The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

He ignored me, probably thinking he was taking the high road.

  He was such an easy target though. He always had been. “Your agitator?”

  “You’re drunk, stop it,” Matt said, trying and failing to contain a slight smile.

  “I am not,” I said, “I’ve had two beers. You know I just like to make fun of you. What do you think of her?”

  Matt looked at me. I didn’t usually inquire as to what he thought about things. “She’s pretty cool,” he said. “Smart—I think she’s an accountant or something, some finance thing. Do you think you can help her?”

  “I’m going to try,” I said as my mother came back into the dining room. She was carrying a crystal vase full of lilies and miniature gerbera daisies.

  “Did you see these, Roxane?” she said. “Tom brought them by over the weekend. For my birthday.”

  I knew that Tom checked in on her from time to time, which was sweet of him. My brothers didn’t like it though, probably because it made them both look bad. Neither of them had brought birthday flowers. And my brothers would have liked Tom even less if they knew I was sleeping with him. “Pretty,” I said.

  My mother set the flowers down in the center of the table and went back into the kitchen.

  “Now we have to do the sink,” Matt muttered, turning his glare on the flowers. “You know she’ll love it once it’s done.”

  Andrew leaned around the corner, brushing water off his shirt, another victim of the sink in question. He shot the double finger at the flowers. “I’m in,” he said. “Rox?”

  “Oh, whatever,” I said.

  The street was quiet and cloaked in fog when I left around ten thirty. As I slid the key into my car door lock, I could tell something was up: I felt no resistance when I turned it. I squinted at it in the dark for a second, confused. The door was unlocked, and I knew I’d locked it when I went into the house. I spun around and looked at the street, but it was still empty and silent. Then I opened the door and peered in.

  “Great,” I muttered.

  At least nothing appeared to be damaged or missing, but the loose change, hair ties, and pens in the console were moved to one side and the whiskey bottle I’d purchased earlier was resting on the gear shift instead of on the passenger seat where I’d left it. A hoodie that had been on the floor of the backseat was now partially draped over the armrest. I checked the latch on the glove box but it was still locked up tight—good news, because my gun was in there.

  This was the sort of thing you might expect in my own neighborhood, although usually accompanied by the glitter of safety glass on the curb and, if you were lucky, a complimentary brick left on the seat for your trouble. But my mother’s block was usually exempt from petty crime, and nothing had been taken anyway.

  Someone who didn’t belong here had been in my space, and I didn’t like it.

  I straightened up and surveyed the street again. Then I walked down the block and checked out the cars that were parked behind me. Nicer and certainly newer than mine, they nonetheless appeared un-rifled-through. I paused next to an Audi that had what looked like an iPad blatantly sitting on the passenger seat. Seriously? Even around here, that was just asking for trouble. I leaned in closer for a better look and bumped the side mirror with my elbow. A blast of sound made me jump a foot into the air as the car’s alarm began to bleat into the night. I staggered backward a few steps, one hand over my chest. I had to laugh. Jumpy much? I hurried up the block before anyone came out of their houses to ask me what the hell I was doing, because I certainly didn’t have an answer.

  EIGHT

  In the light of day, I could see that whoever had gotten into my car last night must have used a slim jim or a coat hanger. The weather stripping at the bottom of the window was ripped and the blue paint on my door was faintly scratched. Better than a brick through the glass, but it still pissed me off.

  On top of that, I didn’t quite know what my next move should be on Brad Stockton. So far there were three votes for Brad Stockton’s innocence, two maybes on the unnamed dog owner, one strange encounter with the Belmont cops, but zero corroboration for Danielle’s claim that the woman she saw was Sarah. And anyway, locating that woman based on the no information I had about her felt impossible. After all, beyond a credit-card trail and the unlikely event another motorist remembered me, there’d be no trace of me at the last gas station I visited either. But that was still all I had, and I wasn’t quite ready to cry uncle.

