The Last Place

CHAPTER 24

Back at state police headquarters, something was up. Tess sensed it, the way one senses a coming thunderstorm. The air seemed to hum and everyone was moving a little faster, as if trying to get things done before the skies opened up. She could see the change, too, in the quick sidelong glances from Sergeant Craig, Lieutenant Green, and Major Shields as they barreled up and down the corridor.

But, most telling, Major Shields was suddenly very keen for them to stay in the office and wait for the phone to ring. Which it seldom did. Tess began to feel as if they were caught in a loop not unlike that traffic circle off Interstate 70, chasing their own tails. Nothing is more tedious than make-work, and Tess wondered if the state police had decided to bore her and Carl into giving up or dropping out.

The stalemate continued for three days: Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. On the third straight day of doing nothing, Tess got out a sketchbook and began making lists.

“What are you doing?” Carl demanded over his shoulder. He had been tapping disconsolately on the computer, playing with search engines, reading out-of-town newspapers to see if there were unsolved homicides in other states.

“Brainstorming. Reorganizing what we know, looking for links.”

“That’s pointless.”

“You got a better idea?”

He turned away from the computer and watched as Tess began sketching, jotting down everything she knew about Tiffani and Lucy, looking for any other similarities they might have missed.

“Pretty. Small, fine-featured. Bad ex-boyfriends. Both worked in convenience stores.”

“Good place to meet women when you’re new in town.” Like a sulky child who claimed he didn’t want to play a game, Carl couldn’t resist once the pieces came out and he saw his playmate having fun.

“But it helps if they have bad ex-boyfriends,” Tess said. “And you can’t know that just by looking at some woman who’s selling you a Slim Jim.”

“Well, there’s a similarity you’ve overlooked. These girls were bubbly, according to those who knew them. Unguarded. They probably told their life story to anyone they waited on more than twice. And look.” He pointed to another item on Tess’s list. “They worked overnight shifts. Imagine a guy coming in, regular-like, buying a few things. How many visits would it take before he asked, ”So a pretty girl like you has to have a boyfriend.“ And she’d tell him all her troubles, like he was a big brother. He didn’t come on strong, remember? With Lucy, he got her to rent the house and only moved in later.”

“Which also has the advantage of keeping his fake name off the lease and the utility bills.”

“Right. Hey, let’s graph this.”

“Graph it?”

“On a map, like.”

“It won’t be much of a graph, just a straight point from Frederick to North East.”

“I don’t know. What if you add”-he took an old framed map of the state of Maryland from the wall and marked the two hometowns with silver thumbtacks-“the places where he spent the night before.” He added a thumbtack to Saint Michaels and placed one in the lower left-hand corner, about where Spartina, Virginia, would be.

“I’m not seeing a pattern emerge here,” Tess said.

“Wait.” Carl removed dental floss from his pocket.

“You carry dental floss?”

“My dad had gum disease. You’d floss after every meal too, if you saw your old man coming home from the dentist in a wife-beating mood.”

“Interesting turn of phrase,” Tess said primly.

“I don’t use it as a figure of speech.”

His back was to her, and Tess needed a minute to deconstruct what he had said. “Oh-hey, I mean, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“You know what I mean.”

“It wasn’t so bad. I got my growth early. By the time I was thirteen I could take him. And I did. He moved out and on.” He was fixing the dental floss along the points he charted. One mint-green line from Frederick to North East, two small lines dangling down to the places their killer had used to set up his alibis. “It still doesn’t look like much, does it?”

Tess studied the map. Again, she had that sensation of a gnat in her ear, a buzzing memory she could not capture.

“Try this,” she said. She removed the strings that attached the two cities to their satellites, then held out her hand for the dental floss, breaking off another piece. “Now look.”

She balanced the map in her lap, stringing a line from the speck that was Notting Island to Frederick and adding another one between the island and North East. The resulting triangle was almost a perfect isosceles. Its sharpest angle formed where the dental floss intersected Notting.

“What’s the point?” Carl asked. “We don’t know that Notting Island has anything to do with this.”

“But there’s a similarity,” Tess said. “Water.”

“What?”

“Water. Water, water everywhere. Wherever he lived, he could see water. From Tiffani’s town house, which backed up to the Monocacy, to Lucy’s house in the trees, also with its river view. And there’s no point on Notting Island that you can’t see the bay.”

“That doesn’t eliminate a lot of the earth’s surface, Tess.”

“But it eliminates entire towns in Maryland. We’re not talking about someone who just likes water. We’re talking about someone who wants it within his sight as much as possible. I’ve been to Tiffani’s house- you could see the river from the back deck. I stood in Lucy’s yard-you could see the river glinting through the trees.”

“Water?”

It was Major Shields who asked the question, leaning against the doorjamb with a too-deliberate casualness. Tess tilted the map toward her, so he couldn’t see how they had defaced it with thumbtacks and dental floss.

