The Last Place Read online

  “So you said before. By an unpaid volunteer. But how does a volunteer end up including Julie Carter on the list? Right name, right age, right address, just no fatal bullet wound to the head. How does that mistake get made?”

  “Some people are fallible, Miss Monaghan,” Ames said, his voice nasal with sarcasm. “You, for example, miscalculated your mileage. The going IRS rate is thirty-two and a half cents per mile.”

  “Where did you get these names?” Tess repeated. “I can always ask the volunteer directly if you don’t know.”

  “No, you may not,” Ames snapped. “You’d only harangue and harass her, and no one deserves that for the simple sin of trying to be helpful. May I remind you there are two more cases on your list? Why don’t you concentrate on those—do the work you’re actually paid for doing? You may yet find out something useful. I’m just sorry there’s no luxury hotel for you to visit up in Cecil County.”

  Miriam Greenhouse shot Tess a look that was at once sympathetic but cautionary: He’s an asshole, her face seemed to say, but please don’t pick this fight.

  “I’ll let you know what I find out,” she said, crumpling up the white waxy bag from the carry-out sub shop. “And I’ll try to get my mileage right next time.”

  Two years ago, a little more actually, Tess had written a letter to herself and mailed it to her Aunt Kitty.

  Tess being Tess, the envelope had carried this slightly melodramatic notation: To be opened only in the event of my death.

  Kitty being Kitty, she had never opened it or even thought to inquire about it. Nor did she seem particularly curious when Tess stopped by the bookstore after her lunch and asked to check the safe, to see if her letter was still there. Kitty was preoccupied, getting a tutorial from Crow on her own computer system.

  “Inventory,” Kitty said absently, running her fingers through her hair until the red curls stood up in strange little shapes all over her head. But Kitty made even bad hair days look good, just as she gave shape and elegance to the baggy, vaguely ethnic outfits she favored. “It’s gotten harder since Tyner computerized the system, although he swears it will be easier once I get used to it. By the way, he said to ask if you were fulfilling the terms of your probation.”

  “To the letter.”

  Kitty was too distracted to catch the surly tone in Tess’s voice, but Crow wasn’t. Tess refused to meet his questioning gaze. It unnerved her, sometimes, how attuned he was to her every nuance.

  “Combination still the same?”

  “Sure, sure,” Kitty said. “Now, why is this computer saying I have two hundred and forty copies of Valley of the Dolls? That can’t be right.”

  Kitty’s bookstore was in an old drugstore, her living quarters above. Tess took the envelope from the safe and used the elevator, put in just for Tyner, to go to the second-floor kitchen and dining room. She found a beer in the refrigerator and helped herself. Then she helped herself to a wedge of Roquefort, several crackers, and some grapes. The envelope sat on the table, propped against the vintage salt-and-pepper shakers, slender and innocent. She didn’t need to break the seal. She remembered its contents all too well.

  The letter told the story of how Luisa O’Neal had made a deal with the devil, or the closest thing to the devil to ever roam the state of Maryland: Tucker Fauquier, a notorious serial killer. O’Neal, working through intermediaries, had persuaded Fauquier to add one more body to his résumé, that of a child killed by her own son. Fauquier had twelve bodies on his ledger and was already facing the death penalty. What was another corpse between friends? Especially when the friend was promising expert legal help and a financial stipend to Tucker’s mother back in western Maryland. Luisa O’Neal had then placed her troubled son in a maximum security psychiatric hospital, where she had promised Tess he would stay until he died. In Luisa O’Neal’s mind, this had been a form of justice.

  And perhaps Tess could have seen her point of view if Jonathan Ross hadn’t been killed when he came too close to figuring it all out.

  “Hey.”

  Crow’s voice so startled her that she jumped, banging her knee on the underside of the table.

  “Shit, Crow. Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

  “Sneak up on you? If you didn’t hear the elevator whining up and down, you’re in another world.” He took a seat next to her. “So, the letter. Still here, after all this time.”

