The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  Dewitt again. It seemed impossible to have a conversation about Lucy Fancher without having one about the former Toll Facilities cop as well.

  “I don’t know the man,” Tess said. “And he probably doesn’t want to know me, given that I’m here to examine his work. I’m looking into how some cops do their job.”

  “Yeah?” That brought his nose out of his beer mug. “I can tell you how. Like it’s Nazi Germany, that’s how they do their job around here. Like a man’s got no rights at all. Dewitt won’t stop, and he’s not even a cop anymore. Not that he was ever a real cop.”

  “He hounded you, then?”

  “I almost filed police brutality charges against him.”

  “He hit you?”

  “Well, he was dogging me. He talked to me over and over and over again. He knew I didn’t do it, from the first. He said as much. But for some reason he just likes to hear me tell the story. I took a polygraph. Passed it, too. But a week didn’t go by that I didn’t see Carl Dewitt staring at me. Down at the marina, in the bar up the street, here. Like a little freckled ghost, following me around.” Then, as an afterthought, “I hate freckles.”

  Flood finished the rest of his beer with one deep inhale and wiped the back of his mouth with his arm. The tattoos had once been discrete designs. But there were so many crowded together, and the lines had faded over time until his arms looked more discolored than anything else. The right was blue-purple, like a bruise, the left more reddish, as if he had been badly burned.

  Tess sipped the beer the waitress had brought in lieu of her Coca-Cola. Bad sign. She drank so Bonner Flood might feel more companionable. Now that was something to tell Dr. Armistead: She had to drink for her job sometimes, even when she didn’t want to. What would he make of that?

  “I’m Tess Monaghan,” she said in her best voice, a sweet, serious tone she knew men liked.

  “Bonner Flood,” he said. “But you seem to know that.”

  “Tell me about Lucy.”

  “I thought you weren’t here to hound me.”

  “Not about her death. About her, her life. What was she like?”

  “She was okay. We were together two–three years, off and on.”

  Tess had done her homework at the district court this time. She knew the “off” times Flood alluded to usually came on drunken weekends when he threw Lucy around the living room. By Monday morning, he was sober and she was forgiving.

  “You break up with her, or did she break up with you?”

  “Neither. I ended up in jail for six months.”

  “Assault?”

  “Uh-uh, more serious. Poaching.” There was not a wisp of a smile on Flood’s face. “I had to do a little county time while waiting trial, and then I got time served. I come out, Lucy’s got this new guy. And I’m glad, you know, I’m just glad for her. Plus, it makes her somebody else’s problem. I don’t have to hear any more about how I should be doing this or doing that. You see, Lucy wasn’t any better’n me—but she wanted to be.”

  “Where was she from? I couldn’t find any other Fanchers in these parts.”

  “Virginia? North Carolina? Somewhere south of here, I know that much.”

  “And you weren’t mad when you got out of jail and found out she had a new guy?” The cheeseburger arrived, but plain, without the “everything.” It barely had cheese. The french fries had come in gravy, as requested, but they were ice-cold on the inside and the gravy appeared to have been salvaged from Jiffy Lube.

  “Wasn’t her fault. Truth be told, when I went to jail, she couldn’t make the rent on her own. She had to find a new man. A girl like Lucy, that’s how she lives. Waiting tables, working at the Royal Farm, she’s not gonna make enough to cover her expenses. I took Lucy away from someone, someone took her away from me. She was like Tarzan.”

  “Tarzan?”

  “She went from tree to tree, and she always knew where the next vine was.”

  “Was she pretty?”

  Flood stared at the ceiling, as if this question were of cosmic significance. “Not when I knew her. She had a figure—she was one of those tiny girls with big breasts, you know?”

  “No,” Tess said.

  “You’ve got—” Flood began.

  “I’m not tiny,” Tess said, stifling what Flood obviously believed to be a compliment. “You said Lucy wasn’t pretty ”when I knew her.“ Something change?”

