Mary, Mary - James Patterson [39]
His shoulders drooped. He wiped his eyes with a closed fist. “I’m sorry. I keep thinking that what’s happened has sunk in, but it really hasn’t.”
“Take your time,” I told him.
I wanted to say more; I wanted to tell him that I knew what this felt like. Not just to lose a wife, but to lose her in this way. A while back, I’d been pretty much where he was right now. If his experience was anything like mine with Maria, there was no comfort to be had anywhere, much less from a stranger, a policeman. Anything personal I could tell him at this point would only be for my own sake, though, so I didn’t talk about Maria and how she was murdered.
“Dad?”
Zoey, the oldest daughter, stood in the high arch between the living room and hallway. She looked frightened, tiny, and very alone in the doorway.
“It’s okay, hon,” he said. “I’m okay. Come here for a sec.” He opened his arms, and she went to him, taking the long way around the couch to avoid walking next to me.
She fell into his hug, and then both of them began to cry. I wondered if she had seen her father cry before. “It’s okay,” he said again, smoothing her hair. “It’s okay, Zoey. I love you so much. You’re such a good girl.”
“I love you, Daddy,” Zoey whispered.
“We’ll do this later,” I said softly. “Another time. I’ve got your statement on file. I don’t need much more anyway.”
He looked at me appreciatively, the side of his face pressed against Zoey’s head. She had softened her posture now and curled to meet the shape of his hug. I could tell that they were close, and I thought of Jannie.
“Please let me know if there’s anything I can do,” he said. “I do want to help.”
“If I could just take a quick walk through the house, it would be useful for me,” I said.
“Of course.”
I turned to go, but then stopped and spoke again, only because I couldn’t help myself. “You’re doing exactly the right thing,” I told him. “Your children will get you through this. Keep them close.”
“I will. They’re all I have now. Thank you. You’re very considerate.”
I left it at that, and if I had to guess, I’d say he knew it wasn’t just a cop’s advice I was offering. It was a father’s, and a husband’s. Suddenly I didn’t want to be at this house any longer than I had to be.
Chapter 45
AS A DETECTIVE, I would have liked to have spent hours in the Lowenstein-Bell house, to soak up all the details. Under the circumstances, I gave myself fifteen to twenty minutes.
I started by the pretty pool and stood at the deep end, staring down at the royal-blue racing lines painted on the bottom. Estimates were that Mary Smith had shot Marti Lowenstein-Bell from this position, a single bullet to the top of the head. Then she’d pulled the body over to her with a long-handled pool net.
The killer calmly stood right here and did the knife work without ever taking the body out of the water. The cuts on the victim’s face had been sloppy and quick, dozens of overlapping slashes. As though she were erasing her.
It was evocative of what people sometimes do to photographs, the way they symbolically get rid of someone by Xing out the face. And in fact, Mary Smith had also destroyed several family photos in the office upstairs in the house.
I looked up to where I imagined the office would be, based on file diagrams.
The logical path from here to there went through the living room, then up the limestone staircase in the main entry hall.
The killer had visited the home before the day of the murder. How exactly had that occurred? At what time? And—why? How was Mary Smith evolving?
When I passed through the house again, Michael Bell was sitting with his three small daughters, all of them blankly watching their movie. They didn’t even look up as I went by, and I didn’t want to interrupt them again if I could help it. For some reason, I remembered hugging Jannie and Day right after what happened with Little Alex in Seattle.
The upstairs hallway was a suspended bridge of wood and glass that bisected the house. I followed Mary Smith’s likely path up there, then down