The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  If only I knew what it was.

  I pulled over to the curb and slid the car into park and waited. I didn’t bother looking for my registration because this clearly wasn’t going to be a routine traffic stop. Finally, a tall figure got out of the car and approached me.

  I rolled down my window and peered out into the cold, damp night. The man who looked back at me was fifty-five or so, barrel-chested, with a grey-blond buzz cut and narrowed, hooded eyes. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, but instead a windbreaker over a pair of khaki pants. “Good evening, Miss Weary,” he said. “I’m Jake Lassiter, chief of Belmont police.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Let me guess,” I said. “I’ve got a brake light out.”

  He actually took a step back to check, and then he looked annoyed. “Listen, I believe you’ve spoken with a few of my officers before.”

  “I have.”

  “About paying the professional courtesy of announcing when you’ll be down here, asking questions.” He draped one arm over the roof of my car and leaned in. “And yet here you are, unannounced.”

  I felt myself edging slightly away from the door. The air was frigid, and Lassiter was a bit too close to me for comfort. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I wasn’t aware that the professional courtesy was necessary any time I set foot in Belmont. Can I just make a blanket announcement that I’ll be down here off and on for a while?”

  “For a while,” he repeated. He looked over his shoulder, like he wanted to laugh at me with his imaginary backup. “The Cook case is solved. So you asking questions?” he added, turning back to me, his features harder now. “That stops now.” He tapped his hand against the roof of my car with each word, and the hollow sound made me jump a little.

  I wanted to mention that he didn’t have the authority to tell me that, police chief or no. But there was very little point, not if I wanted to go home any time soon. “I understand,” I said.

  “Good,” Lassiter said.

  We stared at each other, cold air whistling in through my open window. The blue and red lights from Lassiter’s car cast an eerie glow against his stony features. His expression said that he was more than happy to stand here for hours.

  “May I leave now?” I said.

  He watched me for another few seconds, and then he removed his arm from my car. “You have a great night,” he said.

  He retreated and got back into his cruiser, but he didn’t go anywhere, just stayed put with those blinding lights whirling in my mirror. I put the car in gear and darted back into traffic, eager to get away before he changed his mind.

  * * *

  When I got home, it was about eighty degrees in my apartment. I peeled off my clothes and lay in bed with a whiskey bottle and looked up at the stars. I wasn’t making any friends or any progress, and though I wasn’t tired yet, I wanted to be done with the day. I listened for the sounds of anyone else nosing around my building, but I heard nothing.

  Yet.

  I needed to think about something else.

  I took a long swallow from the bottle and scrolled through the numbers in my phone, breezing past the streak of calls from the unknown number, not wanting to think about that either. Finally I paused on the listing for Catherine’s studio at home. She eschewed technology, including cell phones. I used to tell her she was nuts for that, but now I was starting to think she had the right idea.

  I dialed the number and her husband answered.

  I hung up.

  THIRTEEN

  On Saturday, I called Kenny Brayfield and told him I had some follow-up questions for him. I was looking for something that could shut down the remote possibility of Brad Stockton’s involvement in Mallory Evans’s death so I could move on, although I kept this to myself on the phone. He invited me to drop by his house in Belmont and when I got there, I saw that house was a little modest. It was easily the largest single-family dwelling I’d ever laid eyes on—a huge stone McMansion with a long circular driveway and a three-car garage, all inside a dramatic wrought-iron fence. I pulled up to the gate and rolled down my window and stated my case into a speaker, thinking the gold-flake vodka business must be damn good. But when I pulled up to the house, I saw an older, better-dressed version of Kenny in the garage loading suitcases into the trunk of a late-model Lexus, and it all made sense: Kenny still lived with his parents.

  Kenny was waiting for me on the porch. He was wearing velour sweatpants and a white undershirt and was barefoot and drinking a green substance from a tall plastic cup. “Hey, you found the place.”

  “Hard to miss it,” I said.

  “Well, come in, there’s breakfast. Quiche Lorraine, or you can try this, I’m doing this Superfood RX Herbal Smoothie.” He waggled his cup at me and the beverage made a pond-like sloshing sound. “It’s got that ginkgo stuff in it, boosts energy and focus.”

  I held up a hand. “Another client of yours?”

  He deflated a little. “Yeah,” he said. “Want to give it a try? It comes in a bunch of flavors.”

  I said I’d just have a cup of tea and followed him inside. The interior of the house was all vaulted ceilings and plush off-white carpet, with double curved staircases arcing away from the foyer to a second-floor walkway. The kitchen was the size of a normal house’s lower level, with gleaming countertops that gave no indication food had ever been prepared in there. But a large glass baking dish of the aforementioned quiche sat on a silicon trivet, untouched.

  “What do you think of the place?” Kenny said as he poured hot water from a one-cup coffeemaker. He brought it to me on a saucer, along with a tiny wooden chest of tea bags.

  “How many people live here?” I said, taking a seat at the breakfast bar.

  “Me and my folks, right now,” Kenny said. “And my sister’s moving back in a couple weeks—she’s getting divorced. Plus the housekeeper.”

