The Last Place Read online

  “You said the girl in Frederick died of a gunshot wound,” Carl pointed out. “So did Lucy.”

  “Yes, but Tiffani’s body was—well, intact. Lucy’s head was cut off postmortem, and the killer kept the body for a couple of days. That’s a pretty big change in just eighteen months.”

  “Serial killers do change their methods, contrary to popular belief. And they don’t leave little notes for the cops, egging them on, inviting them to come and find them.”

  “Who said anything about a serial killer? We’re talking about two homicides, and we haven’t proved they’re connected. It’s just a wild hunch on my part.”

  “A serial killer doesn’t have to kill dozens and dozens of people,” Carl said. “Law enforcement guidelines used to say it has to be three or more, but others say two is plenty. Maybe we’re seeing this guy early in his career.”

  “Please don’t use that word to talk about homicide, okay? Killing is not a career, unless you’re a hit man.”

  Carl leaned forward in his chair, which took some effort, for he fit so well into its deep-set grooves that its slick surface stuck to his skin. He almost had to peel himself away, which made a rude sucking sound wherever chair met flesh.

  “You came to my door, remember? You’re the one who made this link. Don’t be afraid of your own intuition. I stopped being a cop almost three years ago. But I never stopped hoping for a break in this case.”

  “This isn’t what I was hired to find. Quite the opposite. I’m looking for evidence that law-enforcement types who don’t handle a lot of homicides make basic mistakes—” She broke off, realizing a second too late how rude she must sound. I’m here because you and your ilk are supposed to be bozos. But Carl just nodded, signaling her to continue. “My clients care about domestic violence, not the random acts of some psychopath. This has nothing to do with what I’ve been asked to investigate.”

  “I dunno.” Carl’s face glowed in the lamplight. His head was very round, and the orange cast of his hair and complexion made Tess think of a jack-o‘-lantern—which unfortunately made her think of Lucy Fancher. The photos that Carl had plucked from his cardboard box were still sitting in plain view, on a dainty table covered with a lacy antimacassar. She nudged them away with her elbow.

  “These are crimes against women, after all,” Carl continued. “You said you thought it was all about jealousy, that someone had set out to destroy two people and their happiness. Do you know where that other girl’s boyfriend ended up?”

  Tess shook her head. “Out of state, according to her family. He was heartbroken because he couldn’t have custody of his girlfriend’s daughter. It was easier for him, apparently, just to cut off contact.”

  “Well, as you know, Alan Palmer is stuck in a hospital, living on a ventilator. The hospital social worker called me when he was transferred, said he’d probably live out his days there.”

  “The reporter at the local paper seemed to be hinting he had a breakdown.”

  “The reporter at the local paper,” Carl said, “doesn’t know shit. She thinks everyone’s always having a breakdown because she’s constantly on the verge of one.”

  Having met Margo Duncan, Tess could see his point.

  “Anyway, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say this killer wants to hurt the guy as much as he wants to kill the girl. Maybe more. So that’s why he had to ratchet it up, raise the stakes. He didn’t manage to destroy the first guy, but he sure as hell ruined Alan Palmer. I’m not sure the guy even took a drink before this happened. Two women dead, two men shattered. That’s a kind of domestic violence, isn’t it?”

  “You keep saying he. Is that just generic sexism? Or do you assume a serial killer—assuming this is a serial killer—has to be a man?”

  “More bunk,” Carl said, waving his hand in front of his face as if to dispel a bad odor. “There are plenty of women serial killers. But I just figure this is a man. It’s the kind of jealousy a man would feel, you know? I hate to say it about my own kind, but when you see a guy with a good-looking woman, you’re kinda like, ”Hey, how did he get that?“ And then, ”Where can I get me one?“ Alan Palmer was a nice enough guy, but ordinary. If someone saw him with a pretty girl, they’d want to know how he did it. What about your guy?”

  For a moment, Tess thought he was talking about Crow. Even when she understood the question, she wasn’t entirely comfortable with this your guy/my guy rhetoric. It made it sound as if they were in a rotisserie baseball league, swapping stats about starting pitchers.

