The Last Place

CHAPTER 17

The Maryland State Police are strangely invisible to the people they protect. An average citizen, asked to explain what this branch of law enforcement does, would know only that they give out speeding tickets along the major highways. Those who read newspapers might recall that an undercover state trooper is almost always involved when a Marylander attempts to arrange a contract hit on a loved one. Troopers receive the most attention when they get killed in the line of duty.

Otherwise, no one seems quite sure what they do or why they exist. Not Tess, at least. But Carl had worked with troopers on the Fancher case and, presumably, knew what they did.

“I wish we didn’t have to depend on these guys,” Carl muttered, as he and Tess waited ten, twenty, thirty minutes past the scheduled meeting time. “Couldn’t we have gone straight to the FBI?”

“You know better than I that the FBI has no jurisdiction. Our guy may have rented a car in Virginia, but as far as we know he’s killed only within the boundaries of Maryland. Besides, the state police seemed awfully keen when I called.”

“If they’re so interested,” Carl said, “why are they making us wait?”

“To remind us that they’re more important than we are,” Tess said complacently. “Or to convince themselves of their own importance.”

“Trust me, they never doubt their own importance. They’re dicks. I hated working with them up in Cecil County.”

“They were in charge of the Lucy Fancher case, right?”

“Yes, and they were dicks. Know-it-all dicks. They’ll cut us out of this investigation in a heartbeat. Treat us like ordinary citizens.”

“We are ordinary citizens,” Tess pointed out. “But follow my lead in there, and we’ll be able to keep our hand in.”

Another five minutes elapsed before a secretary ushered them into a conference room where three uniformed men waited. In their stiff khaki uniforms, their broad-brimmed hats on the table in front of them, they gave the impression of wearing mirrored sunglasses, although they were not-their eyes were simply that flat and expressionless. No one offered an apology for making them wait, although the youngest of the three nodded at Carl.

“Carl,” he said.

“Corporal Gregg.” He nodded back.

“Craig. And I’ve made sergeant since we last met.”

“That’s right, you assisted on the Fancher case for a while, Mr. Dewitt,” said the middle of the three men. His nameplate identified him as Lieutenant Green. “Sergeant Craig briefed us on that situation. All water under the bridge, you’ll pardon the expression.”

Tess tried not to make a face at the ill-advised pun.

“Now we’ve looked at the two cases you believe are linked and already contacted VICAP,” Lieutenant Green continued. “No obvious connections have jumped out, but we have forty open homicides of adult women over the last five years-including another decapitation, although an arrest was made in that case. And in that case the body was found before the head.”

He looked quite pleased with himself for knowing this chronology was relevant. The oldest of the trio, Major Shields, rewarded him with a smile. This appeared to make Sergeant Craig, a boyish blond, eager for his share of approval.

“We’re also looking at domestics that were resolved as murder-suicides.”

“Resolved?” Tess echoed.

Major Shields caught her tone. “Resolved in the sense that they’re not ongoing cases. But we have to be open to the possibility that this killer-assuming you’re right about there being just one-has stopped killing because he’s already dead. Or he’s in another state. In which case, there’s not a lot we can do but put the word out and hope someone else is checking VICAP.”

“He wouldn’t kill himself,” Carl said. Tess wasn’t so sure, but she didn’t want the state police to see them as less than a united front, so she put a cautionary hand on the side of Carl’s leg, beneath the table where it couldn’t be seen. He let it rest there for a moment, then shook it off.

“No,” the major agreed. “Not if you’re right about his pattern. But it’s hard to deduce a pattern from just two. Sam here has been down to Quantico and trained as a profiler.” He nodded toward the lieutenant. “These things are not as cut-and-dried as you might think.”

Again, Tess tried not to make a face. She had a friend in Baltimore City homicide who had gone to Quantico on a consultation once, for two seemingly random homicides that had happened in two of the city’s posher neighborhoods. It was a red ball squared, to use cop parlance, but the trip to Quantico had been more public relations than police work. The profiler had looked at the files and said, “Both these crimes occurred at night. So now we know your killer is nocturnal.” That turned out to be the only useful information derived from the session. The homicides were unrelated, after all, and the two independent perps who were ultimately arrested proved capable of committing crimes at any time of the day or night.

“What about closed cases?” She tried to sound deferential, non-combative. There was a bad feel to the room, the sense of some unresolved grudge between Carl and Sergeant Craig.

“Closed cases?” Lieutenant Green looked baffled. “Closed cases are closed.”

“But what if the person who committed these crimes is in prison for another crime?”

“Well, of course. We’re always open to that possibility.”

“Or what if one of your resolved cases was resolved incorrectly? What if the wrong man was convicted for a crime, allowing this killer to continue?”

“That’s”-the major searched for a word-“an interesting notion. We’ll consider that too. We do appreciate your help, your cooperation. This case may turn out to be quite important.”

