The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  “I still think it’s the state cops,” Tess said.

  “We should be so lucky.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Back at state police headquarters, something was up. Tess sensed it, the way one senses a coming thunderstorm. The air seemed to hum and everyone was moving a little faster, as if trying to get things done before the skies opened up. She could see the change, too, in the quick sidelong glances from Sergeant Craig, Lieutenant Green, and Major Shields as they barreled up and down the corridor.

  But, most telling, Major Shields was suddenly very keen for them to stay in the office and wait for the phone to ring. Which it seldom did. Tess began to feel as if they were caught in a loop not unlike that traffic circle off Interstate 70, chasing their own tails. Nothing is more tedious than make-work, and Tess wondered if the state police had decided to bore her and Carl into giving up or dropping out.

  The stalemate continued for three days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. On the third straight day of doing nothing, Tess got out a sketchbook and began making lists.

  “What are you doing?” Carl demanded over his shoulder. He had been tapping disconsolately on the computer, playing with search engines, reading out-of-town newspapers to see if there were unsolved homicides in other states.

  “Brainstorming. Reorganizing what we know, looking for links.”

  “That’s pointless.”

  “You got a better idea?”

  He turned away from the computer and watched as Tess began sketching, jotting down everything she knew about Tiffani and Lucy, looking for any other similarities they might have missed.

  “Pretty. Small, fine-featured. Bad ex-boyfriends. Both worked in convenience stores.”

  “Good place to meet women when you’re new in town.” Like a sulky child who claimed he didn’t want to play a game, Carl couldn’t resist once the pieces came out and he saw his playmate having fun.

  “But it helps if they have bad ex-boyfriends,” Tess said. “And you can’t know that just by looking at some woman who’s selling you a Slim Jim.”

  “Well, there’s a similarity you’ve overlooked. These girls were bubbly, according to those who knew them. Unguarded. They probably told their life story to anyone they waited on more than twice. And look.” He pointed to another item on Tess’s list. “They worked overnight shifts. Imagine a guy coming in, regular-like, buying a few things. How many visits would it take before he asked, ”So a pretty girl like you has to have a boyfriend.“ And she’d tell him all her troubles, like he was a big brother. He didn’t come on strong, remember? With Lucy, he got her to rent the house and only moved in later.”

  “Which also has the advantage of keeping his fake name off the lease and the utility bills.”

  “Right. Hey, let’s graph this.”

  “Graph it?”

  “On a map, like.”

  “It won’t be much of a graph, just a straight point from Frederick to North East.”

  “I don’t know. What if you add”—he took an old framed map of the state of Maryland from the wall and marked the two hometowns with silver thumbtacks—“the places where he spent the night before.” He added a thumbtack to Saint Michaels and placed one in the lower left-hand corner, about where Spartina, Virginia, would be.

  “I’m not seeing a pattern emerge here,” Tess said.

  “Wait.” Carl removed dental floss from his pocket.

  “You carry dental floss?”

  “My dad had gum disease. You’d floss after every meal too, if you saw your old man coming home from the dentist in a wife-beating mood.”

  “Interesting turn of phrase,” Tess said primly.

  “I don’t use it as a figure of speech.”

  His back was to her, and Tess needed a minute to deconstruct what he had said. “Oh—hey, I mean, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “It wasn’t so bad. I got my growth early. By the time I was thirteen I could take him. And I did. He moved out and on.” He was fixing the dental floss along the points he charted. One mint-green line from Frederick to North East, two small lines dangling down to the places their killer had used to set up his alibis. “It still doesn’t look like much, does it?”

  Tess studied the map. Again, she had that sensation of a gnat in her ear, a buzzing memory she could not capture.

  “Try this,” she said. She removed the strings that attached the two cities to their satellites, then held out her hand for the dental floss, breaking off another piece. “Now look.”

  She balanced the map in her lap, stringing a line from the speck that was Notting Island to Frederick and adding another one between the island and North East. The resulting triangle was almost a perfect isosceles. Its sharpest angle formed where the dental floss intersected Notting.

  “What’s the point?” Carl asked. “We don’t know that Notting Island has anything to do with this.”

  “But there’s a similarity,” Tess said. “Water.”

  “What?”

  “Water. Water, water everywhere. Wherever he lived, he could see water. From Tiffani’s town house, which backed up to the Monocacy, to Lucy’s house in the trees, also with its river view. And there’s no point on Notting Island that you can’t see the bay.”

  “That doesn’t eliminate a lot of the earth’s surface, Tess.”

  “But it eliminates entire towns in Maryland. We’re not talking about someone who just likes water. We’re talking about someone who wants it within his sight as much as possible. I’ve been to Tiffani’s house— you could see the river from the back deck. I stood in Lucy’s yard—you could see the river glinting through the trees.”

  “Water?”

  It was Major Shields who asked the question, leaning against the doorjamb with a too-deliberate casualness. Tess tilted the map toward her, so he couldn’t see how they had defaced it with thumbtacks and dental floss.

  “You got a lead?” the major prodded.

  “No,” Tess said, with her best girly smile.

