Julie Carter’s people probably didn’t make those kinds of distinctions anyway.
Tess had more experience with death than she did with its attendant rituals. Julie Carter’s funeral, held in a pretty stone church out in what people insisted on calling the country, was only the third or fourth that Tess had attended in her adult life. She counted them up: Her maternal grandfather. An older colleague from the Star, who had died of cancer in her fifties. A service for the grandchild of one of her mother’s best friends, killed in a fall, the saddest by far.
And Jonathan Ross.
Sometimes, she thought the scar tissue over that wound was almost too hard, too complete. It was as if her very ability to heal had revealed just how half-assed, how sleazy, their relationship had been. The nightmares came from being an eyewitness to his death, not because he was the love of her life. She had never mistaken him for that. She had envied him, however, in life and death. Jonathan’s funeral had been crowded, his legacy as a journalistic star unquestioned. Later, when Tess had faced her own near-death, her first thought was of how skimpy her obituary would be. A superficial thought, but it had helped her fight for her life, and here she was—at the most awkward funeral she could imagine, a service of long silences and stammered clichés. What can you say about a twenty-one-year-old woman who died? That she was a junkie and a con artist.
In the front pews, Julie’s family—parents, brothers and sisters, a few elderly people who might have been grandparents or even great-grandparents—appeared sullen and disgruntled, as if they had better places to be on the unseasonably warm day. Julie’s friends were scattered among the rear pews, party girls and boys, at once sleepy and restless at 11 A.M. The in-between pews were empty. There was no middle ground in Julie’s life. You were either family or you were one of her fucked-up friends.
Tess took a seat in the last pew and tried to study the men. Even from the backs of their necks, she could tell the man she was looking for was not here. These young men were mullet heads, their longish hair straggling over shirt collars that were not as clean as they should be, reaching down to jackets that looked as if they had been dragged from some cramped closet and shaken to remove the wrinkles. They were young, too, these men, not much older than Julie. The parking lot outside, with its Trans Ams and shiny pickups, attested to their youth as well. Tess had known before she walked in that her quarry was not here and probably would not be here.
Unless, she thought, he knows I’m here. I’m the one he wants, after all. And she slid her right hand beneath her black linen jacket, felt for her holster and her gun. It was hot in the church, and the unaccustomed bulk of the leather and metal beneath her arm felt like some strange tumor. She would have to get used to it.
The young are difficult to bury under the best of circumstances. But Julie Carter presented additional challenges. Her life had not only been short, it had been stupid and shiftless. She hadn’t even seemed particularly nice. The priest worked gamely through the service, and it was hard to know if his red face was glistening from the heat in the small church or if he was just covered in flop sweat. Julie’s family appeared to be seething, muttering among themselves, shifting in their seats impatiently. The funeral, rather than providing solace, seemed only to remind them of all the ways she had disappointed them in life. Julie had found one last way to humiliate them.
Or perhaps it was merely Julie Carter’s penultimate disappointment. For there was no room in the church’s graveyard for Julie Carter, although there was plenty of space left in that peaceful tree-lined acreage. When the service finally, thankfully, ended, it turned out that Julie was to be laid to rest in a sprawling antiseptic cemetery on the outskirts of Baltimore. Julie would be happy to be that much closer to the excitement for which she had yearned, Tess thought. At least she wouldn’t be stuck out in the sticks for eternity.
Only a few mourners made the trip to the gravesite, which made Tess more conspicuous than she had been in the church. She was standing a few feet back, as befitted a stranger, wondering how to approach the family, when the decision was made for her. An older sister—she had Julie’s coloring and the same pert features, although they were congealed in an extra hundred pounds—walked over to her after the casket had been lowered and the final prayers chanted.
“I don’t believe I know you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that she considered this a bad thing.
“My name is Tess Monaghan. I met Julie recently, through my work.”
“What kind of work?”
“I’m a private investigator.”
The sister rolled her eyes. “What’d she do, shoplift something? It wouldn’t have been the first time, although I bet she told you different. Did she cry—she could cry on cue, you know—and tell you it would never happen again? Because all that meant is she wouldn’t do it again in your store.”
“I’m a private investigator, not a security guard.”
“Oh.” The sister was perplexed, trying to figure out the connection. “Did she have to pass a drug test for a job? Or was she fooling around with some married man?”
“Julie wasn’t doing anything. She was… an innocent party.”
This provoked a derisive snort. “That would be a first.”
Tess almost wished she could tell the sour-faced sister just how innocent Julie was, how undeserved her death. But how could you ever convey such information? For all the Carter family’s anger and fury at their wayward daughter, they had not wished her dead. They were angry because she had not lived long enough to straighten up.
“I liked her,” Tess said, and it was true enough, under the circumstances. “It was interesting, actually, how we met. I was compiling some information about domestic violence, working with some local foundations that are trying to figure out why it’s so hard for women to break the cycle. Because a lot of women do get out of abusive or unhealthy relationships, only to start afresh in new relationships that are just as bad.”
“I’m not sure you could call what Julie had relationships. Men were just a means to an end for her, a way to get money so she could get drugs.” The sister sighed. The heat was hard on her, overweight as she was, and she was almost wheezing. A burden years in the making seemed to be escaping her, asthmatic breath by breath.
