He had already turned away but now pivoted back on me. “I said if anything changed, it was over. That’s precisely what I said to you.”
“So what changed, goddammit?”
He took a beat. “Fuck you, Agent Cross. I don’t have to give you answers.”
I lunged at him, and it was probably exactly what he wanted. Two of his monkeys stepped between us and pulled me back. Just as well, but it would have felt good to erase that cynical sneer off his face, even better to briefly rearrange some of his features. I shook off the two officers and walked away.
Before I’d even begun 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.