The Last Place Read online

  “I don’t know,” Tess said, assuming she was expected to object. “You have a nice house here.” It was neat and well-kept, even if the white walls had yellowed from cigarette smoke.

  “A rental. I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for this guy I once dated. He convinced me to move out here, then dumped my ass. The stories I could tell you. I sure can pick ‘em.”

  It occurred to Tess that the error that had sent her to Julie Carter’s door might at least be rooted in fact.

  “Bad boyfriends?”

  “Nothing but.”

  “Have you ever been… stalked?” Somehow, this seemed more acceptable than asking a stranger if she had been hit or assaulted. “Had to take out a restraining order?”

  “Most of the men I get involved with can’t be restrained. That’s the problem. It’s gotten to the point where, when I start dating a guy, I feel like saying, ”Look, why don’t you just sleep with one of my friends now and get it over with?“ Honest. I figure if he did it in the beginning, he’d get it out of his system and I wouldn’t feel cheated on.”

  “Oh.” That kind of restraint.

  “They’re different, aren’t they?”

  “Who?”

  “Men. What else are we talking about? Although, I gotta say, when I find a good one, I get bored. The good ones can be so boring. Like the guy who wanted me to move up here. He paid the rent and all, so I thought, Why not? But he was so dull, never wanted to do anything, and got mad when my friends came by. He said I had to choose, them or him. Then he left, so I didn’t have to choose after all. What are you going to do? Go with boring and faithful, or exciting and jerky?” She fixed her eyes on Tess, as if she were some oracle.

  “I think that changes, depending on where you are in your life.”

  “No, I mean what do you do? You look like fun, you’ve got a hot job. You married? Or are you still running free?”

  “I—why, neither. My boyfriend’s great.” Crow was great. Saying it out loud reminded her just how great he was, how lucky she was. “He’s warm and funny and spontaneous, loyal as a dog.”

  “No such thing,” Julie said. Her incongruously deep voice gave her words an unearned authority.

  “How old are you anyway?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “You’re awfully young. You can’t have had that many boyfriends.”

  “I’ve had enough. All ages, too, all the way up to thirty.”

  “Thirty. Wow.”

  Julie didn’t catch the sarcasm. “And that was when I was seventeen. But I don’t like old men. They’re boring. How old is your boyfriend?”

  Tess did the math. “Twenty-five.”

  “Oh, a younger man.” Julie Carter’s certitude on this fact stung a little. Tess liked to think she could pass for twenty-five, at least. “Well, maybe that’s the way to go. After thirty, I mean. But I like a guy who has spending money. Is that too much to ask? A nice guy, good sex, a little money so we can go out on the weekends, not count pennies. Last guy I went out with got mad when I ordered a third rum and Coke. You know what he said? He said, ”You’re already drunk enough to screw me.“ I said, ”You know what, honey? I’ll never be that drunk.“ Walked out of that bar and hitchhiked home. But that’s another story.”

  “Yes,” Tess agreed, feeling a little dazed by all these words, all this information.

  “A lot has happened to me. I mean—a lot. But I’m alive and never been anything but. In fact, I’ve never had stitches, even though I almost cut my toe off once.” She propped her bare foot on the table and grabbed her second toe, as if beginning a game of Little Piggy. The second toe was considerably longer than the big one. The foot was absurdly small, even for someone as tiny as Julie Carter, plump and white as a baby’s.

  “See that?”

  “See what?”

  “My scar. I was walking in the surf at Ocean City after graduation— you know, we all drove down, got a motel room: six girls, six blow-dryers, blew the fuses every night—and I felt this little tug, like a fish nipped me. I said to my friend, ”I’m going up to my towel, there’s fish in this water.“ Then I saw my toe, hanging by, like, a thread, and I started to scream. There was a boy on the beach, said he was premed at Maryland, he wrapped his T-shirt around my foot. They took me to the clinic on Fifty-third Street, but they didn’t know what to do. But there was no—what did he call it?—no topical skin loss. The doctor in Salisbury just patted it back in place and I was fine. I was on crutches a whole week. You want to talk about a good way to meet boys, walk around on crutches.”

