The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

I sighed and shoved my whiskey glass away. “I’m the world’s worst detective. I set out to prove this woman was still alive, and instead I found her body. I was supposed to be helping my client’s brother get out of jail, but instead I think I might have implicated him in another crime. I want to be wrong, but I don’t know. Not now.”

  “No you don’t,” Tom said. “Want to be wrong, that is. You wish the world was different. That’s something else. And the world’s worst detective wouldn’t have found out anything about anything, so I’m afraid you don’t get to claim that title.”

  I stared up at our reflection in the half-moon-shaped mirror behind the beer taps. I wanted to ask how his symphony date with Pam had gone but I didn’t want to know. Based on the fact that we were in this bar and not in my bed, I probably already had the answer anyway. Months of me telling Tom that it was just sex somehow left me disappointed when he finally took my word for it. I didn’t even understand myself. It was no wonder I didn’t understand my case. But Tom was a good guy to have on my side either way. “Look at us,” I said, but then I left it at that.

  EIGHTEEN

  The phone woke me out of a dream again, but this time the room was still dark and the house was quiet and I hadn’t been asleep long enough to be hungover. The glowing red numerals of my clock told me it was seven forty. I sat up and grabbed for the phone and my stomach dropped: Danielle Stockton. I thought about rejecting the call but I didn’t, figuring I at least owed her that much.

  But she didn’t even let me say hello. “They found another body,” she said breathlessly.

  I bit my lip. She sounded way too excited about that. “I know,” I said, “I tried to call you yesterday—”

  “What if you were right, Roxane? About Mallory, that whoever killed her also killed Sarah’s parents, and maybe now this other girl, like a pattern?”

  I turned the light on, something about the darkness keeping my thoughts from connecting. “Danielle, that’s not—”

  “They’re saying that she was a runaway, that the police didn’t even look for her.”

  Now I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it for a second before responding. “What are you talking about?”

  “They identified the body,” she said impatiently, “her name is Colleen something and she’s been missing for the last eight years.”

  I automatically jumped to my feet. “What?” I said. Thinking that eight years ago, Brad Stockton was already in prison. What the hell was going on? My heart was pounding. I immediately went into the office and booted up my computer. “Where did you hear that?”

  “Kenny just called to tell me,” Danielle said.

  I paced the length of my office. There was still some whiskey in my system but my confusion felt separate from that. What did Kenny Brayfield know about this?

  “I’m sorry, I know it’s early,” my client continued. “But I just, look, I know I was kind of harsh the other day, when I acted like you didn’t know what you were doing. Basically, I thought you were nuts. But now—I don’t know. You might be on to something.”

  I slumped into my desk chair and leaned hard on my hand, waiting for the wireless to connect. “Yeah, I thought so too,” I said.

  Promising to check in with her later, I hung up. I had become the worst detective in the world. Good detectives—or even okay ones—didn’t go around erroneously implicating their own clients of additional crimes. The body wasn’t Sarah. This realization was like a bomb blast. The location. The blond hair. I’d been so certain. And furthermore, whoever it was, Brad couldn’t have killed her. Although yesterday I’d wanted to be wrong, now I just felt guilty. I navigated to the Dispatch’s Web site, breezing past what felt like dozens of articles about the Ohio State football team. Then, I found it:

  Human remains found by police in Belmont development site.

  “Right,” I muttered.

  I scanned the article. Yeah, yeah, the future site of eight hundred luxury apartments, whatever.

  Police Chief Jacob Lassiter says the discovery might be linked to a missing Belmont teen, but it’s too early to tell. Acting on a tip from other law enforcement, investigators located the human remains in a wooded area late Sunday afternoon. Lassiter said dental records will be collected from the missing 18-year-old woman’s parents to confirm if the remains are hers. The results won’t be returned for weeks.

