The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  * * *

  I located Derrow’s actual house, a well-maintained but ugly two-story with an attached garage and green siding and black shutters. Most of the yards on the street were still covered with a thick blanket of fallen autumn leaves, but Derrow’s was just an expanse of grass. I drove past it and parked a few houses down, where the street widened into a cul-de-sac. Two women in patterned leggings and neon jackets with reflective trim were speed-walking on the other side of the street, engaged in a loud, breathless conversation about low-fat slow-cooker recipes. I tried to tune them out as I looked at Derrow’s place. There were lights on in the lower level, glowing pale yellow behind miniblinds. I hadn’t heard Derrow on the scanner since I got back to Belmont, so I didn’t know if he was home or not.

  If Veronica was in there, I didn’t think she was calmly reading next to a table lamp.

  My head was pounding. The speed walkers had stopped on the sidewalk to finish their conversation before parting ways. “Go away,” I muttered. I wanted to check out the house, but I didn’t want anyone to see me and call the police. It seemed likely enough that someone might call on me just for sitting here for too long anyway.

  The house looked so normal. Like just a house. I felt nothing when I looked at it, unlike the old house earlier today. Did that mean something? I looked through the binocs but it was too dark to see any detail. On the scanner, there was a scuffle between teenagers at the skate park, a complaint of someone smoking too close to the door of the mall. Shanahan caught another fender bender on Clover Road.

  I wondered how many fender benders on Clover Road there were each week in Belmont.

  I wondered if the dispatcher somehow screened the calls before even putting them on the radio, because I’d heard no actual crime all day, which was a little weird even for a suburb. Especially one as fucked up as Belmont.

  I wondered if I could return the overpriced scanner to Radio Shack for a refund and spent a minute looking for the receipt, but gave up.

  I looked at my phone—a text from my brother asking me if my Mercedes took diesel, another call from Tom. He didn’t leave a voice mail this time. I texted yes to Andrew and dropped the phone onto the seat. I rubbed my eyes, forgetting again about the scab on my cheekbone.

  “What are you doing,” I said out loud, not for the first time recently.

  No one ever solved a case from staring at a house.

  I went back to my notebook. I’d written hardly anything down.

  Red sedan.

  Big green pickup.

  Long wool coat.

  Marisa?

  No one ever solved a case with notes that looked like this.

  I dropped the notebook on the passenger seat and massaged my forehead, waiting for a clear thought to shake loose.

  Derrow had been involved in the SHOCK program for at least eighteen years. Based on those pictures hanging in the lobby of the station, I guessed an average of fifteen students per class. That was a lot of kids, a lot of girls. The department surely kept records. I thought for a minute about how I could wheedle a list out of them, track down Derrow’s former students to establish a pattern. But I could spend months on end tracking down a few hundred formerly troubled teens. And Veronica didn’t have months. Just like Brad didn’t have months.

  I thought about Derrow’s friendly little wave when he drove past me on Shelby’s street Monday night. When I said to tell Lassiter hello for me. What if that was when he got the idea? The other day I’d consoled myself with the knowledge that Veronica’s disappearance wasn’t my fault, but maybe it was. I got the flask out of my bag and ran my thumbnail back and forth over the cap, debating. Whiskey might kill the edges of the feeling I had, but it wasn’t going to help Veronica. I put the flask down. Then I scrolled through the names in my phone, pausing for a second on Tom’s again. But I couldn’t. I still felt something hot and dark squeezing my insides when I thought of it, my father using his dying breath to remind me that I didn’t know what I was doing.

  The speed walkers hugged and went into their separate houses.

  A garage door behind me opened and a rusty Chevy Nova wheezed down the street and turned left onto Clover just as another vehicle turned onto Derrow’s street.

  I squinted against the LED headlights, momentarily blinded.

  Then Derrow’s garage door went up, and the vehicle turned and the headlights were no longer shining right at me.

  I saw that it was a green pickup truck.

  My hands squeezed into fists.

  A dark green pickup.

