The Last Place

CHAPTER 18

Their first task was predictably small: Take a photograph of “Alan Palmer” to the private mail franchise where he had kept a box. The store was on Guilford Avenue, a stone’s throw from the city jail and state prison complex.

A stone’s throw was not necessarily a figure of speech in this neighborhood. Broken windshield glass crunched beneath their feet as they crossed the street, which was so pitted that the bones of Baltimore’s long-vanished trolley system peeked through in parts. Carl glanced around, unnerved.

“People live here?”

“It’s not so bad,” Tess said. “Walk two blocks west and you’ll be in some of the prettiest real estate in all of Baltimore.”

“And walk two blocks east and you’ll be dead.”

“Oh, not even. In fact, the neighborhood around the prison is probably safer than some, if only because cops are always coming and going. Now, go another mile east beyond there, and you’ll be in some serious trouble.”

The mail store was small to begin with, and the owner’s decision to stack empty boxes in ramshackle towers made it feel more cramped. Tess and Carl threaded their way through this cardboard maze and approached the counter, where a cheerful young man was listening to his Walkman and eating a sandwich, letting the crumbs fall into a box he was packing. He had a round face that was some unknowable stew of ethnic identities: almond-shaped green eyes that were flecked with amber, pale brown cheeks with a scattering of dark freckles. If Tess had to guess, she’d put him at part Japanese, part African American, with maybe a little Irish blood like her own.

Whatever his ethnic heritage, he was one hundred percent happy. Joyful even. He was perhaps the giddiest person Tess had ever seen on the business end of a cash register.

“Hello,” he practically sang at their approach.

Tess showed him the photograph of Alan Palmer. This had been taken from the driver’s license photo, enlarged on the computer, and then printed out, so the quality was good. But in the photo, Alan Palmer had a full beard, a telling detail. Carl didn’t remember the man having a beard at all; it was just another part of his plan, a way to confuse those who noticed he didn’t quite resemble what was supposed to be his younger self. The beard obscured his face shape, which both Carl and Sergeant Craig remembered as a simple oval. They didn’t know if Eric Shivers had been bearded when his driver’s license had been renewed; he had done that before the state went to the digital imaging system, and there was no copy to be found. But Tess would bet anything that he had, that he began to grow a beard whenever he planned to take on a new identity, shaving it once his transformation was complete.

Why, maybe he even let his new girlfriend cajole him into losing the beard.

“How long have you worked here?” Tess asked the man.

“Too long.” He sighed, but there was no pain in it. He was an actor, a clown.

“We’re working with the state police.” Funny, the truth sounded like a bigger lie than any she had told. “We want to know if this man is one of your customers.”

“Our customers,” the young man said, his tone still lilting with his innate joy of life, “receive a guarantee of confidentiality, just like the U.S. mail. Mail is private. Mail is sacred.”

Tess supposed that if one ended up working in a shipping-and-mail outlet, it helped to see the job as part of a higher calling.

“We don’t want to read his mail, we just want to know if he’s still a customer. We know he was using this address five years ago.”

“Five years ago? That’s a lifetime here.” But he removed the plastic headphones from his ears and studied the photo. Steel drum music, tinny but infectious, came bouncing out of his headset. “Maybe, maybe not. He’s definitely not someone who comes in now. You wouldn’t forget that face, would you?”

“You wouldn’t?” To Tess, their quarry was disturbingly normal. Not handsome, but not unattractive. Medium height, medium build. It would be too easy for him to move through life without drawing attention to himself.

“Man, he looks like the Unabomber.” He tapped the bushy beard in the photo, the only similarity that Tess could see between Alan Palmer and Ted Kaczynski. “Does he blow stuff up?”

“Only people’s lives,” Carl said.

They had other photos, just no places to distribute them. Major Shields had said they could drive back to Spartina, if they were so inclined, and check with Ashe to see if Alan Palmer’s driver’s license matched the man Ashe had known as Eric Shivers. But Tess was already certain of the answer-after all, Spartina was where they had found this link. She’d much rather go back and see what the Gunts family remembered. Of course, the state police had deemed that interview much too important for Tess and Carl to handle, or even observe.

“Eric Shivers,” she said. “Think he had a family?”

“Almost everyone does.”

“He was from Crisfield, right? Or around there.”

“Yeah, so-no.”

“No, what?”

“We’re not supposed to be doing that.”

“We’re not supposed to be trying to talk to hospital personnel, or looking for a connection between the place where Eric died and the place where Alan Palmer was treated in-state. We’re not supposed to talk to anyone directly connected to the victims. But what about Eric Shivers’s family?”

“What about them?”

“They could tell us about Eric. The hospital is one possibility, but it’s not the only possibility. Maybe it will turn out that he and Alan Palmer went to the same… band camp.”

“Band camp? What, this all began over some chance meeting with a tuba? You’re throwing too wide a net. You have to be focused in police work, methodical.”

They were back out on Guilford Avenue. Tess glanced up at the expressway that loomed over the street. How easy it would be to go up there, get out of town, head east instead of west.

“Look, we have two choices. We can drive back to Spartina, retrace our steps, and talk to the same guy we talked to last week. Or we could go back into that mailbox store, pay to fax the photo to Ashe in Virginia, and head to the Eastern Shore to learn something new.”

“They told us not to do that.”

Tess was becoming impatient. She couldn’t help thinking how quickly Crow or Whitney would warm to such a plan. How had she ended up being saddled with this strange stick-in-the-mud, this know-it-all?

“They told us we couldn’t interview people they had earmarked. But clearly they can’t get angry if we develop a few new leads. If we don’t learn anything, they’ll never know we were in Crisfield. If we do, they’ll be thankful.”

“Thankful enough to ignore the fact that you disobeyed the prime directives?”

“The prime directives?”

“From RoboCop,” Carl said. “Serve the Public Trust. Protect the Innocent. Uphold the Law.”

“Look, I can handle the state police,” Tess said, surprised at how confident she felt, how cocky. “The fact is, we still have my trump card. If they cut us loose from this, I can go to the press.”

“You told me you hated the press.”

“But they don’t know that.”

Carl chewed the inside of his cheek, puzzled. His mind didn’t work on a lot of levels, Tess realized. If you threw him a football, he’d run straight toward the goal. If you dealt him a bad hand in poker, he’d fold. He wasn’t dumb, far from it, but he had a directness about him that could be a handicap.

She’d have to remember that-and control for it.