The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  When we got back to the house, Joshua had shaved and changed clothes and had taken the collection of beer bottles out of the kitchen. He looked bright-eyed and rested. “Thank you,” he said. “I mean it.”

  He invited me to stay for dinner—pizza delivery was on the way—but I couldn’t wait to get out of there. I felt nauseous and crazy and like anyone could read it on my face, that I was terrified of my own conclusion. Derrow hadn’t blipped on my radar at all until now. At first, he was helpful. Then at the Brayfield house, he’d been aggressive with me but at the time, I thought it fit with the context. But the unknown calls had started immediately after I met Derrow for the first time and—I realized as heat spread across my face now—the calls had stopped once I was arrested. He didn’t call while I was locked up because he knew I wouldn’t answer, and he didn’t call after that because I did exactly what he wanted: I gave up and went home. My cheekbone throbbed. Trying to force a connection hadn’t gone very well for me before. But sometimes the connection insists on making itself. The universe sends you the same lesson over and over until you learn it. The world is a series of patterns on its own; the coincidence is only in the discovery of them.

  Can’t go over it. Can’t go under it. Can’t go around it.

  Gotta go through it.

  * * *

  The lobby of the police station was empty at nine o’clock. I walked in and went directly to the photos in the lobby, the ones I’d spent an hour looking at while Lassiter kept me waiting the other day. Five-by-sevens with little engraved plaques on the bottom of each frame. SHOCK, 2015. About twenty kids in matching green T-shirts. I squinted at the image and saw Veronica Cruz in the second row, smiling halfheartedly. Jack Derrow stood behind the kids, his arms folded over his chest. I went back in time, guessing when Colleen Grantham might have been in the program. If she was.

  Of course she was.

  SHOCK, 2007. The year she disappeared. She stood in the front row, looking uncomfortable. Jack Derrow was in the background of this shot too.

  I went back a few more years. Mallory wasn’t in the class of 1999, the year she was murdered. But she would have dropped out of school by then, already married to Joshua. I looked further back and found her in 1997, a dead-eyed stare from the back row. Jack Derrow was directly behind her.

  I took a deep breath and sat down on a bench. This was a connection that was hard to ignore. Derrow had been involved in five of the welcome receptions I’d received in Belmont. He knew all three girls. I thought about the way he’d acted during my arrest, his hand slowly snaking up my chest to unzip my coat.

  But what about Sarah? She hadn’t been a troubled kid.

  Then it hit me.

  The Cooks were personal friends of his.

  He had told me this himself.

  * * *

  The lounge at the Westin was packed tonight. I took the last open seat at the bar and nodded at my brother as he held up a hand to indicate that it would be a minute until he could get to me. While I waited I thumbed the screen of my phone, debating. I wanted to call Tom. Some part of me was still pissed at him. But he’d know what to do next, or he’d know how tell me to drop it, that I’d finally lost my mind after nine months of not thinking very clearly anyway. But at any rate, he’d know.

  I couldn’t do it.

  My contact list was a wasteland of people I no longer spoke to. Cops, lawyers, a woman from the county sheriff’s office whom I’d gone on two miserable dates with a year ago. I put the phone away.

  “You,” my brother said, sliding a shot across the bar, “were supposed to call me today.”

  “Isn’t in person better?” I said. I downed the shot and pushed the glass back for another.

  “It is,” Andrew said, “but right now you just want something.”

  I laughed. “Me?” I said.

  He grinned at me. “What is it?”

  “I want to borrow your car,” I said.

  He refilled my shot glass and poured one for himself, looking at me with mild concern. “What happened to yours?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I mean, I want to trade cars. Just for a few days. I need to go incognito.”

  “I told you that car would be shit for surveillance,” Andrew said.

  “And I told you to get the Escape because no one would ever think somebody in a beige compact SUV was up to no good,” I said. “Which is exactly what I need.”

