The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  “I could have told you that the doctor’s boyfriend isn’t one of our guy’s personas,” Carl said when she hung up the phone. Esskay had allotted him a small portion of the office sofa.

  “How so?”

  “Our guy’s not queer.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Sorry. Gay, he’s not gay. He’d be appalled you even thought to check.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  He tapped his forehead. “I just do.”

  “Uh-uh. You’re the one who said you didn’t want to get into that mind-hunter shit.”

  “I’m just saying I know he’s not a—not gay.”

  “It’s still a supposition. Let’s keep to facts. Here’s one: Michael Shaw’s partner, unlike the other boyfriends in our various cases, didn’t disappear off the face of the planet. Too bad. Shaw’s death would be a more obvious part of the overall pattern if he had. So what else do we know about Shaw?”

  “He was a shrink.”

  “Right. Is it possible our guy ever went to him?”

  “Not of his own volition. He wouldn’t want to be in analysis.”

  “What if it were court-ordered?” Tess couldn’t help thinking of her own situation. She reread the obituary in her file. Shaw had been a doctor in Hopkins’ famed sex clinic. Serial killing had a strong sexual component. If EAC—the shorthand she and Carl had started using for Eric-Alan-Charlie—had committed a lesser crime in yet another persona, he might have been ordered into therapy. But wouldn’t an arrest have outed his identity scheme?

  Carl was on the same train of thought, even farther down the track. “We’ll never get the doctor’s client list,” he said. “It would be hard enough if we were real cops. As amateurs with no legal standing, there’s no way. Besides, why kill your shrink? He can’t tell your secrets to anyone.”

  “That’s not exactly true. If you blurt out your intention to harm someone, the doctor does have an ethical obligation to alert the authorities. A psychiatrist has to make a clear distinction between delusion and true intent, but he couldn’t sit there and listen to a patient describe his plan to commit a criminal act and just shrug it off.”

  “Okay, but Michael Shaw is, chronologically, the last on the list. He was killed in December. So what did our guy tell him that was so bad he had to kill him?”

  Tess chewed on her pencil, looking at the list she had long ago memorized. The first victim was Tiffani, killed six years ago. Lucy had died eighteen months later. EAC—then in Alan guise—had met and courted Julie Carter between Tiffani and Lucy, dropping her, possibly because of her addiction. He staged his own death the summer after he killed Lucy. Hazel Ligetti’s house had burned down a few months earlier. And then—nothing for two years, not until Michael Shaw the past December.

  “I bet anything he was the doctor’s patient,” Tess said. “But I don’t know where to go with that. Where does Hazel fit in?”

  “Got me. What did she do?”

  “She worked for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Hagerstown, in some low-level paper-pushing job. You know, all the other women—the ones he killed and the ones he didn’t—they all had some joy in their life, even if it proved to be false. They got to have the illusion of being happy. But Hazel Ligetti had nothing. According to her landlord, she lived alone and seldom went out.”

  “A paper pusher?”

  “Yep.”

  “What kind of paper do you think they push at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene?”

  “I don’t know. Insurance claims?”

  “Yeah, among other things. Also”—he paused, to give his words more weight—“disability programs.”

  “So? He’s disabled, he sees a psychiatrist, he kills the doctor and the woman who sent him there. We’re back to where we started.”

  “You don’t know much about disability programs, do you?”

  Tess shook her head.

  “Well, I do, sad to say. When I had… my problems at work, they tried to get me to apply for SSI—Supplemental Security Income. That’s the federal program. But to get that, you almost always have to go through the state and qualify for some sort of temporary support first. Nobody gets SSI the first time out. What do we know about our guy’s second two identities?”

  “They’re men in hospitals who have suffered catastrophic injury.”

  “Right. Which means their case files could have passed through the hands of a DHMH worker in Washington County. There’s a rehab hospital out there, but it’s short-term. What do you want to bet that the real Alan Palmer and Charlie Chisholm were hospitalized there before they found long-term care?”

