Mary, Mary

at several lines of code on the screen. “Mary Smith knows what she’s doing.”
    There it was again—
she
. I understood why everyone was using the pronoun. I was doing it, too—but only for the sake of convenience.
    That didn’t mean I was convinced the killer was a woman, though. Not yet, anyway. The letters to Griner could represent some kind of persona. But
whose?

Chapter 17
    HOW DO YOU LIKE YOUR VACATION so far, Alex? Having a lot of fun?
    I took copies of both bizarre e-mails and headed out for a meeting with the LAPD. The detective bureau on North Los Angeles Street was only a quarter mile from the
Times
offices—a Los Angeles miracle, given the cliché that it takes forty-five minutes to get anywhere in the city.
    Oh, the vacation’s great. I’m seeing all the sights. The kids are loving it, too. Nana is over the moon.
    I walked slowly, rereading the two e-mails on my way to LAPD. Even if the writing was persona-based, it had come from the mind of the killer.
    I started with the first one, which described the last moments of Patsy Bennett’s life. It was definitely chilling, this diary of a psychopath.
    To: [email protected]
    From: Mary Smith
    To: Patrice Bennett:
    I am the one who killed you
.
    Isn’t that some sentence? I think so. Here’s another one that I like quite a lot.
    Somebody, a total stranger, will find your body in the balcony at the Westwood Village Theater.
You,
Patrice Bennett.
    Because that’s where you died today, watching your last movie, and not a very good one at that.
The Village
? What were you thinking? What could have brought you to the theater on this day, the day of your death, to see
The Village
?
    You should have been home, Patsy. With your darling little children. That’s where a good mom belongs. Don’t you think so? Even if you spend much of your home time reading scripts and on the phone playing studio politics.
    It took me a long time to get so close to you. You are a Big Somebody at your Studio, and I am just one of the nobodies who watches movies on video and
Entertainment Tonight
and
Access Hollywood
. I couldn’t even get inside the big arched entrance at your Studio. No sirree.
    All I could do was watch your dark-blue Aston Martin going in and out, day after day. But I’m a really patient person. I’ve learned how to wait for what I want.
    Speaking of waiting, that incredible house of yours is hard to see from the street. I did spot your lovely children—a couple of times, actually. And I know with some time I could have found a way into the house. But then today, you changed everything.
    You went to a movie, in the middle of the afternoon, just like you say you do in some of your interviews. Maybe you missed the smell of popcorn. Do you ever take your little girls to the movies, Patsy? You should have, you know. As they say, it all goes by in a blink.
    It didn’t make sense to me at first. You’re such a busy little Big Shot. But then I figured it out. Movies are what you do. You must see them all the time, but you also have a family waiting for you every night. You’re supposed to be home for dinner with little Lynne and Laurie. How old are they now? Twelve and thirteen? They want you there, and you want to be there. That’s good, I suppose. Except that tonight, dinner is going to come and go without you. Kind of sad when you think about it, which is what I’m doing right now.
    Anyway, you sat in the balcony in the ninth row. I sat in the twelfth. I waited, and watched the back of your head, your brunette-from-a-bottle hair. That’s where the bullet was going to go. Or so I fantasized. Isn’t that what one is supposed to do at the movies? Escape? Get away from it all? Except that most movies are so dismal these days—dismally dumb or dismally dreary.
    I didn’t actually pull out my gun until after the film started. I didn’t like how scared I felt. That was how scared
you
were supposed to be, Big Shot. But you didn’t know what was happening, not even that I was there. You were out of the loop.
    I sat like that, holding the gun in my lap, pointing it at you for the longest time. Then I decided I wanted to be closer—right on top of you.
    I needed to look in your eyes after you knew you’d been shot, knew that you would never see Lynne and Laurie again, never see another movie either, never green-light one, never again be a Big Shot.
    But then seeing you wide-eyed and dead was a surprise. A shock to my nervous system, actually. What