The Last Place

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.”

“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.