  It took Tess a few seconds to work it through for herself. Of EAC’s myriad identities, only the first alias belonged to someone who was dead, Eric Shivers. He had died as a teenager, old enough to have a driver’s license on record—and young enough not to have anything else on record. Frederick cops would have run Eric’s name and the date of birth and the Social Security number through the computers, but they wouldn’t have found anything suspicious. It never would have occurred to them to check Vital Records to see if Tiffani’s boyfriend was dead. After all, he was living and breathing, right in front of them.

  She booted up her computer and plugged the next two names, Alan Palmer and Charles Chisholm, into a phone directory that searched every listed number in the nation. Dozens of hits came up, unusual names were harder to come by in this day and age. So if there ever was any confusion—if anyone ever said, “Hey, I knew an Alan Palmer back home”—EAC could laugh and say, “Yes, I’ve met a few Alan Palmers in my time too.”

  Did he laugh? Did he smile? How normal-seeming was he? Very, according to his last girlfriend, Mary Ann. The perfect boyfriend. Until he killed you.

  “He needs relatively common names,” Tess said, thinking out loud. “Names of people who have no connection to him. The men also have to be a certain age—they all had the same birth year—and have a physical description he can more or less fit. Caucasian, around six feet, light eyes. Hazel helped him get those. Why?”

  “Beats me. If she knew what she was doing, it made her an accomplice to some pretty awful stuff. And from the way you said she lived, it doesn’t sound as if she was blackmailing him or anything.”

  Tess chewed the inside of her mouth. “We can’t just sit here, speculating. We need to drive out to the office where Hazel worked, find out what records she had access to.”

  “Same problem we have with the shrink. Why would anyone talk to us?”

  Tess rummaged through her desk, finding letterheads from an insurance company, one that happened to exist only in her imagination: S&K Fire and Life, named for the greyhound. She loaded a sheet in the printer and began typing.

  “To Whom It May Concern—”

  “What are you doing?” Carl demanded.

  “Lying.”

  “I don’t think I can be a party to—”

  “Carl, you’re not a cop anymore, remember? You’re never going to be a cop again. But you could be a private investigator, if you wanted to, or a security consultant. So step back and watch how it’s done.”

  He walked over to her desk, looking over her shoulder at the template on her screen. “This works?”

  “Fake letterhead is amazing. The thing that really sells it, however, is the motto.”

  “Motto?”

  She opened the printer tray and pointed. “There, under the name: Serving Baltimore families since 1938. For some reason, that clinches it. It’s the little extras that make a lie work, the superfluous details.”

  “Did you always think like a criminal, or did you learn on the job?”

  Tess stopped to think about this, fingers hovering above the keyboard. “I believe there was always a criminal in me, waiting to find a noncriminal way to express itself. So far, this arrangement is working out nicely.”

  The letter, backed up by Tess’s real business card and license, worked its usual magic. Hazel Ligetti’s super
visor in Hagerstown had only to hear the words “possible Medicaid fraud” to pull the files requested by the two earnest investigators from the insurance company. After all, Tess had the men’s names, DOBs, Social Security numbers, even the Soundex numbers from their Maryland driver’s licenses. She knew the hospitals where they were now being treated.

  She also knew it didn’t hurt that the person suspected of wrongdoing was dead. The department might have closed ranks around a living employee. But if giving up a dead one could make trouble go away, why not bend a few rules?

  “Did Hazel have ready access to these files?”

  The supervisor, Alice Crane, was a pale thin woman with frizzy bangs that belied the effort that had gone into straightening the rest of her highlighted hair. Or perhaps her hair was naturally straight and she tortured her bangs into those crimped waves. Tess found the things women did in the pursuit of beauty oddly endearing.

  “Hazel had access to all the files. She entered the dates of each hearing, as the case moved from the state to the federal rolls. Once someone got SSI, the case was closed, but we kept the files. Part of Hazel’s job was transferring the paper files to computer.”