  After I got a cup of tea and a muffin at the gas station, I showed my sketch to the morning clerk with no success, and then holed up in the car in the parking lot. I was hoping to spot the Sarah look-alike, but I’d settle for a brown curly dog, a red sedan, or a green pickup. Something to corroborate even a piece of Danielle’s story. But all I found was rain, a thin, icy drizzle that made everyone tuck their chins to their collars and dash in and out of their vehicles. Ordinarily I didn’t mind spending a lot of time in the car, even in shitty weather, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the fact that someone had been pawing around in here last night, and it made my skin crawl.

  By two o’clock, I’d been watching for a few hours—minus a break for lunch of melitzanosalata and pita at Taverna Athena—and I was restless and very cold. Optimistically I had brought my Nikon D750, but so far there was nothing remotely worthy of photographing. I turned it on and clicked through the images saved on the memory card. The last time I had used it was last January, when I had taken pictures of a real-estate broker suspected—correctly—of stepping out on his wife. The good old days, when my cases were straightforward.

  Between Novotny, Kenny, Brad, and Cass, I had four votes for the likelihood of Sarah being dead. So far, that constituted an overwhelming majority. But unfortunately none of those four were paying me.

  Danielle’s endgame was to find evidence that could help her brother, though, not just to locate the woman she saw, and I was starting to wonder if there might be another way I could go about it. The murder of Sarah’s parents didn’t seem like one of chance. It wasn’t a robbery, a random home invasion, or a serial crime—or was it? With one eye still on the scene in front of me, I put away the camera and opened my laptop. Tom said the police had closed the Cook case fast, which made sense, since there would have been a lot of pressure. And regardless of how they made the leap to getting a warrant for Brad Stockton’s car, they hit pay dirt with that search. They wouldn’t have had to look any further after that, wouldn’t have bothered to look at past cases or anywhere else. And if a similar modus operandi had been used since then, I doubted that anyone would have volunteered to revisit the investigation.

  I tapped my fingers lightly on my keyboard without typing anything for a minute, thinking. Then I turned my attention to my network of databases and started a clunky search for stabbing deaths in Franklin County. There were roughly one hundred homicides in the county each year. Of them, ten percent had used knives or cutting instruments as murder weapons. I went back as far as 1990, which meant two hundred and fifty stabbings to consider.

  It might be easier just to wait for the dog lady.

  But I alternated between watching the street and reading through reports for a while. Bar dispute, domestic, domestic, drug-related home invasion, teenage girl charged with stabbing her friend in the arm with a homemade shiv, man stabbed to death in his North Linden home, no suspects. But forty minutes into it, I saw the word Belmont in an entry from the year before the Cook murders, and I got excited. The crimes appeared to be very different, but the victim, Mallory Evans, was eighteen years old, close in age to Sarah. To Brad Stockton, too. Wondering if they all knew each other, I opened a new browser tab and searched the Dispatch database for Mallory’s name.

  The body of a Belmont woman who was reported missing last May has been found in southeast Columbus. A man hiking in the woods near I-270 and State Route 33 on December 5 discovered the body of Mallory Evans, 18, buried in a shallow grave.

  Evans had multiple stab wounds, a police spokesper
son said.

  Evans was last seen at her Belmont home at 73 Providence Street on Friday, May 25, at 10 p.m. There had been no confirmed sightings of Evans since her disappearance.

  Police are asking anyone with information to call the homicide squad at 614-645-4730. Detective Frank Weary is the primary investigator.

  Frank Weary.

  I reread it, heat flooding through my face. It still said my father’s name.

  I quickly clicked through the other search results, but none of them contained much more detail or mentioned my father. The case appeared to be unsolved. Although my objective had been to try to establish a pattern, actually finding a similar crime jarred me a little, especially one that my father had worked. What were the odds? I was still staring at the screen when I heard a vehicle pulling in behind me, and I turned around to see a Belmont police cruiser parking perpendicular to my bumper.

