The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

“Sarah,” I said, turning to her now. Her shoulders were heaving, her breath coming way too fast. The air was too tight in my own lungs, and the chill from the open window seemed to increase as the temperature in the basement crept up. “You need to calm down.”

  “I’m going to die down here,” she said. She grabbed on to my forearm, not for comfort but as if to prevent me from leaving. “And this, my—” She looked down at her belly.

  “You’re not going to die down here,” I said. I wiped roughly at my eyes, watering from the acrid smoke. Heat radiated from the ceiling. I squinted through the darkness, hoping for a sign that Veronica was able to get help. I didn’t know how long it would take until the basement filled with hot, black smoke, until the air was unbreathable. I didn’t want to stick around to find out. “We’re not going to die down here. We’re going to be fine. I’m not going to leave you. We’re going to get out of here together.”

  Sarah was shaking her head. “All the times I wished for it, that I just wouldn’t wake up,” she said. “And now, now—” She leaned against the cinder-block wall, coughing. “Why did you even do this?”

  I gritted my teeth and said nothing. The fire above us was angry now, raging, hungry for fuel. Over the roar of the flames, I heard him dragging something across his kitchen to the garage. It sounded like a suitcase. He had an escape bag packed. He was prepared. I wasn’t. Sarah was right. I wasn’t helping her at all.

  “Sarah,” I said, grabbing her by the shoulders. “I’m going to get us out of here.”

  She looked back at me, her nostrils flaring, furious.

  “I know I just made things worse for you, but I’m trying to make them better. I’m going to. You have to trust me.”

  She said nothing.

  “If I go up there, I can get back into the house and open the door,” I said.

  Sarah shook her head, still holding on to my arm with all the strength she had.

  “I will do that,” I said, “I will come and open the basement door so you can get out. Okay?”

  She didn’t believe me. I wasn’t going to leave her until she did.

  “I will,” I said. “You have to trust me.”

  Finally, she let go of my arm and leaned against the wall. She started to slide down into a sitting position on top of the freezer, but I caught her by the elbow.

  “You have to stay by the window, you have to keep breathing,” I said.

  She stood up again, her face tense in the moonlight.

  “I will be right back,” I told her.

  I holstered the revolver. Then I set my palms on the concrete lip of the foundation and pulled myself up until my torso was in the well. It wasn’t easy. I balanced on my pelvis against the foundation and pushed my elbows up to the grass until I had enough leverage to pull my head above ground, then get my knees up into the well. Then I could stand, dizzily gulping lungfuls of clean night air as I pulled my gun out again and ran around the side of the house and into the garage—

  I got there just as Derrow opened the door from the kitchen and stepped out.

  A handgun in one hand, a suitcase in the other.

  He looked at me, angry and stunned as he raised the arm with the gun.

  I shot him twice.

  They weren’t good shots, but I hit him. Once in the shoulder and once in the thigh. He went down, blood spurting from his leg. The gun he was holding clattered to the concrete floor and I grabbed it before he could. I left him moaning in the garage and pushed into the house, which was no longer even a house but instead a wall of black smoke and orange flames, the floor a roiling plane of heat. I felt the vinyl flooring stick to my wool socks. I couldn’t see a thing. I pulled my coat over my head and dashed through the kitchen, trying to remember how far down I needed to go. Luckily, not very. I bumped into a chair, the one Derrow had wedged under the knob of the basement door. I shrieked at the touch, the chair metal and white hot. Using my coat to protect my hands, I wrenched it out of the way and threw the door open. “Sarah,” I coughed, “come on.”

  I didn’t see her through the smoke, so I ran down the steps. The basement was at least forty degrees cooler than the upstairs. “Sarah.”

  She was still standing on the freezer, her face tipped up to the window. Her expression was one of eerie peace.

  I grabbed her hand, and she turned to me, startled. “You came back,” she whispered.

  I helped her down from the freezer and gave her my coat to put over her head. “Follow me,” I said. “There’s no time.”