  “It looks… good.” The story seemed confusing to Tess, implausible even. The thick skin at the base of the toe didn’t look like any scar she had ever seen. But the story also had made her queasy, and she didn’t want to ask questions lest Julie Carter provide more information.

  “So, I’ve never had stitches, never been in a hospital at all. Except when I was born, I guess. I’ve never even had a near-death experience. That’s when your life passes before your eyes, right? I hope when I do, it’s not just me stacking cans at Mars. What a bummer that would be.”

  Julie was rocking in her seat now, beating her hands on the kitchen table, ignoring her tea. She sniffed once, twice. The tip of her nose was pink as a rabbit’s. Tess finally put it together then: Julie’s need to get to Baltimore on a regular basis, the rapid-fire speech, the eyes that were all iris. It might be speed, it might be cocaine or even crack. But it was something that juiced you up, not down.

  And now Julie was moving in to close the deal, as sure of her mark as any Fuller Brush guy, any tin man.

  “Look,” she said. “I know I just met you, but you seem so nice. Not stuck up. There’s been this terrible computer mix-up at work. The checks are, like, frozen inside the computer because the bank’s computer crashed and we’re not going to get paid for another two days, after they make a wire transfer or something like that. Could you lend me a little money so I could get some food for the house? I’m good for it, you know. But I live check to check, and when the check is late I’m hosed.”

  The easy thing would have been to hand over a twenty. The futile thing would have been to lecture, or even call attention to the bullshit. Tess chose to play Julie’s game, Julie’s way, piling lie on top of lie.

  “Gosh, I wish I could. I don’t have any cash on me, or even my ATM card. I’m overdrawn myself. Got a little out of control, playing the Delaware slots last month. And the people I’m working for, they haven’t paid me a dime yet. I have to wait until the end of the month to see dollar one.”

  Julie sniffed once, twice. “I guess that makes sense. Because whoever told you I’m dead doesn’t know their shit, do they? That is some weird-ass job you’ve got, going to people’s doors and telling them they’re dead.”

  Tess thought so too.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Be calm, be polite, play the game.”

  Whitney’s advice, hissed in a whisper in the corridor of her family’s foundation offices, was undeniably good. Still, it infuriated Tess, who felt she had earned the right to her snit.

  “Play the game? I’m sorry, I didn’t realize this was just a game. I thought I was working for a group of people who were sincerely interested in making a difference in the world.”

  “Poor choice of words.” Whitney was maddening when she was reasonable. “One doesn’t go charging into a meeting with people who are paying you—paying you quite well, by the way—and accuse them of being incompetents. There were bound to be a few glitches along the way.”

  “Glitches? I was told Julie Carter was dead and she pops up alive. Hazel Ligetti died in a fire that appears to have been set accidentally by someone who didn’t even know her. The investigators in Frederick may not have been brilliant, but they were competent. These cases are worthless.”

  “Let us worry about how to lobby the General Assembly,” Whitney said. “For now, make nice with the board. You work for the entire group, remember?”

 
Tess did. She took a deep breath and smoothed back a tendril of hair that had snaked from her widow’s peak, just like the little girl with the curl. She would be good, she would be very, very good.

  They were the last to arrive, a Whitney power play: Summon everyone to your office, then make them wait. Tess watched with barely concealed amusement—and impatience—as the other members of Whitney’s consortium unpacked the lunches they had brought to their “brown bag” meeting. Lunch told so much about a person. Even how one carried a lunch indicated a lot. Only one person here, for example, had a literal brown bag, and it happened to be the group’s lone male member, Neal Ames. He pulled a bologna sandwich on white bread, an apple, and a bag of Utz pretzels from the soft crinkled sack, which had obviously been recycled several times. Earnest and idealistic, if not particularly imaginative, Tess decided.