  One of those big new ones, just like Danielle Stockton had said.

  What if Sarah wasn’t buried somewhere in the ravine?

  What if she was alive?

  THIRTY-THREE

  I fumbled around on the seat for my phone as the garage door closed again and glanced at Tom’s number but scrolled to Peter Novotny’s instead. “Who do you know in the sheriff’s office?” I said when the old PI answered. I was thinking I needed to go bigger than Belmont. To an agency with the authority to swoop in over their heads. “Or the Ohio BCI?”

  “Wait a minute, wait just a minute,” Novotny said. He sounded confused. “What’s going on? Are you in trouble?”

  “Not in trouble, no,” I said. “But I need a name. Someone you trust.”

  “Listen, honey.” He cleared his throat. “You sound a little wound up. Tell me what’s going on.”

  Derrow’s garage door opened, and he dragged out some long sheets of drywall, which he leveraged into the truck with some difficulty. I took a deep breath. “I think there was a Belmont cop involved in the Cook murders,” I said. It was like ripping off a bandage and then waving around the open wound for all the world to see.

  Novotny didn’t say anything for a while. Then he cleared his throat and said, “Why?”

  “Petey, listen, I don’t think Sarah Cook is dead. I think she’s in his house. Right now. I don’t know if she helped with the other girls or not but—”

  “Roxane,” he said slowly. “Have you been drinking?”

  I ground my teeth together. “No—”

  “Because you sound like you’re out of your goddamn mind. I know I drink a little too, and so did your daddy, and it’s fine. But you have to learn to keep work and whiskey separate, okay?”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen, I mean it,” he said sharply. “You don’t play around with stuff like this.”

  “I’m not playing—”

  “Oh, you’re not playing, okay,” Novotny said. “So you’ve got evidence, then?”

  “He knew all the girls. He’s driving the same truck that Danielle saw that night at the gas station—”

  “Danielle is your frame of reference? That’s not a point in your favor. And what other girls are you even talking about?”

  “Please,” I said. “Do you know anyone in Ohio BCI?”

  “You just got a wild idea and I know it sounds right to you, but that’s just the booze talking. Shit, I could tell you all kinds of stories, cases I was sure I cracked after a drink or five.”

  I didn’t have time or desire to hear any of his old war stories. “No—”

  “Where are you? Can I come get you? Believe me, you’ll thank me in the morning.”

  I hung up and I covered my mouth with my hand and screamed until my throat ached. My heart was hammering at the base of my skull. The irony of it was, I felt like I was thinking clearly for the first time in months. I watched as Derrow went back into the garage. A second later, his driveway was illuminated by the truck’s taillights. Then he backed out.

  I got the car in gear but I didn’t follow. Instead, I waited until he’d turned off his street and then I parked in front of his house.

  * * *

  The doors to Derrow’s house were all newish and secure. I wouldn’t be kicking these in, not unless I wanted to break an ankle. The basement had four subterranean windows, the kind set in a half-moon-shaped egress well. The windows in the f
ront of the house were glass-block and would be difficult to break without making a hell of a racket. The ones in the back were made of single glass panes, though. I lay on the cold, wet grass and shone my flashlight into each, trying to gauge what might be down there. But the windows were old and caked with grime and I couldn’t see much. Finally, I just picked one.

  I punched the handle of my flashlight through the glass and used it to clear away the jagged shards left clinging to the frame. Then I waited for a second, to see if neighbors came outside or porch lights turned on.

  Nothing.

  No one cared.

  There was really no turning back now.

  It was nine o’clock. I figured I had at least an hour before Derrow made it back from his new home in the woods. That would have to be enough time.

  I looped the flashlight to my belt and lowered myself into the hollowed-out space in front of the window, hands bracing against the concrete lip of the foundation, my legs hanging down into the house. Then I slid forward and let go.