  Her hand in mine, we ran back up the steps and into the kitchen. The curtains had caught now, flames shivering up the wall. She followed me out into the garage, gasping at the sight of Derrow bleeding on the floor. There were sirens approaching, lots of them, fast.

  I fell to my knees in the yard, just as a squad car flew down the street and jumped the curb, stopping inches from me. “Put down the gun,” a sheriff’s deputy was shouting, and it took me a minute to realize he was shouting it at me.

  I lowered it slowly to the grass, then felt his weight on top of me as he pushed me face-first to the ground, followed by the bite of handcuffs. Sarah was screaming no over and over. The rest of the sirens wailed down the street and cast a flickering light show across the pavement.

  It was almost beautiful.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  I told the story so many times I lost count. In the back of a squad car, on the bumper of an ambulance between breaths through an oxygen mask, while I received treatment for third-degree burns on my left hand and wrist, in a dimly lit interrogation room at the Belmont police station. I told it to people from the sheriff’s department, the Franklin County prosecutor’s office, BCI, since the Belmont police, I assumed, had no say over the situation anymore. I wrote it in longhand on a legal pad and signed a printed copy of a statement and agreed to be videotaped. It was a hell of a story, one that even I would think strained against the limits of the plausible had I not just lived through it. And in between the tellings, there was a lot of waiting. I put my head down on my arms when I was in the interrogation room, and it didn’t feel like I slept, just drifted in and out on a burnt cloud of memory, but each time the door opened, I jerked upright, gasping and coughing.

  Light was slanting in through the window near the ceiling when a man in a three-piece suit came in and sat down across from me. He was even wearing cuff links, though it couldn’t be much past eight in the morning yet. That’s how you know someone is important, I thought mildly.

  “I’m David Homza,” he said.

  The name was familiar. I looked at him: salt-and-pepper hair, Elvis Costello glasses. I didn’t know him. But then I remembered why I had heard of him. “You prosecuted Brad Stockton,” I said. My throat was scratchy from the smoke. I smelled like I had set the fire myself, and bits of ash kept falling out of my hair.

  “I did,” he said. “And you’re Frank Weary’s kid.”

  I leaned on my good hand, my stomach flip-flopping. “I am.”

  Homza watched me for a minute. “Do you need anything? Coffee, soda?”

  I asked him for a Coke. He nodded and stood up.

  “And is there any way I could get a bit of whiskey in that?” I said when he opened the door. Someone in the police station was bound to have a bottle stashed in a desk drawer, and I figured that if Homza knew my father, he might not judge.

  He smiled and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a can of Coke still cold from the vending machine and a coffee mug with a quarter inch of whiskey in the bottom. “Will that do it?” he said.

  “It will,” I said. I opened the can one-handed and poured the soda into the mug and took a sip. This was the only drink I was going to have today, I told myself. I was so happy for a second, the sugar and caffeine and liquor giving me a rush as good as any narcotic high.

  “You had quite the night,” Homza said a minute later.

  “Yes,” I said. “How are Veronica and Sarah?”

  “Good,” he said. “We
ll—you know. Good, considering. They’ve both been sexually assaulted, Veronica pretty violently and recently. They have been admitted to Mount Carmel East for the time being. You’ll be happy to know that they corroborated your account of tonight.”

  I nodded. But I hadn’t even been thinking about them corroborating my story. I was just glad they were okay. “Did someone call Veronica’s family?” I said. “And Shelby Evans?”

  He nodded.

  “What about Sarah’s family? She has an aunt in town, and a cousin.”

  Homza leaned back in his chair. “No,” he said. “I wasn’t aware that she had family left and she didn’t say anything.”

  I thought about that for a second. Maybe Sarah wouldn’t want to see Elizabeth Troyan, since her somewhat exaggerated testimony had put Brad Stockton in jail. But it might be good to have someone there. “I have their numbers,” I said. Then I realized I didn’t—my broken phone was a useless chunk of metal and glass and I didn’t even know where it was.

