The Last Place

CHAPTER 25

The apartment complex was newish, a place with mild aspirations to class that began with the name-Dove’s Landing-and ended at the front door. Once inside, the common areas were extremely common. Tess noticed that the carpet was dingy and a smell of ammonia lingered in the air.

“She’s in 301,” Major Shields said, beginning the climb to the top floor. Carl fell back. Tess glanced over her shoulder to see if his knee was troubling him, but he was simply moving with extraordinary care, as if he had no desire to reach the top.

The woman who answered the door to 301 wore an orange smock with a name tag, MARY ANN. Petite, with a face at once fine and coarse, foxlike. Much of it was hidden, however, by an extraordinary mane of dark curly hair styled in the feathery blown-dry wings of the late 1970s. The girl could not have been alive when this haircut was first popular, Tess thought. Tess herself had been barely alive, a grade-schooler who had yearned for such big hair, if only because her mother kept hers barbershop short.

“Miss Melcher?” Major Shields asked.

“Uh-huh,” she said, showing them in. The apartment was neat but not quite clean. The carpet crunched beneath their feet. The framed posters, which ran to large-eyed kitty cats, were dusty and streaked. A cat was clearly on the premises as well, for Tess picked up the telltale odor of a litter pan that needed to be emptied.

Their hostess settled in a small rocker, while Major Shields and Sergeant Craig took the sofa, an overstuffed monstrosity of white cotton, its side shredded by the phantom cat. Tess took the only other chair in the room, while Carl was left standing.

“The cheese stands alone, huh?” said Major Shields, sliding over and patting a spot next to him on the sofa. “Have a sit, buddy.”

“That’s okay,” Carl said, pulling a chair in from the dining alcove and setting it up at the edge of their circle, as close to the door as possible.

Mary Ann looked nervous. Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap, her head seemed to wobble a bit on her neck. Maybe it was the weight of all that hair, Tess thought. Then she did a mental double take.

That hair. That smock. Mary Ann Melcher was the living prototype of the killer’s victims. Were they going to save someone’s life? Had they actually arrived in the nick of time, like the cavalry in some old Western?

Major Shields said, “Mary Ann, I’d like you to tell these folks what you told me yesterday, when you called our tip line.”

She glanced nervously at Carl, then back at the major, who nodded his encouragement.

“I work at the Wawa? Going on three years?” She kept looking over at the major, as if he knew her life story better than she did. “About two years ago, a gentleman started stopping by there regular. He would buy a fountain soda and he would mix the Cherry Coke with the Diet Coke. He said it was the best combination-sweet, but not as many calories, and it tasted like the sodas you got at a real fountain? The other girls figured out he liked me before I did.”

“What was his name, Miss Melcher?”

“Charlie. Charlie Chisholm. Like the trail, he’d say, but I didn’t know what he was talking about. Later, he explained. Something about the West and cows. I don’t know.”

“Did you and Charlie”-the major had a delicacy, almost a tenderness, in the way he addressed the young woman-“did you have a relationship?”

“Not at first. He took a real interest in me. I was having problems with my roommate-”

“What kind of problems?” This was Carl, and his voice was as sharp as the major’s had been soft. Something sullen crept into Mary Ann’s face, as if she had heard this tone too many times in her life, had known a few too many bossy bosses.

“She was a little wild. Ran around with jerks. Which was her private business, but I had to put up with ‘em too, and they weren’t my boyfriends. Although some wanted to be. If she only knew-”

“Miss Melcher.” The major’s prodding tone continued soft. “About Charlie Chisholm.”

She tossed her head. Tess wanted to tell her the effect wasn’t as coquettish as she thought.

“He helped me get this place. Lent me money so I would have enough for the deposit, showed me how to get credit. All you have to do is get a little gas card and pay on it regular, he says, and bit by bit you can get everything you need. He also told me I should enroll at the community college, start taking courses so I could do something other than retail.” She smiled at the memory. “He called my job retail. Or the service industry. I liked that.”

Tess was confused. “You liked working in retail?”

“I liked the fact that he give it a name, didn’t look down on me. He said it was hard, doing what I did. He said I had all sorts of talents, if only I’d use them.”

Without warning, the girl broke down and began to cry. She was all of twenty-one, Tess figured, and still quite young in many ways, despite being on her own.

Major Shields was the kind of man who carried a handkerchief. He took this out and handed it to Mary Ann. “What happened to Charlie?”