  “Uh-huh. I saw her at Happy Harry’s, about a month before she died. Her hair was cut different, really short, which I don’t much care for. Turns out she had a pretty little face under all that hair. She’d gotten her teeth bleached and fixed—she’d had a big space between the front two and a snaggle tooth with a gold crown. I didn’t much care for what she was wearing. Like I said, she had a good figure, and she had taken to hiding it away, like it was a secret. I tried to talk to her a little, but she didn’t have time for me. Said she was running late, on her way home from her community college class.”

  “Sounds pretty rude,” Tess said.

  “It was more than rude. It pissed me off. I knew Lucy Fancher. She wasn’t better’n me.”

  “Maybe she was.”

  “What? No one’s better’n anyone else. Not in America.”

  “You believe that bullshit? Whoever you are, there’s someone better than you and usually someone worse. Someone nicer, with better manners and more money.”

  “Having more money doesn’t make you superior.”

  “Then why do we call it better off? Look, I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying it is. When you were bouncing Lucy off the walls every Saturday night—”

  “Not every Saturday night,” Flood objected, a sudden stickler for accuracy.

  “—you were on the same footing. You went to jail, Lucy started moving up in the world. Did you want her back?”

  “No. I had a girl by then. I don’t have a problem getting women.”

  Flood was probably telling the truth, a sad commentary on her gender. Tess found herself thinking about the boyfriend who had cheated on her. Actually, there were more than one, and Jonathan Ross had been a member of the club. But right now she was thinking about a particularly smarmy guy back in college, a guy who seemed to think his dick was like the root of a plant: If he didn’t get it damp on a regular basis, it was at risk of drying up and falling off. The last time she had caught him cheating—and it was to her everlasting shame that there was a last time, as opposed to a one-and-only time—the last time she caught him, he had explained that the woman in question was his old girlfriend. Apparently ex-girlfriends were like territories on which he held lifetime mineral rights.

  “I’m not saying you wanted Lucy back,” Tess said. “But maybe once? For old times’ sake?”

  “I called her the next day, told her how nice it was to see her, asked if we could have a drink some time. She liked that. She said it was civilized, having a drink with her old boyfriend. She said her fiancé— that was her word, fiancé—was out of town on business, and she’d meet me for a drink. I remember she ordered a white wine spritzer. Very fancy, she was, all full of herself.”

  “How’d the evening end up?”

  “The way it usually did with me and her.” Bonner Flood was smirking, proud of himself. “Lucy with her legs in the air, asking for more.”

  Tess studied the man. It was unfathomable to her that he could be sexually desirable to anyone, under any circumstances. There weren’t enough white wine spritzers in all of Cecil County.

  “You know,” she said, “Oliver Twist didn’t ask for more because the gruel was good.”

  “Huh?”

  “If Lucy was always asking for more, maybe it was because she never got enough.”

  Flood reached his blue-purple right arm toward the soiled creases of his blue-jeaned crotch. “You wanna see what I got in here? You wanna see?”

  “God, no.”

  “All right, then,” he said, as if he had won some debate. Tess didn’t have many flashes of i
ntuition, and she didn’t trust many of the ones she did have. But she knew, in that instant, that Bonner Flood had not reconnected with his old flame. She saw Lucy—or Lucy as she imagined her, for she had never seen so much as a photograph of the girl— arrayed in her version of business attire, primly shaking Flood’s hand outside the bar. Lucy had turned Flood down.

  Which would explain why the ex-cop, Dewitt, had been dogging him all this time. It wasn’t a bad motive, not that motives counted for anything. And Flood worked in a marina. He could keep a body in water for a couple of days.

  “You didn’t sleep with her. Not that night.”

  “I did.” Moral outrage, as if lying about sleeping with another man’s girlfriend was worse than doing it.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Look, I’d take it back if I could. Believe me, I’d take it back. If I knew that some crazy cop was going to dog me until the end of my life, asking me over and over again about the last time I saw her, what she said, how she looked, if she mentioned anything unusual.”

