Mary, Mary

extreme.
    She sat bolt upright and screamed at me, her neck muscles straining.
“Tell me what you’ve done with my children! Answer me this instant! Where are my kids? Where are my kids?”
    Steps sounded on the floor behind me, and I stood up so I could be the first one to reach her.
    She was raving now, screaming over and over.
    “Tell me! Why won’t you tell me?” Now she had started to sob, and I felt sorry for her.
    I slowly walked around the table.
“Mary!”
I shouted her name, but she was completely unresponsive to the sound of my voice, even to my movement toward her.
    “Tell me where my kids are! Tell me! Tell me! Tell me! This instant!”
    “Mary —”
    I leaned over and took her by the shoulders, as gently as I could under the circumstances.
    “Tell me!”
    “Mary, look at me! Please.”
    That’s when she went for my gun.

Chapter 97
    SHE MUST HAVE SEEN THE HOLSTER tucked inside my jacket. In a split second, she reached up and her hand was on the butt of my Glock.
    “No!” I yelled. “Mary!”
    I instinctively knocked her back into her chair, but the gun wrenched free from the holster and she had it. I caught a flash of her eyes, which were glazed and crazy.
    I dove at her, grabbing her wrist with one hand and the gun with the other. I continued to yell her name.
    Next, the two of us fell over the chair as it went down with a loud crack.
    I was vaguely aware of people scrambling all around us. My focus stayed on her.
    She strained, red-faced, slamming my side with her free fist. I now had a knee on her chest and one hand still on her wrist, pinning the gun to the ground, but she was as strong as she looked.
    And her finger was already wrapped around the Glock’s trigger. She squirmed hard, turning the barrel of the gun toward herself—and tilting her head to meet it. She knew exactly what she was doing.
    “No! Mary!”
    With a rush of adrenaline, fighting an equal surge of resistance from her, I managed to lift her gun hand toward the ceiling. Then I smashed it back down, very hard, against the floor.
    The Glock fired once into the wall of the interrogation room, even as it fell out of her grasp. I snatched it up, the shot still ringing in my ears, the side of my face numb.
    There was a brief, suspended moment of near silence.
    Mary stopped struggling immediately, and then, in an unbelievable echo of the previous day’s events, the police descended on her like a small army. They picked her up as she flailed once again, arms and legs whipping crazily.
    I could hear her unchecked sobs as they carried her away.
    “My babies, my babies, my poor babies . . . Where are my children? Oh, where? Oh, where? What have you done with my children?”
    Her voice receded down the hall until a heavy door slammed with great finality, and she was gone. Not surprisingly, I didn’t get the chance for another interview.
    To make matters worse, if that was possible, I saw James Truscott as I left the building about an hour later. He was among the throng of reporters gathered outside waiting for any tidbit of news.
    He yelled at me, “How did she get your gun, Dr. Cross? How’d that happen?” Somehow, Truscott had already gotten the story.

Chapter 98
    I COULD ONLY WONDER about the causes and the full extent of Mary Wagner’s mental illness and the obvious torment and stress it was putting on her. There certainly hadn’t been any time for a meaningful psych evaluation, and my part in the investigation was coming to an end now, whether I liked it or not. And, to be honest, I had mixed feelings.
    By early that afternoon, Mary’s state of mind was a moot point. LAPD’s search of her house had turned up a holy trinity of evidence.
    A Walther PPK, discovered under a blanket in her attic crawl space, had already shown a preliminary ballistic match to the weapon used in the murders.
    CSI had also found half-a-dozen sheets of children’s stickers and, most significant, stolen family photographs from Marti Lowenstein-Bell’s office and Suzie Cartoulis’s purse. Both Michael Bell and Giovanni Cartoulis had positively identified the photos as having belonged to their murdered wives.
    “And best of all, most important anyway,” Fred Van Allsburg told the small group of agents assembled in his office, “twelve o’clock came and went today without incident. No new victim, no new e-mail. It’s
over
. I think I can safely say that.”
    The mood was grimly congratulatory. Just about everyone was glad to leave