Mary, Mary

until Mary Wagner was checked out.
    As dusk changed to night, it grew quiet and still on the street. Mary Wagner finally turned on a few lights and seemed to settle in. I couldn’t help thinking,
life of quiet desperation.
    At one point, I got out my Maglite and my wallet, and I stole a glance at the pictures I had of Damon, Jannie, and Little Alex, wondering what they were doing right now. In the dark, I didn’t have to worry about the goofy grin it put on my face.
    For the next several hours, I divided my attention between Mary Wagner’s unchanging house and a file of case notes in my lap. The notes were more of a prop than anything else. Everything there was to know about Mary Smith was already lodged in my head.
    Then I saw something—
someone,
actually—and I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.
    “Oh, no,” I said out loud. “Oh, Jesus!”
    Poor Manny Baker almost jumped out of his seat.

Chapter 87
    “HEY!
TRUSCOTT! Stop right there! I said
stop
.” I got out of the car as I saw the writer and his photographer approaching Mary Wagner’s house. What in hell were they doing here?
    We were about the same distance from the bungalow, and suddenly Truscott started to run for it.
    So did I, and I was a lot faster than the reporter, and maybe faster than he thought I might be. He gave me no other choice—so I tackled him before he got to the front door. I hit him at the waist, and Truscott went down hard, grunting in pain.
    That was the good part, hitting him. What a mess, though, a complete disaster! Mary Wagner was sure to hear us and come out to look, and then we’d be blown. Everything was going to unravel in a hurry now. There wasn’t much I could do about it.
    I dragged the reporter by his feet until we were out of sight from the Wagner house, and hopefully out of sound.
    “I have every right to be here. I’ll sue you for everything you have, Cross.”
    “Fine, sue me.”
    Because Truscott had started to scream at me, and his photographer was still snapping pictures, I put him in a hammerlock, and I ran him even farther up the street.
    “You can’t do this! You have no right!”
    “Get her! Take that camera away!” I called to the other agents coming up from the rear.
    “I’m gonna sue your ass! I’ll sue you and the Bureau back to the Dark Ages, Cross!” Truscott was still shouting as three of us finally carried him around the first corner we reached. Then I cuffed James Truscott and shoved the writer into one of our sedans.
    “Get him out of here!” I told an agent. “The camerawoman, too.”
    I took one last look into the backseat before Truscott was hauled away. “Sue me, sue the FBI. You’re still under arrest for obstruction. Take this lunatic the hell out of here!”
    A few minutes later, the narrow side street was quiet again, thank God.
    Frankly, I was amazed—stunned—Mary Wagner, this supposedly careful and clever murderess, seemed not to have noticed.

Chapter 88
    MARY WAGNER GOT A LOT MORE SLEEP that night than any of the rest of us. James Truscott spent the night in jail, but I was sure he’d be out in the morning. His magazine had already put in a complaint. He hadn’t missed much of anything, though. There was nothing new to report when the relief team finally came at 4:00 A.M.
    That gave me enough time to get to my hotel for a two-hour nap and a shower before I was back on the road again.
    I got to the Beverly Hills Hotel just past 7:00. Mary Wagner’s work shift started at 7:30.
    This was definitely getting interesting now, and also weirder by the minute.
    The luxury hotel, a pink stucco landmark in Hollywood, sat nearly obscured behind a wall of palms and banana trees on Sunset Boulevard. The inside echoed the outside, with its pink-everything lobby and ubiquitous banana-leaf wallpaper.
    I found the security chief, Andre Perkins, in his office on the lower level. I had deliberately arranged for only one contact at the hotel.
    Perkins was a former Bureau agent himself. He had two copies of Mary Wagner’s file on his desk when I got there.
    “She pretty much reads like a model employee,” he told me. “Shows up on time, keeps up with the work. As far as I can gather, she just seems to come in, do her thing, and leave. I can ask around some more. Should I?”
    “Don’t do it yet, thanks. What about her background? Anything for me there?”
    He pulled out Wagner’s original application and a couple of pages of notes.
    “She’s been here almost eight