  We swapped keys. A woman in a grey suit at the opposite end of the bar rapped her snifter sharply on the polished wood, and Andrew rolled his eyes. “I hate these fucking people,” he said. “All night it’s been like this.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, “go. I’ll take good care of your baby, I promise.”

  He started to walk away, but then turned back. “Roxane,” he said, “I don’t give a shit about the car. Take good care of you.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  I got to the Radio Shack in the Shops at Wildflower Glade right as they opened on Friday morning. I had a plan this time, having already learned my lesson about pursuing leads without thinking it through. I wasn’t about to get thrown into a cell for another fifteen hours. I didn’t have time for that. And neither did Veronica Cruz, if she had any time left at all. Either way, I was going to prove that I was right about Derrow. But first I wanted to be able to tell where he was.

  After looking around helplessly for a while, I allowed a pimply but enthusiastic kid wearing a tie with a saxophone on it to talk me into a five-hundred-dollar police scanner. Far from the cheapest, it was also not the most expensive one in the store, which I thought showed restraint on his part. But it was the correct tool for the task of listening to the Belmont police radio broadcasts from anywhere within the city’s thirteen square miles.

  “A lot of departments are still on the analog systems,” the kid told me excitedly, “but the police here just got a brand-new communications center last year, everything upgraded. Before that, you could have gotten into scanning for way less. And they’ve got apps for it now too, but you can’t listen to all the channels that way. Too bad, huh?”

  I thrust my credit card at him, even though I had no one I could bill this expense to. “Bad for me, good for you,” I said. “Maybe don’t rub it in.”

  I asked if he could program it for me and he said to give him thirty minutes. Then I went into a sports-apparel store and tried on a series of baseball caps, finally settling on the grey Ohio State hat that made me look the most forgettable.

  “You know we have ladies’ hats,” the cashier told me at the register, pointing to a rack of pink ones in the back of the store.

  “Ladies’ hats?” I said loudly, slapping my card down on the counter.

  I went back to Radio Shack, where Saxophone Tie gave me a brief lesson on straight repeater operation and trunking radio systems and talk groups. Much of it went over my head, but the gist was that the scanner automatically tuned itself to the frequency someone was speaking on within the talk group, but I would have to manually check one talk group at a time. Then I took my overpriced new toy out to Andrew’s car and stretched out in the backseat.

  One thing was immediately clear: people in Belmont called the cops a lot.

  Even shortly after ten in the morning, there were complaints about noise, about traffic jams at afternoon kindergarten drop-off at the Montessori school, about a suspicious individual entering a neighbor’s house.

  (“I advised the caller that the individual was actually the neighbor, wearing a new coat.”)

  I heard a few familiar voices, namely Meeks and Pasquale. I didn’t hear Derrow yet. So I lay there and drank some tea and waited, paging through the scant information I had found about him.

  On paper, he was conspicuously inconspicuous. John “Jack” Derrow. Fifty-six, born and raised in Belmont, a lifelong resident apart from six years spent in the navy following high school. After a general discharge, he joined the police department. Married early on to Theresa Marr, a fellow Belmontian, divorced four
years later. No kids. No social media profiles. No search results at all beyond the occasional police-beat item and, in 2003, the race results from the Capital City Half Marathon. Two hours and six minutes, in the bottom third for his age group. But that told me nothing, of course. None of it did.

  It was around eleven when his quiet rumble of a voice came over the radio. He was driving car one-four, the same vehicle he’d driven when I had the pleasure of riding with him. I listened as he responded to a traffic-accident call and then an identity-theft complaint on the far eastern edge of the town. I drove over there and parked a block away from Derrow’s cruiser. Once he emerged from the victim’s house and had radioed in that the call was resolved, I pulled out my phone and called the police dispatcher.

  “There’s a woman taking pictures of people in Brayfield Park,” I said in my most concerned tone of voice. “Like from a car. She’s in an old blue Mercedes. I don’t know what she’s doing, but there are children here.”

  I described myself—dark brown hair, leather jacket, maybe a black eye?

