Mary felt the tension building in her shoulders and neck. “Ash, honey, you have to have at least one bite. Ashley! You have to try it. Look at me when I’m speaking to you.”
Mary knew with all her heart she should just let it go. Not eating was a self-correcting problem. Ashley’s problem, not hers. “Do you know how much this cost?” she said in spite of herself. “Do you know what everything costs here at Fantasyland?”
Brendan tried to intervene. “Mommy, don’t. Mommy, Mommy.”
“Do you?” she pressed. “Have any idea?”
“I don’t care,” Ashley fired back. The little bitch, the awful girl.
The tension took hold, shooting from her shoulders down into her arms and legs. Mary felt a sharp prickling in her muscles, and then all at once, a release.
Ashley didn’t want the food? Fine. Just fine.
Her hand swept across the table.
“Mommy!” Brendan cried out.
Paper plates and slices of pizza slid to the concrete patio floor. The one soda tipped over, its sudsy contents sloshing onto the open stroller where Adam was sitting. His shriek was almost instantaneous. It resonated with Mary’s own.
“Do you see what you’ve done? Do you?”
She barely heard any of it. Her voice was like something on the other side of a door, and the door was closed, and locked.
Oh, this wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She and the kids were at Disneyland for God’s sake. This was so wrong, so wrong. Everything she’d worked so hard for was going down the toilet. This was a nightmare. What else could possibly happen to spoil everything?
Chapter 85
IF MARY SMITH’S LATEST E-MAIL was to be believed, we were down to forty-eight hours or less to stop the next homicide.
To make the impossible situation even worse, we couldn’t be everywhere at once, not even with hundreds of agents and detectives on the case.
One lead in particular had emerged, and we were going to run with it. That’s all Fred Van Allsburg had told us. I wasn’t sure we needed another meeting to discuss it, but I showed up, and now I was glad I did.
We’d managed an end run around Maddux Fielding’s unofficial closed-door policy at LAPD. A member of their blue-Suburban detail was on the phone when I got there.
The LAPD detail consisted of two lead detectives, two-dozen field agents, and a clue coordinator, Merrill Snyder, who was on the line with us.
Snyder started with his overview of the search. His voice had a subtle touch of New England. “As you know, DMVs don’t track by color, which is the only specification we have on Mary Smith’s alleged Suburban,” he told the group.
“That’s left us with just over two thousand possible matches in Los Angeles County. As a matter of triage, we’ve been focusing on civilian call-ins. We’re still getting dozens every day—people who own a blue Suburban and don’t know what to do about it; or people who’ve seen one, or thought they might have seen one, or maybe just know someone who’s seen one. The hard part is recognizing the worthwhile point zero zero one percent of calls from the other ninety-nine point ninety-nine.”
“So why did this one spike?” I asked.
It was a combination of things, Snyder told us. Plenty of leads had some individual compelling detail to them, but this one had a convergence of suspicious factors.
“This guy called in about his neighbor, who’s also his tenant. She drives a blue Suburban, of course—and goes by the name Mary Wagner.”
Eyebrows bobbed around the room. This was the stuff coincidence was made of, but it wouldn’t have shocked me to know that our killer—with her penchant for public attention—was actually using her own first name.
“She’s a virtual Jane Doe,” Snyder went on. “No driver’s license here, or in any state for that matter. The plates on the car are California, but guess what?”
“They’re stolen,” someone muttered from the rear.
“They’re stolen,” said Snyder. “And they don’t track. She probably got them off an abandoned car somewhere.
“And then, lastly, there’s her address. Mammoth Avenue in Van Nuys. It’s only about
ten blocks from that cybercafe where the one aborted e-mail was found.”