  “Not really.” Carl was playing the country boy. Tess glanced over at his Huckleberry Finn visage, all freckles and sunburn, and thought about the confidence he had just shared. He must have been an exceptionally patient and deliberate little boy, waiting all those years to be big enough to beat the crap out of his father. You had to be strong to be that patient.

  You had to be a little scary, too.

  “Well, we’ve got one,” the major drawled.

  “Yeah?”

  “Down in Saint Mary’s City. Want to come?”

  Tess and Carl looked at each other. It was as if he was trying to shake his head no without moving it at all. She, too, sensed a trap. But she couldn’t see how they could say no to any opportunity. Could they have found him?

  “Sure,” she began, even as Carl said, “No.”

  “No? I thought you’d be glad to be included in the investigation, Carl. Why don’t you want to go to Saint Mary’s City?”

  “Well, we’re pretty busy here.”

  The major walked around the table and looked at their map. “Why, this looks very… interesting. But it will wait, won’t it? Saint Mary’s City is a long way, and I want to get down and back before rush hour, if possible. Besides, this gal doesn’t have all day. She has to go to work at three P.M., she says.”

  “What gal?” Tess asked.

  “Just a gal who says she knows something. Might be a wasted trip, for all we know. But I got a good feeling about this and thought you should be there. After all, you brought this to us. We owe you.”

  Tess looked at Carl and tried, as casually as possible, to point to Saint Mary’s on the map: water. Saint Mary’s City was also on the water. Carl nodded, but he didn’t look happy. Later, thinking back, Tess would recognize the expression. It was the face of a man who was cornered.

  Saint Mary’s City was where Maryland had begun, with the arrival of two ships, the Ark and the D
ove. It had been years since Tess had ventured this far south along the bay’s Western Shore, and the usual desecrations had sprung up in this once-lovely country: the drive-through burger joints, the fast-oil-change places, the strip malls that looked as if they had been built overnight.

  “Where are we going?” she asked the major, who had insisted they ride with him, not follow in Carl’s car, as Carl had suggested. “I know you said Saint Mary’s City, but where exactly?”

  “Just outside of town.”

  “And this woman—what does she know?”

  “She may have seen our guy. That’s a pretty significant break.”

  “Recently?”

  “No. Been almost two years ago. But she’s pretty sure she saw him.”

  “You forget.” She leaned forward, so her head was even with Major Shields, who sat in the passenger seat while Sergeant Craig drove. “Carl has seen him too. He interviewed him. So what’s the big deal?”

  “Oh, I think this could be a very big deal,” Major Shields said. “Don’t you, Carl?”

  Why did he keep addressing Carl, who was slumped in the backseat, arms folded across his chest? The major had never struck her as sexist before, but he was suddenly acting as if Tess didn’t even exist.

  “Why?” she persisted. “Why would it be significant?”

  The major took so long to respond that she wondered if he had heard her at all. Men, in her experience, often retreated so far into their own worlds that some voices—women’s voices in particular, it occurred to her now—reached them as if on a delay. Even Crow, whom Whitney had once dubbed the perfect postmodern boyfriend, could become absentminded and dreamy, until she had to tug on his sleeve and bring him back to earth.

  For some reason, this made her think about Dr. Armistead. As much as he irritated her, he always listened. He wasn’t always good on the nuances, but he at least heard every word. Maybe that’s what it took to get a man to listen to every word you said: $150 an hour.

  Even as Tess reached a hand toward Major Shields’s shoulder to jolt him into response, she was thinking again about the man they sought. He listened. Oh, how he listened. From the moment he arrived in a woman’s life, he was the most attentive and solicitous of men. He listened because he was gathering information, preparing for the day he would betray the trust of these young, naive women. Because he was the perfect man, the perfect boyfriend. He listened because he was less likely to betray his own complicated history if he didn’t talk about himself.

  “It’s up ahead and down to the left,” the major said. He turned his head to face them, seemingly unfazed by the fact that Tess was so close to him, hovering near his ear.

  “Let’s go,” he said as Sergeant Craig rolled to a stop and put the patrol car in park.

  “What, are you a Wild Bunch fan, too?”

  “Never saw it.”

  “You should,” Carl said. Tess realized it was the first time he had spoken since they had merged onto the Baltimore beltway two hours earlier. “It’s only one of the best movies ever made.”

  “But it’s all the usual outlaw shit, right?” Major Shields’s easygoing drawl had taken on a new hard edge. “I don’t get those movies where the good guys are obsessed with the bad guys, as if they’re locked in some sort of immortal relationship. When you’re an officer of the law, you lock up the bad guys and move on. It’s not personal. It’s not about individual glory or vendettas. It’s a job, and you conduct yourself like a professional.”

  His eyes flicked at Carl, quick as the blue-yellow flame from a cigarette lighter, and moved away.

  “In fact, let me show you how it’s done.”

  CHAPTER 25

  The apartment complex was newish, a place with mild aspirations to class that began with the name—Dove’s Landing—and ended at the front door. Once inside, the common areas were extremely common. Tess noticed that the carpet was dingy and a smell of ammonia lingered in the air.