  “Thanks for the tip, ma’am,” the dispatcher said. “Can I get your name?”

  “Pam Gregorio,” I said.

  A minute or two later, I heard the call come across the scanner. “Anybody near Brayfield Park? Got another report of the chick in the blue Mercedes. Sounds like she has a camera this time. Concerned parent called it in.”

  Derrow answered immediately. “This is one-four, I’m right around the corner. I’m on it.”

  He snapped on his lights and sirens and took off in a flash. I followed. He lost me on Clover Road, going far too fast for me to follow without looking suspicious. But I knew where he was going. And the thing was, he wasn’t right around the corner. He was clear on the other side of town.

  So everyone, including the dispatcher, was aware to be on the lookout for me, but Derrow’s interest was a little stronger than most. Strong enough to tear across Belmont, sixty in a thirty-five-miles-per-hour business district, and—as I observed when I caught up to him—to systematically approach every person in the park that afternoon. It was damp and chilly out, so there weren’t that many people in attendance, but he spent close to thirty minutes looking for me or someone who had seen me. I watched from the safety of my brother’s nondescript vehicle for a while and then left him to it before he made his way to the side of the lot I was parked on. Ten minutes later, his voice came through the scanner as he radioed in clear, apparently giving up.

  I contemplated calling in again—maybe I could be harassing people at the skate course this time—but decided to reserve the only trick I had for later, when it might count more. I parked at the library and listened to the voices on the radio for a while. Pasquale pursued a kid who’d stolen three cans of spray paint from the art-supply store but lost him; Derrow caught a speeder with expired tags; Meeks followed up on a tip about an individual lurking around the closed-for-the-season pool of the Holiday Inn Express.

  There were no mentions of Veronica Cruz, I noted.

  Sure, the police were doing everything they could.

  I caught up with Derrow around three, when he cleared a security-system call near the center of town and then radioed in for a meal break. I followed him in Andrew’s car to a Lowe’s near the mall. He went inside and emerged eight minutes later, carrying two plastic bags that appeared heavy. He put them in the cruiser and pulled out of the lot, heading west.

  I kept after him. In the middle of the day, traffic was heavy enough to make tailing him easy. Plus, he wasn’t looking for me in a nondescript beige sport utility vehicle. That helped too. But eventually he made his way to 665 and we went west for six miles, and he turned in to a tangle of narrow country roads. I had no choice but to fall back. But the black-and-white cruiser was hard to miss, and eventually I was able to spot it through the almost-bare November trees, parked in the gravel driveway of a white clapboard Victorian with a SOLD! sign out front.

  It was a little eerie out here, foggy and quiet, the sky the color of wet concrete. And this wasn’t his house, or at least not his regular address, which was back in Belmont proper. I slowed down as I passed the road the house sat on. I couldn’t see Derrow or anything else. So I kept going, pulled a U-turn, and parked on the shoulder. I dug through the bag I’d brought—gun, computer, notebook, flashlight, camera, binoculars, flask—and got out the binocs and checked out the house. It was pretty rough, the white paint worn off around the eaves, roof tiles missing or flapping loose like errant buttons. The windows had no curtains, but they were too dirty to see through at this distance.

  He came out of the house five minutes later, the blue Lowe’s bags crumpled and empty in his hand. This time when he drove away, I didn’t follow. I got out my revolver and a flashlight and walked up to the house and rapped on the front door. I heard nothing but hollow silence. Then I lapped the perimeter and peered in all the windows. Clearly no one lived here, not yet. From what I could see, the wood floors were dirty and littered with tacks and flaps of glue from stripped-out carpet. The kitchen, though newly linoleumed, was missing a part of a countertop and all the appliances.