  “Yes.”

  “What brought this on?”

  “Luisa’s foundation is one of the groups underwriting my review of these unsolved homicides.”

  “You told me. But I thought Luisa was essentially non compos mentis since her stroke. You’re not working for her, you’re working for her money. And it’s a good cause.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe it’s a good cause?”

  “Maybe it’s incidental that the Tree Foundation is involved. Luisa and Whitney’s mom were tennis partners once upon a time. That’s how things work in Baltimore: tennis partners team up on philanthropic missions, members of the Maryland Club hire each other’s sons.”

  “College roommates,” Crow said gently, “throw gigs each other’s way.”

  “Point taken. I am a Baltimorean, first and foremost. Still, it creeps me out. Whitney said it was her idea to hire me, but I don’t know. The Tree Foundation has always been more into building things than doing things. As Whitney said, if the O’Neals couldn’t hang a plaque on it, they didn’t see the point. None of this makes sense.”

  “Maybe Luisa is shopping for a little redemption before she dies. One good deed for the road.”

  “Luisa reserved all her good deeds for her family.”

  Crow massaged the muscles in her neck. Until he touched her, she hadn’t even realized how tight she was. Too many miles in the old Toyota, too much time in meetings.

  “Put it away, Tess. Literally and figuratively.”

  Reluctantly, she picked up the envelope and stood up, ready to walk it back to the safe. Perhaps it was her imagination, but it felt warm to the touch, not unlike a feverish forehead—or an infected limb.

  CHAPTER 11

  North East was what it said it was, a compass point to the north and east of Baltimore. But it wasn’t much else.

  Tess caught herself. She was being unfair to this little town at the head of the Chesapeake. It had a sleepy down-to-earth charm, despite the weekend homes and the proliferation of those baffling gift shops found in tourist spots. North East was a real town, a place where people lived and worked year-round. Water was a source of work and leisure here: The marinas outside of town were filled with sailboats and small yachts from as far away as Philadelphia and New Jersey. But it wasn’t as built up as some beach resorts.

  Tess realized she was cranky because Cecil County was so much farther than she had remembered and she had hoped to finish today. This was her last stop. She was torn between wanting to have some-thing—anything—to tell her clients and yearning to be done with the whole mess. She felt as if she had been on the hillbilly tour of Maryland. So many sad, tired houses. So many sad, tired lives—except for Dr. Shaw, of course. But even his death had spooked her a little.

  She had started the day with the doctor, driving south from Baltimore to the stretch of highway where Michael Shaw had been killed while jogging. It turned out he lived on Gibson Island, the ultimate gated community. It was a literal island, a private patch of land with a gatehouse where the guard was vigilant about keeping the uninvited away.

  Using Michael Shaw’s name to try and gain entrance only made him more skeptical.

  “He hasn’t lived here for some time,” the guard said. Tess noticed he didn’t say that Shaw was dead. He was cagey, this guarded guard.

  “I know. But I wonder if his family—”

  “Doesn’t have any family.”

  “Doesn’t have any family living here.” But her voice had scaled up in spite of itself, and the guard caught the uncertainty.

  “You didn’t know him, did you?
”

  “No, but—”

  “Well,” the guard said. “It’s too late now.”

  The Anne Arundel County cops were more welcoming, at least, if not more helpful. They provided copies of the reports filed when Shaw was killed, late last year, and sent the investigating officer out to speak to her. Detective Earl Mutter—who defied his last name by speaking in clear, ringing tones—appeared downright cheerful about how little he knew about the Incident, as he insisted on calling the fatal hit-and-run.

  Mutter explained that Shaw was a serious runner training for the Marine Corps marathon in Washington. He had been hit in a blinding rainstorm and his body was thrown clear of the highway into a ditch, where he remained for hours. The accident was classified as a hit-and-run, but Mutter believed the driver never realized someone had been struck and killed.