  “I don’t know what Eric Shivers looked like. But Tiffani was pretty enough, almost like a changeling. It was hard to imagine how such a tiny, elfin girl emerged from that sour, doughy family.”

  “And what did your guy do?”

  “Salesman—in camera supplies, I think. Or maybe it was film. Something to do with photography.”

  “Hmmmm.” Carl stroked his chin. “Hard to see how someone hooks up professionally with these two, one being in camera supplies, the other an antique scout. Where was he the night she died?”

  “Spartina, Virginia. It’s a college town in the Shenandoah Valley.”

  “Out of town. Just like Alan.”

  “Yeah.”

  Carl stood, with some difficulty. It wasn’t just that his chair held him tight. One of his knees, the left one, seemed to give him some trouble. He wobbled a little, but he didn’t lose his balance.

  “Let’s go.” He was remarkably pleased with himself.

  “Go where? It’s nine o’clock. The only place I’m going tonight is back to Baltimore. This has been the creepiest day I’ve spent in a long time, and I just want to sleep in my own bed, with my dogs. And my boyfriend.”

  Carl looked disappointed. “I didn’t really mean—didn’t you get it? ”Let’s go.“ ”

  “To Spartina? Right now? It’s almost nine o’clock.”

  “No, you don’t get it. ”Let’s go.“ It’s the key line of The Wild Bunch. William Holden says, ”Let’s go,“ and there’s, like…” His voice trailed off at the incomprehension in her face. “You’ll have to see it sometime. It’s only the greatest movie ever made. I’ve got it on DVD and wide-screen VHS. The scorpion in the opening shot looks six feet long!”

  He gestured to the bookcases that flanked his large television. There were some books there, but there were far more DVDs and videocassettes.

  “So you don’t want to go anywhere? You’re just doing movie dialogue?”

  “No, I think we should go to Spartina. Your guy went there a lot, isn’t that what you said?”

  “At least once a month, according to his almost in-laws.”

  “And Alan had to go down the shore on a regular basis, to hit the auctions. Okay, picture this. There’s a bartender, works in some nowhere place. Guy pulls his girl’s picture out when he’s had a few beers. She’s pretty. She’s wonderful. He’s going to marry her. Can’t stand being away from her so much. Or maybe he shows her photograph to another traveling salesman type, a guy who can’t get a girl, doesn’t have anyone back home.”

  “Sounds a little crazy.”

  She caught a flash of ire in Carl Dewitt’s face, a stereotypical redhead’s temper.

  “It’s not crazy. Maybe far-fetched, but I’m just talking out loud, trying to think this through. You came to my door, remember? Well, now you’re here, so listen to me.

  “I know everything about how Lucy Fancher died. I know everything about Lucy Fancher. I know her birth date and her perfume—lily of the valley. I know she wore a color she called periwinkle, although it looked like just plain lavender to everybody else. I know she had put a hundred dollars down on a wedding dress and veil on Labor Day weekend. It was going to be a Christmas wedding. I know what the weather was like the night she died—cold, for October, and damp. I know the tides for that day and that the moon was new. Her nearest neighbor watched the ten o’clock news before he went to bed, the next-nearest neighbor gave out Butterfingers and Baby Ruths to the trick-or
-treaters.”

  “I—”

  But Carl was too wound up to hear her, to hear anything. “You think the hot-shit state trooper who was in charge of the case knows even half of what I know? One-fourth? One-tenth? I don’t know if there’s any link between her and this girl who died out in Frederick. But if there is, I’ll be the one to see. No one else can help you, assuming you want any help. Assuming you really understand what you’ve found here.”

  The photographs of Lucy Fancher were still in view. They were poorly lit, the kind of black-and-white crime-scene photos that Tess rushed past whenever she steeled herself to read textbooks on investigative techniques. Death was so undignified. That was its real power. People looked stupid when they were dead.

