The Last Place Page 12

  “You interested?”

  The voice, hoarse and rusty, made Tess jump. She turned to find a man in his forties with a weatherbeaten face beneath an old Caterpillar gimme cap. Grimy and unkempt, he looked like a drifter, but she could hear an engine running on the other side of the house. North East must be a small enough place for people to stop at the sight of a strange car.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You interested in buying the place?” The shadows were so deep here, under the trees, that it was hard to see much of his face. “Owner will give you a good deal on it. It’s been empty for a while.”

  “Since—” She stopped to think about how to phrase it, how much she should reveal. “Since when?”

  The man scratched his chin. “Four years? Three? Around that. I live just up the road.”

  “It’s a great location. I’m surprised someone hasn’t snatched it up.”

  “Owner got greedy, I think. People had a lot of money when he put it on the market. Then they didn’t, and he wanted to sell, bad. Now, every time he gets a contract it falls through. People talk.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Something happened here.”

  His country terseness was wearying, and Tess decided to speed things up.

  “The girl who lived here”—she figured girl would be the local parlance for a woman of twenty-three—“she was killed, right?”

  He nodded.

  “Did you know her?”

  “Just to say hello.” He raised his hand to demonstrate, throwing his left arm up as if waving from a car.

  “Did she have a boyfriend?”

  “A fellow lived with her. I guess that made him a boyfriend.”

  “Did you know his name?”

  “No, I knew him just—” The left arm saluted again. “They didn’t live here that long, before… He looked nice, though. He kept his van real clean and tended to the yard when he was here. It wasn’t so overgrown then.”

  A clean van and a neat yard. Tess guessed those clues to a man’s character were as reliable as anything else glimpsed from a distance.

  “What happened to him?”

  “No one knows.” The man leaned forward, lowered his voice. “People said he… kind of lost it. Not right away, funny enough. He was okay with the first, but not with the second.”

  He looked at her expectantly, as if he wanted her to fill in the next part.

  “Second what? Was someone else killed?”

  “Because… because”—he looked offended—“don’t you know? I mean, can’t you imagine?”

  “I know his girlfriend was shot and they never solved the case.”

  The neighbor scratched his chin. “I’d forgotten that the newspaper didn’t tell it. But everyone knows.”

  Tess shook her head. “I don’t.”

  “It was October thirty-first, Halloween?”

  She nodded, confirming that October thirty-first was Halloween.

  “That was the first part.”

  “The first part?”

  “They found Lucy Fancher’s head in the middle of the Route 40 bridge, about two A.M. Just sitting on the median strip, almost exactly at the county line between Cecil and Harford. Her head and her driver’s license, in case anyone couldn’t make the ID with just the head.”

  Suddenly, everything was too sharp: the deep itchy smell of the evergreens, the bay-tinged breeze, the blue eyes of her cheerful informant.

  “That wasn’t the worst, of course.”

  Of course.

  “Two nights later, the body shows up, here on the back steps. It’s waterlogged, like it’s been submerged somewhere. People say the person who done it had found a jack-o‘-lantern, left over from Halloween, and propped it on her neck for a joke. Yes, she was shot, and that was the cause of death. But it always seemed the point was to get at her boyfriend, to taunt him in some way.”

  Tess was beginning to see how those elliptical newspaper stories fit together. If Fancher’s head had been found on the bridge, a cop who worked for the Maryland Transportation Authority was probably first on the scene. But it was only when the body was found that they could determine the cause of death—the so-called break in the case. Which meant the head had been removed postmortem. The bit about the jack-o‘-lantern was the kind of thing cops would withhold, even if the whole town was alive with gossip about the case.

  “Was she—”

  “Raped?” It was creepy how quickly he filled in her unvoiced thought. “They never said.”

  “What happened to the boyfriend?”

  The man had scratched his chin until he opened up a small cut, but he kept scratching, smearing blood. “I don’t know. He moved away. Some said he went crazy. Who’d blame him?”