  “Carl Dewitt.”

  “Carl Dewitt,” he said wearily.

  Tess gave up. She gave up on her cheeseburger, which tasted like compressed cardboard. She gave up on her fries. She gave up on her beer, which was flattish and briny, as if it had been mixed with river water. She gave up on Bonner Flood. Whatever had happened here, the police had not been lax or indifferent. She threw some money on a table, enough to cover both their meals, and stalked out. Job over. What a waste of time and mileage.

  She hated to admit it to herself, but she was disappointed. Despite her cynical protestations, she had wanted this job to be what Whitney had promised. She wanted to work for the good guys. She wanted—did she dare say this out loud?—to be a force for good. Part of the solution. She wasn’t so sure the state’s laws needed to be changed and revised, but she knew Maryland’s mind-set did. Miriam Greenhouse was right: Every time a man killed a woman, it was reported as another love story gone bad, especially if the man then finished himself off. Where was the love in this?

  A light rain had started to fall. April was a petulant month in these parts. Tess sat in her car, anxious to get home, too weary to turn the key in the ignition. From here, the diner looked charming and cozy. Talk about a trompe l’oeil. A young couple sat in one of the front booths, leaning toward each other, laughing at some shared joke, the kind of laugh that was almost like a kiss, only better. The young man reached out and touched her face. It made Tess ache, and she had someone at home.

  There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. That had been the lunatic neighbor’s theory. By the light of day, it had seemed ridiculous. People killed for a lot of reasons, but rootless envy was not on that list to Tess’s knowledge. Besides, if you yearned to be part of a happy couple, wouldn’t you kill the man and make a play for the woman? No, it made no sense.

  Still, something was bugging her. She dug through the folders in the passenger seat and found Tiffani Gunts, the grainy reproduction of her high school graduation photo. Lots of dark hair, tiny face. Lucy Fancher’s physical particulars were the same, before the haircut. The life was even more similar. Abusive ex-boyfriend, followed by a new life, full of promise, a new place to live, a fiancé. Then a sudden violent force rips through the happy household with the power and rage of a natural disaster, a hurricane coming to shore at the spot it is least expected. The woman is dead, the man is destroyed.

  The storm moves on, implacable, searching for another place to come aground.

  Tess went back into the diner, found the phone book, and tore the page she wanted from its residential listings. Dome light on, map propped on her steering wheel, she drove haphazardly through the streets of North East, running into the same dead ends and cul-de-sacs that had plagued her throughout the afternoon. North East nights were darker than Baltimore ones. Even with a full moon, it was like swimming through black water. Tess began to fear she would end up in a ditch or miss the curve on one of these back roads and slam into a tree.

  But eventually she found the house she wanted, a white bungalow with a front porch and only a sliver of land between it and the water. There was a dock, the silhouette of a sailboat visible in the moonlight. The house was dark except for the throbbing blue-white glow of a television set, the light pulsing through lace curtains.

  The man who opened the door had gingery hair, sad blue eyes, and so many freckles crowded onto his round, placid face that he gave the impression of being striped, like a red tabby cat.

  “My name is Tess Monaghan. I’m a private investigator from Baltimore, and I think there may be a new angle on the Lucy Fancher case.”

  “About time,” said Carl Dewitt.

  CHAPTER 14

  “I saved everything,” Carl Dewitt said. “Copies of everything, I mean. I didn’t take away anything official, not even my own notes. But I xeroxed everything I could find.”

  He was digging through a cardboard box, looking at various papers, frowning at them, clearly in search of something in particular. The box was sitting in the middle of his small living room as if he had, in fact, been waiting for Tess’s knock. Or anyone’s knock. Judging by the faint circles on the top, he had been using it as a makeshift coffee table, setting glasses on the box as he sat in his Barcalounger and watched the enormous flat-screen television that dominated one wall.

