Mary, Mary (12 page)
ACCORDING TO THE STATISTICS
I was reading at my desk, something like 89 percent of known female serial killers used poison, suffocation, or lethal injection on their victims. Less than 10 percent of various killers employed a gun as their weapon of choice, and none I had found on record used a knife.
Is Mary Smith the exception that proves the rule?
I didn’t think so. But I seemed to be all alone on that.
I scanned the deskful of clippings, photos, and articles spread out in front of me like pieces from several different jigsaw puzzles.
Aileen Wuornos was a shooter. In 1989 and ’90, she killed at least seven men in Florida. When she was arrested, the media dubbed her America’s first female serial killer. She was probably the most famous, but nowhere near the first. Almost half of those on record were black widows—husband-killers—or else motivated by revenge. Most had some relationship with their victims.
Bobbie Sue Terrell, a nurse, injected twelve patients with lethal doses of insulin.
Dorothea Montalvo Puente poisoned nine boarders in her home so she could get their Social Security checks.
A secretary at the field office, Maureen, poked her head in.
“You want anything from In-n-Out Burger?”
I looked up and realized it was dark already, and that, actually, I was starving.
“If they have a grilled chicken sandwich, that’d be good. And an orange juice, thanks.”
She laughed merrily. “You want a hamburger or a cheeseburger?”
Since my sleep and personal life were something of a mess, I was trying to keep the junk food intake in check. I hadn’t worked out in days. The last thing I needed was to get sick out here. I told Maureen never mind, I’d get something eventually.
A minute later, Agent Page was hovering at my desk. “How’s it going?” he asked. “Anything yet?”
I spread my arms to indicate the breadth of information on the desk. “She doesn’t fit in.”
“Which was probably true for about half the female serial killers in history at the time of their activity,” said Page. The young agent was impressing me more and more.
“So what about our good friends at LAPD? Anything new from them?”
“Sure is,” he said. “Ballistics came back on that gun of hers. Hear this—it’s a golden oldie. A Walther PPK, same one every time. There’s a full briefing tomorrow if you want to be there. If not, I’ll cover.”
That was surprising news, and very odd—the age of the murder weapon.
“How old is the gun? Do they know?”
“At least twenty years, which deepens the mystery some, huh? Could be hard to trace.”
“You think that’s her reason? Traceability?” I asked, mostly just thinking out loud. Page quickly ticked off a handful of possibilities.
“She’s not a professional, right? Maybe it’s a weapon she’s had for a long time. Or maybe she’s been killing a lot longer than we think. Maybe she found it. Maybe it was her father’s.”
All solid guesses from a rapid-fire mind. “How old are you?” I asked, suddenly curious.
He gave me a sideways glance. “Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to ask that.”
“Relax,” I said. “It’s not a job interview. I’m just wondering. You’re a lot quicker than some of the folks I see coming out of Quantico lately.”
“I’m twenty-six,” he said, grinning widely.
“You’re pretty good, Page. Need to work on that game face, though.”
He didn’t alter his expression. “I’ve got game; I just don’t need it here in the field office.” Then, affecting pitch-perfect surfer-speak, he said, “Yeah, dude, I know what you’re thinking about me, but now that my surfing scholarship fell through, I’m like, totally dedicated to being here.”
It felt good to laugh, even if it was mostly at myself.
“Actually,” I said, “I can’t imagine you getting up on a surfboard, Page.”
“Imagine it, dude,” Page said.
AROUND 5:00 THE NEXT DAY,
the briefing room at LAPD was packed to overflowing, a suitcase with way too much crap inside. I leaned up against a wall near the front, waiting for Detective Jeanne Galletta to get the madness going.
She came in walking briskly alongside Fred Van Allsburg, from my office; L.A.’s chief of police, Alan Shrewsbury; and a third man, whom I didn’t recognize. Jeanne was definitely the looker in the group, and the only one under fifty.
“Who’s that?” I asked the officer standing next to me. “Blue suit.
Lighter
blue suit.”
“Michael Corbin.”
“Who?”
“The deputy mayor. He
is
a suit. Useless as tits on a bull.”
I was kind of glad to have been left out of the speechifying at the meeting—but a little wary as well. Politics were a given on this kind of high-profile homicide case. I just hoped they weren’t about to start playing a larger-than-usual role here in Los Angeles.
Galletta gave me a little nod hello before she started. “All right, people, let’s go.” Everyone quieted down immediately. The deputy mayor shook Van Allsburg’s hand and then slipped out a side door. Huh? What was that all about? It wasn’t a guest appearance, more like a ghost appearance.
“Let’s get the nuts and bolts out of the way first,” Detective Galletta said.