“She was an addict?”
“She was a pain in the ass. I know I sound harsh, but everyone—my parents, me, my brothers and sisters—we’ve been cleaning up behind her for six years. Trying to make amends with teachers, then with bosses, getting her into programs. Then she’d come out and start all over again. If anything, Julie was the abusive one. Emotionally, I mean. She destroyed every opportunity she got, and she got more than she deserved.”
“Still, I bet she had bad luck with men.”
“Bad luck? I’d trade my right arm for her kind of bad luck. There was always someone around she was playing, some guy who was too good for her by half. She had one boyfriend when she was just eighteen who woulda done anything for her. He was perfect.”
“Perfect?” It was what she had wanted to hear. It was what she had dreaded to hear.
“Well, maybe a little old for her, but that’s not a bad thing. He was steady. Nice and polite, drove a nice car, had a good job, although he had to travel all the time. Selling something.”
Sure, Tess thought. He was always selling something.
“When he found out she was a junkie, he tried to get her into rehab, paid for it even, and stayed by her through it all—and she went back to drugs the first chance she got. He finally just gave up on her and left.”
“Do you remember his name?” Not that it matters, Tess thought. It would be another man’s name, another fortuitous match of an unused life and a sociopath’s inexplicable mission.
“Alan Palmer,” the sister said promptly, surprising Tess. It had not occurred to her that he would use the same name twice. But then—he hadn’t killed Julie Carter, not then, so he was free to move on, to keep using the stolen identity. “Oh, he w
as such a nice man. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him here today.”
“Has he called?”
“No,” the sister said, her voice wistful. “I think he moved out of state. He said something about going west. It was almost three years ago.”
So Julie had fallen in the interval between Tiffani and Lucy. Which meant that, for all his planning, the man did not know where he would end up next. He knew only who he would be when he moved on. But did he know, from the moment he met them, that he intended to kill them? Why would he kill women like Tiffani and Lucy, who had never disappointed him, only to spare Julie?
“Where was Julie working when she met”—she had to grope for the name, remind herself which persona would have presented himself in the little town of Beckleysville—“Alan?”
The sister looked at Tess. It was an odd question, but Tess was beyond caring.
“She was working at a High’s Dairy Store, and he came in one night to buy a soda. The job at Mars came later. He just kept coming back. Like I said, he was the best thing that ever happened to my sister.”
No, Tess thought, the best thing that ever happened to Julie Carter was that he decided to leave. Julie had defeated this man on some level, had driven him away. Her addiction, her fierce self-involvement, had kept him from getting what he wanted.
There was a lesson to be learned in Julie’s initial survival—and one from her ultimate demise as well.
CHAPTER 30
Tess picked up the tail as she headed home from her office that night. This time it was a dark van, a minivan, which might have struck her as mildly comical under other circumstances. Death by soccer mom. But the driver, although nothing more than a silhouette through the windshield, was clearly no one’s mother. The shoulders were too broad, the neck too thick. She first noticed him as she was turning on the Jones Falls Expressway from Fayette. He raced the amber light, risking a ticket in an intersection rigged with those new red-light cameras. Who would do that?
Someone who didn’t lose a lot of sleep over traffic tickets.
Funny—even as Tess had embraced Carl Dewitt’s contention that the killer they sought might still be alive, she had not recalibrated her thoughts about his other conspiracy theories. She had assumed, after the fact, that their close encounters on the highway had been nothing but Carl’s paranoia-fueled imagination. Besides, the man they wanted had no need to follow them. He not only knew where Tess had been, he often knew where she was going.
Yet here was a dark van, hanging back a few car lengths on the expressway but keeping steady with her speed, no matter how erratically she drove. And she had begun to drive quite erratically, doing her best impersonation of the archetypal Baltimore driver. Local drivers were not so much aggressive as absentminded, seemingly indifferent to reaching a destination. The average Baltimore driver gave the impression of a sleepwalker who had regained consciousness behind the wheel, baffled and disoriented.
Tess clicked her turn signal, then didn’t budge from the right lane for two miles. She turned off the signal, only to drift into the middle lane, then the left. At the Cold Spring Lane exit, she abruptly veered into the far right lane at the last possible moment, which forced her to brake so hard at the top of the exit ramp that her wheels squealed and the Toyota sent up a cloud of brown smoke.
Still, the van managed to hang with her, lurking in the pack of vehicles stuck at the first light on Cold Spring. Tess still could not make out much of the driver’s face and features. He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap. He also had on a windbreaker, suspicious on such a warm day, and he dipped his chin into its collar so the lower part of his face was obscured.
The light had changed, time to make a decision. Tess didn’t want to lead her stalker to her home. Yet if he had been following her all this time, he already knew where her home was. If she tried to lead him to a different, neutral location—the Northern District police precinct, for example—he might decide to wait for her at the house. Crow could be in the house, possibly lost in one of the endless renovation projects the bungalow kept demanding, like some possessed house in a Stephen King novel. She felt for her gun and looked around for her cell phone, peeking out of the knapsack on the passenger seat. Time to break my own rules, she decided, steering with one hand and dialing with the other.