  “It’s up to her,” Homza told me. “It’s likely they’ve already heard—this is a media circus and a half.”

  I nodded. I hoped my client had heard too, because her phone number was lost to the ages as well. I was a detective, though, and maybe an okay one after all. I could probably figure it out.

  “Derrow’s going to make it, too,” Homza said.

  “Hallelujah.”

  “He’s in stable condition. But the bullet shattered his femur. They might have to put pins in it,” he added.

  “That’s just terrible,” I said. It wasn’t that I’d hoped I had killed him, although I wouldn’t have lost too much sleep over it. I just didn’t want to hear anything else about him. I remembered the pins in Colleen Grantham’s ankle. Maybe someone would find Jack Derrow’s body in a ravine during another lifetime and identify him because of the pins.

  “And,” Homza said, “he’s talking.”

  That got my interest. I sipped my drink and said, “Tell me he made a full confession.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “He did.”

  My jaw dropped.

  “I know,” Homza said. “I was surprised too. I guess he knows when he’s been beat fair and square, sick bastard. And he’s a coward. The first thing he said was he’d cooperate if we won’t consider this a capital case.”

  I drank a little more. “What did he confess to, exactly?”

  He sighed. “Quite a few things. The murder of his ex-wife, Theresa Marr, in 1995, for starters. She apparently moved to Florida after they got divorced. She was reported missing down there, but no one knew she’d come back to Ohio. He also confessed to murdering Mallory Evans, Garrett and Elaine Cook. Kidnapping Sarah and planting the knife in Brad Stockton’s car. Then the murder of Colleen Grantham, kidnapping of Veronica Cruz. And there was another student of his, before any of this started, he said he raped her.”

  I shook my head. I almost asked if Derrow said why, but that was a stupid question. There was no why. I might never get any more answers than I already had. “Lassiter had to know about some of this,” I said instead. “The rape? Was that reported? There’s a lot going on here that isn’t exactly aboveboard.”

  “That,” Homza said, “is something I can’t comment on. It will be looked into.”

  “Seriously?”

  He spread his hands. “Sorry.”

  “Okay, what about Brad,” I said. “What’s going to happen to him? Can you comment on that?”

  He gave me a pained little smile.

  “I hope you have a good apology planned,” I added, although it wasn’t exactly fair of me to put it all on him. It took a village to orchestrate the railroad job against Brad Stockton.

  “Trust me,” Homza said, “no one is more horrified over this than me.”

  “Except Brad. And Sarah. And Veronica.”

  We stared at each other for a long time. He didn’t argue with me on that point. He said, “You look just like him, did you know that? Your dad.”

  “I’ve heard,” I said.

  “Tell you what, your dad would be proud of you today,” he added. He touched my arm and then stood up. “You’re free to go.”

  I looked into my mug, blinking hard.

  * * *

  Before I was actually free to go anywhere, I had a number of practical concerns to deal with: I had no shoes, no coat, and no car. I walked stiffly to the lobby in my socks, freezing in place when I saw the crowd outside the police station, a gaggle of reporters with television cameras. Homza wasn’t kidding about the media circus. One surly uniform was losing a battle to keep them all away from the door. And just inside the lobby, Jake Lassiter was hurriedly removing picture frames from the wall.

  The ones with Jack Derrow smiling behind his groups of students.

  Lassiter spotted me and almost didn’t stop what he was doing, but then he did. We looked at each other for a long moment. He’d aged five years since I saw him two days earlier. Learning you’d harbored a killer for more than twenty years probably did that to a person. I wondered how much longer he’d even have a job. He looked down at the picture he was holding, and then pitched it into the trash.

  “You might want to go out the back,” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I waited for a second, in case he wanted to say anything else. He didn’t. So I kept walking. Then he cleared his throat again. “Ask Dee in the dispatch office to show you the lost and found,” he said. “I’m sure there’s a pair of shoes in there.”