  “She’s in 301,” Major Shields said, beginning the climb to the top floor. Carl fell back. Tess glanced over her shoulder to see if his knee was troubling him, but he was simply moving with extraordinary care, as if he had no desire to reach the top.

  The woman who answered the door to 301 wore an orange smock with a name tag, MARY ANN. Petite, with a face at once fine and coarse, foxlike. Much of it was hidden, however, by an extraordinary mane of dark curly hair styled in the feathery blown-dry wings of the late 1970s. The girl could not have been alive when this haircut was first popular, Tess thought. Tess herself had been barely alive, a grade-schooler who had yearned for such big hair, if only because her mother kept hers barbershop short.

  “Miss Melcher?” Major Shields asked.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, showing them in. The apartment was neat but not quite clean. The carpet crunched beneath their feet. The framed posters, which ran to large-eyed kitty cats, were dusty and streaked. A cat was clearly on the premises as well, for Tess picked up the telltale odor of a litter pan that needed to be emptied.

  Their hostess settled in a small rocker, while Major Shields and Sergeant Craig took the sofa, an overstuffed monstrosity of white cotton, its side shredded by the phantom cat. Tess took the only other chair in the room, while Carl was left standing.

  “The cheese stands alone, huh?” said Major Shields, sliding over and patting a spot next to him on the sofa. “Have a sit, buddy.”

  “That’s okay,” Carl said, pulling a chair in from the dining alcove and setting it up at the edge of their circle, as close to the door as possible.

  Mary Ann looked nervous. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, her head seemed to wobble a bit on her neck. Maybe it was the weight of all that hair, Tess thought. Then she did a mental double take.

  That hair. That smock. Mary Ann Melcher was the living prototype of the killer’s victims. Were they going to save someone’s life? Had they actually arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in some old Western?

  Major Shields said, “Mary Ann, I’d like you to tell these folks what you told me yesterday, when you called our tip line.”

  She glanced nervously at Carl, then back at the major, who nodded his encouragement.

  “I work at the Wawa? Going on three years?” She kept looking over at the major, as if he knew her life story better than she did. “About two years ago, a gentleman started stopping by there regular. He would buy a fountain soda and he would mix the Cherry Coke with the Diet Coke. He said it was the best combination—sweet, but not as many calories, and it tasted like the sodas you got at a real fountain? The other girls figured out he liked me before I did.”

  “What was his name, Miss Melcher?”

  “Charlie. Charlie Chisholm. Like the trail, he’d say, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. Later, he explained. Something about the West and cows. I don’t know.”

  “Did you and Charlie”—the major had a delicacy, almost a tenderness, in the way he addressed the young woman—“did you have a relationship?”

  “Not at first. He took a real interest in me. I was having problems with my roommate—”

  “What kind of problems?” This was Carl, and his voice was as sharp as the major’s had been soft. Something sullen crept into Mary Ann’s face, as if she had heard this tone too many times in her life, had known a few too many bossy bosses.

  “She was a little wild. Ran around with jerks. Which was her private business, but I had to put up with ‘em too, and they weren’t my boyfriends. Although some wanted to be. If she only knew—”

  “Miss Melcher.” The major’s prodding tone continued soft. “About Charlie Chisholm.”

  She tossed her head. Tess wanted to tell her the effect wasn’t as coquettish as she thought.

  “He helped me get this place. Lent me money so I would have enough for the deposit, showed me how to get credit. All you have to do is get a little gas card and pay on it regular, he says, and bit by bit you can get everything you need. He also told me I should enroll at the commu
nity college, start taking courses so I could do something other than retail.” She smiled at the memory. “He called my job retail. Or the service industry. I liked that.”

  Tess was confused. “You liked working in retail?”

  “I liked the fact that he give it a name, didn’t look down on me. He said it was hard, doing what I did. He said I had all sorts of talents, if only I’d use them.”

  Without warning, the girl broke down and began to cry. She was all of twenty-one, Tess figured, and still quite young in many ways, despite being on her own.

  Major Shields was the kind of man who carried a handkerchief. He took this out and handed it to Mary Ann. “What happened to Charlie?”

  “He came home one night and told me he wanted to take me to a fancy supper. We went to the Outback Steakhouse up in Waldorf. Come dessert, he took my hand, and I thought this was when I was going to get a ring, in a little velvet box. I thought he was going to propose.”

  Tess would have thought so too. But perhaps the fact that he didn’t was the difference between being alive and ending up like Tiffani Gunts and Lucy Fancher.

  Major Shields continued to push her gently, as if he didn’t know the rest of the story. But he had talked to Mary Ann on the phone, Tess remembered. He knew where this was leading. “He didn’t? What did he do?”

  “He told me he was sick. He said he had been sick for a very long time, but he thought he could cure himself with…”—she groped for the words— “alternative therapies. He said he now realized he wasn’t going to get well and he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. So he was going to go away.”

  “Go away?” Major Shields prompted. “Are those the very words he used—go away?”

  Mary Ann nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I begged him not to. I told him I would stand by him, take care of him. But he said he was going to go home, let his family care for him. Which was the first I even knew he had family. I asked if he would come back for me if he got well, and he said he would. We didn’t have dessert, of course. We drove home, back here.”