Mary, Mary

out on a date with her.
    We were finishing an after-dinner drink when she declared, “This has been nice, Alex. Very nice and easy.”
    “Surprised?” I asked her.
    “No, not really. Well, maybe a little bit,” she admitted. “Maybe a lot.”
    “Want to tell me why?”
    “Hmm. I guess because I knew you had no idea who I was, even though you probably thought that you did.”
    “When I see you, you’re usually working,” I said. “You’re being Dr. Kayla of Neighborhood Health Services.”
    “Take two aspirin, don’t you
dare
call me at home,” she said, and laughed. “I guess what’s hard is that lots of people confide in me, but most of the time, I don’t get to confide back.”
    I smiled. “You have anything you’d like to tell me?”
    Kayla shook her head. “I think that I said it already. This has been good. I enjoyed tonight even more than I thought I would.”
    “Right. And there
will
be a next time. That’s what you said.”
    She gave me the most delightful wink. “Wasn’t I right about that?”
    “You were right. If you’ll see me again.”
    “Oh, I’ll see you, Alex. Of course I will. I want to see how this turns out.”

Chapter 80
    THE NEXT AFTERNOON, when I got back to the West Coast, the L.A. Bureau field office was buzzing about the latest in the Mary Smith case, but also about me, which wasn’t good news, to put it mildly.
    Apparently, word had gotten around that Maddux Fielding and I hadn’t exactly hit it off after he replaced Jeanne Galletta. The Bureau-LAPD relationship had always been tenuous, more functional on some cases than others, and this was a definite downturn.
    The general gossip/debate, from what I gathered, was about whether or not Agent Cross from D.C. had waltzed in with nothing to lose, and then cavalierly screwed things up for the LAPD.
    I let it bother me for about five minutes; then I moved on.
    Mary Smith, aka the Hollywood Stalker, aka Dirty Mary, was turning out to be one of the busiest, fastest-moving—and fastest-changing—murder cases anyone could remember. Even the old hands were talking about it. Especially now that there was a little controversy mixed in with the moments of dizzying mayhem.
    Another e-mail had arrived the morning I got to town. I hadn’t seen it yet, but the word was that this one was different, and LAPD was already scrambling to respond. Mary Smith had sent a warning this time, and her message had been taken very seriously.
    We gathered in the fourteenth-floor conference room, designated weeks ago as the Bureau’s Mary Smith nerve center. Photos, newspaper clippings, and lab reports lined the walls. A temporary phone bank sat along one side of a huge cherry table that dominated the room with both its length and width.
    The meeting was to be run by Fred Van Allsburg, and he breezed in ten minutes after the rest of us got there. For some reason his late arrival made me think of Kayla Coles and how she liked to be punctual at all times. Kayla believes that people who are habitually late don’t have respect for others—or at least, for clocks.
    Fred Van Allsburg had a dusty old nickname—the Stop Sign. It dated back to a United States-Central American heroin corridor he’d shut down in the late eighties. From what I knew, he had done little of note since then except climb the bureaucratic ladder. Having worked with him now, I had no more respect for him than the job required, per his rank and seniority.
    I think he knew that, so it caught me off guard when he started the meeting the way he did.
    “I just want to say a few things before we get going,” he began. “As you all know by now, we’re quasi on our own where LAPD is concerned. Maddux Fielding seems intent on going it alone if he can, and he’s outdoing himself at being a huge pain in the ass. Isn’t that right, Alex?”
    A knowing chuckle went around the room. Heads turned my way. “Uh, no comment,” I said, to more laughter.
    Van Allsburg raised his voice to quiet everyone. “As far as I’m concerned, we keep our lines of communication open, and that means full and timely disclosure to LAPD on anything we know. If I hear about anyone doing any petty withholding, they’ll find themselves back in fingerprints on their next case. Fielding can run his end of things how he likes. I’m not going to let that compromise our own professionalism. Is that clear to everybody?”
    I was pleasantly surprised by Van Allsburg’s response to the situation.