Mary, Mary (23 page)
TUESDAY NIGHT WAS A DATE NIGHT
with Kayla Coles.
And then so was Thursday.
At a little past 1:00 in the morning, I was sitting with Kayla on her front porch. We’d been out there talking for at least a couple of hours. Kayla had just recruited me to do some work for the Children’s Defense Fund in D.C. She used statistics to make her points—just like Nana did: forty million uninsured in America, a new baby born uninsured every minute of every day. Sure I would help—whatever I could do. Even if the circumstances hadn’t been what they were.
“What are you doing Saturday?” she asked. Just the question, in her sweet voice, made me smile. “This
isn’t
about the Children’s Defense Fund by the way.”
“I was hoping you’d come over for one of Nana’s home-cooked meals,” I said.
“Don’t you need to ask Nana?”
I laughed. “It was her idea. Or one of the kids. But Nana’s definitely part of the conspiracy. She might even be the ringleader of the gang.”
If the universe wanted me to stop dating, its message was getting garbled. All day Saturday, I was a little nervous about Kayla coming over, though. This meant something, didn’t it? Bringing her home—under these circumstances.
“You look
good,
Daddy,” Jannie said from the door to my room.
I had just rejected a shirt onto the bed and pulled on a black V-neck sweater, which I had to admit looked pretty good. It was a little embarrassing to be caught in the act of preening, though. Jannie invited herself in, flopped down, and watched while I finished up.
“What’s going on?” Damon wandered in next and sat beside Jannie on the bed.
“Anybody ever hear of privacy around here?”
“He’s getting all handsome for Doctor Kayla. All duded-up and such. I like him in black.”
My back was to them now, and they spoke as if I weren’t there, their voices just a little stagy.
“Think he’s nervous?”
“Mm-hm. Probably.”
“You think he’ll spill something on himself during dinner?”
“Definitely.”
I turned on them with a roar and grabbed them both before they could separate and squirm away. They exploded into screams of laughter, forgetting, for an instant, that they had outgrown this kind of horseplay. I rolled them both around on the bed, going for all the ticklish spots I knew from past tickle fests.
“You’re going to get all wrinkly!” Jannie yelled at me. “Dadd-eee! Stop!”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll have to change anyway . . . when I spill something on myself!”
I chased them all the way down to the kitchen; then we pitched in to help Nana with the parts that she would let us. Adding a leaf to the dining table. Putting out the good china and new candlesticks.
Nana was showing off a little, maybe a lot. Fine by me; I’ve got no problem eating her finest. Never have.
After dinner, which was pretty amazing—two herb-roasted chickens with oven fries, asparagus, mesclun salad, and coconut cake—Kayla and I got out of there. We took the Porsche, and I drove out to the Tidal Basin and then up to the Lincoln Memorial. We parked, then strolled the length of the Reflecting Pool. It’s a beautiful, tranquil spot at night. For some reason, not too many tourists make it there after sunset.
“Everything was perfect,” she said as we approached the Washington Monument. “Back at your house.”
I laughed. “A little too perfect for my taste. Didn’t you think they were trying too hard?”
It was Kayla’s turn to laugh. “What can I say? They like me.”
“Three dates in a week. Had to give them ideas.”
Kayla smiled. “Gave me some ideas. Want to hear?”
“Like what? Give me an example, a for-instance.”
“My house isn’t far.”
“You’re a doctor. Must know a lot about human anatomy.”
“And you’re a psychologist, so you know the human psyche, right?”
“Sounds like a lot of fun.”
And it was.
But then the Job got in the way again.
“I’LL BE OUT THERE TOMORROW.
That’s the best I can do. I’ll book a flight to L.A. 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 I 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 calling Jamilla, 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.
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 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 of justice, 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
X
’s and three
O
’s at the bottom. A kiss and a hug for each of my babies.”
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 another 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 into 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.
“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?”