  “If you come down to Baltimore tomorrow, we can drive to Spartina together. It will be a long day, but with two of us driving it shouldn’t be so bad.”

  Carl nodded at the photos. “She got to you, didn’t she?”

  Tess started to shake her head no but ended up agreeing.

  “She gets to everyone, eventually.”

  He awakens by the side of the road and for one panicky moment cannot remember where he is. Can barely remember who he is. But slowly he gets his bearings. There is his old patchwork pillow beneath his cheek, which he imagines still carries the scent of his boyhood home, although the cover has been washed many, many times. Not a week goes by that he doesn’t stop at a Laundromat and watch the faded gingham pieces turn somersaults through the porthole of a coin-operated dryer.

  He is in the back of the van, parked somewhere off Route 5 in southern Maryland. The rear of the van is windowless, but light is playing at the edges of the windshield, sneaking in. It had been late when he finished last night, and he was bone-tired. It’s hard work, what he does, physically demanding. The people who hire him don’t always get that. They understand the mess, the need for care and discretion, but they don’t realize how strong you have to be, how much manual labor is involved. Exhausted, incapable of driving the rest of the way home, he had pulled into a parking lot near the Amish flea market and slept his usual dreamless sleep. He is here, the time is now, he is whole, all is well.

  He had a real scare in Saint Mary’s City last night. He thought he saw a woman he once knew, peering hard into his face. Luckily, he doesn’t have the beard and his hair is back to its normal shade, but someone who had been close to him might see the resemblance. Then again, people don’t see what they don’t expect to see, and no one ever expects to see him. Still, the incident served to remind him of all the places that are lost to him.

  That’s why he’s trying to get everything under control. He was not meant to live like this. He wants to put down roots, stay put. He wants what everyone wants, and there’s no crime in that.

  He rolls up his sleeping bag, places the pillow in its usual spot, on the passenger seat of the van, and sets off north, the rising sun almost painful in the perfection of its shape, the flatness of its color. This is not the sun he grew up with. This is an angry sun, querulous and irritable, appearing on the horizon with great reluctance, then shooting up into the sky as if it wants to get the day done. He asked his mother once if she noticed how many colors she lost upon moving here, how the more subtle shades and variations had been drained from the sky and the water, even the trees and the land. She just looked at him as she often did— fond but uncomprehending, utterly baffled. Love does not guarantee understanding.

  Today, as he glances at the sun off to the right, watches it ascend in the sky and change from plain red to dull yellow, he realizes they are in the same boat, him and the sun. They are in exile, unhappy and hollow. The earth still revolves around the sun, but the world tends to forget that fact, even as the sun’s rays reach through the thinning atmosphere, quietly claiming more victims.

  Ah, but he has a plan to fix his life. The sun will have to save itself.

  CHAPTER 15

  Carl Dewitt was given to unnervingly long and deep silences. Such a capacity for quiet could be construed as a sign of strength and power— when the person squinting at the horizon was Clint Eastwood or Dewitt’s beloved William Holden.

  But in Carl’s case, his inability to make conversation on the long drive to Virginia simply made Tess aware of his crippling shyness. Unless the subject was Lucy Fancher, he was incapable of warming to any topic. Sometimes, even he became so unnerved by the silence between them that he punctuated it by reading the highway signs out loud.

  “BEST BISCUITS AROUND,” he said, as they turned south, not far from Hagerstown. Then, a few miles later: “FLYING J TRUCK STOP. CLEAN RESTROOMS, SHOWERS. CRACKER BARREL. VISIT OUR GIFT SHOP.”

  His readings, however, were not endorsements. Carl was appalled when Tess asked where he wanted to stop for breakfast. “I brought along a box of Chix ‘n’ Stix,” he said, pulling out a brand of chicken-flavored crackers that Tess thought had ceased to exist years ago. She declined, and they compromised on a drive-through just outside Martinsburg, West Virginia. Tess had liked the bacon biscuit, soaked with grease, more than she cared to admit.