  I stood in the sloping backyard and looked around. Everything was brown and grey and hopeless here. There weren’t any neighbors within eyeshot. If he’d brought Veronica here, no one would have seen. No one would have heard. No one even knew this house existed, except for whoever had owned it last. What had been in the blue bags, and why was it so important he bring it here, during his lunch break? My pulse was racing. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something for me to find here. The way I had in the woods. This was concerning, since that feeling had ended with a discovery that I couldn’t get out of my head.

  I didn’t want to find Veronica that way.

  But I had to find her.

  Although I had vowed I wasn’t going to do anything else stupid, I considered the cheap knob on the back door—loose in the strike plate, its finish worn off from age. I looked at the hinges next, to determine if the door swung inward. It did. Otherwise, it would be next to impossible to kick in. I took a step back, steadied myself, and kicked hard, driving my heel of my boot into the door just above the lock. It splintered without giving way, so I kicked it again, the shock of it vibrating up through my leg.

  That took care of it.

  There was no turning back now.

  I stepped into the house. The air was cold and dusty and smelled like adhesive and cigar smoke. “Veronica?” I said.

  I heard nothing in return.

  I walked slowly through the house. Floorboards creaked and my boots crunched over the renovation-related debris that was scattered everywhere. But I didn’t hear anything else. I flipped a light switch but nothing happened; no power. So I covered the lower level in fading afternoon light: empty living room, empty dining room, bathroom with an army of dead bugs in the sink and a stack of tools arranged on the lid of the toilet. Without even the faint hum of electricity, the house seemed isolated, sealed off from the world entirely.

  It wasn’t a good feeling.

  Second floor: patchy blue carpet, browning wallpaper peeling off in strips. There were visible rectangles at eye level where picture frames had hung, protecting the wallpaper from the cigar smoke that had discolored the rest of the house. The bathroom up here held a shower with a mildewed white liner. The sight of it made me suddenly, acutely afraid.

  And then it twitched.

  I froze where I was.

  Every horror movie I’d ever seen flashed through my head. It was easy enough to write those off most of the time, but not when you were standing in a creepy house like this and not when you’d discovered human remains only days before. One sweaty palm on my revolver, I lunged forward and yanked the shower curtain back, barely suppressing a shriek when I saw two pale grey mice book it down the rusty mouth of the drain.

  “Jesus,” I said, shoving the curtain away in disgust.

  I checked the rest of the house, including a search via flashli
ght of a horrifying basement with concrete walls and floor painted reddish-brown, but I found nothing except more rodents and a random collection of old Atlas mason jars in a cabinet.

  No one was here.

  It was five thirty and the sun had set. Outside, I shined my light on the splintered door and pulled it closed as much as possible, not wanting my fruitless little visit to be any more noticeable than it already was. Then I went back to my brother’s car and turned the heat on high. I was freezing and unsettled, but more importantly I was no closer to figuring anything out.

  There was no way I was wrong this time.

  Derrow was personally acquainted with Mallory, Colleen, Veronica, and the Cooks.

  There was no way.

  Or was there?

  It would all fit together perfectly, except I still had no idea what had happened with Sarah and her parents. Mallory Evans had been sexually assaulted and stabbed to death. I didn’t know exactly what had happened to Colleen, but she obviously hadn’t wrapped herself in a tarp before dying in her sleep. There was a cold calculation involved in burying those women in the woods. By contrast, there was passion behind Garrett and Elaine Cook’s death. Not planned, not well-thought-out. Derrow knew them, which made it simultaneously harder to fathom but easier to understand. What had happened? Did the Cooks walk into their house and find Jack Derrow attacking their daughter? Was she already dead? Was she buried in the woods too?

  Maybe with enough evidence, the police would rip up all of Clover Point to find Sarah’s body.

  Maybe I could convince Kenny Brayfield to ask them to.

  It wasn’t funny, but that made me laugh out loud, a strained, demented laugh that probably would have made anyone worry about me if they’d heard it. My heart rate still hadn’t returned to normal, even though I’d been out of that house for ten minutes now.

  I put the car in gear and drove back to Belmont. A lot of things could happen with enough evidence. But I had to find it first.