Patterson, James: Alex Cross 11 - Mary, Mary

He then took a position inside the room, next to the door.

Not my first choice, but I didn't argue it. Maybe if there was a second interview, I'd try to loosen things up.

“Good morning, Mary.”

“Hello.”

Her voice was neutral, a minimal show of following the rules. Still no eye contact though.

I wondered if she had served time before. And if she had, for what?

“Let me tell you why I'm here,” I said. “Mary, are you listening to me?”

No response from her. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, staring at a single point on the wall. I sensed that she was listening but trying not to show it.

“You already know that there's a significant amount of evidence against you. And I think you also know that there are still some doubts about your children.”

She finally looked up, and her eyes burned into my skull.

“Then there's nothing to talk about.”

“Actually, there is.”

I pulled out my pen and laid a blank piece of paper on the table. “I thought you might like to write a letter to Brendan, Ashley, and Adam.”

Mary, Mary

Chapter 105

MARY CHANGED IN A BEAT, just the way I'd seen her do before. She looked up at me again, her eyes and mouth noticeably softer. A familiar vulnerability showed across her features. When she was like this, it was hard not to feel something for Mary Wagner, no matter what she had done.

“I'm not allowed to remove your handcuffs,” I said, “but you can tell me what you'd like to say I'll write it for you, word for word.”

“Is this a trick?” she asked, and she was practically pleading for it not to be. “This is some kind of trick, isn't it?”

I had to choose my words carefully “No trick. It's just a chance for you to say whatever you want to say to your kids.”

“Are the police going to read it? Will you tell me? I want to know if they are.”

Her responses fascinated me, a mix of high emotion and control.

“All of your conversations in here are recorded,” I reminded her. “You don't have to do this if you don't want to. It's up to you. Your choice, Mary”

“You came to my house.”

“Yes, I did.”

“I liked you.”

“Mary I like you, too.”

“Are you on my side?”

“Yes. I am on your side.”

“The side ofjustice, right?”

“I hope so, Mary.”

She looked around the room, either weighing her options or searching for the right words, I didn't know which. Then she turned back. Her eyes locked onto the piece of paper between us.

“Dear Brendan,” she said in a whisper.

“Just Brendan?”

“Yes. Please read this to your brother and sister, because you're the big boy in the family”

I took it down verbatim, writing fast to keep up with her.

"Mommy has to be away from you for a while, but it won't be long, I promise. Promise.

“Wherever you are now, I know they are taking good care of you. And if you get lonely, or want to cry, that's okay, too. Crying can help let the sadness out. Everyone does it sometimes, even Mommy, but only because I miss you so much.”

Mary paused, and a pleased look came over her, as if she had just seen something sweet.

Her eyes were fixed on the far wall, and she had an almost heartbreaking smile on her face.

She continued, "When we're all together again, we'll go for a picnic, your favorite. We'll get whatever we want to eat and drive out somewhere pretty and spend the whole day Maybe we'll go swimming, too. Whatever you want, sweetie pie. I'm already looking forward to it.

"And guess what? You have a guardian angel watching over you all the time. That's me.

I give you good-night kisses in your dreams when you go to sleep at night. You don't have to be afraid because I'm right there with you. And you're right here with me."

Mary stopped, shut her eyes, and sighed loudly “I love you very very much. Love, Mommy”

By now, she was leaning much closer to the table than when we'd begun. She held on to the letter with her eyes - still speaking to me in a soft voice. A whisper.

“Put three Xs and three 0's at the bottom. A kiss and a hug for each of my babies.”

Mary, Mary

Chapter 106

THE MORE I HEARD, the more I doubted that Mary Wagner could have invented these three children entirely And I had a bad feeling about what might have happened to them.

I spent the afternoon trying to track the children down.

The Uniform Crime Report came back with a long list of child victims matched to female killers in recent decades. I've heard and read somewhere that shoplifting and the killing of one's own children are the only two crimes that American women commit in equal numbers to men.

If that was true, then this thick, voluminous report only represented half of the child murders on record.

I gritted my teeth, literally and figuratively and did an other run through the disturbing database.

This time, I searched for multiple homicides only With that list compiled, I started wading through.

A few of the more famous names jumped out right away: Susan Smith, who had drowned both her sons in 1994; Andrea Yates, who killed all five of her children after several years of struggling with psychosis and profound postpartum depression.

The list went on and on. None of these female perpetrators could be considered the victims in their cases, but the dominance of severe mental-health issues was clear.

Smith and Yates were both diagnosed with personality and clinical disorders. It was easy to imagine the same could be true of Mary Wagner, but a reliable diagnosis would take more time than we were likely to have together.

That particular question was sidelined a few hours into my research.

I clicked onto a new page and, sadly, found exactly what I was looking for.

A triple homicide in Derby Line, Vermont, on August 2, 1983. All three victims were siblings: Beaulac, Brendan, 8 Beaulac, Ashley, 5 Constantine, Adam, 11 months.

The killer, their mother, was a twenty-six-year-old woman, with the last name Constantine.

First name, Mary.

I cross-referenced the homicide report for local media coverage.

It brought me to an article from a 1983 Caledonian-Record in St. Johnsbury, Vermont.

There was also a grainy black-and-white trial photo of Mary Constantine, seated at a defendant's table. Her face was thinner and younger, but the detached, stony expression was unmistakable, that look she had when she didn't want to feel something, or had felt too much. Jesus.

The woman I knew as Mary Wagner had killed her own children more than twenty years ago, and as far as she was concerned, it had never happened.

I pushed back my chair and took a deep breath.

Here I was, finally, at the center of the labyrinth. Now it was time to start finding my way back out.

Mary, Mary

Chapter 1 07

“NINETEEN EIGHTY-THREE, HUH? Jeez, that's not even this century. All right, hang on a second. I'll try to help you out. If I can.”

I sat through several minutes of tapping keys and riffling paper on the other end of the phone line.

The tapper and riffler was an agent named Barry Medlar, of the Bureau's Albany field office. He was the coordinator of Albany's Crimes Against Children Unit. Every FBI office has a CAC unit, and Albany has oversight for Vermont. I wanted to get as close to the source as I possibly could.

“Here we go,” Medlar said. "Hold on, here she is.

“Constantine, Mary Triple homicide on August second, arrested on the tenth. Let me scroll the rest of this. Okay, here we go. Sentenced NGRI on February first of the following year, with a state-appointed attorney“ ”Not guilty by reason of insanity,” I muttered.