  When he came upon photographs, he would thrust them at Tess and continue his methodical search. She wished he wouldn’t. The only thing more unsettling than photographs of Lucy Fancher’s head were photographs of Lucy Fancher’s body. But Carl didn’t seem to notice. He hummed tunelessly as he sifted through papers. He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed that a stranger had shown up on his doorstep in the dark, babbling about the possibility that the Fancher homicide could be related to one in Frederick several years earlier. If Tess had to describe his mood, she would say he was happy, almost excited.

  “Did you know Lucy Fancher before—” Tess stopped, groping for the right words.

  He lifted his eyes from the box. “Before I found her head on the bridge?”

  “Yes.”

  “North East isn’t that small. Sometimes I think I might have seen her once or twice in town. But that’s wishful thinking.”

  “Wishful thinking?”

  “Wouldn’t you rather know someone as a whole living, breathing person instead of just a head?” His voice was mild, no different from someone expressing a preference for chocolate over broccoli. He had found whatever he wanted and settled back into the Barcalounger, the only piece of furniture in the small living room that seemed to fit him—literally. Its contours had molded to his body over the years so it was almost like a tailored suit. The rest of the decor tended toward flowers and doilies and chintz.

  “Now see, this always bothered me,” he said, flapping a large cardboard rectangle at Tess. “They kept a calendar. The days that her boyfriend were gone were crossed off—see?”

  He handed Tess a calendar from a local insurance company, the months noted by not-very-good photographs of the Chesapeake Bay. Shot through a gauzy sentimental fog, the photos managed to render the bay generic and uninteresting. Beneath a harvest scene, the last three days of October had been circled.

  “You said you took copies of everything. But this is the real thing. Shouldn’t it be logged in with the rest of the stuff?”

  Carl blushed, which made him appear to be the same red-orange shade from the open neck of his shirt to the top of his scalp. “It’s something I found later, and nobody else seemed to care, so I just kept it. Otherwise it was just going to be packed away, with all the other stuff in the house. But I thought it might be significant.”

  “How?”

  “Like I said, it shows the dates her boyfriend was away.” He flipped through, showing her where days were circled.

  “It doesn’t say what these days were,” Tess pointed out. “They’re just circles.”

  “Yeah, b
ut we know he was away those three days in October. So I worked backward from that. Someone else could’ve figured it out, too.”

  “You think someone saw this ahead of time? That the killer had this information?”

  “Yeah, maybe. Only the calendar wasn’t out in the open, like it would be in most houses. I found it in a kitchen drawer, one of those drawers where people keep their junk.”

  “So if it’s not where someone can see it, how can someone know when the boyfriend—what was his name?”

  “Alan Palmer.”

  “How can they know when he’s going to be away?”

  “I figured whoever killed Lucy hid the calendar, so no one would make the connection. But if it was on the refrigerator—and there’s a mark, up on top, as if it had been held in place by a magnet—it would have been in plain view.”

  Tess held the calendar closer to a small table lamp. She couldn’t help noticing it had a rose-colored shade that was fringed in maroon. There was a faint rust-colored line, the kind a metal clip might leave behind.

  “Anyway, let’s say you’re a plumber or a cable television installer. You come and go through people’s houses all the time, you see things, you take notice of things. You realize there’s a pretty young woman whose boyfriend travels a lot. You realize the calendar is the key to when he’s gone. Maybe she even tells you that’s what the circles are for, or you’re making an appointment and she says, ”No, not then, because Alan is away at the end of the month.“ But if you take it off the refrigerator and put it in a drawer, nobody else makes the connection.”

  “So did Lucy have anyone do work on the house in the year before she was killed?”

  Carl’s shoulders slumped. “Not that I could find. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t use somebody. There are a lot of fellas around here who work off the books, you know? Who do stuff on a cash-only basis.”

  Tess was following her own thoughts, down a different track. “If the same man killed Tiffani Gunts and Lucy Fancher, how did he come to meet them, to fixate on them? You couldn’t meet such women by sheer accident. There’s a connection we haven’t figured out yet. And why are the deaths so different?”