  “Did she have an ex-boyfriend around, or an ex-husband?”

  “Don’t know. Only knew her by sight, as I said, and the only man I ever saw around here was her boyfriend. They looked like a nice young couple, with everything in the world to live for. I sometimes wonder if that was the point.”

  “The point?”

  “Of what that crazy man did. Because he’d have to be crazy, wouldn’t he? And he’d have to be a man—just to carry her back here, I mean. Couldn’t have been easy, the body waterlogged as it was. Not easy to cut off a person’s head, come to think of it, even after they’re dead. You’d need proper tools. But I always thought the person who done it hated him more than her, you know?”

  “Someone killed Lucy Fancher to get at her boyfriend?”

  “I’m not saying he knew them. I’m saying he mighta saw ‘em. In town, or at the diner up on Route 40. They looked happy together. There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. You ever play checkers when you were a kid?”

  “What?” The conversation became more surreal at every turn.

  “I used to go to a friend’s house, after school, play checkers. His little brother wanted to play, but it’s a one-on-one game, and there’s no way to make it three-person. Besides, he didn’t know how to play for beans. So we told him to go away. Well, he—he—” The gabby neighbor was suddenly at a loss for words. When he spoke again, his voice was lower, as if he feared being overheard. “He whipped it out and sprayed that board like a dog marking his territory. If he wasn’t going to play checkers, no one was going to play checkers.”

  “This theory of yours—is it part of the local gossip, too, or just based on your observations about human nature?”

  She had tried to sound respectful, but the man drew himself up, affronted.

  “It’s good as anything they ever come up with. Better than anything ol‘ Carl Dewitt came up with, and I didn’t go crazy in the process, did I?”

  “Who’s Carl Dewitt?” Tess asked. But he was already walking away, leaving her alone in the backyard. Tess glanced at the concrete back steps, trying to imagine how the scene had looked on a grayer, colder day, when the sun set so much earlier. From a distance, in the dark, the body had probably looked like a straw man, some child’s tasteless joke. Close up? Close up, that discovery could be enough to drive a man crazy. She wondered if Carl Dewitt was Lucy Fancher’s boyfriend, the one whose happiness another man might have begrudged. And she knew it would be a long time before Lucy Fancher’s landlord ever sold this property.

  After almost five years at the Elkton Democrat, Margo Duncan almost quivered with ambition. When she heard that a private investigator from Baltimore wanted to talk to someone about the Fancher case, she crossed the small newsroom in three bounds, chattering before she reached Tess’s side.

  “That was my story,” she said. “The editors totally screwed it up. They kept saying, You can’t have decapitations in a family newspaper! Why? It’s the news, it’s a fact. It’s not like I dwelt on the details. Do you know how hard it is to sever a human head?”

  Tess nodded, fearful this young woman would tell her if she didn’t.

  “So it’s her, right? I mean, they have the head and her driver’s
license. But I’m not allowed to say they have just a head. They change it to ”North East woman has been found dead on the toll bridge, an apparent victim of foul play,“ blah, blah, blah. As if it could be a suicide! And then, when her body shows up, propped up on the back steps—”

  “With a jack-o‘-lantern. Or so I’ve been told.”

  “Well, how do you write that when they don’t let you say in the first place that all they had was a head? Besides, the cops were saying I couldn’t include the jack-o‘-lantern part because it’s something only the killer knows, and my bosses took their side. So small-town. I looked like an idiot. I think the publisher was just thinking about real estate values. That area was going up then. Visions of property taxes danced in his head.”

  Margo’s rat-a-tat rhythms seemed to have been modeled, in equal parts, on Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and the little chicken hawk who dogged Foghorn Leghorn through so many Saturday-morning cartoons. Tess felt weary. It had been a long day and she was at least sixty miles from home. She yearned for her bed, her boyfriend, and her dogs, in more or less that order.

  She took Margo by the elbow. “Isn’t there a break room around here?”

