The Last Place Read online

  The Last Place

  A TESS MONAGHAN MYSTERY

  by

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  In memory of my grandparents—

  Louise Deaver Lippman and Theodore Lippman

  Mary Julia Moore Mabry and E. Speer Mabry Jr.

  Ripe plums are falling, Now there are only seven, May a fine lover come for me, Now while there’s still time. Ripe plums are falling, Now there are only three, May a fine lover come for me, While there’s still time. Ripe plums are falling, I lay them in a shuttle basket, May a fine lover come for me. Tell me his name.

  —Confucius

  PROLOGUE

  He begins his day on the water. The way his father did. The way she does.

  Not that he can quite admit to himself that he has come here to see her this morning. He has legitimate reasons to be on this idling motorboat as day breaks. He smiles at his own turn of phrase: legitimate reasons. Legitimate. A funny word, when applied to his life, and yet fitting. He draws it out, reveling in its syllables, imagining it in the accent of his youth. Legitmate.

  He has cut the engine for the last part of his journey, gliding to a stop beneath a low-lying overpass. Not many people know about this small inlet off the wider waters of the Patapsco, south of the city and the Inner Harbor. Those who do probably think it’s too shallow to be navigable. Good. That’s why he chose it. But he has seen her here, once or twice. Which is okay, as long as she stays on the water, doesn’t get out and poke around. He can’t imagine why she would. But you never know.

  Another day, another dollar. His father had said that, heading out every morning, and it was almost too literal in his case. Those were the years when the bay began to betray them: the bay and then the politicians, with their limits on this, their moratoriums on that. Starve this generation in order to feed the next, that seemed to be their plan. But who was going to harvest the oysters and catch the crabs if they let the watermen die out? Oh, they loved the watermen in the abstract, paid lip service to the history and the tradition, and they sure as hell loved the food when it came. Here in the city, they make a similar fuss over the Arabbers, the black men who sell fruits and vegetables from horse-drawn carts. But it’s the horses they love, not the men. The people who do the dirty work aren’t flesh and blood to those who rely on them, no more human than threshing machines or cotton gins. Folks seem to think the food appears on their tables by magic, and that it will keep appearing if the watermen could just get over being greedy.

  He knows, better than most, how memories ripen to bursting over time, but everything really was bigger and better in his youth. Fried oysters big as your fist, bursting in your mouth, all brine and cornmeal. The steamed crabs were eight to ten inches across, monsters who could take a toe or a finger while alive. Then everything began to get smaller, smaller, smaller. The oysters, the crabs. His family. Even the island itself.

  Yet his parents knew no other life and never wanted to. His father thought he was the luckiest man in the world because he spent his life outdoors, on the water. The bay rewarded his love by hastening his death by several years. What the sun didn’t do, the water finally did, poisoning his blood. A simple cut became a death sentence when the dumb mainland doctor sewed it up, sealing the bacteria into his not-old man as neat as you please. Yet his father never once complained, even as the infection crept up his body, destroying it limb by limb. He had lived life on his own terms and taught his son to do the same. Do what you love and you’ll love what you do. That was his father’s mantra, his father’s legacy, and he had taken it to heart.

  But it hadn’t escaped his notice that what you love might be the death of you.

  He leaves the inlet, satisfied that all is well. He is in the Middle Branch now and his boat heads toward the Cherry Hill Marina, almost of its own volition. He does not risk this, not often. But he needs to see her today. He needs to see her with increasing frequency. It is hard now to remember a time when she was unknown to him, when she did not come to him in his dreams, promising him the one thing he wants. It frightens him to think of the coincidence that brought them together. What if he had not… ? What if she had not? He can no longer imagine a world without her.

  He sees several eights on the water, a couple of fours, but no single scullers. He’s too late, he thinks, and his heart, which seldom speeds up, lurches. The seagulls sound as if they are mocking him: Too late, too late, too late. The coxswains’ exhortations seem meant for him as well. Half slide. Full slide. Legs only. Full power. The seagulls shriek back: Too late, too late, too late. The girlish voices rise, emphatic and shrill. Full power. Full power. Full power. The seagulls win the argument as the boats slide away, the nagging voices of the coxswains dying on the wind.

  But no, she’s the one who’s late, the last rower to pass under the Hanover Street Bridge this morning. He knows her by her broad back, the brown braid that hangs straight as a second backbone. He cuts his engine and she gives him a chin-only nod, acknowledging his courtesy without looking at him, for that would disrupt her rhythm.

  She is not pretty-pretty, and he has decided that’s a good thing, although he once preferred a more delicate beauty. But a pretty-pretty face, or even a cute one, would have been a mistake on that body. Handsome is a word some might use, but he won’t. Handsome is a word for men.

