The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  After she left, my mother stood up and cleared away the coffee cups. But the sink was only a sink in theory at the moment, so she put them on the stove and crossed her arms. “Someone came by for you this morning,” she said.

  “Someone?”

  “I didn’t catch his name. A boy you knew growing up, maybe.”

  I broke another pizzelle in half and nibbled the lacy edge of it. “What makes you think that? Did he look familiar?”

  “Well,” my mother said, “no. But he asked if you were home. I told him you hadn’t lived here since high school and he got a little bit sheepish. He said, right, that makes sense. Then he left.”

  I thought about that for a second, chewing. “What did he look like?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, he had one of those piercings in his eyebrow.” She reached for a cookie. “And his tongue, too. He kept clicking it around in his mouth. Isn’t that bad for their teeth?”

  “Probably,” I said, impatient. “What else? What was he wearing?”

  “A jacket, a camo jacket with leaves on it, like hunters wear. And a knit hat.”

  The individual she was describing didn’t sound like anyone I knew. But my thoughts snagged on the camo jacket. Like hunters wear. The knife Garrett and Elaine Cook had been killed with was a hunting knife. A random connection, maybe. No doubt hunting jackets were just as common around here as Ohio State bumper stickers. But I still didn’t like the thought of this person looking for me, especially not after the car-rifling incident last night. “So he just knocked on the door and asked if I was home?”

  “He didn’t really knock, I guess,” my mother said. “I was just walking by the front door and I heard someone opening the storm door. I was expecting a package, so I thought it was the mailman. Why—do you know who it was?”

  I ate the rest of my second cookie and shook my head. I didn’t want to worry her. She’d dealt with enough this year, and she had never been happy with my career choice anyway. “Probably someone from school, like you said. If he comes back, let me know?”

  My mother nodded. Her chilly expression had warmed up a bit, until she said, “So what brings you over here again?”

  I sighed. I knew she wasn’t going to like my reason for coming. “Dad’s files, his notebooks and stuff,” I said anyway. “What happened to all that?”

  “What?”

  “You know he kept everything. What did you do with his old case files?”

  My mother’s expression went tight. “Well, I suppose it’s all still in his office.”

  “What do you mean, you suppose?” I said.

  She crossed the kitchen and began searching through her purse. “I don’t know what all is in there. It’s locked.”

  I stared at her. “You mean you haven’t been in the office since—” I stopped. “Since February?”

  “No, Roxane, I have not,” my mother said. “I’m going out to smoke.”

  She had been a smoker all my life, but my father had hated the smell and always made her go outside. There was no one to stop her from smoking in the house now, but she still didn’t do it. She went out through the back door without a coat and I saw her through the window, shivering in the cold, a cigarette poised halfway to her mouth.

  Upstairs, I jiggled the knob on my father’s locked office door and regarded the cheap wood grain of its surface. The house was small and my brothers and I had always shared bedrooms in various permutations, but this room had always been Frank’s office. I guess he needed a place for his record collection and his notebooks and his booze, even though all he did in there was drink and make late-night phone calls. Once, when I was nine, I picked up the phone to call a friend and I heard my father on the line, talking to one of his women. Her voice was breathy and she was crying. My father’s voice was just his voice, rough and flat.

  He’d always kept the door to the office locked, and none of us had ever dared even to attempt to breach it. So this could have been significant. Should have been. I felt like a thief for robbing anyone else of the opportunity to witness this, the opening of the tomb. We could have left it sealed up for months, years, decades, opening it only on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, when all of us had dealt with it already. We could have toasted to him, shared an anecdote or two—remember the time he … But instead I jimmied the door open with the nail file from the Swiss army knife on my key chain and that was that.