  So Hazel sat there, her fingers moving over the keys as she recorded the particulars of hundreds of lives that had been interrupted or derailed. The medical files wouldn’t tell her everything she needed to know to find the right identities for her friend, but quick calls to the Motor Vehicle Administration and Vital Records would have filled in the gaps.

  “What was Hazel like?”

  “Oh, she was a good worker. Quiet. Put in long hours. Whenever I had jobs that meant overtime, I always gave Hazel first crack. After all—” The supervisor blushed.

  “What, Mrs. Crane? What were you going to say?”

  “Hazel didn’t usually have plans in the evenings. You could kind of count on that. She… kept to herself.”

  But Tess had known that. Hazel’s landlord had told her the same thing, with bland cruelness. At least Hazel had a nice boss.

  “Didn’t she have any friends here in the office? Or photographs on her desk? Did anyone ever visit her here?”

  Mrs. Crane shook her head. “I boxed up her desk myself after the fire. There were just a few things. She had a vase of silk flowers. And a paperweight, I think. She didn’t leave a will and, boy, was that a mess. Set me straight about what you have to do, even if you’re a single woman. Would you believe we had to put her personal effects in storage, wait to see if anyone came forward to make a claim? In a way, it was almost a godsend the house burned to the ground—” She caught herself, put her hands to her mouth in horror. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded.”

  “I know,” Tess assured her. “What happened to Hazel’s things?”

  “We were allowed to get rid of them after a year went by, so we did.

  Except for some silk flowers—I have those on my desk. But if no one came forward for the money, I can’t see how anyone would want some flowers.“

  “Money? I thought it took all Hazel’s life insurance just to bury her.”

  “Her life insurance? Oh, yes, the little state policy we all have. That’s about all it would cover, for sure. But we have a good 401(k) plan through the state, and Hazel was a saver. Someone must have told her the value of compound interest because she started putting those dollars away early. There was over a hundred thousand dollars in her account when she died, and it’s still drawing interest. They advertise every year, but the beneficiary never comes forward.”

  “Beneficiary?”

  Carl straightened up, like a hound dog catching a scent, while Tess found herself reaching for the edge of the table, to still a suddenly shaking hand.

  “Well, she wrote down someone’s name on the form, but there’s no address and she didn’t put down his Social Security number. Sometimes, I wonder if she just picked the name out of the phone book. Hazel told me one time the only time she felt lonely was filling out forms. She had no kin, but she didn’t think of herself as solitary unless she had to fill out a form.”

  “But there was a name—”

  “Oh, yes. Not that it did any good. As I said, they put it in the legal notices in Hagerstown and Baltimore and even DC. But that money just sits and sits. I guess the state will get it, which seems a shame to me. It’s not as if the state needs Hazel’s money—”

  “The name, Mrs. Crane. Do you remember it?”

  “I wrote it down someplace, in case he ever calls or comes to look for her.” She flipped lazily through the Rolodex on her desk and then through the pages of a date book. It was all Tess could do not to grab her hand and make it go faster. Carl caught her eye and mouthed “Eric Shivers.” She nodded, worried about the same thing. If the killer had come to Hazel already disguised, they wouldn’t know anything more than they did now.

  “Here it is—William Windsor. I’d love to know what he was to Hazel. Imagine, leaving over a hundred thousand dollars to a stranger. He must have done something really nice for her.”

  Tess managed a mouth-only smile. “Something memorable, at least.”

  She had Carl call the name in to Dorie Starnes as they drove back to the city. Even from the driver’s seat, Tess could hear her mercenary friend’s voice booming over the cell phone’s unsteady line.

  “Remind Tess that I charge extra—”

  “I know what she charges for a rush job. Just tell her to do it. Pull out all the stops.”

  They were ten miles outside Baltimore before the phone rang. Tess grabbed it from the well beneath the radio, forgetting again her principles about using a phone while driving.