  Other law enforcement. I guessed that was me. I was sure there were other ways that Lassiter would have preferred to describe me. The short article didn’t say anything more, no mention of any Colleen. It could be talking about anyone. But it certainly wasn’t talking about Sarah Cook.

  * * *

  The Belmont police station resembled a motel that had been built to look like a castle, an L-shaped brick building with tall tinted windows perched under dramatic notched eaves. I went in and asked to see Chief Lassiter, having assumed—correctly—that he’d be working overtime, given the developments of yesterday. I was telling myself that I was actually doing Lassiter a favor by dropping in to tell him I was in Belmont. But, of course. I just wanted information from him, a last name to go with Colleen, for starters. He probably knew I wasn’t just offering a professional courtesy, and that was probably why he kept me waiting for close to an hour. I drifted from one end of the small lobby to the other, half looking at the framed pictures on the walls of various uniformed officers doing various good works in the community: teaching self-defense classes, posing with the graduates of Junior Police Explorers and opportunity youth programs, painting over graffiti on the siding of a Lutheran church. It was all very touching. Finally, the chief escorted me back to his office without saying anything.

  Once he’d closed the door, he turned on me. “What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you to stay away from my town?”

  “Look, you can’t actually tell me to stay out of Belmont, you know that, right?”

  His silence confirmed that he did.

  “Believe it if you like, but I am not interested in making any kind of trouble for you,” I went on. “I work for Danielle Stockton. She thinks her brother is innocent, and since his execution date is in less than two months, she wants to give it one last try. Now, I’ll admit that yesterday, I didn’t think that was looking too good for her because the whole reason I even went to Clover Point was something Brad told me, that it used to be a make-out spot.”

  “It did,” Lassiter allowed.

  I tried to sound as harmless and open as possible by laying it all out for him, in the hopes he’d relax and just tell me what I wanted to know. “He told me that the rumor used to be that Mallory Evans was not just buried there, but killed there. That she went up to the overlook with somebody. And yesterday, especially after finding those bones in just about the same spot that Mallory was buried, I was thinking that person must’ve been him. That’s why I thought the body was Sarah. That he had killed both women.”

  “It’s not Sarah.”

  “I know that. How’d they make the ID so fast? Tentative ID,” I said, so that we didn’t get into a semantic debate.

  He leaned back in his chair and sighed, resting a hand over his midsection like something hurt. My act seemed to be working, because eventually he started talking instead of telling me again to get out of his town. “Yesterday at the scene, one of my guys noticed that it—she—the body—there were pins in the ankle joint. Screws. Surgical screws. Right ankle. He recalled an old missing-persons report he took, young lady, a runaway. She also had screws in her right ankle from a bad fracture. The medical examiner gave some rough guesses as to how long the body had been buried there as well as the victim’s height, both of which were consistent with Col—with the young woman my guy recalled. The word got out after that.”

  “What was her name?” I said. But his slip already confirmed what Danielle had told me.

  He shook his head.

  “Sir, if there’s a missing-persons report, you know I can find it.”

  He started shaking his he
ad again, but this time it was a sad, existential commentary rather than a refusal. “Colleen Grantham,” he said. “The report’s from eight years ago, filed by her mother. But by her own admission she had no reason to believe her daughter had not left willingly. Troubled kid, history of drug use. But eighteen years old, you’re allowed to leave home.”

  “Everyone thought Mallory Evans left willingly too,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “But she didn’t. And she was buried in the same woods.”

  “Yes.”

  “You can see the connection.”

  “Possibly. But what does this have to do with Brad Stockton?” He blinked at me, giving away nothing. I found it hard to believe he still didn’t see the connection, but he seemed like the type to be unhelpful on principle.

  “Mallory, Sarah, and now Colleen,” I said. “Three young ladies from Belmont, all missing or dead.”

  He took a few beats before answering. “Stockton belongs in prison, don’t get me wrong. But as much as he disgusts me, he clearly had nothing to do with Colleen Grantham. He’d been locked up for at least seven years by that point.”

