Mary, Mary

already. Ron Burns wasn’t asking me to stay on this case.
He was telling me
. God, I was tired of this—the murders, the horrific cases, one after another. According to estimates at the Bureau, there were more than three hundred pattern killers currently operating in the United States. Hell, was I supposed to catch all of them?
    I clicked Pause on the machine to take a second and decide how I felt about what was going on here. My thoughts went straight back to Mary Smith. I had let her into my head again. She’d caught my interest, my curiosity, probably my ego. A female serial killer—could it be? Killing other women? Mothers?
    But why? Would a woman do that? I didn’t think so. I just couldn’t imagine it happening, which didn’t mean that it hadn’t.
    I also wondered if there had been another e-mail to Arnold Griner. What part did Griner, or the
L.A. Times,
play in all this? Did Mary Smith already have the
next
victim in her sights? What was her motivation?
    That was the line of thought that finally got to me. Some unsuspecting woman, a mother, was going to lose her life in L.A. soon. A husband, and probably children, would be left behind. It hit too close to home for me, and I think Burns knew that when he called. Of course he did.
    Several years before, my own wife, Maria, had been gunned down in a drive-by shooting. Maria had died in my arms. No one was ever convicted, or even arrested. My biggest case, and I’d failed on it. It was all so unspeakably senseless. And now this terrible case in L.A. I didn’t need my PhD in psych to know that Mary Smith was pushing all my buttons, both personally and professionally.
    Maybe I would just check in, I thought. Besides, Burns was right—I didn’t want to show up behind the ball on Monday morning.
    Damn it, Alex, you’re weakening
.
    When I picked up the phone, though, I was surprised to hear Damon’s voice already on the line.
    “Yeah, I missed you, too. I was thinking about you. I swear I was, all the time.”
    Then an adolescent girl’s laughter. “Did you bring me anything from California, Day? Mouse ears? Somethin’, somethin’?”
    I forced myself to hang up, quietly.
    Yeah, I missed you, too?
Who was this girl? And since when was Day keeping secrets? I had fooled myself into thinking that if a girlfriend came along, he’d want to tell me about it. That suddenly seemed like a silly delusion on my part. I’d been thirteen before, too. What was I thinking?
    One teenage moment down. About two million to go. I’d give him five minutes and then tell him it was time to hang up. Meanwhile, I went back to the answering machine—where another message was waiting.
    A real mindblower.

Chapter 30
    “ALEX, IT’S BEN ABAJIAN calling on Thursday, one-thirty my time in Seattle. Listen, I have bad news I’m afraid.
    “It seems that Christine’s attorney has filed a motion to move up the final custody hearing date out here. I’m not sure I’ll be able to block it, or even that we should. There’s more, but I’d rather not go into it until we speak. Please give me a call as soon as possible.”
    My heart picked up its pace. Ben Abajian was my lawyer in Seattle. I had hired him soon after Christine brought Little Alex to live there. We’d talked a couple dozen times since then—on my dime, of course.
    He was an excellent attorney, a good guy, too, but his message was a bad sign. My guess was that Christine had taken her own interpretation of what had happened in California and run with it, straight to her counsel.
    With the time difference out west, I was able to catch Ben Abajian still in the office. He tried to emphasize the positive for me, but his tone was all bad.
    “Alex, this is only temporary, but they’ve also filed an ex parte motion asking for sole physical custody of Alex Junior until the final hearing is over. The judge went for it. I’m sorry to have to tell you that.”
    I squeezed the phone tight in my hand. It was hard to respond, or even take in what Ben was telling me. Christine had never gotten this aggressive before. Now she seemed to be trying to keep me from even seeing Little Alex. In fact, she’d just succeeded, at least temporarily.
    “Alex, are you there?”
    “Yeah, Ben, I’m here. Sorry. Just give me a second.”
    I put down the phone and took a deep breath. It would do me no good to spiral down right now. Or to blow up over the phone. None of this was Ben’s fault.
    I put the phone back to my ear. “What was