Jeanne finally cracked a half smile. “You’re a really good guy,” she said. “For FBI.”
“You’re okay for a cop. For LAPD.”
Then she reached across the table and put her hand on mine. But she quickly took her hand away.
“Awkward,” she said, and smiled again. “Sorry, if I’m being goofy.”
“You’re being human, Jeanne. That’s different, right? I wouldn’t apologize for it.”
“All right, I won’t apologize anymore. I have to go, though, before I cry or something incredibly embarrassing like that. You know where to reach me, if you need to.”
Then Jeanne got up from the table. She turned back before she got to the door. “I’m not off this case, though. I’ll be around.”
Chapter 70
WEIRD.
When I got back to my room that night, an envelope was waiting for me at the front desk.
It was from James Truscott.
I opened it on my way to my room, and I couldn’t stop reading the contents all the way there.
SUBJECT: WOMEN ON DEATH ROW I
N CALIF.
There were fifteen at the moment, and Truscott included a brief write-up on each of them.
The first woman was Cynthia Coffman. In 1986, she and her boyfriend robbed and strangled four women. She’d been sentenced in 1989 and was still waiting. Cynthia Coffman was forty-two years old now.
At the end of the long note, Truscott said that he planned to visit some of the women in prison. I was welcome to tag along if I thought it might be useful.
After I finished reading the pages, I leafed through them a second time.
What was with James Truscott? And why did he want to be my Boswell? I wished he would just leave me alone, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it?
Chapter 71
THE PHONE IN MY HOTEL ROOM woke me at just past 2:30 in the morning. I was having a dream about Little Alex and Christine, but I forgot most of it as soon as I heard the first ring.
My first coherent thought: James Truscott.
But it wasn’t him.
Around 3:00 A.M. I was driving through an unfamiliar Hollywood neighborhood looking for the Hillside condo complex. I might have found it sooner in daylight, and if my mind hadn’t been racing the whole way there.
Mary Smith’s game had changed again, and I was struggling to understand it. Why this murder? Why now? Why these two victims?
The condo complex, when I finally found it, looked to have been built in the seventies. The units were flat-roofed three-story structures in dark cedar, with fat columns for legs and open parking underneath. There was also parking on the street, I noticed, and that would offer an intruder privacy.
“Agent Cross! Alex!” I heard from across the lot.
I recognized Karl Page’s voice from somewhere in the dark. My watch read 3:05.
He caught up with me under a streetlight. “Over this way,” he said.
“How’d you hear about it?” I asked him. Page was the one who had called me in my hotel room.