Mary, Mary

to calm down, though, I was dialing my cell phone.
    “Jeanne Galletta.”
    “It’s Alex Cross. Do you know anything about the Mary Wagner arrest?”
    “Fine, thanks. How are you?”
    “Sorry. But do you, Jeanne? I’m at her house right now. It’s an incredible mess. You wouldn’t believe how it went down.”
    Jeanne paused. “I’m not on that case anymore.”
    “Would I get a different answer in person?”
    “You might.”
    “Then give me a break. Please, Jeanne. I need your help. I don’t have time to run around.”
    Her voice finally softened. “What happened out there? You sound really upset.”
    “I am upset. Everything blew up. I was right in the middle of interviewing her when LAPD burst in like a damn clown car at the circus. It was ridiculous, Jeanne, and unnecessary. Fielding knows something, and he won’t say what.”
    “I’ll save you a step,” Jeanne said. “She’s the one. She did those murders, Alex.”
    “How do you know? How does LAPD know? What is going on?”
    “You remember the hair that was found at the movie theater when Patrice Bennett was killed? Well, they pulled one off Mary Wagner’s sweater from her locker at the hotel. The results just came through. It’s the same hair. Fielding ran with it.”
    My mind raced, placing this new bit of information alongside everything else. “I see you’re doing a good job staying off the case,” I finally said.
    “Can’t help what I overhear.”
    “So did you overhear where they took her?”
    Jeanne hesitated, but only for a couple of seconds. “Try the Van Nuys station on Sylmar Avenue. You better hurry. She won’t be there long.”
    “I’m on my way.”

Chapter 94
    I GOT RIGHT OVER to the Van Nuys station, but I was stonewalled: I was told to my face that Mary Wagner wasn’t being held there.
    There was nothing I could do to budge LAPD: They had this woman, their suspect, and they weren’t sharing her. Even Ron Burns couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help me out.
    I wasn’t able to see Mary until the next morning. By that time, LAPD had transferred her to a temporary holding facility downtown, where they kept her completely tied up in interrogation—without any real progress, as I had predicted.
    One sympathetic detective described her to me as somewhere between despondent and catatonic, but I still needed to see Mary Wagner for myself.
    When I arrived at the downtown facility, the assembled press corps mob was twice the size of anything we’d seen so far. Easily. For weeks, the Hollywood Stalker case had made national headlines, not just local ones. Mary Wagner’s mug shot was everywhere now, a blank-eyed, disheveled woman looking very much the part of a killer.
    The last thing I heard before I switched off my car radio was ridiculous morning-talk-show banter and psychobabble about why she had committed murders against rich and famous women in Hollywood.
    “How about Kathy Bates? She could play Mary. She’s a great actress,” one “concerned” caller asked the talk show host, who was all too glad to play along.
    “Too old. Besides, she already did
Misery
. I say you get Nicky Kidman, get her to slap on another fake nose, wig, thirty pounds, and you’re good to go,” replied the DJ. “Or maybe Meryl Streep. Emma Thompson? Kate Winslet would be strong.”
    My check-in at the station house took almost forty-five minutes. I had to speak with four different personnel and show my ID half a dozen times just to reach the small interrogation room where they were going to bring Mary Wagner to me. Eventually—in their own sweet time.
    When I finally saw her, my first reaction, surprisingly, was pity.
    Mary looked as though she hadn’t slept, with bruise-colored half-moons under her eyes and a drooping, shuffling walk. The pink hotel uniform was gone. She now wore shapeless gray sweatpants and an old UCLA sweatshirt flecked with pale yellow paint the same color as her kitchen.
    Vague recognition flickered in her eyes when she saw me. I was reminded of some of the Alzheimer’s patients I regularly visited at St. Anthony’s in D.C.
    I told the guard to remove her cuffs and wait outside.
    “I’ll be okay with her. We’re friends.”
    “Friends,” Mary repeated as she stared deeply into my eyes.

Chapter 95
    “MARY, DO YOU REMEMBER ME from yesterday?” I asked as soon as the guard was back out in the hallway. I had pulled up a chair and sat across from her. The plain four-by-eight table between us was bolted to the