Mary, Mary

Cartoulis’s husband is?” I asked.
    “He’s supposed to be on a plane, coming home from Florida. Why?”
    “I need to know if this woman carried family photos in her wallet.”
    My question was a formality; I was almost certain I knew the answer. This would be the second time in as many incidents that Mary Smith had been interested in family photos. She’d gone from leaving the children entirely alone to either destroying or stealing their photographs. Meanwhile, her methodology was increasingly erratic, and her e-mails seemed more confident than ever.
    How slippery a slope was this going to be from here on? And where was it taking me?
    I didn’t think I could live with myself if Mary Smith started turning on kids before we caught up to her. But that’s what I was afraid might happen next.

Chapter 64
    “CAN I SEE YOU for a minute, Dr. Cross? We need to talk.”
    I looked up to see Detective Jeanne Galletta standing in the door. Her expression was strained; I thought that she looked older than the last time we met, and thinner, as if she’d lost ten pounds she hadn’t needed to shed.
    We went out into the hall. “What’s going on? Don’t tell me something else has happened.”
    “I don’t want to go wide with this yet,” she said in a low, tired voice, “but there’s a woman who saw a blue Suburban leaving the hotel parking lot in a big hurry. Happened around two o’clock. She didn’t notice much else. I wonder if you could interview her, and then we could compare notes. Before I do anything with this.”
    It was a good move on her part. I’m pretty sure she was thinking the same thing I was: The D.C. sniper case in 2002 had included a massive public search for what turned out to be the wrong vehicle, a white van with black lettering. It was an investigative and public-relations nightmare, exactly the kind of mistake LAPD wouldn’t want to make now.
    “And could you do it right now? That would be helpful. I’d appreciate it,” she added. “If I’m going to run with this, I don’t want to wait.”
    I hated to leave the crime scene. There was a lot of work to be done. If Jeanne weren’t wearing her stress so plainly, maybe I would have said no.
    “Give me five minutes to finish up here,” I told her. “I’ll be right down.”
    Meanwhile, I asked Jeanne to do me a favor and follow up with Giovanni Cartoulis about the missing photos in his wife’s wallet. There was frustratingly little we could do with the information from him, but it was important to know if Mary Smith had stolen family pictures. Also, Giovanni Cartoulis needed to be eliminated as a suspect, as all the previous husbands had been. Jeanne and her people had been handling this, but I was satisfied with the reports. The LAPD was doing a good job.
    “What?” Jeanne asked, standing very still in the hallway and staring at me. “What are you thinking? Tell me. I can handle it. I
think
.”
    “Take a deep breath. Don’t give in to this crap. You’re running the case as well as anyone possibly could, but you look like hell right now.”
    She knitted her eyebrows. “Um . . . thanks?”
    “You look good, just not as good as usual. You’re pale, Jeanne. It’s the stress. Nobody understands that until they get hit with it.”
    Jeanne finally smiled. “I look like a fucking raccoon. Big dark smears around my eyes.”
    “Sorry.”
    “It’s okay. I’ve got to run.”
    I thought about her earlier dinner invitation and my clumsy decline. If we had stood there a few seconds longer, maybe I would have reciprocated the invitation for later, but Jeanne—and the moment—was already gone.
    And I had an interview to do.
    A blue Suburban, right?

Chapter 65
    IT WASN’T THE FOOT-LONG SERPENTINE tattoos up and down both of Bettina Rodgers’s arms, or the half-dozen piercings on her face that made me doubt what she had just told me. Actually, Bettina was as good a witness as you get. It was more the fact that eyewitness accounts are notoriously sketchy and unreliable. FBI research has shown them to hover around 50-percent accuracy, even just a few minutes after an incident—and this was at least two hours later.
    That said, Bettina’s confidence in what she had seen was unwavering.
    “I was in the parking lot, starting my car,” she told me for the third time. “And the Suburban tore out behind me, over that way, toward Santa Monica Boulevard. I turned around to look ’cause it was going so fast.
    “I know for sure it