  I was pretty sure he was willfully misunderstanding me now. “Right,” I said. “But given the obvious connection between the three cases, what if someone else committed all three crimes? What if Brad Stockton is innocent?”

  “He’s not.”

  “You’re so sure?”

  “Yesterday you were sure that you found Sarah Cook’s body, so I don’t know who you think you are, to be perfectly honest,” Lassiter said.

  That was a valid criticism. I ran a hand through my hair. “Are you trying to tell me you don’t see the connection, though?”

  “I can see how Mallory Evans and Colleen Grantham could be connected, yes,” he said. “But I don’t see what that has to do with Stockton at all. Garrett and Elaine weren’t buried in those woods. Sarah wasn’t buried in those woods.”

  “That you know of.”

  He scowled deeply at me. “The area is private property. You are not to trespass there again, understood? And you’re not to bother the Grantham family, either.”

  The phone on his desk buzzed, and a disembodied voice crackled through the speaker. “Sir, don’t forget you’ve got the mayor coming in a few minutes.”

  “Ah, dammit,” Lassiter said, looking at his watch with dismay. He stabbed a button on the phone. “Thanks, Dee.”

  Then he stood up again and calmly walked to the office door and opened it. “Okay, then,” he said to me, “this conversation is over.”

  I didn’t care for the abrupt end to it, but I didn’t have a choice. He pointed out into the hallway like he was ordering a dog out of the dining room.

  “Thanks for your time,” I said, as insincerely as I could manage.

  He practically slammed the door behind me. It echoed through the short hallway, which was empty except for a middle-aged couple sitting on a bench a few feet away. The woman jumped at the sound.

  “I’m sorry,” I told her as I turned to walk back to the photo gallery in the lobby.

  “Wait,” she said. “Excuse me.”

  I paused and looked over my shoulder at her.

  “Are you Roxane Weary?” she said.

  I turned to face her. She was a small woman with short silvery hair and she gave off the overall impression of grey: her skin, her sweater, her eyes. The man next to her was looking at me sort of sideways, like he was peering from behind himself.

  “Yes,” I said, curious.

  The woman stood up. “My name is Erin Grantham,” she said. “This is my husband, Curtis. Russ Meeks told me about you. That you were—that you were there.”

  I went over to them and offered a hand. I didn’t offer my condolences though, unsure what was appropriate. Were they already in mourning, were they relieved, or were they still hoping against hope? My own hope was that she wasn’t going to ask me to describe what I saw.

  “Do you think—” Erin started. “When you found her—” She stopped, her face twisted in pain.

  I quickly glanced over my shoulder to make sure Lassiter’s door was still closed. I figured it didn’t count against his warning about not bothering the Grantham family if she initiated the conversation.

  “Is there somewhere we can talk?” I said. “Do you live nearby?”

  * * *

  “She never smiled in pictures,” Erin Grantham was telling me thirty minutes later in the living room of her house. “Even when she was just a little thing. My sister-in-law used to tell me Colleen could model, you know, like for one of those kids’ clothing stores. She was so pretty. But Colleen just would not smile. She was happy enough for the most part, don’t get me wrong. But she wouldn’t smile.”

  Colleen’s parents still lived in the same house they had when their daughter went missing, a small Cape Cod just on the west side of Belmont. We sat in the living room, Erin and Curtis on opposite ends of a reddish floral-print sofa and me in an armchair. Erin handed me what looked like a senior picture—Colleen in a blue hoodie, her blond hair cut into long layers and bangs, barely smiling on a park bench. She was gorgeous, and she clearly knew it but didn’t care, not even a little bit. She might have even resented it. Judging from her expression, she didn’t want anyone to look at her at all.

  Erin had only wanted to ask me about what I had seen in the woods and what had led me there, and I had given her a G-rated version of it. Now I was hoping I could get another lead out of her. “For the most part?” I said.

