Mary, Mary

had, for what?
    “Let me tell you why I’m here,” I said. “Mary, are you listening to me?”
    No response from her. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, staring at a single point on the wall. I sensed that she
was
listening but trying not to show it.
    “You already know that there’s a significant amount of evidence against you. And I think you also know that there are still some doubts about your children.”
    She finally looked up, and her eyes burned into my skull. “Then there’s nothing to talk about.”
    “Actually, there is.”
    I pulled out my pen and laid a blank piece of paper on the table. “I thought you might like to write a letter to Brendan, Ashley, and Adam.”

Chapter 105
    MARY CHANGED IN A BEAT, just the way I’d seen her do before. She looked up at me again, her eyes and mouth noticeably softer. A familiar vulnerability showed across her features. When she was like this, it was hard not to feel something for Mary Wagner, no matter what she had done.
    “I’m not allowed to remove your handcuffs,” I said, “but you can tell me what you’d like to say. I’ll write it for you, word for word.”
    “Is this a trick?” she asked, and she was practically pleading for it not to be. “This is some kind of trick, isn’t it?”
    I had to choose my words carefully.
    “No trick. It’s just a chance for you to say whatever you want to say to your kids.”
    “Are the police going to read it? Will you tell me? I want to know if they are.”
    Her responses fascinated me, a mix of high emotion and control.
    “All of your conversations in here are recorded,” I reminded her. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. It’s up to you. Your choice, Mary.”
    “You came to my house.”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “I liked you.”
    “Mary, I like you, too.”
    “Are you on my side?”
    “Yes. I am on your side.”
    “The side of justice, right?”
    “I hope so, Mary.”
    She looked around the room, either weighing her options or searching for the right words, I didn’t know which. Then she turned back. Her eyes locked onto the piece of paper between us.
    “Dear Brendan,” she said in a whisper.
    “Just Brendan?”
    “Yes. Please read this to your brother and sister, because you’re the big boy in the family.”
    I took it down verbatim, writing fast to keep up with her.
    “Mommy has to be away from you for a while, but it won’t be long, I promise.
Promise
.
    “Wherever you are now, I know they are taking good care of you. And if you get lonely, or want to cry, that’s okay, too. Crying can help let the sadness out. Everyone does it sometimes, even Mommy, but only because I miss you so much.”
    Mary paused, and a pleased look came over her, as if she had just seen something sweet. Her eyes were fixed on the far wall, and she had an almost heartbreaking smile on her face.
    She continued, “When we’re all together again, we’ll go for a picnic, your favorite. We’ll get whatever we want to eat and drive out somewhere pretty and spend the whole day. Maybe we’ll go swimming, too. Whatever you want, sweetie pie. I’m already looking forward to it.
    “And guess what? You have a guardian angel watching over you all the time. That’s me. I give you good-night kisses in your dreams when you go to sleep at night. You don’t have to be afraid because I’m right there with you. And you’re right here with me.”
    Mary stopped, shut her eyes, and sighed loudly.
    “I love you very, very much. Love, Mommy.”
    By now, she was leaning much closer to the table than when we’d begun. She held on to the letter with her eyes—still speaking to me in a soft voice. A whisper.
    “Put three
X
’s and three
O
’s at the bottom. A kiss and a hug for each of my babies.”

Chapter 106
    THE MORE I HEARD, the more I doubted that Mary Wagner could have invented these three children entirely. And I had a bad feeling about what might have happened to them.
    I spent the afternoon trying to track the children down. The Uniform Crime Report came back with a long list of child victims matched to female killers in recent decades. I’ve heard and read somewhere that shoplifting and the killing of one’s own children are the only two crimes that American women commit in equal numbers to men.
    If that was true, then this thick, voluminous report only represented
half
of the child murders on record.
    I gritted my teeth, literally and figuratively, and did another run through the