  The air inside the small room was dusty and cold and smelled just like my father, like whiskey and Aqua Velva. One wall was mostly taken up by a particleboard desk, the front right corner going gummy from years of a tumbler of melting ice sitting in the same place. A big, nineties-era computer monitor occupied the desk, plus a scratch pad with a single, indecipherable word written on it in my father’s hopeless handwriting. The other wall was lined with bookcases, haphazardly piled with random artifacts of his life: baseball glove, a framed picture of my grandparents, rows of cracked-spine Western paperbacks, records—mostly jazz, some in sleeves but some just stacked on top of each other—manuals to long-gone cars and appliances, someone’s graduation tassel, and, finally, a dozen whiskey bottles, arranged on the top like trophies from his proudest accomplishments. I took in the labels. He’d been holding out on us all this time, stocking the liquor cabinet downstairs with cheap stuff.

  I grabbed a bottle at random and took a long pull and sat down in the black leather executive chair at the desk, opening drawers. A rubber-band ball, a roll of stamps, a matte black Smith & Wesson 327 revolver. I picked it up, expecting it to somehow feel different from the way my own 327 felt, but it didn’t. I set the gun down as my phone started vibrating in my pocket.

  Danielle.

  My stomach flip-flopped. I couldn’t answer, not yet. She left a voice mail asking me to call back with an update, which I also couldn’t manage. To my credit, I had only been on the case for four days. But to her credit, four days was a hell of a long time when her brother only had two more months to live. And four days had been plenty of time for me to debunk her version of events, but not nearly long enough to come up with a new theory. I put my phone away and continued the search.

  I found what I was looking for in the filing-cabinet drawers on the other side of the desk: the notebooks I remembered him always carrying, little black Moleskines with pages soft from wear and dense with ink. There were dozens of them stacked in the bottom drawer. I pulled out a stack and thumbed through a couple. His writing was somewhat more legible here, probably—hopefully—because he was sober while working. But his entries didn’t appear to be dated, the notebooks basically just endless volumes of one giant list. I paused briefly on a page with an uneven crime-scene diagram scribbled onto it, stick figures like a child’s drawing, except they were dead bodies.

  My phone rang again. This time the caller ID said Unknown. I answered, hoping that it was somebody calling to solve my case for me and not a ploy on Danielle’s part to trick me into picking up. But all I heard was the sound of breathing in my ear.

  “Hello?” I repeated. “Who is this?”

  The breathing continued. A creeping dread began to inch up my spine. I leaned on my elbow, trying to be logical about this, extract information from the sound. But there wasn’t anything—no background noise, no clues. Just the rhythmic breath, which got more menacing the longer I listened to it. When I couldn’t take it anymore, I hung up. But a few seconds later, the unknown number began calling me again.

  “Hello?” I said.

  There was no response, just the sound of the breathing.

  “Who the hell is this?”

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  I hung up again and slammed the phone down in disgust. Funny how a phone call could feel like an intrusion, a threat, even though the caller wasn’t anywhere near me.

  Right?

  I went to the window and lifted the miniblinds, looking out at the street. But nothing appeared out of the ordinary, no camo jackets or suspicious-looking breathers anywhere to be seen
.

  I glared at my phone and waited for it to ring again, but it didn’t.

  I paged through a few more of the notebooks and then I went back to the kitchen to get a bag to put them in. In the thirty or so minutes I’d been upstairs, the plumber had put the sink back together, a shiny new faucet in place of the lopsided, rusty one that had plagued dish-doers in this house for years. I flipped it on; the water pressure was instant and even. My mother was sitting in the living room watching Dr. Phil fix everybody up. She didn’t look at me.

  “Are you taking care of this?” the plumber said to me, holding up a pink invoice.

  I took it from him and when I looked at the bottom line I about died. Seven hundred dollars. “Hang on a second,” I said.

  I walked down the hall out of earshot and called Matt. “I’m at the house,” I said when he answered. “Who the fuck hired this plumber? It’s seven hundred bucks.”

  There was a briefly stunned pause. “Well,” he said.

  “Matt. I’m over here and someone has to pay the guy now.”