  “Now what,” I muttered. I put my computer on the passenger seat and got out of the car, too keyed up to sit still. It had stopped raining but the air was damp and cold. The cop took his time getting out of the cruiser. This guy was older than the officer from the other night, fiftyish and tall with short silver hair and a neat goatee. He was good-looking in a reliable sort of way, like he could build you a hell of a cabin. I could see sergeant’s bars on his sleeve through his tinted window. “Good afternoon,” he said.

  “Hi,” I said. “Complaint about loitering, right?”

  He walked over to me, nodding. His name tag said J. Derrow. “Can you tell me what you’re up to?”

  “I’m waiting for someone. Well, looking for someone. I’m a detective, private.”

  “Oh yeah?” he said pleasantly. “Can I see some ID?”

  I leaned into my car and got out my license. He glanced at it briefly and handed it back.

  “What brings you to Belmont?”

  Since he’d already asked the same question, I gave him roughly the same answer. “Just looking into something.”

  Derrow smiled. “Come on, humor me. I always thought about going private myself, after my thirty.” He looked skyward. “Four more years.”

  He would have been a cop when the Cooks were murdered, I realized. “Do you remember a case about fifteen years ago, a double murder here in Belmont? A married couple were stabbed to death, and their daughter vanished?”

  Derrow’s expression darkened. “Garrett Cook was a friend of mine,” he said.

  I opened my mouth to respond, but he kept talking.

  “Is that what you’re looking into? We got the guy already, thank God, and he’s on death row, where he belongs.” He ran a hand over his face. “We get this every now and then, people nosing around here, looking for details on the case. Like their house, before it got torn down. Always people in there looking for ghosts.”

  “I’m sorry, about your friend,” I said quickly, and he nodded. “And I’m not trying to bring back bad memories. Just following up on a lead that Sarah might have been spotted here.”

  “Here?” Derrow said. He twirled a finger around atmospherically to indicate the general vicinity. “Let me guess. Stockton’s sister told you that.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted.

  He nodded slowly and sadly. “Nice girl, but maybe not too realistic. She comes in to the station sometimes, to ask about something she heard of, something she saw on CourtTV, what about DNA testing, what about this, what about that. I’ll tell you what we always tell her: The case is closed for a reason. Because it’s solved. You know he had the knife in his car, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And he had a record, too.”

  “Kid stuff, though, right?”

  “If you call breaking into a teacher’s car and slicing up the seats kid stuff, sure,” Derrow said.

  I felt my eyebrows go up. “Oh?”

  “Not sure of the details, but it was over some kind of beef at school,” he said, shaking his head. “He got suspended. She left the school, didn’t even stick around long enough to press charges. I sure wish she would’ve, though. Belmont’s a nice town, and we never had any trouble before Brad Stockton.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this. But based on what I’d just read about Mallory Evans’s murder the year before the Cooks were killed, it wasn’t entirely accurate that Belmont never had any trouble before Brad. “I just learned about another case though,” I said. “A young woman named Mallory Evans?”

  It was his turn to raise his eyebrows. “You know your local history,” he said. “Mallory Evans, poor soul. We weren’t part of that investigation, on account of where she was found, that was inside the Columbus city limits. But there was always a rumor floating around that it was someone she went to school with.”

  “Really.”

  “Nothing concrete, but yeah. Never even could find a name to investigate. The Homicide boys from Columbus didn’t want to haul in every student for questioning, which I guess makes sense. Parents would lose their minds,” Derrow said, shrugging. “But if I were you, I’d cut my losses. Stockton’s not somebody worth fighting for.” He added, “People around here get a little jumpy, so I’m not going to jam you up for loitering. But maybe it’s time for you to be on your way.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I was starting to feel that way myself. I was now in the murky middle of the case, where the early intrigue of the mystery had burned off, leaving me with the bitter taste of inadequate facts and loose ends in my mouth. But after Derrow left and I pulled out of the bank parking lot, I drove back across the street to Taverna Athena. It would be easier to blend in there, and I figured it would buy me another hour or so before I gave up for the day. Although I was cold, I knew I only had so long before I was lulled into stakeout complacency, where even if my subject walked right by me, I might not even notice.