  “Rain was so heavy that day you could barely see your hand in front of your face,” Detective Mutter told Tess. “There was no sign of anyone losing control of his vehicle, no swerve marks, no tracks in the mud along the highway. My guess is the doc was hugging the road pretty close and was thrown so far that the driver wouldn’t have seen his body even if he stopped and looked around. Driver probably came up over a rise and—whomp.”

  “They say that’s the way the world will end,” Tess said. “Not with a bang but a whomp.”

  “Huh?” Mutter asked.

  “Never mind.”

  Actually, she understood Detective Mutter’s willingness to take the driver’s side. She thought about the times a human form had suddenly emerged from the darkness when she was driving—careless pedestrians trying to cross busy highways, cyclists riding toward the traffic instead of with it. She had wondered why people weren’t hit more often, given their stupidity. She glanced over the report that the department had provided her.

  “It says here he was wearing a bright orange reflective vest.”

  “It does?” Mutter turned the report back around so he could read it. “Yeah—but it was morning. Driver has to have his lights on in order for the vest to have something to reflect.”

  “I thought state law said you had to have your lights on if you have your windshield wipers on. In rain that heavy, you’d be using your wipers, right?”

  “You don’t have to tell me what the law is. But people out here in the country are different, you know? A little more independent in their thinking than you city folk.”

  Tess found this rationalization hilarious. There were a few rural pockets between Baltimore and Annapolis, but the area had long ago run together, like a batch of failed cookies spreading over the pan. Anne Arundel County was nothing more than a big suburb. Besides, independent thinking had never been one of its hallmarks.

  “Still, technically it’s a homicide, right? So the case stays open.”

  “Sure. And we did everything we do with a hit-and-run. We took it to the media, in case anyone saw anything—or in case the driver could be persuaded to come forward after the fact. We checked with body repair shops in the area, to see if anyone brought a car in, claiming they had hit a deer or something like that.”

  “Did you look into the doctor’s personal life?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was he married, did he have a girlfriend, did anyone come into money because he died?”

  “There was a guy who kept calling himself the doctor’s partner, but I don’t think they were in business together.” The detective didn’t bother to hide his smirk. “I guess the doctor considered himself married, even if the state didn’t. But the doctor forgot that death doesn’t always make an appointment. There was no will, so everything bounced into orphan’s court. It’s still there, I think. I mean, it was five months ago that he died.”

  Tess looked at her notes. According to his obituary, Dr. Michael Shaw had been a psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he had been involved in several groundbreaking studies, including one on chemical castration. He also had worked at Clifton T. Perkins, Maryland’s prison hospital for the criminally insane.

  “But you looked at the partner, right? You checked his alibi, ran records checks, made sure there was no ongoing strife in the relationship.”

  “That guy? Jesus, if you met him, you’d know he couldn’t pull off something like that. Not even if he hired someone to do it. He was a mess. Said they had a fight right before it happened—”

  Tess looked up from her notes.

  Mutter shook his head. “About running in the rain. He told him not to do it. And then he felt bad, because that was the last conversation they ever had. I never understand why people feel so bad about those things. I mean, if your life really passes before your eyes, then you remember the happy stuff too, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Tess said. “I imagine a lot of people die grumpy. I know I will. So what happened to the partner?”

  “Moved away. To California, I think, some place he has family. A lawyer is trying to untangle the estate. The doctor had money, but not as much as you’d think. Most of his net worth was in the house. They sold it and put the profits in escrow. You got a will?”

  The question startled her. “I’m only thirty-one.”

  “I’m thirty-eight. Had one drawn up when my first kid was born, when I was twenty-five. It’s inconsiderate, not looking after your affairs. Think of it that way.”

  “I guess I don’t want to think of it at all.”

  “Exactly,” Mutter said, waggling a finger in her face. “That’s what the doctor did. Which is why his partner had to move back to California without a cent.”