  And there’s nothing manly about her. The body—why, that belongs on the prow of a ship, in his opinion. It reminds him of Hera, in that cheesy movie with the skeletons, watching over Jason as he headed out to find the Golden Fleece. Stupid Jason: He used up Hera’s three wishes so quickly, despite her warnings. Her long-lashed eyes closed, and she was lost to him forever. Jason deserved everything he got and more. Not that the movie told that part, oh no. But it had sent him to the myths on which it was based, just the way teacher had intended when she set up the rickety film projector and screened the movie as a treat on the last day of school. He had fallen in love with all the Greek myths, stories that seemed to have been written just for him. Aphrodite rising from the sea, only to be bestowed upon earnest hard-working Hephaestus, the one ugly god. Psyche and Eros, Pygmalion and Galatea. Epimetheus and Prometheus, racing to create the earth’s inhabitants.

  But the Golden Fleece remained his favorite, if only because it was his first. And the book was so much more thrilling than the movie. He was pleased to read of Medea’s vengeance on faithless Jason, to watch Jason’s new bride writhe in agony beneath the bewitched cloak that seared her flesh, to see Jason demeaned and demonized.

  The only thing that bothered him was Medea�
�s escape. It seemed an imperfect ending. She betrayed her father for a man, then killed her sons when the man betrayed her. Someone should have chased her dragon-drawn chariot across the sky and brought it crashing to the earth. Medea must die for the circle to be completed. Medea must die.

  She has a tank top on today, he can see all his favorite parts, which are not the obvious parts, not at all. He likes those defined muscles at the top of her shoulders, those little dents that look as if someone’s fingers lingered there the night before. He admires the long pouting collarbone, a shelf above a shelf. She has a beautiful forehead, as broad as a marquee, and a juicy bottom lip, overbit to begin with and sucked in beneath her top teeth this morning, a sign that she’s concentrating.

  He has never been quite sure of the color of her eyes, in part because they are as changeable as sky and water. Besides, it’s hard for him to get close to her in public, harder still to look her in the eye when he does.

  Here on the water, a baseball cap shadowing his face, binoculars concealing his eyes, this is as close as he dares to come.

  For now.

  CHAPTER 1

  It seemed like a good idea at the time.

  Tess Monaghan was sitting outside a bar in the Baltimore suburbs. It was early spring, the mating season, and this bland but busy franchise was proof that birds do it, bees do it, even Baltimore County yuppies in golf pants and Top-Siders do it.

  “Kind of a benign hangout for a child molester,” Tess said to Whitney Talbot, her oldest friend, her college roomie, her literal partner in crime on a few occasions. “Although it is convenient to several area high schools, as well as Towson University and Goucher.”

  “Possible child molester,” Whitney corrected from the driver’s seat of the Suburban. Whitney’s vehicles only seemed to get bigger over the years, no matter what the price of gas was doing. “We don’t have proof that he knew how young Mercy was when this started. Besides, she’s sixteen, Tess. You were having sex at sixteen.”

  “Yeah, with other sixteen-year-olds. But if he came after your cousin—”

  “Second cousin, once removed.”

  “My guess is he’s done it before. And will do it again. Your family solved the Mercy problem. But how do we keep him from becoming some other family’s problem? Not everyone can pack their daughters off to expensive boarding schools, you know.”

  “They can’t?” But Whitney’s raised eyebrow made it clear that she was mocking her family and its money.

  The two friends stared morosely through the windshield, stumped by the stubborn deviancy of men. They had saved one girl from this pervert’s clutches. But the world had such a large supply of girls, and an even larger supply of perverts. The least they could do was reduce the pervert population by one. But how? If Tess knew anything of compulsive behavior—and she knew quite a bit—it was that most people didn’t stop, short of a cataclysmic intervention. A heart attack for a smoker, the end of a marriage for a drinker.

  Their Internet buddy was in serious need of an intervention.

  “You don’t have to go in there,” Whitney said.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “And then what?”

  “You tell me. This was your plan.”

  “To tell you the truth, I didn’t think it would get this far.”

  It had been six weeks since Whitney had first come to Tess with this little family drama, the saga of her cousin and what she had been doing on the Internet late at night. Correction: second cousin, once removed. The quality of Mercy was definitely strained, weakened by intermarriage and a few too many falls in the riding ring.

  And perhaps Mercy would have been a trimester into the unplanned pregnancy she had been bucking for, if it weren’t for a late-night hunger pang. Mercy was foraging for provisions in the kitchen when her computer-illiterate mother had entered her bedroom just in time to hear the sparkly thrush of music that accompanies an IM and seen this succinct question: “Are you wearing panties?” Within days, Mercy’s hard drive had been dissected, revealing a voluminous correspondence between her and a man who claimed to be a twenty-five-year-old stockbroker. Mercy’s parents had pulled the plug, literally and figuratively, on her burgeoning romance.

  But by Whitney’s calculation, that left one miscreant free to roam, continuing his panty census.

  It had been Tess’s idea to search for Music Loverr in his world. With the help of a computer-savvy friend, they created a dummy account for a mythical creature known as Varsity Grrl and began exploring the crevices of the Internet, looking for those places where borderline pedophiles were most likely to stalk their prey.