  It went better in my head than it did in practice. The basement floor was farther down than I expected and I came down sideways, my left hip crunching against the concrete. I immediately wanted to throw up, flattened by a wave of pain. I lay there for a second on the cold, dusty floor. I was in over my head already. I reached into my pocket for my phone. Tom could get here in thirty minutes, maybe less. He probably wouldn’t even make me explain myself—if I said I needed him to come, he would. But my phone was toast: a spiderweb of broken glass and bleeding colors was all that remained of the touch screen.

  “Have you been drinking,” I muttered to myself.

  I struggled to my feet. Once I was up, I was okay. There would be a hell of a bruise in the morning, but at least I wasn’t paralyzed in Jack Derrow’s basement. And at least I hadn’t landed on my other hip, where my gun was holstered. I flipped the flashlight on and bounced the beam around the room. There wasn’t much to look at—boxes, neatly sealed up with packing tape; a weight machine that looked like it actually saw some use, unlike the ones in most people’s basements; a long white deep freezer, an ironing board stacked high with folded uniforms. I crept to the bottom of the steps and listened.

  Nothing.

  The house was dead silent.

  I went up the creaky wooden steps, my hip protesting. I stopped every few feet to listen but still heard nothing, just my own anxious breathing. At the top of the staircase, I opened the door slowly, holding my breath and half expecting someone to stop me, but no one did. I closed the basement door behind me.

  The house was neat and orderly, a small eat-in kitchen with speckled blue countertops and plaid wallpaper, a living room with sculpted blue carpet and fake wood paneling on the walls. Leather recliner, big entertainment stand with a tube television, the kind so heavy you needed three people to lift it. The only light on was the one I’d seen from the street, a lamp beside the recliner.

  The house was outdated, but not out of the ordinary.

  It looked like a boring, lonely person lived here.

  I bounced the beam of the flashlight around, hoping to find a landline phone. But there wasn’t one, just an exposed jack mounted on the wall between the kitchen and living room.

  If I was keeping someone hostage in my house, I probably wouldn’t have a working phone line either.

  I still heard nothing, not even a breath.

  But then it began to get weird.

  The front door of the house had a metal bar across it, secured with a padlock. The floor creaked as I walked over to it and tugged on the padlock.

  Ordinary houses didn’t have a door like this.

  I stared at it for a long time, almost disbelieving my own eyes. Half expecting, after all of this, that there was nothing to find in the house, that I was wrong again.

  But I knew better now. I might have been a lot of things, but wrong wasn’t one of them.

  The sight of the door made me feel like a caged animal, panicky. I checked out the other doors: the one leading out to the deck at the rear of the house was secured with a similar lock. But the door off the kitchen that led to the garage, the one that Derrow used to come and go from his house, was just a regular door. I opened it and shined my flashlight around the garage. There was nothing to see, just typical garage fare: lawn mower, snow shovel, an oily, dirty smell. A peg board where tools had once hung from individual nails. Before he moved them to the new house, maybe. More boxes here too, stacked neatly against the wall.

  Derrow was nothing if not orderly. I went back into the house, and that was when I heard the sound.

  A gentle keening, an urgent whisper. I spun around with the flashlight, hitting all the walls. But it wasn’t coming from in here. I entered the foyer and stood by the barred front door, listening as I turned for the first time to the carpeted staircase that went the second floor.

  At the top of the steps: another door, grey metal.

  I crept up the steps and shone my flashlight on the door, taking in the knob of a dead bolt installed at eye level. Installed backward, so that you’d need a key to get down the steps but not up. I turned the knob and pulled open the door, taking care to disable the dead bolt so it didn’t lock behind me. Then I stopped and observed. There was a strange smell up here, musty and sour. The sound was getting louder.

  “Veronica?” I said. “Sarah?”

  The noise stopped and silence filled up the darkness again. But this time it was the soundless tension of listening. I swept the flashlight around the upstairs hallway. Four doors. Two of them had the backward dead bolts at eye level, again to keep something in the rooms rather than out.

  “Veronica?” I said again, louder this time.

  The wind blew outside, bare tree branches scraping against the house.

