Mary, Mary - James Patterson [56]
“What?” Jeanne asked, standing very still in the hallway and staring at me. “What are you thinking? Tell me. I can handle it. I think.”
“Take a deep breath. Don’t give in to this crap. You’re running the case as well as anyone possibly could, but you look like hell right now.”
She knitted her eyebrows. “Um . . . thanks?”
“You look good, just not as good as usual. You’re pale, Jeanne. It’s the stress. Nobody understands that until they get hit with it.”
Jeanne finally smiled. “I look like a fucking raccoon. Big dark smears around my eyes.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay. I’ve got to run.”
I thought about her earlier dinner invitation and my clumsy decline. If we had stood there a few seconds longer, maybe I would have reciprocated the invitation for later, but Jeanne—and the moment—was already gone.
And I had an interview to do.
A blue Suburban, right?
Chapter 65
IT WASN’T THE FOOT-LONG SERPENTINE tattoos up and down both of Bettina Rodgers’s arms, or the half-dozen piercings on her face that made me doubt what she had just told me. Actually, Bettina was as good a witness as you get. It was more the fact that eyewitness accounts are notoriously sketchy and unreliable. FBI research has shown them to hover around 50-percent accuracy, even just a few minutes after an incident—and this was at least two hours later.
That said, Bettina’s confidence in what she had seen was unwavering.
“I was in the parking lot, starting my car,” she told me for the third time. “And the Suburban tore out behind me, over that way, toward Santa Monica Boulevard. I turned around to look ’cause it was going so fast.
“I know for sure it was dark blue, and I know it was a Suburban ’cause my mom used to have one. I’ve ridden in it a million times. I remember thinking it was kind of funny, ’cause it was like my mom was driving crazy like that.”
She paused. “The Suburban took a sharp left out of the parking lot. That’s all I know. Can I fucking go now?”
That was about as much as Jeanne Galletta had gotten out of her, but I pressed on with a few more questions of my own.
“Any markings on the car?” I asked. “Bumper stickers, dents, anything at all?”
She shrugged. “I mostly just saw it from the side, and like I said—it flew by super fast. For a Suburban. I didn’t see the license plate or anything.”
“How about the driver? Anything you noticed? Was there anyone else in the car? More than one person?”
She fiddled absently with one of the thick silver rings in her eyebrow while she thought about that. Her makeup was heavy and mostly black, except for the pale white cast of her face powder. I didn’t know too much about Bettina, but she put me in mind of the urban vampire culture I’d investigated a few years back on a case. One thing I’d learned then was how sharp some of these people were despite the goth-slacker stereotype.
Finally, Bettina shook her head. “I want to say it was a woman, ’cause that would make sense, right? I mean, Jesus shit, we’re talking about that fucked-up Hollywood Stalker wench, aren’t we? Don’t bother to lie, I know it’s her. One of the other cops told me already.”
I didn’t respond, letting her think some more until she shrugged again. “Blue Suburban goin’ like a bat out of hell, left turn, that’s all I really know for sure. That’s my final answer.”
The fact that she wasn’t inclined to fill in details actually boosted my confidence in her. It’s incredible how many people do the opposite, sometimes just to please the interviewer. A few minutes later, I thanked Bettina for her time and help, and let her go.
Then I found Jeanne Galletta to tell her my thoughts. We met in an unused guest room on the second floor. Jeanne told me that another hotel patron had corroborated the story.
“Around two o’clock, he saw a large, dark-blue SUV tearing out of the parking lot from his room on the third floor. He couldn’t see too much, but he said