  “So pay him,” my brother said, like the whole thing hadn’t been his idea. “We can sort out the details later.”

  “We were supposed to split it. I don’t have that kind of money,” I said, lowering my voice even more.

  “You can’t cover seven hundred bucks for a few days?” Matt said. “Didn’t Danielle just write you a big old check?”

  I didn’t need any reminders about that. Nor did I need my brother’s judgment. I drew in a sharp breath. Then I hung up on him.

  I went into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. Cold medicine, aspirin, a prescription ointment of some kind. I slammed it closed and stared at my own reflection. Either the mirror was filthy, or I was physically turning as blurry as I felt.

  I tried Andrew next, but he didn’t answer. So I went back to the kitchen and handed the plumber my Visa and tried to give him a withering look. He didn’t notice, or didn’t care. Then I headed upstairs, telling myself that I was not going to page through all of my father’s notebooks before resuming work on my case, or that it wouldn’t just be a stalling tactic if I did.

  TEN

  “Evans, Mallory Lynn,” Tom read to me from a thin stack of printouts that evening. We were sitting on the sofa in the front room of my apartment, a barely touched pizza from Yellow Brick on the table in front of us. I was rolling the rubber-band ball from my father’s office between my palms. “Age eighteen. Cause of death, severe blood loss due to multiple lacerations from a single-edged blade. Evidence of sexual assault, fingernails torn like she had put up a fight, but no DNA. She was wrapped in a blue tarp, which was secured around her body with bungee cords. She was buried approximately ten inches below ground and covered with rocks and leaves.”

  He fanned the pages, summarizing. “According to her husband, she left home after an argument and she never came back.”

  “Husband?” I said. “Even though she was only eighteen?”

  “He was older,” Tom said, “twenty-three. Joshua Evans. They had a six-month-old daughter. Mallory dropped out of high school when she got pregnant.”

  “Oh man.” I leaned back against the cushions and pulled my knees to my chest. The story of Mallory Evans was a bleak one all around.

  “Yeah.” He had come to my apartment straight from his shift and still wore a white dress shirt and tie, his service weapon and gold shield still clipped to his belt. “This was obviously before my time, but Frank talked about it sometimes. This case. It was the tarp, that’s what stuck out to him. That’s the work of someone cold as hell.”

  “For being a bland little suburb, a lot goes on down there,” I said.

  “Yeah, they’ve got their share,” Tom said. “Pretty heavy drug use going on in the public high school back then, maybe now too. Plus the Brad Stockton case.”

  “You couldn’t have mentioned Mallory Evans to me the other night?”

  “Well,” he said, lightly tapping the papers against my shoulder. “The only connection between them is you.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “A single-edged blade? That’s what killed Garrett and Elaine Cook. Feels like that means something.”

  “You sound like Frank.”

  I said nothing. Thinking about Frank not as my father but as Detective Weary gave me a sharp little zap, like touching the tip of your tongue to the coil on a nine-volt battery. I didn’t like it, but it was also hard to stop. The pulse of anxiety I’d had in the pit of my stomach since talking to my mother that afternoon was only getting worse.

  “What about where she was found, any clues there?”

  “Nope,” Tom said after a second. “Looks like it was a party spot for people in the area—bottles, condoms, vials, the whole spread. So forensics back there was pretty hopeless. And the area itself, it’s ten or so acres of woods right on the Columbus city limits, but no specific connection to Mallory.”

  “So what then? No witnesses, no trace evidence, no obvious link to anyone she knew, so it’s just hopelessly unsolvable?” I said.

  “Well, no, I’m sure he threw a lot of time at it,” Tom said. “But when nothing shakes loose right away, it does get a lot harder, it gets buried under other cases that are easier to close—triage, I mean, that’s the only way you can get anywhere. But Frank would revisit old cases from time to time, ask around, call the victim’s family to see if anything new happened.”

  “Which in this case, nothing did.”

  “Correct.”