  “She got in with the wrong crowd, when she started high school,” Erin said. “We used to know all her friends, and all her friends’ families. But then all at once we didn’t anymore, and she was getting into trouble, shoplifting, cutting class.”

  “It seemed like kid stuff,” Curtis added, speaking for the first time since we sat down. He looked like he very much needed to believe that kid stuff was an okay explanation for what had happened to his daughter. “I mean, we were upset with her, of course.”

  “Disappointed, more like,” Erin said. “But you don’t automatically assume skipping class a few times means someone is going to turn into a drug addict.”

  The Granthams looked at each other, Erin’s mouth pressed into a thin line.

  “Was Colleen a drug addict?” I said next.

  “No,” Curtis said.

  “Yes,” Erin said at the same time.

  “I think I’m going to get a drink of water,” Curtis said, and got up without another word.

  “It’s still hard to talk about,” Erin continued when he was gone. “You’d think it would have gotten easier. And it did, up to a point. Then it just didn’t anymore. But yes, Colleen had a drug problem. Have you heard of DXM?”

  “Dextromethorphan?” I said. “The cough medicine?”

  She nodded. “That was the first thing. She was about fourteen. This was before there were the buying restrictions on cold medicine, you know, you have to show your ID now. But then, kids could buy it just like candy. I went into her room to look for something, and I found a dozen empty bottles of Vicks 44.” She paused and shook her head, smiling like something was almost funny but not quite. “God, I’ll never forget that. It was just this horrible realization. She’d been getting moodier for months, sleeping fourteen and fifteen hours at a stretch. But, like my husband said, we thought it was just a sullen teenager phase.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We confronted her right away, full throttle—that was probably the first mistake. We got her seeing a therapist, grounded her. But the whole idea of grounding a kid, it just doesn’t make sense. She was still going to school, still seeing those same friends. So it didn’t make a difference. When she was sixteen, she broke her ankle—jumping off the bleachers at the stadium, she’d been drinking. She needed surgery and they had to put pins in it, it was all very serious. And she was prescribed some narcotic painkillers, and that’s when we really started to get it, that she had a problem, a real problem.
But you always think you have more time to make it right.”

  I shifted in my chair, uncomfortable. “I know,” I said. She didn’t ask me how I knew, but she nodded before speaking again.

  “We did what we could. We sent her to one of those scared-straight-type boot-camp programs the city puts on. We got her into a residential treatment facility that our insurance covered, but she got kicked out. For, well,” Erin said, lowering her voice a little, “having sex with other patients. She was a girl out of control. After she came home from that, she was barely speaking to us. Do you have kids?”

  I shook my head.

  “People would say to me, How can you let this go on? If Colleen was my daughter, I wouldn’t let her out of my sight. How can anyone say that?” she said. “Even after she left, people would still tell me that. Like it made them feel better about themselves somehow.”

  “You know what,” I said, “fuck those people.”

  “I mean, seriously. What were we supposed to do? Physically chain her up in the bedroom?” She picked up the photo from the table and stared at it like she didn’t recognize the girl at all. Maybe she didn’t. “When she turned eighteen, she stopped going to school. She came and went as she pleased. Curtis tried to set some rules, like, if she wasn’t going to school, she needed to get a job, start paying rent. He never understood what we were dealing with where she was concerned, he really didn’t. Colleen said fine, she’d get out of our hair.”

  It was clear that Erin needed to talk about her daughter with someone. “Just like that,” I said.

  Erin nodded. “Just like that. A few weeks after her birthday, that’s when she left.”

  “You weren’t surprised?”

  “I don’t know how many times I told her I loved her, and she just looked at me,” Erin said. “It was like she didn’t want to be loved. I made sure she knew that she always had a place in our home. But it wasn’t enough. And no, I wasn’t surprised. It still hurt. It hurt in ways I can’t even describe, that she would just walk out.”

  I hoped I never had to find out just how much something like that would hurt. “How did it happen?”