“You got a lead?” the major prodded.

“No,” Tess said, with her best girly smile.

“Not really.” Carl was playing the country boy. Tess glanced over at his Huckleberry Finn visage, all freckles and sunburn, and thought about the confidence he had just shared. He must have been an exceptionally patient and deliberate little boy, waiting all those years to be big enough to beat the crap out of his father. You had to be strong to be that patient.

You had to be a little scary, too.

“Well, we’ve got one,” the major drawled.

“Yeah?”

“Down in Saint Mary’s City. Want to come?”

Tess and Carl looked at each other. It was as if he was trying to shake his head no without moving it at all. She, too, sensed a trap. But she couldn’t see how they could say no to any opportunity. Could they have found him?

“Sure,” she began, even as Carl said, “No.”

“No? I thought you’d be glad to be included in the investigation, Carl. Why don’t you want to go to Saint Mary’s City?”

“Well, we’re pretty busy here.”

The major walked around the table and looked at their map. “Why, this looks very… interesting. But it will wait, won’t it? Saint Mary’s City is a long way, and I want to get down and back before rush hour, if possible. Besides, this gal doesn’t have all day. She has to go to work at three P.M., she says.”

“What gal?” Tess asked.

“Just a gal who says she knows something. Might be a wasted trip, for all we know. But I got a good feeling about this and thought you should be there. After all, you brought this to us. We owe you.”

Tess looked at Carl and tried, as casually as possible, to point to Saint Mary’s on the map: water. Saint Mary’s City was also on the water. Carl nodded, but he didn’t look happy. Later, thinking back, Tess would recognize the expression. It was the face of a man who was cornered.

Saint Mary’s City was where Maryland had begun, with the arrival of two ships, the Ark and the Dove. It had been years since Tess had ventured this far south along the bay’s Western Shore, and the usual desecrations had sprung up in this once-lovely country: the drive-through burger joints, the fast-oil-change places, the strip malls that looked as if they had been built overnight.

“Where are we going?” she asked the major, who had insisted they ride with him, not follow in Carl’s car, as Carl had suggested. “I know you said Saint Mary’s City, but where exactly?”

“Just outside of town.”

“And this woman-what does she know?”

“She may have seen our guy. That’s a pretty significant break.”

“Recently?”

“No. Been almost two years ago. But she’s pretty sure she saw him.”

“You forget.” She leaned forward, so her head was even with Major Shields, who sat in the passenger seat while Sergeant Craig drove. “Carl has seen him too. He interviewed him. So what’s the big deal?”

“Oh, I think this could be a very big deal,” Major Shields said. “Don’t you, Carl?”

Why did he keep addressing Carl, who was slumped in the backseat, arms folded across his chest? The major had never struck her as sexist before, but he was suddenly acting as if Tess didn’t even exist.

“Why?” she persisted. “Why would it be significant?”

The major took so long to respond that she wondered if he had heard her at all. Men, in her experience, often retreated so far into their own worlds that some voices-women’s voices in particular, it occurred to her now-reached them as if on a delay. Even Crow, whom Whitney had once dubbed the perfect postmodern boyfriend, could become absentminded and dreamy, until she had to tug on his sleeve and bring him back to earth.

For some reason, this made her think about Dr. Armistead. As much as he irritated her, he always listened. He wasn’t always good on the nuances, but he at least heard every word. Maybe that’s what it took to get a man to listen to every word you said: $150 an hour.

Even as Tess reached a hand toward Major Shields’s shoulder to jolt him into response, she was thinking again about the man they sought. He listened. Oh, how he listened. From the moment he arrived in a woman’s life, he was the most attentive and solicitous of men. He listened because he was gathering information, preparing for the day he would betray the trust of these young, naive women. Because he was the perfect man, the perfect boyfriend. He listened because he was less likely to betray his own complicated history if he didn’t talk about himself.

“It’s up ahead and down to the left,” the major said. He turned his head to face them, seemingly unfazed by the fact that Tess was so close to him, hovering near his ear.

“Let’s go,” he said as Sergeant Craig rolled to a stop and put the patrol car in park.

“What, are you a Wild Bunch fan, too?”

“Never saw it.”

“You should,” Carl said. Tess realized it was the first time he had spoken since they had merged onto the Baltimore beltway two hours earlier. “It’s only one of the best movies ever made.”

“But it’s all the usual outlaw shit, right?” Major Shields’s easygoing drawl had taken on a new hard edge. “I don’t get those movies where the good guys are obsessed with the bad guys, as if they’re locked in some sort of immortal relationship. When you’re an officer of the law, you lock up the bad guys and move on. It’s not personal. It’s not about individual glory or vendettas. It’s a job, and you conduct yourself like a professional.”

His eyes flicked at Carl, quick as the blue-yellow flame from a cigarette lighter, and moved away.

“In fact, let me show you how it’s done.”