  I sighed. “Frustrating,” I said, “not knowing.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why do you do it?”

  “Why do you?”

  We looked at each other.

  “What I do,” I said, “is nothing like this. Dead girls left in the woods? Christ.” I stood up and grabbed the pizza box. “Want any more of this?”

  Tom shook his head. “So how did you land here? I thought you were looking for the missing daughter.”

  “I was, but that’s a dead end,” I called on my way to the kitchen. “So I started thinking that the Cook murders might have been part of a pattern.” I opened the fridge and tried to make space for the pizza box. In the hallway, the floorboards creaked as Tom walked toward me. “And I found this, which might look unrelated on the surface, but the Belmont cop I talked to said there had always been rumors about a student from the high school being involved. Then, less than a year later, there’s another murder and a student is involved in that too? It just feels like it means something.”

  “Like what?”

  Tom leaned against the doorway and watched me.

  “I don’t know,” I said. The pizza box was too big to fit and I abandoned it on the stove. “The crimes are very different, but it just makes me wonder. If they’re connected, it opens up a whole bunch of possibilities.” I rubbed the bottom of my foot against the ankle of my jeans. The linoleum floor was cold, thanks to the partly open window. The overactive radiator was currently silent. I reached over to close the window and caught a flash of something through the curtain.

  Then I froze.

  “What’s wrong?” Tom said.

  “Shh,” I said.

  I snatched the curtain aside and jumped away from what I saw: behind the ghost of my own reflection, there was a man on the other side of the glass, looking in at me.

  Knit hat, pierced eyebrow. Our eyes locked for a second, a ringing sound building in my head.

  Then he ducked and started running, his footsteps in the alley audible through the open window.

  I darted down the hall and grabbed my gun from the desk in my office. On the other side of the wall, I could hear my neighbor’s dog yapping furiously. I ran outside, shoeless, but once I hit the street I saw nothing but a pair of taillights disappear around the corner on Ohio Avenue.

  “Dammit,” I said to the empty street. I wondered how long the guy had been lurking outside, if he could hear our conversation through the open window. The thought made me shudder. I ma
de a mental note to call my landlord about the heat for the ten thousandth time.

  “Roxane, what’s going on?” Tom said behind me.

  I turned around and looked at him. His hand rested on the grip of his holstered gun and his expression had gone all-business. “I don’t know,” I said. “I saw someone in the alley, right outside the window.”

  “So you just thought you’d come charging out here in your socks with a gun?”

  “What, you think I don’t know how to use it?”

  He looked at me flatly. “I know you know how to use it,” he said. “But maybe don’t tell me to shh the next time you think you might get a chance to, okay?”

  I sighed. He had a point. “I’ve been getting some strange phone calls. And someone went to my mother’s house, looking for me.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Some guy in a hunting jacket with a pierced tongue.”

  “A hunting jacket?”

  I looked at him.

  He went on, “There was somebody hanging around on the corner when I got here. Hunting jacket, shady-looking. I figured he was there to score.”

  A fair assumption. “Knit hat?” I said.

  “Yeah.” He folded his arms. “There’s always a somebody hanging around on your corner looking shady. I didn’t think much of it. Do you want me to take a look out here?”

  “No, I’m sure it’s nothing,” I said, although I didn’t know who I was telling since clearly neither of us believed me. “It’s cold out here. Let’s go back in.”

  Inside the building, my neighbor Alejandro was on the landing with his dog—a tiny, spastic Chihuahua wearing a little cable-knit sweater—squirming in his arms. “What’s going on, darling?” He looked at Tom over my shoulder and added, “Detective Darling.”

  I climbed the steps and held out my hand for the dog to sniff. “Did you happen to see who she was barking at?” I said.

  Alejandro sighed fabulously. He was in his early twenties and flat broke. But he pulled off broke better than anyone I’d ever met. “I don’t mean to alarm you,” he said, “or disappoint you. But it’s probably Richard.”