Mary, Mary

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.
    “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
A
s 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.

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