, and she brightened visibly.
“Coming right up.”
I followed her as far as the doorway. Everything in the kitchen was neatly arranged, too. The counters were mostly empty, except for a four-slice toaster and a set of country kitsch-style canisters.
The dish rack next to the sink was full, and there were two steak knives among the clean silverware.
She filled a glass at the tap and handed it to me. It tasted slightly soapy.
“Are you originally from California?” I asked conversationally. “From around here?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “Nowhere near as nice as this.”
“Where’d you move from?”
“The North Pole.” Another coy laugh and a shake of the head. “At least, it might as well be.”
“Let me guess. Maine? You strike me as a New Englander.”
“Can I get you a refill?”
“No, thank you. Really, I’m fine.”
She took the water glass out of my hand, not yet half empty, and turned toward the sink.
That was when all hell broke loose.
First, I heard heavy footsteps and a loud shout coming from just outside.
Almost immediately, the back door burst open with a crash of splintering wood and glass. I heard the front door crashing in as well.
Then police officers streamed into the kitchen from both sides, flak jackets on, their weapons drawn and pointed at Mary Wagner.