  “Cramped quarters,” I said.

  He grinned at me. “You’re funny.”

  Kenny’s dad came back in from the garage and, barely looking at me, said, “Okay, we’re taking off. We’ll be back Tuesday morning, so please no get-togethers in the house this time. Okay, Kenny?”

  “Yes, sir,” Kenny said, straightening up.

  His dad gave a slightly irritated smile and left again. Kenny seemed a little bit old to require such a warning. But maybe with money like this, you never had to grow up at all. Without missing a beat, he said, “I’m having some people over Monday night for the Browns-Steelers game. Around seven. You should come.”

  I had to laugh. “Yeah, we’ll see,” I said.

  “We have an indoor pool, it’s heated to eighty-five degrees. When it’s cold out, damn, there’s nothing better. It’ll be chill, just some old friends. I mean it, if you’re around, you should come.”

  “Indoor pool,” I said, “I bet that made for some wild prom afterparties.”

  He sipped his pond-water smoothie. “Oh man, you know it. This house was the place to be. My folks were always so cool, they were down with us having booze, no problem. My mom knows how to throw a party, that’s for sure. She’s the one who got me started in the promotion biz—it’s like our vocation.”

  I wasn’t sure that event promotion counted as a vocation. Rather than comment on it, I decided to use the subject to start talking about Brad. “Did Brad come to your parties?”

  “Oh yeah,” Kenny said. “Brad’s, you know, one of those introverted-type people, and sometimes you could just see him going into this little room in his head where he could write his poems. But he was always down for whatever.”

  “Who else was in your group of friends?”

  “Danielle,” he said. “She was two years behind us in school but she could hang. And this kid Brian Zollinger, we were close with him, but he moved away junior year. We’d party with anyone, as long as they were cool as fuck.”

  My ears perked up. Brian Zollinger was one of the other crossed-out names on the list in my father’s notebook. Plus, from what I knew about Mallory, she was a
partyer too. This seemed like a good place to jump in with it. “What about a girl named Mallory Evans?”

  Kenny’s face closed right up. So my instinct not to open with that had been correct, I thought with dismay. “Mallory. Wow, I haven’t thought about her in years.”

  “Did you know her?”

  “Sure, just from around.”

  “Did Brad know her?”

  He seemed uneasy. I couldn’t tell what, exactly, was the source of his uneasiness, but it was worth noting. “I guess. I don’t know.”

  “She and Sarah,” I said, “they were kind of similar, looks-wise?”

  “I don’t know. I guess.”

  “You know what happened to her, right?”

  “Yeah, that was crazy.” He set his cup down and spent a long time lining it up with the edge of the counter like a man trying to buy some time. “Why are you asking about her?”

  “It’s just strange,” I said, “two violent crimes happening in a place like Belmont only a few months apart.”

  Kenny nodded but didn’t say anything, even though he’d been the definition of chatty a moment earlier. I’d clearly hit a nerve.

  “So Mallory and Brad,” I said. “Were they in any classes together or anything like that?”

  “You’d really have to ask him that, I’m not sure,” Kenny said.

  I could see I wasn’t going to get any more out of him about that, so I tried another angle, “Did you ever hear any rumors about what might have happened?”

  “You know, I’m sorry to cut out on you but I need to run some errands, okay?”

  I stared at him. This was an awfully abrupt end to the conversation, after the production he’d made of offering me the tea chest. “Are you throwing me out?”

  “No, no,” he said, although he clearly was. He smiled halfheartedly. “I just have some shit I need to do. It’s not a big deal, right?”

  “No, I get it,” I said.

  But I didn’t. I had been hoping that Kenny would steer me away from the idea that Brad could have been behind Mallory Evans’s death too, but instead he steered me a little closer. He hadn’t told me much, but the change in his attitude said a lot.

  * * *

  I clearly needed to talk to Brad, but when I left Kenny’s house, it was too late in the day for a road trip down to the prison. Instead, I hit up a Starbucks drive-through for another cup of tea and sat in the parking lot, poaching their Wi-Fi to look into the other names that appeared with Brad Stockton’s in my father’s notes.

  First, I nosed around on Brian Zollinger, the guy Kenny said had moved away junior year. The entry next to his name in the notebook said Bullying, plagiarism. That hardly seemed relevant to my case, but I pulled background info on him anyway. He lived in Chicago and posted a lot on Twitter about craft beers. I turned up a phone number for him and left a voice mail, requesting a call back.

  The next name on the list was Dylan Lapka. His entry read B&E, which I interpreted as breaking and entering. But I determined in short order that he was dead—car accident, a decade ago.

  Zero for two so far.

  I had better luck on the third name: Michael Timton, sealed JV record? He had a Columbus address, and he also had an adult record that rendered his sealed juvie crimes irrelevant: he was fresh out of jail from a sexual assault six years ago.

  Mallory Evans had been sexually assaulted.

  This was worth paying attention to. Michael Timton’s name was crossed out in Frank’s notes—for who knew what reasons—but since he was local, I figured I could just ask him.

