The first woman was Cynthia Coffman. In 1986, she and her boyfriend robbed and strangled four women. She’d been sentenced in 1989 and was still waiting. Cynthia Coffman was forty-two years old now.

At the end of the long note, Truscott said that he planned to visit some of the women in prison. I was welcome to tag along if I thought it might be useful.

After I finished reading the pages, I leafed through them a second time.

What was with James Truscott? And why did he want to be my Boswell? I wished he would just leave me alone, but that wasn’t going to happen, was it?

Chapter 71

Chapter 71

THE PHONE IN MY HOTEL ROOM woke me at just past 2:30 in the morning. I was having a dream about Little Alex and Christine, but I forgot most of it as soon as I heard the first ring.

My first coherent thought: James Truscott.

But it wasn’t him.

Around 3:00 A.M. I was driving through an unfamiliar Hollywood neighborhood looking for the Hillside condo complex. I might have found it sooner in daylight, and if my mind hadn’t been racing the whole way there.

Mary Smith’s game had changed again, and I was struggling to understand it. Why this murder? Why now? Why these two victims?

The condo complex, when I finally found it, looked to have been built in the seventies. The units were flat-roofed three-story structures in dark cedar, with fat columns for legs and open parking underneath. There was also parking on the street, I noticed, and that would offer an intruder privacy.

“Agent Cross! Alex!” I heard from across the lot.

I recognized Karl Page’s voice from somewhere in the dark. My watch read 3:05.

He caught up with me under a streetlight. “Over this way,” he said.

“How’d you hear about it?” I asked him. Page was the one who had called me in my hotel room.

“I was still in the office.”

“When the hell do you sleep?”

“I’ll sleep when it’s over.”

I followed the young agent through a series of right and left turns, to where a square of buildings faced a common garden and pool area. Several residents, many of them in nightclothes, were gathered around one of the front doors. They were craning their necks and whispering among themselves.

Page pointed to a third-floor unit where the lights were on behind drawn curtains. “Up there,” he said. “That’s where the bodies are.”

We made our way past the officers on duty and up the front stairs—one of two ways into the building.

“Check.” Page shorthanded his response to the stickers on the apartment door as we passed inside. Marked with two As and a B. This was Mary Smith all right. The stickers always made me think of that clown doll in Poltergeist—benign on the outside but completely ominous in context. Child’s play turned inside out.