  Back on the highway, heading toward Baltimore and then beyond on I-95, Tess wondered who else on her list had forgotten to make a will. Tiffani Gunts had nothing, but she did have a daughter. Did she have a life insurance policy, a trust? Whatever Hazel Ligetti owned had probably gone to the state, to become one of those mysterious unclaimed accounts advertised by the comptroller’s office. Julie Carter was alive and, if she kept going down the reckless path she appeared to be set on, wasn’t likely to leave much behind for her heirs. Four down, one to go.

  Lucy Fancher, you are the last remaining hope of my hopeless amateurs. If I can’t find a domestic angle to your death, it’s a shutout.

  Still, she should have thought to ask about wills, Tess admonished herself, pulling off in Perryville when she saw a Dairy Queen sign beckoning to her. Here she was, grading local cops on their ability to investigate homicides and she had neglected a basic check.

  By day’s end, she’d regret not making another basic check. But at least she had considered, however fleetingly, pulling the autopsy reports for her victims.

  It just hadn’t occurred to Tess that someone who died of a gunshot wound might have been discovered in pieces.

  CHAPTER 12

  It was late afternoon by the time Tess found the cottage where Lucy C. Fancher had lived. It wasn’t much, but it was all Tess had. Perhaps Lucy had felt the same way. As best as Tess could determine, there were no other Fanchers in the area—not on the voter registration rolls or in the local courthouse files, either as defendants or plaintiffs. The only Fancher listed was Lucy, and the only public record of her existence was a speeding ticket. She was named in a warrant for not paying the fine, the interest on which had been compounding steadily since her death.

  Going 50 in a 40 mph zone. Conditions: Dry and clear. Tess checked the date on the ticket. October 29, three and a half years ago. Two nights before Lucy Fancher died.

  She looked at the articles from the local paper, the Elkton Democrat. The accounts of Fancher’s murder seemed incomplete to Tess, but she chalked that up to the inexperience of the local reporter. Margo Duncan probably hadn’t written many homicide stories. Still, all the more reason for the paper to go hog-wild with the story, instead of running these strangely prissy mishmashes that raised far more questions than they answered. The first article said only that state police were investigating the apparent homicide of Lucy C. Fancher. A follow-up, whi
ch appeared two days later, spoke of a “break” in the case and said Cecil County officers were now working with the state police and the Maryland Transportation Authority’s law enforcement agents. The second article noted that the cause of death, pending an autopsy, was a gunshot wound to the chest. But Margo Duncan provided no information about the break or why these three disparate agencies had joined forces.

  And that was that. A year after Lucy Fancher’s death, the paper ran the obligatory anniversary story about her unsolved homicide, “which rocked the bucolic community of North East.” Lucy had been a student at Cecil County Community College and worked part-time for a small real estate firm. She seemed to have no friends, or no friends the newspaper could find, and the officers involved in the case issued terse no-comments. Clearly, something was being withheld—details the paper wasn’t reporting or wouldn’t report. A sexual assault? Evidence that only the killer could know? Tess supposed she could drop by the paper and ask to speak to Margo Duncan, but it was unlikely that the reporter was still there. Three years was an eternity at a small-town newspaper.

  So she looked for Lucy Fancher’s last-known address instead, getting lost in a series of meandering roads that dead-ended at the river.

  The house sat off by itself, in a grove of trees. It was nothing special, a dull rectangle with rust-red asbestos shingles for siding, and it appeared to have been vacant for some time. A generic For Sale sign, peppered with dirt and water stains, listed to one side at the driveway’s edge. Tess got out and walked around the small house, largely for something to do. The house may have been plain, but the view from the rear was extraordinary, all water and sky. The trees, a mix of sweet gums and evergreens, formed a natural screen from the houses on either side. No water access, but it was probably only a matter of time before Fancher’s landlord sold the place. Expensive new houses were sprouting up all over these narrow lanes. The lot must be worth a fortune.