The troopers were giving them the bum’s rush, just as Carl had feared. Tess could sense his anger building, but she knew they needed to be tactful, almost servile, to get what they wanted. Like beta dogs, they had to roll on their backs and offer up their stomachs to the alpha dogs. This was a hard lesson for men, but it came naturally to most women.

“We called the state police because we want to help. We’d like to work with you.”

Major Shields smiled at her. “The state police doesn’t work with civilians.”

“Of course.” She paused for a beat, and the troopers smiled, full of the warm feeling that comes from getting one’s way effortlessly. “Only this extremely sensitive information grew out of our investigation. I’m still under contract. My work hasn’t ended. You could even say I own this information. Me and my clients.”

The troopers were no longer smiling.

“You are free to continue whatever it is you do,” the major said, “where it does not overlap or interfere with official police work.”

It was a bluff. Tess shook her head, calling him on it.

“My clients are well-connected people. They’re not used to being pushed aside or controlled in any fashion. They already know what I’ve uncovered. And so far they haven’t gone to the media or made a stink. Nor will they-as long as I’m involved. If I tell them you’ve shut me out, they’ll be all over television, screaming cover-up.”

“Cover-up?”

“My clients will press any advantage they have to get more funding for domestic violence prevention. They could make a lot of hay over the Fancher case, how you let the boyfriend slip away. Especially if it turns out he killed again.”

“Alan Palmer would have fooled anyone,” Sergeant Craig sputtered. “He was an upstanding citizen. Everyone who knew Lucy Fancher approved of him. He’s in a hospital, for Christ’s sake.”

“Someone named Alan Palmer is in a hospital,” Tess said. “But he was there before the Alan Palmer you knew left North East.”

“Well, the guy we knew had a pretty good alibi. As far as I’m concerned, he still has an alibi. Just because-”

The major silenced him with a look, then said, with impressive menace, “Don’t threaten us, Miss Monaghan.”

“These aren’t threats, just facts. My clients feel a certain proprietary interest in what I’ve uncovered. The best way to assure them they’re not being cut out is to let me-and Carl-work with you.”

“You are not a public safety officer and Carl is no longer one. What could you possibly do?”

“Small tasks, even scut work. Field interviews you don’t have time for. We can answer phones, take tips, pass out leaflets with Alan Palmer’s driver’s license photo. By the way, does it match Eric Shivers’s?”

The troopers’ quick glances among themselves told Tess they had not yet checked. She saw Lieutenant Green make a quick note on his pad.

“Carl and I could even look into the two men’s lives, try to see if they overlap in any way.”

“They don’t-” Sergeant Craig began, only to get another cautionary look from the major, the kind that can make words shrivel on the tongue. Either Major Shields was thinking about her request, or he didn’t want the young trooper to reveal anything the state police had learned.

“If we allow you to work with us, even in the most tangential way,” the major said, “it must be understood that everything we do is confidential. No leaks to the press. If this man has remained in Maryland, he believes he has escaped detection. His sense of security is one of the few advantages we have.”

“Also, it would appear he has long dormancy periods,” put in the lieutenant.

Duh, Tess yearned to say, but Shields and Craig beamed at him for this insight. Perhaps she should let the profiler strut his stuff.

“Tell us what else you’ve been able to figure out by looking at the case files.”

“This killer seems particularly methodical.”

Double duh.

“Assuming it is one killer. That’s by no means certain.”

“What is certain?” Tess asked, as if she had not assembled half the facts of the case to date. “Have you put together a timeline for the case?”

“Tiffani Gunts was killed in April six years ago. About two months before she died, ”Alan Palmer‘ renewed his license at the DMV in Mondawmin, in Baltimore City.“

“Renewed?”

The lieutenant shrugged. “Maryland licenses come up for renewal every five years. The real Alan Palmer had a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-six, about eighteen months before the license was renewed. But being comatose doesn’t invalidate your driver’s license. It remains in the system.”

“Even if you don’t keep up your insurance?”

“Loss of insurance flags the registration, not the license. As far as the DMV computers were concerned, Alan Palmer was entitled to drive, brain dead or no, even if he hadn’t renewed his license when it expired. He was still in the twelve-month grace period. Whoever took over his identity must have known this somehow and arranged to get other documents that allowed him to renew the license-a Social Security card, a certified birth certificate.”

“What address was on Alan Palmer’s driver’s license? The most recent one, I mean.” Tess cupped her chin in her hand and leaned forward as if mesmerized.

“We did check that.” Lieutenant Green granted her a smile. He was warming to her. Men usually warmed to women who listened to them in this fashion. “It looked like a real street address, but it turned out to be a box in one of those Mail Boxes chains in Baltimore. He used the street address and made the box number look like an apartment number. A month before he came in for the renewal, he filed a change of address, so the paperwork went to that box.”