  There was, there always was. No newspaper could publish without a row of vending machines somewhere in the building, filled with salty snacks and sodas and scalded coffee that missed the paper cups three out of five times. Margo Duncan chose a box of Mike & Ikes and began tossing them back as if they were tranquilizers and she was the main character in a sex-and-shopping novel.

  “Want one?” She rattled the box at Tess.

  “No, thanks.”

  “No fat. I’m not saying they’re good for you, or even low in calories, but it’s pure sugar. You burn it off.”

  Margo clearly did. Although she was of medium height and build, she had the jangly nerves of a toy poodle.

  “I used to be a reporter,” Tess said. “Down in Baltimore.”

  “At the Beacon-Light? Can you get me an interview?”

  “I worked for the competition before it went under.” The frown on Margo Duncan’s face indicated she had forgotten Baltimore was once a two-newspaper town. “But you can use my name to get your foot in the door. The editors know me.”

  They also hated her, but let Margo discover this on her own.

  “Why are you interested in the Fancher case? Is there a story in it for me?”

  A typical reporter’s question. “No, it’s pretty boring stuff. I’m just looking at open homicide cases, chosen at random. It’s an exercise in statistical analysis.”

  That shut her interest down. In fact, Margo became positively sullen. She slumped in her seat, fishing the green Mike & Ikes from the box.

  “I’m curious to know if there’s anything else that didn’t make the paper—besides the head thing, I mean.”

  “Does that suck or what? They said it didn’t pass the breakfast test. Postmortem, I kept telling them, postmortem.”

  “I imagine it’s hard to remove someone’s head before death,” Tess said.

  “Which isn’t to say it hasn’t been done. Let me tell you, I’ve read all the books, all the life stories: Bundy, Dahmer, and lesser-known ones like Maryland’s own Metheney. People do some seriously sick shit.”

  But books were the only place where Margo had encountered the seriously sick. She was no more than twenty-seven, and she was a young twenty-seven, with a face so clear and untroubled that Tess knew she had seen very little of the world. Margo Duncan was all talk.

  “In your opinion,” she began, and Margo sat up a little straighter, delighted someone wanted her opinion, “in your opinion, how’d the local cops handle the case?”

  “The local guys were cool. The state cop was a little jerky, but it turned out he had never caught a case like that either. Carl Dewitt was the king of no comment. Like he had anything to say anyway.”

  It was the second time Tess had heard that name in as many hours. “Carl Dewitt was an investigator?”

  “Carl Dewitt was the Toll Facilities cop who found the head and was, you’ll pardon the expression, like a dog with a bone. He couldn’t let go of the case. To his detriment. The state police finally wrestled it away from him, after he had to take a leave for knee surgery.” She stopped to think, using her index finger to work a piece of candy out of her teeth. “Or maybe it was back surgery. Something bad enough to get him disability, I remember that much.”

  “Did they have suspects? Was it one of those cases where they just couldn’t make the case?”

  Margo shook her head. “They didn’t have anything.”

  “Did they look at the boyfriend?”

  “Sure. Alan Palmer was down the shore in Saint Michaels, camping out before a big estate sale.”

  “Camping out?”

  “Palmer was sort of like a go-between for decorators and high-end antique dealers in Baltimore, Wilmington—even Philadelphia. I think they call them pickers, something like that.”

  “Scouts,” Tess said.

  “Really?” Margo wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, he shopped the auctions and antique sales with their wish lists. A huge estate sale, the whole contents of the house of some one-hit wonder of a writer, was scheduled for eight A.M. October thirtieth. Palmer went down October twenty-ninth. They were going to start handing out numbers at five A.M., and he wanted to be in the first batch of people let in. He planned to sleep in his truck.”

  “So the cops go down to Saint Michaels and find him shopping an estate sale?”

  Margo nodded.

  “How did he take it?”

  “Better than you think, actually. At least, he was okay for Part One. Maybe he was still in shock, I don’t know. But he got through identifying her head. It was when the body showed up that… I think someone came to town and took him away, kind of quiet-like. Later, the cops told me he was hospitalized, in a rehab facility somewhere out of state.”