  Now the woman in the middle of the table, Miriam Greenhouse, the executive director of the city’s best-known women’s shelter, had brought a fashionable-looking salad, a chocolate cream cheese muffin, and a Diet Mountain Dew: caffeine junkie, much too busy to pack her own lunch. The two other women, still in their twenties, had Diet Cokes, Greek salads, and low-calorie yogurt, which Tess found mildly depressing. Regular yogurt should be abstemious enough. Finally, there was Whitney, who wasn’t eating at all. Probably another power play on her part.

  Tess unwrapped her own lunch and tried to decode what message she was sending: turkey sub with lettuce, tomato, and extra hots, a bag of Utz crab chips, and a real Coca-Cola. She didn’t know what those gathered around the table saw, but she knew who she was: a diet-averse, shellfish-allergic hometown girl who had never tasted crab seasoning until Utz had the brilliant idea of putting it on potato chips.

  “So bring us up to date,” said Miriam Greenhouse, the woman from the shelter, taking the lead. She was the kind of woman to whom others automatically deferred—confident, calm, with a hint of an edge that allowed her to stay confident and calm, because no one wanted to find out what would happen if she was pushed. “What kind of lapses have you discovered so far? What warning signs were ignored, what clear signs of danger were missed in these women’s cases?”

  Tess, who had just bitten into her sandwich, had to work her way to the end of the mouthful, holding a finger aloft as she chewed for what seemed like a lifetime.

  “Sort of the opposite,” she said, after swallowing. It had the feel of an anticlimax.

  “You’ve made no progress? But Whitney said you’ve already submitted expenses for your trip to Frederick and Washington counties.”

  “I submit my expenses weekly. It is possible to rack up quite a bit of mileage without—” She paused, not sure of what she wanted to say, how she wanted to phrase it. She had come in loaded for bear. How had she ended up on the defensive?

  The man, Neal Ames, rushed into the pause. “That wasn’t a cheap meal you had in West Virginia. Nor was it a cheap motel. Couldn’t you have stayed in lodgings more reasonable than the Bavarian Inn?”

  No one had second-guessed Tess’s expenses since her newspaper days, when the accounting department flagged any tip above 15 percent. “I could have avoided a hotel altogether, driving back and forth over two days. But that would have doubled my time on the road— which is billed hourly—and resulted in extra mileage of almost seventy-five dollars. So I think, given that information, I was entitled to stay where I wished and eat what I wanted.”

  But his attack had emboldened the others.

  “What about this line item, forty dollars for Troy Plunkett?” asked the one Tess thought of as Strawberry Yogurt, because she not only had pale pink yogurt in front of her, she had on a pale pink blouse and a gingham plaid headband with the same shade of pink in it. “Did you get a receipt?”

  “I paid Plunkett to speak to me. It’s not uncommon in my business.”

  Now Banana Yogurt, who had not color-coordinated her outfit to her lunch but did have hair just a shade darker than her Dannon, stared at Tess with round eyes. “You pay people to talk to you? Isn’t that unethical?”

  “Not in my business, no. It’s a consideration of their time. I pay people what I think their time—and information—is worth.”

  “And did you get forty dollars’ worth out of Mr. Plunkett?” This was Ames, who seemed awfully pleased with himself for having opened up this line of inquiry.

  “Yes, I did. But I got the biggest bang for my buck just by driving out to northwest Baltimore County, near Prettyboy Reservoir, where I met one of our ”victims’ face-to-face. Julie Carter is alive, ladies and gentleman. A fact that, coupled with the dead ends on the other two cases, makes me wonder if this board has its collective head up its collective ass. How did you come up with these names, anyway, throw darts at a dartboard? Just plug HOMICIDE and MARYLAND into a search engine and see what kicked out?“

  Whitney raised an eyebrow at Tess, and Whitney was capable of encapsulating a world of meaning in that small gesture. The problem was, Tess couldn’t decode this facial semaphore. Was she overstepping, forgetting whom she worked for in this situation? She had intended to play nice but had lost her resolve when they began poring over her expenses. The Yogurt Twins looked shocked, while Neal Ames was tapping his pen on the table’s edge as if he wished he could bounce something off her skull.

  But Miriam Greenhouse, the ostensible leader, looked amused.