“Still, they have a photo of the real Alan Palmer in front of him. And he wouldn’t match.”

The lieutenant rubbed his chin. “Yeah, but he’s a young guy, and young people can change a lot over a six-year period. Plus he was a lot skinnier. The original Alan Palmer weighed two thirty-five; this one put his weight at one seventy-five. If the eye color, hair color, and height were close enough and the age wasn’t too far off, he could fake it.”

“And he went to Mondawmin,” Sergeant Craig said. “Those are some surly-”

He caught himself, but Tess’s head snapped up. This remark she couldn’t let pass. “Go ahead, Sergeant. Feel free to finish the racial slur. Or is it the gender of the DMV workers that gets under your skin?”

“I’m not a racist.” Then, a beat later. “Or a sexist.”

“Let’s chalk that up as a moot point. The fact is, you’re probably right.”

Carl, Major Shields, and Lieutenant Green looked at Tess in horror.

“No, I mean the pseudo-Alan Palmer probably chose Mondawmin because the government work force in the city tends to be exclusively African American. And you know what? We do all look alike to them.”

“Who’s the racist now?” Sergeant Craig asked.

“I have a friend, Jackie Weir, who has a three-year-old toddler. The other day she saw Julia Roberts on television and began pointing at her, yelling, ”Tesser! Tesser! Tesser!“ All because she was wearing her hair in a braid.”

The troopers saw her point with unflattering speed. Sergeant Craig even sneered a little and repeated the actress’s name to himself, then shook his head in disbelief.

“You’re so much bigger-” he muttered.

Tess decided she didn’t need to let him finish that sentence.

“Look, he’s a clever guy, whoever did this. He can’t control everything, but he plays the percentages. By using a living person who was incapacitated, he got himself a whole new life. There was little risk he would be caught as long as Alan Palmer’s in a vegetative state-and as long as he didn’t do anything to attract attention to himself. He’s like a parasite who’s just passing through. You don’t notice the tick that jumps off you after sucking up only a little blood.”

The major and the lieutenant nodded. Tess may not have won all of them over, but she now had a quorum.

“You’re on the money,” Major Shields said. “Identity theft is usually committed to rip other people off: open a charge account, get some stuff, move on. Alan Palmer had exactly one charge account, with a relatively small line of credit, and he paid the bills promptly. I’m not sure why he bothered to get a credit card at all.”

“He needed to rent a car,” Tess said. “To do that, you need a driver’s license and a credit card. Tell me this: Does Alan Palmer still have any open accounts?”

“He closed out the credit card a little over two years ago,” Lieutenant Green said.

Sergeant Craig leaned forward, eager to assert himself. “Which turns out to be a month after I got a call from a woman who said she was a caseworker with the state and wanted us to know he was in a hospital out of state.”

“She called me too,” Carl said. Tess poked his leg under the table again.

“Did you call the hospital to check?”

“Of course.” Sergeant Craig had the good grace to look sheepish. “I confirmed the Social Security number and DOB but let it go. I didn’t think to ask when he was admitted.”

“You didn’t find it odd, getting a call from some unidentified woman?”

“No, because Alan had been calling every month, asking if I knew anything. In fact, he was becoming a pest. The only thing I thought was, That is one unlucky guy.”

“Follow-up questions,” Major Shields said. “You have to remember to ask those simple questions, the ones that seem so dull and obvious. That’s where you find the inconsistencies.”

“It was a woman who called me too,” Carl said.

Everyone in the room looked at him, wondering why he was stuck on this point.

“Indicates an accomplice,” he said.

Score one for Carl, Tess thought. But it didn’t fit with what she thought she knew about this man. He was a loner, peripatetic, moving from town to town, woman to woman.

“Or a new girlfriend,” she suggested. “Another sweet dark-haired girl who wouldn’t ask too many questions if her new perfect-in-every-way boyfriend asked her to make such a call. Maybe he told her it was a prank, that the sergeant and Carl were old friends he wanted to fool.”

They sat in glum silence at the idea that the man was with a new girlfriend. Or would be, until the pattern kicked in. Why did he kill, why did he move on, what set him off?

“What about his other identity, Eric Shivers?” Tess asked. “Is that his real name, or did he steal that too?”

“Eric Shivers died fifteen years ago, at the age of seventeen,” Major Shields said. “But, sure enough, he had a valid Maryland driver’s license ten years after he died. It expired about a year after Tiffani Gunts did. Still in the system, but no one renewed it. Issued originally on the Eastern Shore.”

“How did Eric die?” Tess asked.

“Massive asthma attack, apparently. It was in a hospital over in Salisbury, although his family lived in Crisfield.”