  “Drugs?”

  “No, it’s physical rehab. He broke his neck in a car accident. Might be DWI, I dunno. Who could blame him?”

  “Had Lucy been married before? Did she have an ex, or even family members that the police suspected?”

  “There’s an ex-boyfriend, a super-scary guy. His arms are so tattooed he looks like he’s always wearing sleeves. But they never charged him. Best I can tell, the cops have given up.”

  “The state police just gave up?”

  “The case is still open. Homicides never—”

  “Close, I know. Still, it doesn’t seem like the kind of case cops give up on.”

  “They think it was a drifter, someone passing through. So it’s not as if it’s a public safety risk for the county. And it’s not as if it’s happened again. But my theory is the other investigators look at Dewitt and figure they don’t want to end up like that.” Margo looked thoughtful, which in her case meant she managed to still her twitching limbs and features for about five seconds. “The Fancher case is like one of those mummy’s tombs, you know? There’s a curse on everyone who had anything to do with it. Dewitt screws up his knee—or his back, whichever—the boyfriend cracks up his car. I wonder if I’m next.”

  She hugged herself, delighted by her ghoulish theory. Margo was probably trying to calculate if there was a marketable first-person narrative in all this tragedy. After all, what was the use of proximity to a great case if it didn’t further your career?

  “What was the ex-boyfriend’s name?”

  “Bonner. Bonner Flood.”

  “Sounds like someone out of a Faulkner novel.”

  “He wishes. He’s a creep, but a petty one. As I said, the police never charged him. He works in one of the marinas, when he can hold a job.”

  Tess got up to go, then remembered she had one more thing she wanted to ask. “Did you ever get to interview Alan Palmer?”

  “No, but he was the best thing that ever happened to Lucy, apparently. She was working some minimum-wage job, didn’t even have her GED, when he came along. Hey, I have a que
stion for you. What do you think of Margo A. Duncan?”

  It was always a bad sign, someone speaking of herself in the third person.

  “I think… you’ve been a great help,” Tess ventured.

  “No, I mean the name. I think my byline might be holding me back. I want something more New York Timesian. My middle name is Alice, which doesn’t really work that well, but M.A. Duncan sounds like I’ve got a master’s in doughnuts. Or I could go with M. Alice Duncan.”

  Tess didn’t have the heart to point out that this would simply turn Margo into Malice. “Sounds great,” she said, edging toward the door. “I’m sure it will make all the difference.”

  CHAPTER 13

  The man with the tattooed arms ended his day with a cheeseburger and a beer, which he all but inhaled, so that a gob of the head stuck to his nose. It was a long pointy nose, like a hound’s. That nose would turn out to be the only sharp thing about Bonner Flood.

  When he put down his glass and saw Tess, holding out her card, he sighed. “I don’t wanna,” he said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Whatever it is you want, I don’t wanna talk about it. I’m off, okay? This is my time, my dinner.”

  “I’ll buy you dinner.”

  “I don’t wanna.”

  “And give you some cash for your time.”

  “I don’t wanna,” repeated this modern-day Bartleby. “Come back tomorrow.”

  “I don’t wanna,” Tess said, taking the seat opposite him in the booth. It had not been too hard to find out that Bonner Flood took his evening meal in this diner on Route 40, an authentic one with hand-lettered signs advertising the specials and not a speck of self-conscious charm. The Riverview Diner might be a find, but it could just as well be a dump, staying in business by cultivating a clientele that cared more about prices than food. A waitress shuffled over and, looking much put-upon, took down Tess’s order of a Coke, a cheeseburger with everything, and french fries with gravy.

  “Lucy Fancher,” Tess began.

  “Tell Carl Dewitt to go fuck himself.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “My lawyer said he’s gotta stop doing this shit to me. If the cops want me, they can jack me up official-like. But they gotta let me live my life in peace.”