Shit. The voice mail engaged after three rings, which meant Crow was out. If he had been on the phone, or on-line, the machine would have picked up on the first ring. He was probably walking the dogs. Which meant he could arrive home at any moment, unprepared for their mystery guest.
“You think you know me? You think you want me?” She still had the cell phone cradled to her mouth, so if any other driver glanced at her, it would appear as if she were speaking to someone. “Okay, let’s see if you do know where I live.”
She shot through the intersection, then dawdled up the hill to the next intersection, knowing it was a relatively long light. Perfect—she had timed it right, reaching the light just as it turned amber. She bolted even as it turned red and, Baltimore being Baltimore, one more car sneaked through the light as well. But the van was stuck several cars back. She would reach her house with at least a five-minute head start.
Home. Normally, she exulted in the semi-isolation of East Lane, which was more alley than street. But in the greenish-gray twilight, her block was too private. The neighbors’ houses were dark and quiet behind the evergreens that screened them from the street, and the informal dog play group that met in the park behind her house must have dispersed, for she did not hear the usual barks and yips. She let herself in, calling for Crow and the dogs, but no one came out to greet her. On a walk, she told herself, it has to be a walk. No single person could overcome that trio. Not with Crow’s common sense and Miata’s Doberman instincts. Esskay’s breath alone could fell an attacker.
But if Crow and the dogs came back in the next few minutes, and the man in the van had found his way here, things could get dangerously out of control. She had to figure out a way to keep everyone safe.
Leaving her front door standing open, she went to the rear of the house, unlocking the dead bolt on the French doors that led to the deck off the bedroom, then locking them from outside with her key. Now what? The house was built into a hill, so the ground was a half-story down—less, when one slid from the deck and hung from it before dropping to the ground below. Still, the landing was harder than she expected, sending shocks through both knees.
Tess crawled under the deck until she was as close as she could get to the house while still able to see a slice of the gravel driveway. The ground here never saw the sun, and it was cool where it rubbed into the white shirt she had worn with her linen funeral suit. Her black skirt was hiked up almost to her hips, her low-heeled shoes had slipped from her feet while she was hanging from the deck. At least she had thought to leave the jacket back in the house, flung over a chair in the dining room to help create the illusion that she was inside.
Of course, this meant her gun was no longer concealed. She didn’t want it to be. The Smith & Wesson was out of the holster. She held it in two hands, arms extended on the ground, and waited.
And waited. Then waited some more, feeling increasingly ridiculous with each passing second, which seemed to be ticked off by the blood that pounded in her ears. If the van’s driver had been intent on following her, he surely would be here by now. She remembered a game she had played growing up, German tanks. They had stretched out on the ground just like this, pretending to shoot the cars moving along the streets of Ten Hills. But then the guns had been fingers and sticks, nothing more. God, she felt like an idiot. Her neighbors already thought she was a strange and somewhat outré addition to the Roland Park zip code. If the local swim club got wind of this, they would never let her join.
Then she thought of Julie Carter and Lucy Fancher and Tiffani Gunts, and she didn’t feel quite so ridiculous. If someone had given them a chance, if they had known what or who was coming for them in the final hours of
their lives, they would have fought back. Despite her self-destructive habits, Julie was scrappy and tough. Lucy Fancher was beginning to find her place in the world, she had told her ex-boyfriend as much. Tiffani was a mother. She would have done anything to keep Darby from growing up without her. Given the chance, these women wouldn’t have worried about whether they seemed strange or odd. They would have tried to live.
Someone’s vehicle was pulling up front. It was a dark van, its wheels crunching on the gravel.
Tess heard the door slam, saw a pair of sneakered feet approach her front door. She glanced over her shoulder, making sure Crow and the dogs weren’t coming up the path through the woods. If they arrived now, she would have to shout and warn him away and risk losing her quarry. But the woods were quiet. Everything was quiet. She listened for footsteps, but the rock foundation of her house was too solid. Had he crossed her threshold, ventured deep enough into the house? Was he in the bedroom yet, looking for her—throwing open her closet and bathroom doors, trying the locked French doors? She needed him to get as far inside as possible.
Her plan was to lock him in her house by racing to the front door and turning the dead bolt with her key from the outside. She then would call the police from her cell, reporting an intruder. He would be stuck inside and she would be safe outside, keeping a watch for the police and Crow, whoever arrived first.
A board creaked. His footsteps were headed toward her. She inched forward on her stomach, ready to go.
And then she saw a second pair of legs, running up her hill in a strange hobbled step. Khaki’d legs, with nerdy dress shoes and no octet of doggie legs alongside them. In other words, not Crow legs. So where had these come from? Who was this? She had not heard another car door slam, and there had been no passenger in the van that she saw. Two men? Why would there be two men? Yet the second man was now in the house, he had just crossed the threshold. If he heard her coming, he would have time to get out, ruining everything. She would have to lock them both inside, ask questions later. She wiggled a few more inches up the hill, gun still extended, wondering how fast she could move. She wasn’t built for speed, as the old blues song said. Adrenaline was going to have to power her through.
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