“Hospitals.” Carl’s voice was too loud, almost a bark. “That’s one link between Eric and Alan: a place where someone with access to records can get Social Security numbers. You’ve got to look at hospitals.”

The major’s voice was not unkind. “We’re checking into that. We also searched registration records, but neither Eric Shivers nor Alan Palmer had a car in his name, not in this state.”

“Yet he drives,” Tess said. “More evidence of an accomplice-or yet another identity, a fixed one that he returns to in between…”

“Dormancy periods.” Lieutenant Green supplied the term again, but Tess no longer felt the urge to mock him. Clearly, there were dormancy periods, long ones.

“You gotta give him credit,” Carl said. “His organizational skills are formidable. Most people can’t get through the DMV with the right documents. Here our guy is, zipping through with phonies.”

“I don’t know,” Tess said, thinking of Mickey Pechter. “There’s a booming business in fake IDs out there. Even nerds from Towson know how to get them. What bothers me is the degree of planning, the care he takes. Yet he had no financial incentive to kill these women. They were dirt-poor, they had nothing to give, and they weren’t in a position to take anything from him. They weren’t even common-law wives under Maryland statute. He could have walked away without a care in the world.”

“Maybe he has a fear of commitment,” Sergeant Craig offered. It wasn’t meant as a joke, Tess realized, which only made it worse.

“You know what I think? He’s always planning. He knows when he starts dating a girl that this day will come. Yet his grief appears authentic. You never doubted Alan Palmer’s emotions, right?”

Her question was for Carl, not Craig. She didn’t think the sergeant was the best judge of human emotion. Of course, Carl was only marginally better.

He thought for a moment, shook his head.

“No, I never did. Which bothers me to this day. He was devastated. Now I may not have a lot of experience in homicide”-his eyes shot around the table, daring the troopers to note he had assisted on exactly one such investigation-“but I don’t get this: How did he manufacture grief for a woman he killed? A woman he butchered?”

“Postmortem,” Tess said. “Both women died from gunshot wounds to the chest.”

“The guns-” Major Shields began, a note of hope in his voice.

“No match,” Lieutenant Green said glumly.

“He sawed off Lucy’s head so his breakdown would be more credible.” Tess realized she had begun speaking in Carl’s definitive fashion-no “I think” or “what if.” She was creeping inside the killer’s skin, although not in the fashion of a profiler. She felt the way she did when she had crushes in junior high school, the kind where you slowly assembled a dossier on the object of your affections. You learned his class schedule, watched what he ate in the cafeteria, figured out who his friends were-all so you could time an accidental meeting at the water fountain, impress him with your wit and flipping hair.

Major Shields looked skeptical. “He shoots a woman, then cuts off her head and keeps her body with him a couple of days. In water. Someone that sick can’t pass for normal.”

“But he did, didn’t he? He does.”

Tess had spoken as quietly and softly as possible, not wanting to sound as if she were contradicting the major. Because she wasn’t. He was right and yet he was wrong. The man they sought was capable of passing for normal. But only for a while. Then something happened and he had to escape. So why did the women have to die? Was it a foregone conclusion in his mind that he would kill them, or was he trying to have a normal life and failing?

“There’s a girl out there,” Tess said. “She has dark hair and light eyes. She’s petite, and if she’s not quite beautiful, she will be once he gets hold of her-fixes her teeth, convinces her to get a great new haircut. She works at a convenience store, as Tiffani did, and Lucy. Right now, in fact, this girl could be leaning forward on her elbows, laughing at the charming stranger who has started coming into the store regularly. If I could do anything, I would like to save this girl’s life.”

“You did,” Major Shields said, “just by picking up the phone and calling us. Now let us do what we do.”

Tess shook her head. “I can’t let it go. I just can’t. There have to be things that Carl and I can do, no matter how small.”

“Hell,” Sergeant Craig said, “you’re both as crazy as he is.”

Carl almost came to his feet on that, but Tess saw it coming and hooked her hand in the back of his waistband, jerking him back to the chair. Major Shields narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, as if that gesture told him something he needed to know.

“Okay,” he said. “You can come in every day, work from an office here. I’ll try to find ways to keep you involved and informed. But the ground rules are this: You tell us everything you know as soon as you know it. You don’t talk to anyone without clearing it through me. If I wake up and see even one detail of this in the local paper, your ass is out on Reisterstown Road. Can you live with that?”

Tess looked at Carl. He nodded a little grudgingly, as if he thought they could do better. Or perhaps he believed she was holding him back. But he had given his assent, so she reached her hand across the table and shook Major Shields’s hand, as her father had taught her to do-firmly, surely.

Sergeant Craig looked disgruntled, but Lieutenant Green reached over and shook Tess’s hand as well.

“You’ll bring the woman’s perspective to things,” he said. “That could be helpful.”

“Well,” Tess said, “there’s a first time for everything.”