  First, I tried his home address, a shabby James Road bungalow with an overturned children’s picnic table in the yard. A skinny blond woman answered the door with an urgent enthusiasm that told me she was expecting somebody but it wasn’t me. “Oh,” she said, scratching at the inside of her elbow.

  “Looking for Michael,” I told her. “Is he around?”

  “No, he’s at work.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “I don’t want to make any trouble for him,” I said, a hedge that sometimes worked. “I just need to talk to him.”

  The woman leaned on the doorframe. She was wearing a long, ratty green cardigan over pajamas. I was willing to bet that under her sleeves, her arms were dotted with needle marks, and that the person she’d been hoping was at the door had something to do with that. She glanced at the street behind me and said, quickly, “He works at the electronics drop-off over by Walmart. Look, can you leave? I’m waiting for a friend.”

  “Hey, sure,” I said. “Thanks a lot.”

  She closed the door without saying anything else.

  A few more minutes of research yielded the information I needed: Powered Up, an electronics recycling center on Main Street that was run by a reentry support group, offering employment and training to recently released felons. They accepted broken televisions and fax machines and microwaves—the kind of electronics you’re not supposed to throw in a Dumpster—and repaired them, then resold them in their retail storefront, which closed at 4 p.m. on Saturdays. So I hurried over to Main and found Powered Up in a mostly vacant plaza across the street from the Walmart, hoping he’d actually be there.

  He was. I recognized him from his mug shot on the sex-offender registry and spotted him from the street as he wrestled what appeared to be a miniature organ out of the trunk of an ancient Bonneville and into the open door of the shop. A well-dressed, elderly lady nodded approvingly after him and then got into the car and drove away. That left the lot empty. I pulled into a parking spot and a few seconds later, Michael Timton came back out. He was big and angry-looking, wearing one of those back braces that professional movers use. His forearms were covered with tattoos, some crude and improvised. He looked like the type of person to own a camo jacket, but he didn’t have any facial piercings.

  “Can I help you,” he said, like he had no interest in doing so at all.

  I got out of the car. “Hi, Michael,” I said.

  He just looked at me.

  “My name is Roxane Weary. I’m a private investigator and I was hoping to ask you a few questions”—here his features screwed up into an expression of pure hatred—“about someone you went to high school with.” Then his face relaxed into confusion. “In Belmont.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

  “I don’t—high school? Seriously?”

  “Seriously,” I said.

  He folded his arms over his chest. “Who?”

  “A classmate of yours, Mallory Evans. She was murdered your senior year.”

  “Seriously?” he said again. “Why?”

  “Did you know her?”

  “No. I have to go back to work.”

  “You didn’t know her at all?”

  Michael scowled at me. I opened my wallet and teased up the corner of a twenty dollar bill. He cocked his head at it. I pulled out forty bucks and held it nonchalantly in my hand.

  “I didn’t really know her, no,” he said. He released the scowl and went back to looking confused. “I knew who she was, but we weren’t in the same circles. I was a jock, she was, like, a druggie.”

  I didn’t say anything about the woman who had pointed me here. It seemed like Michael Timton had fallen on trouble of his own design no matter which way you sliced it. “The police questioned you after she was murdered, didn’t they?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Why? If you didn’t know her?”

  “You’d have to ask them.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  He scowled again. He appeared to have two modes: irritated and puzzled. “There was this girl,” he said, “she claimed I forced her to suck my dick at a party. Pressed these bullshit charges and everything. And then I was like on a list or something. A list of guys the police bothered any time some bitch claimed she saw someone looking at her funny.”

  Thoroughly charmed by him, I said, “So what
did the police want to know?”

  “Where I was and shit. The night she was last seen.”

  “And where were you?”

  “I wasn’t even in town. I was in Virginia with my family for my grandpa’s funeral.”

  I let out a sigh. That seemed like a pretty solid reason for his name to be crossed out in my father’s notes. “And that was the end of it?”

  “Yeah.” He held out his hand. “Give me my money.”

  I didn’t feel like I’d gotten forty bucks’ worth of information out of him. “What about Brad Stockton,” I said, “did you know him?”

  “Brad?” He almost smiled. “That dude. Yeah. You know he’s on death row.”

  “He is.”

  “Why are you asking about him?”

  “I heard he got questioned about Mallory Evans too,” I said. “Was he like you, always getting bothered by the police?”

  “I didn’t know him too well. But yeah, he was in trouble a lot. I know he got suspended, because of some poem.”

  “A poem?”

  “He was always writing these dumb poems in his notebook. He wrote one about this substitute teacher we had, about how much he wanted to fuck her. It got around and he got in big trouble for it, and then he sliced up her car or something.” He looked smug, like this was an act he’d never stoop to. “She never came back after that.”

  I didn’t like the sound of this at all. The car vandalism was bad enough, but I had been thinking it was over something like a bad grade, not a sexually explicit poem. “Imagine that.”

  “Look, I can’t just stand out here, lady,” he said. “Can I have my money?”