  I turned back to him, but he didn’t look at me again. Maybe offering me a pair of stranger’s shoes was his version of an apology. I decided to assume that it was. Besides, in that moment, I needed shoes more than I needed anybody’s I’m sorry. He threw two more photos away and I left him to it. I’d spent more than twenty-four hours in this terrible building in the last week. After I got a hoodie and a pair of canvas sneakers from the lost and found, I started looking for the back door of the police station.

  Then I heard my name.

  “Roxane?”

  I turned around at the familiar voice and Tom was there, jogging down the hall toward me. He grabbed my arm, relief flooding his face. I thought maybe no one had ever been happier to see me in my life. “You’re okay,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?” I said. I wanted to be mad at him for showing up like this, but I couldn’t. I placed my good hand over his and held on tight.

  “I—” he began. He shook his head like he had no idea what to say to me. His tie was loose, his hair sticking up from running a hand through it one too many times. “I had to meet this badass detective who closed Frank’s case.”

  My face felt weird, but I tried to give him a smile. “That’s right, I did,” I said. Somehow, in all of the excitement, I had forgotten that part. Mallory Evans. My father’s case.

  “Your phone is off,” Tom said, “and we kept getting conflicting information on what had happened, and I needed to know. For me. I needed to know if you were okay.”

  “We?” I said.

  “I probably speak for much of the city with that we,” he said, “but I meant my squad. All of Crimes Against Persons, actually. I told you, cops are gossipy as fuck.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Like a bunch of sorority sisters,” Tom said. He grinned at me, but there was something nervous about it. “So you’re a little banged up,” he said, glancing down at my bandaged hand.

  I nodded. It didn’t hurt, or not yet, anyway. But it would, once the adrenaline wore off. “Indeed, and someday soon, we can get together for a drink and I’ll tell you all about it.”

  He took a deep breath. “But today is not that day,” he said.

  “Today is not that day.” I squeezed his hand and then let go. “I just, I don’t know, Tom, I can’t. I can’t talk about it any more right now.”

  “Hey, of course, of course.”

  We watched each other for a few beats. I could no longer even remember exac
tly why I thought I was so mad at him.

  “So,” I said. “I could use a ride back to the car. Again.”

  He laughed, and the sound put me a little more at ease. “Do you want to ride in the backseat?” he said. “And I can wear a little chauffeur hat?”

  “As much as I would love that,” I said, “I’ll just settle for the ride today.”

  “You got it,” he said. He set a hand lightly between my shoulder blades and steered me down the hall. “I figure you’d rather skip the press junket.”

  “It’s like you know me or something.”

  Once we got in the car, I told him where to go, and then we rode in silence for a while. But it was a better silence than the one we endured on Wednesday. I closed my eyes against the bright morning sun, even though I couldn’t sleep. I wondered if I would ever be able to sleep again.

  “Listen,” Tom said as he turned onto Derrow’s street. It was still mostly blocked off by cop cars, but not as many as earlier. “About the other day.”

  I shook my head. “Tom, it’s okay,” I said. “That was all me. Really. I’m sorry. Let’s just forget it.”

  “No, I don’t want to,” he said, “I need to say this.”

  He parked the car and turned to me. I thought about just getting out and walking away. But I didn’t. I assumed I had already made it through the hardest part of my day.

  “I know you and Frank didn’t have the easiest relationship,” he said next, catching me off guard. “I know you think he didn’t respect you, that he was always trying to undermine you. I know that. But Roxane, I spent ten-plus hours a day with the guy for almost ten years, and I think I knew him better as a person than you did.”

  My chest was starting to ache. “Please don’t,” I whispered.

  But he did. “He was my best friend,” he said. “So I know what I’m talking about when I tell you that when he asked me to promise to look out for you, he didn’t mean because you couldn’t look out for yourself. He meant it because he loved you.” His warm brown eyes were bright, and he blinked hard. “And I promised, because I loved him. And I do take that promise seriously.”

  I said, “It’s fine.” But I didn’t know what was fine or who I was telling.