  “There’s a bunch of William Windsors in the MVA records,” Dorie said. “You go nationwide, you’re looking at hundreds.”

  “Start with Maryland and worry about the rest of the nation later. And narrow the search to someone who’s in his early thirties. Also, this would be a license that’s dormant, hasn’t been renewed for a while, but is still in the system.”

  “Dormant licenses aren’t in the system.”

  “Yes, they are, Dorie. I know someone who moved out of state and came back twelve years later, and there was still a record. Had to take the written test again, but her records were still there. Look again.”

  Silence, then more costly little clicks as Dorie strolled and scrolled through her computer records.

  “Here’s a William Windsor, thirty-one. No, thirty-two—he just had a birthday. Got his license a few months after his sixteenth birthday but never renewed it.”

  “What’s his address?”

  “It’s kind of screwy. I’ve never seen one like this. There’s no street— well, there’s no street number. In fact, I think it’s a typo.”

  “They don’t make typos on driver’s licenses.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then how come I once had a license with an expiration date that predated the issue date? Caused me all kinds of trouble when I tried to renew. This one, I think they just left the number off, or maybe it’s a real little street or in one of those gated communities where you don’t need a number—”

  “What does it say, Dorie?”

  “Yelling like that is going to cost you,” Dorie said. “It says Hackberry Street, Harkness.”

  “Harkness? Where’s that?”

  “I don’t do geography,” Dorie said.

  Carl was already looking for the Maryland map in Tess’s crowded glove compartment, unfolding it with what seemed to be almost elaborate care, turning it around and around, searching the index, finding the grid on the map, turning it again. It seemed an eternity before he looked up.

  “Harkness is in the Crisfield zip code,” he said quietly, “but it’s on Notting Island. There are two towns there, Harkness and Tyndall Point. We visited Tyndall when we went looking for Becca Harrison. Harkness is on the north side of the island.”

  Tess glanced at Carl, then turned her attention back to the road just in time to brake for a tractor-trailer that was merging into the right lane, he
edless of her little Toyota. Carl’s stubby index finger was stabbing at the map, punching it again and again. As if this map were to blame, as if the place were to blame.

  Perhaps it was. Perhaps if the bay had succeeded in breaking up Notting Island years ago, this native son, this monster, would never have made his way into the world.

  CHAPTER 33

  On their second approach to Notting Island, Tess imagined the residents watching them, waiting for them, laughing at them. It was a gray day, rain threatening, the bay choppy and rough. May had never been as moody as it was this year. Their old friend, the semi-ancient mariner, had been reluctant to rent them his boat, even at double the price. He quizzed them about tides, asked if Carl knew where the shallows were. But in the end he allowed them to go.

  “Don’t know why anyone wants to go to Notting Island on a day like this,” he said, pocketing Carl’s driver’s license and credit card as insurance against their return. “Don’t know why anyone wants to go to Not-ting Island at all.”

  The trip out seemed to take forever, now that they knew what they hoped to find. It couldn’t be more than fifteen miles, Tess calculated. But fifteen miles in a boat that vibrated if it went above 30 mph was a thirty-minute journey. Despite the overcast skies, the day was muggy and warm. She shrugged off her denim jacket, but she was still warm in her T-shirt and jeans.

  “You going to go around like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “With your gun showing?”

  She glanced down at her holster. She was getting used to its feel. After all, she wore it all day, up until dinner, when she placed the weapon on the table in front of her as she ate. At night, it sat on the bedside and waited, its barrel staring into the darkness like some one-eyed creature, for Crow to come home. The gun then watched, as they made love. And they made love every night these days, at Tess’s insistence.

  Crow eventually fell asleep, but Tess didn’t, not really. She was untroubled by her insomnia, had no desire to fight it or cure it. She believed her body knew she could not afford much more than catnaps, like the one she had allowed herself this morning, on the long drive to Crisfield.