She quickly ran over all the common elements of the case—the Walther PPK, the children’s stickers marked with two
A
’s and a
B,
the so-called Perfect Mother victims, which was the angle the press was running with, of course. One nasty out-of-town paper had called the case “The Stepford Wife Murders.” Galletta reminded us that the exact wording in the e-mails Mary had sent to the
L.A. Times
was classified information.
A few questions flew.
Does the LAPD or Bureau know of or suspect any connection between Mary Smith and other homicides in the area?
No.
How do we know it was a single assailant?
We don’t for sure, but all signs indicate as much.
How do we know the killer is a woman?
A woman’s hair, presumably the offender’s, was found under a sticker at the movie theater in Westwood.
“This might be a good time to ask Agent Cross to give us an overview of whatever profile the FBI has going. Dr. Cross has come here from Washington, where he solved cases involving serial killers like Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig.”
Something like a hundred pairs of eyes shifted to look at me. I had come to the briefing as an observer, I thought, but now I was going to be put on center stage. No sense wasting the opportunity, or worse, everybody’s time.
“Well, let me start by saying that I’m not yet absolutely convinced Mary Smith is a woman,” I said.
That ought to wake them up in the back rows.
IT DID, TOO.
A ripple went through the room. At least I’d gotten everybody’s attention.
“I’m not saying it’s definitely a male offender, but we haven’t ruled that out as a possibility. I don’t believe you should. Either way, though,” I said, raising my voice over the low rumble, “there are a few things I can say about this case.
“I’ll use
she
as a default for now. She’s likely white, and in her midthirties to forties. She drives her own car, something that wouldn’t get too much notice in the upscale neighborhoods where the murders happened. She’s most likely educated, and most likely employed, nonprofessional. Maybe some kind of service position for which she may very well be overqualified.”
I went on for a bit, then fielded some questions from the assembled team. When I was finished, Jeanne Galletta gave the floor over to ballistics for a gun report; then she wrapped up the meeting.
“Last thing,” she said. “Kileen, sit down, please. Thank you, Gerry. We’re not done. I’ll tell you when we’re done.” She waited for quiet, and she got it.
“I don’t need to tell you about the kind of ridiculous press coverage this is getting. I want
everyone
thinking and acting as though there’s a camera on you at all times, because there probably is. Absolutely no shortcuts out there, people. I’m serious as lung cancer on that last point. S.O.P. should be a nonissue.”
I noticed Galletta’s eyes shift toward Van Allsburg while she spoke. Procedure had probably been the topic of their closed-door meeting with the deputy mayor. It occurred to me that this was an election year. The mayor needed a clean result on this one, and a fast one. I doubted it was going to happen that way.
“Okay, that’s it for now,” Galletta said, and the room came alive. She caught my eye and nodded her head toward the conference room in the back.
I had to push through the crowd to get there, wondering what she wanted to talk about.
“How’s it going?” I asked as she closed the door behind us.
“What the hell was
that?
” she snapped.
I blinked. “What the hell was what?”
“Contradicting me, talking about Mary Smith as a man, confusing the issue at this time. I need these people focused, and you need to keep me informed before you start reviving dead issues out of the blue like that.”
“Dead issues? Out of the blue? We talked about this. I told you my feeling.”
“Yeah, and we put it away.”
“No. We didn’t put it away.
You
did. Jeanne, I know you’re under pressure—”
“Goddam right I am. This is Los Angeles, not D.C. You have no idea.”
“I
do
have some idea. In the future, if you want me to present at a briefing, and avoid any surprises, you should check in with me ahead of time. And try to remember what you said up there, about how I caught Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig.”
I tried to stay calm and even supportive with my tone, but I also wasn’t going to cave because of anyone’s bullying.
Jeanne gritted her teeth and stared at the floor for a second. “All right. Okay. Sorry.”
“And for the record, I’m not saying you need to check in with me. This is your case, but with something so big and unwieldy, there’s only so much control you can have.”
“I know, I know.” She breathed a big sigh, not one of relief, more like a cleansing breath. Then Jeanne smiled. “You know what, how about I make it up to you? You like sushi? You have to eat, right? And I promise we won’t talk about work.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m not done for the day. Unfortunately. I need to head back to the office from here. Jeanne, I
don’t
think this killer is a woman. So, who is it? Some other time for a bite, okay?”
“Some other time,” Jeanne Galletta said; then she walked away hastily, the same way she’d entered the conference room earlier.
FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS
I stayed focused, one of those very productive work states I wish I could put myself in every time I sat down at a desk.
