THE NEXT AFTERNOON, when I got back to the West Coast, the L.A. Bureau field office was buzzing about the latest in the Mary Smith case, but also about me, which wasn’t good news, to put it mildly.

Apparently, word had gotten around that Maddux Fielding and I hadn’t exactly hit it off after he replaced Jeanne Galletta. The Bureau-LAPD relationship had always been tenuous, more functional on some cases than others, and this was a definite downturn.

The general gossip/debate, from what I gathered, was about whether or not Agent Cross from D.C. had waltzed in with nothing to lose, and then cavalierly screwed things up for the LAPD.

I let it bother me for about five minutes; then I moved on.

Mary Smith, aka the Hollywood Stalker, aka Dirty Mary, was turning out to be one of the busiest, fastest-moving—and fastest-changing—murder cases anyone could remember. Even the old hands were talking about it. Especially now that there was a little controversy mixed in with the moments of dizzying mayhem.

Another e-mail had arrived the morning I got to town. I hadn’t seen it yet, but the word was that this one was different, and LAPD was already scrambling to respond. Mary Smith had sent a warning this time, and her message had been taken very seriously.

We gathered in the fourteenth-floor conference room, designated weeks ago as the Bureau’s Mary Smith nerve center. Photos, newspaper clippings, and lab reports lined the walls. A temporary phone bank sat along one side of a huge cherry table that dominated the room with both its length and width.

The meeting was to be run by Fred Van Allsburg, and he breezed in ten minutes after the rest of us got there. For some reason his late arrival made me think of Kayla Coles and how she liked to be punctual at all times. Kayla believes that people who are habitually late don’t have respect for others—or at least, for clocks.

Fred Van Allsburg had a dusty old nickname—the Stop Sign. It dated back to a United States-Central American heroin corridor he’d shut down in the late eighties. From what I knew, he had done little of note since then except climb the bureaucratic ladder. Having worked with him now, I had no more respect for him than the job required, per his rank and seniority.

I think he knew that, so it caught me off guard when he started the meeting the way he did.

“I just want to say a few things before we get going,” he began. “As you all know by now, we’re quasi on our own where LAPD is concerned. Maddux Fielding seems intent on going it alone if he can, and he’s outdoing himself at being a huge pain in the ass. Isn’t that right, Alex?”