  “Our selection was random, I admit. We thought that was purer, if you will. We picked open homicides outside Maryland’s incorporated cities and the bigger counties. Neal, you compiled the list, right?”

  “Actually, it was a volunteer for the Tree Foundation.” Ah, Tess had forgotten he was Luisa O’Neal’s representative on the board. Well, she had disliked him from the start, so she came by her revulsion honestly. “An unpaid volunteer,” he added.

  “As opposed to the paid variety?” But Tess’s nitpick sailed over the lawyer’s head as he deflected blame to his poor anonymous volunteer—and then cloaked himself in righteous virtue over the fact that anyone would try to blame a poor anonymous volunteer.

  “Well, at least two of them have been in the ballpark so far. The Tiffani Gunts case is ripe to reopen, right? The new sheriff says the old one was incompetent.”

  “Yes, but the ex-boyfriend is not a suspect, so it’s not a domestic. Look, I met the guy. Whatever he is, he’s not some criminal mastermind who staged a robbery to kill his girlfriend because they were fighting over child support. He has more ingenious ways of avoiding his obligations.”

  “How’s that?” Miriam asked, eyes narrowed. Financial support was an important component of the shelter’s work. If Safehouse’s staff couldn’t get estranged husbands to pay battered women child sup-port—or have the man evicted from the house—the women’s odds of escaping were greatly reduced.

  “He told me he takes cash jobs, off the books. You can’t get blood from a turnip, and you can’t get money from a man who doesn’t seem to have any. Can’t attach his income tax refund when he has no reportable income. Can’t take his car or his house when he doesn’t have either one of those.”

  “We can get his license suspended,” Banana Yogurt said.

  “A guy like Troy Plunkett will drive without one. Look, you can’t even threaten to reduce his visitation, because he doesn’t want any. The guy’s snake-mean. Tiffani’s family just gave up after a while.”

  “Still”—Miriam looked thoughtful—“the case fits our purposes. He beat her when they were together. She ended up dead.”

  “She was shot,” Tess said, “in a robbery. How are you going to obscure that piece of information?”

  “Let us worry about how we present our case. Just bring back reports on the next two homicides. If those prove as futile as the first three, we’ll find more for you to examine. We’re pursuing a worthwhile goal. The facts will fit. We’ll make them fit.”

  Something in Miriam’s argument didn’t sit right with Tess. Lord knows, she was against domestic violence. Who wasn’t? But
she believed in other things, too. Being truthful, for example, and not bending the truth toward any ideological end or purpose.

  “You know, I did a little reading after I signed on with this board,” she began. Everyone looked surprised. The private detective can read. Whitney’s eyebrow was jumping so violently it looked like a facial tic. “And I found an interesting article, based on Justice Department statistics. The number of homicides that are classified as domestic violence haven’t gone down, not significantly, in twenty years.”

  “So?” Miriam said. “Doesn’t that prove our point? This is a preventable crime, yet the numbers are not going down.”

  “It would prove your point if nothing had been done in the last twenty years. But a lot has been done. Shelters have been built, laws changed. Yet for all this effort, the number of women killed by their partners has held remarkably steady. Why?”

  Miriam’s good-humored tolerance of Tess had vanished. “Because we need more laws, more funding. I am tired of reading newspaper stories about men who kill women because they love them too much. That’s not love.”

  She actually pounded the table as she spoke, and her husky voice grew shrill. Tess had a quick insight into the consortium’s political problems. If Miriam spoke this way to legislators, she’d never get what she wanted.

  “Agreed,” Tess said. “I’ve always said when a brokenhearted man contemplates murder-suicide, he should do the suicide part first. We really are on the same side here. So let me ask you again: How did you get these names?”

  Everyone stared at her blankly. That is, the women stared blankly, while Neal Ames gave the impression of someone trying to fake blankness.

  “Did the people on this list seek help from you, or from any of your sister organizations, before they died? Is that how you got their names?”

  A long silence, broken by Miriam Greenhouse. “Such things are confidential.”

  “But you would know,” Tess pointed out. “You would have access.”

  “The names were chosen at random,” Neal Ames said, “from online resources—newspaper databases, things like that.”