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.

“How about Kathy Bates? She could play Mary. She’s a great actress,” one “concerned” caller asked the talk show host, who was all too glad to play along.

“Too old. Besides, she already did Misery. I say you get Nicky Kidman, get her to slap on another fake nose, wig, thirty pounds, and you’re good to go,” replied the DJ. “Or maybe Meryl Streep. Emma Thompson? Kate Winslet would be strong.”

My check-in at the station house took almost forty-five minutes. I had to speak with four different personnel and show my ID half a dozen times just to reach the small interrogation room where they were going to bring Mary Wagner to me. Eventually—in their own sweet time.

When I finally saw her, my first reaction, surprisingly, was pity.

Mary looked as though she hadn’t slept, with bruise-colored half-moons under her eyes and a drooping, shuffling walk. The pink hotel uniform was gone. She now wore shapeless gray sweatpants and an old UCLA sweatshirt flecked with pale yellow paint the same color as her kitchen.

Vague recognition flickered in her eyes when she saw me. I was reminded of some of the Alzheimer’s patients I regularly visited at St. Anthony’s in D.C.

I told the guard to remove her cuffs and wait outside.

“I’ll be okay with her. We’re friends.”

“Friends,” Mary repeated as she stared deeply into my eyes.

Chapter 95

Chapter 95

“MARY, DO YOU REMEMBER ME from yesterday?” I asked as soon as the guard was back out in the hallway. I had pulled up a chair and sat across from her. The plain four-by-eight table between us was bolted to the floor. It was chilly in the small room, with a draft from somewhere.

“You’re Mister Cross,” she said dully. “FBI Agent Cross. Excuse me, I’m sorry.”