  That was the only sound.

  And then it wasn’t.

  “In here, in here, in here,” a scratchy voice pleaded. There was a clang of metal on metal, the muffled thump of pounding on a wall.

  I ran to the end of the hall and yanked open the dead-bolted door. “Veronica,” I said.

  Seeing her in the beam of my flashlight was shocking, even though I had been looking for her for days.

  Abruptly, she stopped pleading, just stared at me. She was sitting on a bare twin mattress on the floor, clutching a sheet to her chest. She appeared to be naked beneath it. Her red-violet hair was tangled. Her lips were dry and peeling. She was looking past me somehow, as if she expected someone else.

  “Veronica,” I said again.

  “Shhhhh,” another voice whispered from somewhere else in the house.

  I whirled around in the dark, but the room was empty.

  I went over to the bed. “Veronica.” I knelt down in front of her, holding the flashlight between my elbow and my rib cage. “Veronica.”

  “It’s a trick, don’t say anything,” the other voice hissed.

  Veronica blinked at me, her eyes wide with confusion and stunned fear. “Wh—” she said. Then she stopped.

  “Veronica, are you okay? Are you hurt?” I reached for her shoulder but she jerked away from me. Then she pulled the bottom of the sheet up, exposing her legs. Her ankles were shackled together, the skin around the cuffs scabbed and bruised deeply. The irons were attached to a long length of heavy chain, which was bolted to the floor. The mattress was stained and the room smelled like blood and sex and urine and I bit my lip so hard I tasted metal.

  “Veronica, listen,” I said to her. I stood up and scanned the room. The only window was boarded up, the curtain smashed against the glass under a sheet of plywood. The chain tying Veronica to the floor was long enough to get to a bucket in the corner, which appeared to serve as a toilet. I grabbed the chain and pulled against the bolt, but it was fastened tight. I knew from the other whispered voice that we weren’t alone in the house but I needed to focus on getting her out of there. I dropped the chain and knelt in front of her again. “I met you at Shelby’s house,” I said, in case the horro
r of her last few days had wiped her memory. “You can trust me.”

  “I remember,” she whispered numbly. I wondered if she was drugged. “One ‘n.’”

  I smiled, or at least tried to. I hoped it was reassuring but it felt like anything but. “Yeah, that’s right. Roxane, with one ‘n,’” I said. “Girl, am I glad to see you. And Shelby’s going to be so happy too. I’m going to get you out of here, okay? Is Sarah here?”

  “Shelby,” she said.

  I tried again. “Where is Sarah?”

  “Other room.”

  “Okay, Veronica? Veronica. Do you have clothes?” I said. She just stared at me. I looked around the room again. No clothes. Nothing except the bucket in the corner. Hoping Sarah might be able to assist me in some way, I went back into the hall and pulled open the other dead-bolted door. It led into another small bedroom. A very different bedroom. This one had a lamp and a bed with pillows and an actual blanket, a section of floral fabric hanging over the plywood on the window, a small television, two stacks of books and journals on a dresser.

  And there was Sarah Cook, crouched in the corner, her hands on her belly.

  She was pregnant.

  Very pregnant.

  I dropped to my knees in front of her and we stared at each other. She was wearing sweatpants and a grey T-shirt. Her ankles were bare, no shackles in sight. She looked to be in much better shape than Veronica did, except for the obvious. She did not seem happy to see me, however.

  “You tell him I was good,” she whispered. “You tell him I was good because I was.”

  “Sarah, I’m here to help you. I want to get you out of here, both of you,” I said, approaching her slowly.

  Sarah shrank back into the corner. She was shaking her head, muttering no no no no no no. In the other room, Veronica was crying.

  “I know Brad,” I said. “Brad Stockton. That’s why I’m here.”

  She stopped muttering, her nostrils flaring. “Brad,” she said.

  “I don’t know what happened here but it’s over, Sarah,” I said, “please, help me. Help me with Veronica and we can get away from this place and you can see Brad.”