  Whitney and Tess had both taken turns at the keyboard, but it was Tess who lured Music Loverr, now rechristened GoToGuy, into the open. She had finally found him in a chat room devoted to girls’ lacrosse. They had retreated to a private room at his invitation—an invitation that followed her more or less truthful description of herself, down to and including her thirty-six-inch inseam. Then she had watched, in almost grudging admiration, as this virtual man began the long patient campaign necessary to seduce a high school girl. As she waited for his messages to pop up—he was a much slower typist than she—Tess thought of the movie Bedazzled, the original one, where Peter Cook, a most devilish devil, tells sad-sack Dudley Moore that a man can have any woman in the world if he’ll just stay up listening to her until ten past four in the morning. Tess figured a teenage girl could be had by midnight.

  Not that GoToGuy knew her pretend age, not at first. He had teased that out of her, Tess being evasive in what she hoped was a convincingly adolescent way. She made him wait a week before she admitted she was under twenty-one. Well, under eighteen, actually.

  Can we still be friends? she had typed.

  Definitely, he replied.

  The courtship only intensified. They soon had a standing date to chat at 10 P.M. Tess would pour herself a brimming glass of red wine and sit down to her laptop with great reluctance, opening up the account created for just this purpose. Afterward, she showered or took a hot bath.

  Do you have a fake ID? GoToGuy had IM’d her two nights ago.

  Finally. He had been slow enough on the uptake, although not so slow that he had revealed anything about his true identity, which was what Tess really wanted.

  No. Do you know how I can get one?

  Sure enough, he did. Last night, informed that she had gone and obtained the fake ID, he had asked if she knew of this bar, which happened to be within walking distance of the Light Rail—in case she didn’t drive or couldn’t get the family car.

  And I can always drive you home, he promised.

  I bet you can, Tess had thought, her fingers hovering above the keys before she typed her assent. Her stomach lurched. She wondered if he had gotten this far with Mercy. The girl swore they had never met, but the tracking software was not perfect. E-mails could have been lost, along with some of the IM transcripts. Besides, she could have corresponded with him from school as well as from home, using a different account.

  Tess had met Mercy only once, and it had been at least two years ago. But even in junior high, the girl had the kind of voluptuous body that adds years to a parent’s life. She also had heavy-lidded green eyes that gave her a preternatural sophistication, and straight blond hair almost to her waist. She was juicy, no other word for it, even with all the nicks and scars left by a lifetime of field hockey. Did Music Loverr troll for young girls because he liked the innocence of high school girls or because he relied on their stupidity? Did he know how young his prey was or simply not care?

  In Tess’s day, such predators had the candor to wait in their cars near the high school bus stop. They showed their faces early, tipping their hands. It was harder to create the illusion of being a successful man if you had to approach from a busted-down Impala, eyes red with the pot you just smoked, spit dried in the corners of your mouth, little telltale flakes of desire.

  Yeah, they really knew how to do pedophilia in my day, Tess had t
hought.

  Varsity Grrl typed: I’ll meet you there at 8.

  GoToGuy: I’ll be at the bar. I’ll have on a flowered tie.

  Go figure: There were three men in flower-patterned ties at the bar.

  “Three flowered ties,” Whitney said. “Only in Hunt Valley. These people give preppies a bad name.”

  “Well, Flower Tie Number One looks like he’s leaving, and Flower Tie Number Two appears to be with that other guy. Ladies, meet our lucky bachelor, Flower Tie Number Three! He likes music, sailing, watching sunsets, and picking up underage girls on the Internet.” Tess began to sing the Herb Alpertesque theme to the old Dating Game, pounding out her own accompaniment on the dashboard.

  “Will he be a dream,” Whitney trilled, “or a dud?”

  “This guy aspires to dud status. Look at him.”

  He was sitting sideways at the bar, watching the basketball game on the set mounted in the corner. His pink shirt ballooned a little on his narrow shoulders, while his disproportionately large ass ballooned over the stool.

  “He drinks frozen margaritas,” Whitney said. “Never trust a man who drinks frozen margaritas. He’s probably already bribed the bartender to give you doubles of whatever you order. I’ll bet you twenty dollars he recommends a piña colada or a daiquiri.”

  “Can I pass for seventeen?” Tess asked, leaning forward to study her face in the rearview mirror.

  “You’ll squeak by in that light, if only because he wants to believe you’re seventeen,” Whitney said, not unkindly, for her. “Besides when was the last time a man ever looked at your face upon first meeting?”

  Tess glanced down. She was wearing a pale pink T-shirt and a flowery skirt, both borrowed from Whitney. It wasn’t easy, being a thirty-one-year-old woman who was trying to pass for a seventeen-year-old girl who was trying to pass for twenty-one. She had unbraided her hair and let it fly loose around her face, a feeling she hated. But she hoped the hair would create a soft frame, offsetting the faint lines by her mouth and eyes. She also had on more makeup than she had ever worn in her life. Here, she hadn’t had to fake a seventeen-year-old’s ineptness.