  Which is almost exactly what happened.

  NINE

  Shortly after four o’clock, a brown, curly-haired dog strolled into view. I watched it idly for a few seconds, nothing registering in my brain yet. But then I noticed the woman on the other end of the dog’s leash: the woman from the sketch.

  “Thank you,” I murmured to the universe. I grabbed my keys out of the ignition and bolted across the street, narrowly avoiding getting hit by no fewer than three cars. “Sadie,” I called, for lack of a better idea.

  The woman stopped in front of a ranch house two doors down from the gas station and turned around, smiling expectantly. She was about five-seven, slim, wearing a hip-length grey wool peacoat. Her hair, dark blond and cut into long layers around her ruddy face, was wind-whipped and shiny. As I jogged over to her, the smile turned confused. “Hi?” she said.

  “Hi,” I said, trying to catch my breath. “This is Sadie, right?”

  She glanced down at her dog, tugging on the leash slightly. “Yes? Do I know you?”

  “No,” I said. “Listen, this is going to sound nuts. I’m a private investigator and I’ve been trying to locate a woman matching your description.” I showed her my license and gave her one of my cards.

  “Really,” she said. Now she seemed amused. “My husband is going to love this, he reads nothing but mystery novels. What did this woman who matches my description do? Allegedly.” She had a wicked little grin. I liked her.

  Her name was Jillian Pizzuti. She lived three streets over, and routinely came by the gas station, both to fill up her car and when she walked her dog. “There aren’t sidewalks on the residential streets,” she explained, “and people around here drive like maniacs. I’ve almost gotten hit more times than I can count. So I stick to Clover as much as I can.”

  I asked her if she remembered the night of November 2. “It was a Thursday,” I added. “Clear skies, if that helps.”

  “That was two weeks ago,” Jillian said.

  “I know.”

  “It’s possible,” she said. Sadie whined, straining against the leash as another woman with a dog walked past us. “I really have no idea.” She pulled out her phone and opene
d her calendar for that night, but it revealed nothing. “I’m sorry.”

  “Do you drive a red sedan?” I asked her, thinking of what Danielle had told me about the cars. “Or a green pickup truck?”

  “White hatchback,” she said.

  I knew it had been a long shot, so I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but it felt like a door closing in my face. I thanked her for her time and patted Sadie on her curly head.

  “I hope you find her, whoever she is,” Jillian said.

  I went back to my car—using the crosswalk this time—and slumped inside. It wasn’t the same as definitive proof. But it did seem likely that Danielle had seen Jillian Pizzuti that night, not Sarah, which meant that my one solid lead in this case was a done deal already.

  * * *

  The plumber’s van sitting in my mother’s driveway should have told me to steer clear, but it didn’t. When I went into the house I could hear my mother and her neighbor Rita talking at the kitchen table. “Oh, Gen, I know,” Rita was saying, “but his heart was in the right place.”

  “I told him, I didn’t want a new sink,” my mother said, her voice thick.

  I froze, hand still on the doorknob. I considered sneaking back out. But I was here on a mission. “Hey, Mom,” I called. “Hey, Rita.”

  “Hi, love,” my mother said coolly as I crossed through the kitchen. “Rita brought pizzelles, you remember how you used to go nuts for those.”

  “The almond ones are a little soft,” Rita said, “but the anise came out perfect.”

  I shoved a cookie into my mouth and looked at the sink, which was partially disassembled on the counter and floor. “Are they just putting in new pipes?” I said.

  “New everything,” my mother said. “New pipes, new faucet, plus something to do with a P-trap and compression washers. Did you know your brother was doing this?”

  I looked at her. I knew better than to answer that. “I think once it’s done, you’ll like it,” I said.

  Rita took that as her cue. “I’m leaving the anise pizzelles for you, Roxane,” she said, pulling on her coat. “Genevieve, I’ll call you later, sweetie.”