  Back in the car, Carl also seemed to find the radio barely tolerable, grunting when Tess punched the buttons to keep the NPR newscast coming in as they passed through one public radio station’s universe after another.

  “That’s news?” he asked at one point, after a report on the funding crisis of an Italian opera company.

  “Sure, it’s news. You have to think of the broadcast as an entire newspaper. A story like that would be in the arts section.”

  Another grunt.

  “Let me guess. You read sports, the front page, and nothing else.”

  “I glance at the front page. I don’t follow sports anymore.”

  “Anymore?”

  “I don’t know. Seems pretty trivial. I liked the Philadelphia teams when I was younger, but only because that station came in clearer than the Baltimore one. But, as the Bible says, I’ve put away childish things.”

  “Are you religious?”

  “Not particularly. I just remember that verse from when my parents dragged me to church.”

  “Which was—”

  “Methodist.”

  “No, I mean where did you grow up?”

  “Right in North East, in the house where I live now. I’ve lived my whole life in Cecil County except for college.”

  “Which was—”

  “University of Delaware.” He allowed himself a small smile. “The Fighting Blue Hens. I didn’t finish.”

  There was something almost compulsive in that last tacked-on sentence, as if he didn’t want to be caught embroidering his résumé in any way.

  “Why not?”

  “My mom got sick. So I came home and took the job with the state. When I found out I would be stationed at the bridge, right outside my hometown, I thought it was the luckiest day in my life. And I guess it was…”

  He did not finish the thought. But Tess thought she understood. The murder of Lucy Fancher had cut through this man’s life, separating him from the person he once was as surely as her killer had separated Lucy’s head from her body. She wondered if Carl had daydreamed, in the boredom of his old job, about doing something more exciting than helping stranded motorists or chasing down people who didn’t pay their tolls. It would have been natural for a young man to yearn in such a fashion.

  More natural still to regret those yearnings in the wake of what had happened.

  “And your mom?”

  “Died. Going on eight years this summer. Time flies.”

  “So it does. We’re almost to Spartina.”

  Spartina was on the long stretch of interstate that cut through the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia, near the Shenandoah River. A college town, home to one of the state colleges, it looked like any other small city on an interstate. Lots of fast-food restaurants and one mall, which had leached the life from downtown, now a place of empty shops and small diners that closed by early afternoon. Only the landscape and the
syrupy-thick southern accents reminded Tess that she had traveled quite a way from Baltimore.

  Their first stop was the small motel, an old-fashioned motor court, where Eric Shivers had spent his last untroubled night on this earth. Spartina had several chain motels, but Eric had been a regular at this family-owned place off the beaten path, a U-shaped arrangement of whitewashed stucco, with planters of geraniums outside the office entrance. The place lacked the amenities that most business travelers considered crucial—a twenty-four-hour restaurant, voice mail, and rooms wired for laptops—but it was homey and restful, the Shenandoah visible from the trampled side yard, where rusty spikes stood waiting for a game of horseshoes.

  “Eric Shivers?” The man behind the counter was jolly-looking, with a round flushed face. Bald, he had allowed his remaining fringe of hair to grow wild and woolly, so he looked a little clownish, but in a good way. “Oh, Lord, I haven’t thought of that poor boy for years.”

  “You remember him, then?” Tess took the lead automatically, although she and Carl had not discussed this beforehand.

  “Surely. I think I’d remember Eric even if it weren’t for that awful thing that happened. I still remember those police officers calling here, then coming down from Maryland to break the news. He couldn’t drive, one of them had to take his van back up there. Oh, he was broken up.” The old man shook his head, lost in the memory. “He came here regular-like, at least once a month for six months, when he was on business. I suppose he’d still be coming, if it weren’t for what happened.”

  “And what did he do exactly?”

  “Salesman?” But the manager-owner’s voice scaled up, unsure. “He paid calls on customers, but I was never clear—something about chemicals?”

  “Photographic supplies, perhaps?”

  “That was it.” He looked relieved. “Something to do with chemicals for photographs.”

  “So did he go to camera shops or local photography studios?”