I ran several theories through the VICAP system, looking for any kind of match to the rash of murders in L.A. Anything even remotely close.
Something finally came up that caught my attention. A triple murder more than six months earlier.
It had happened in New York City, though, not L.A. But the murders took place in a movie theater, the Sutton on East 57th Street, and the details were intriguing at first blush.
For one thing the murders remained unsolved. There’d been nothing even close to a solution by the NYPD. Just like the murders in Los Angeles.
There was no apparent motive for the New York killings either. That last bit was important. Maybe this series of pattern killings began a lot earlier than anyone had thought up to now. And maybe the killer was from New York originally.
I pulled up the NYPD detective notes on the case and read them through. A patron inside the movie theater, as well as two Sutton employees, had been killed that afternoon. The detective’s working theory was that the theater workers had walked in on the killer just after he killed a man named Jacob Reiser, from Brooklyn. Reiser had been a film student at NYU, twenty years old.
But then something else caught my eye—the murder weapon listed in the report. Based on the bullets removed from the bodies, a Walther PPK had been used.
The gun used in the L.A. murders had also been a Walther PPK, though apparently an older model.
But there was something else that grabbed me:
The murders in New York had happened in the men’s room.
GREAT NEWS—
I was accruing enough hotel points for a lifetime of free rooms. The problem was that I never wanted to see another hotel for as long as I lived. West Los Angeles didn’t offer much in the way of distractions, either. I lay on the bed flipping through my notes again, a half-eaten chicken sandwich and a warm soda next to me.
When the phone rang, I gratefully picked up. It was Nana Mama.
“I was just thinking about pork chops and spoon bread,” I told her. “And here you are.”
“Why are you always buttering me up, Alex?” she asked. “Trying anyway. You going to tell me you’re not coming home next weekend?”
“Not exactly.”
“Alex—”
“I’m coming home. And believe me, there’s nothing more I want than to leave this case far behind. But I’m also going to be back and forth some.”
“Alex, I want you to think long and hard about how much time you really need to be out there in California. Turns out, this new job is worse than your last one.”
Apparently, my post-custody trial grace period was over. Nana was back to her old self, laying it on with a trowel. Not that she was entirely wrong.
“How are the kids?” I finally asked. “Can I talk to them?”
And give my ears a rest from you, old woman
.
“They’re fine and dandy,
Daddy
. Just for the record, so am I.”
“Did something happen?” I asked.
“No. Just a dizzy spell. It’s nothing at all. I saw Kayla Coles today. Everything’s fine. Dr. Coles checked me out. I’m good for another ten thousand miles.”
“If I know you, and I
do
know you, that means a big dizzy spell. Did you pass out again?”
“No, I
did
not
pass out,” she said, as if it was the most ridiculous idea she’d ever heard in her life. “I’m just an old woman, Alex. I’ve told you that before. Though, God knows, I don’t look or act my age.”
When I asked Nana to give me Kayla Coles’s phone number, though, she outright refused. I had to wait for Damon to get on the line and Nana to get off; then I told him to go up to my desk and get me Kayla’s number from my Rolodex.
“How’s she seem to you?” I asked him. “You need to take care of her, Day.”
“She seems pretty good, Dad. She wouldn’t tell us what happened. But she went out grocery shopping and made dinner tonight. I can’t tell if there’s anything wrong or not. You know Nana, how she is. She’s
vacuuming
now.”
“She’s just showing off. Go vacuum for her. Go ahead now. Help your grandmother.”
“I don’t know how to vacuum.”
“Then this is a good time to learn.”
I finished up with the kids and then called Kayla Coles, but I got her answering service. I tried Sampson next and asked if he could swing by the house and check on Nana, who had partly brought him up, too.
“No problem,” he told me. “I’ll show up hungry tomorrow for breakfast, how’s that?”
“Sounds like a win-win to me. Also, a very believable excuse for a visit.”
“She’ll see right through it.”
“Of course she will. Although you’re a very believable hungry person.”
“How’re
you
doing?” he asked then. “You sound like you’re at about fifty percent.”
“I’m okay. More like seventy-five. There’s just a hell of a lot going on out here. Big, messy case, John. Way too much publicity. I keep seeing that asshole writer Truscott, too. Though I hear he’s back East again now.”
“You want some backup? I could boogie out to L.A. I’ve got some vacation days.”
“Yeah, just what I need, to piss off
your
wife. Thanks, though. I’ll keep it in mind—
if
we ever get close to this Mary Smith.”
A lot of my best work was with Sampson. Being with him was one of the things I missed most about the police department. I wasn’t through with him yet, though. I had one more idea where he was concerned. When the time was right, I’d spring it.