“I was still in the office.”
“When the hell do you sleep?”
“I’ll sleep when it’s over.”
I followed the young agent through a series of right and left turns, to where a square of buildings faced a common garden and pool area. Several residents, many of them in nightclothes, were gathered around one of the front doors. They were craning their necks and whispering among themselves.
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.
Part Four
THE BLUE SUBURBAN
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 been Jeanne’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 Smith’s 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.