“He came home one night and told me he wanted to take me to a fancy supper. We went to the Outback Steakhouse up in Waldorf. Come dessert, he took my hand, and I thought this was when I was going to get a ring, in a little velvet box. I thought he was going to propose.”

Tess would have thought so too. But perhaps the fact that he didn’t was the difference between being alive and ending up like Tiffani Gunts and Lucy Fancher.

Major Shields continued to push her gently, as if he didn’t know the rest of the story. But he had talked to Mary Ann on the phone, Tess remembered. He knew where this was leading. “He didn’t? What did he do?”

“He told me he was sick. He said he had been sick for a very long time, but he thought he could cure himself with…”-she groped for the words- “alternative therapies. He said he now realized he wasn’t going to get well and he didn’t want to be a burden on anyone. So he was going to go away.”

“Go away?” Major Shields prompted. “Are those the very words he used-go away?”

Mary Ann nodded. “Yeah, I think so. I begged him not to. I told him I would stand by him, take care of him. But he said he was going to go home, let his family care for him. Which was the first I even knew he had family. I asked if he would come back for me if he got well, and he said he would. We didn’t have dessert, of course. We drove home, back here.”

“Did he make love to you that night?” The men looked at Tess, appalled at her tactlessness. But she knew it was important to ask.

“Yes. Yes, he did.”

“Normally?”

Mary Ann lifted her chin. “I’m not sure what you mean by normally, but it was normal as far as I’m concerned.” Then, wistful: “He was the best at that. Very considerate, if you know what I mean.”

Tess did. The men in the room thought they did.

“Did you use birth control?”

“Miss Monaghan!” Major Shields had gone beyond appalled to shocked.

“I don’t have to. I had a baby when I was seventeen and something went wrong. They had to give me an emergency hysterectomy.”

“What happened to the baby?”

“My mama’s got her. Simma’s better off down there, because they live out in the country a little ways, in a good school district, and my mama doesn’t have to work like I do.”

“Did Charlie-” but Major Shields had decided that Tess had asked enough questions. He cut her off with a look, as stern a look as anyone had ever given her, and Tess had been on the receiving end of some pretty harsh looks in her time. He then transformed himself with almost disturbing speed back into the gentle, friendly inquisitor.

“Tell us what happened next, Miss Melcher.”

“Two days later, I leave for work, and Charlie’s here. When I get home at midnight, he’s gone and there’s a note, saying, ”I had to go. Please don’t hate me. This is the only way to say good-bye.“ I’m sad, but I think he’s gone to his family, wherever they are. I never knew. But a week goes by and the police come around. Seems they’ve found Charlie’s car and his boat trailer, the one he had for his boat, at Point Lookout. It’s been there for a week, since just before a big storm come up on the bay. He filled out a float plan-they found it in the little box. He said he was going all the way out to sea to go fishing. Then, at the bottom, he wrote, And I’m never coming back.”

“Did they find the boat?”

“Just p-p-pieces.” She began sobbing. “It was all a lie. Charlie didn’t have any family to go to. He decided to kill himself rather than die slowly, using up all his savings. Turns out he transferred ten thousand dollars into my account the night before he left. It must have been all the money he had in the world.”

It also, Tess knew, was the largest gift you could make to another person without having to pay a gift tax. “What did you do with it?”

“Paid off some bills. Bought a new car. My old one was on its last legs. Know something odd? Turns out that Charlie’s car was in my name. When they found his van at Point Lookout, it was registered to me. So the title was clear, and I was able to sell that too.”

Major Shields turned to Tess and Carl. “We talked to the local police and the DNR police. Charlie Chisholm is missing and presumed dead.”

“Presumed,” Carl said. “Yeah, I’m sure he’s counting on just that. Presumption.”

“It’s been two years,” Major Shields said. “Two years, and we don’t have another open homicide in all of Maryland that resembles the first two. He never faked his death before. Why would he? He just takes another identity and moves on, knowing the real so-and-so-Eric Shivers, Alan Palmer-will seal off the trail. The real Charlie Chisholm, in fact, is in Veterans Hospital in Baltimore. Been there on and off since the Persian Gulf War. Same date of birth as the others, same general description.”

“Another hospital,” Carl said. “Another chronic patient who’s not going to get in the way of anyone who wants to appropriate his identity. It’s not like there’s any shortage of hospitals in the state of Maryland. And there’s a large supply of men born thirty-two years ago.”

Major Shields stood up. “I know, I know. You have a thousand arguments for why this guy is still alive. That’s why you didn’t even bother to pass along Miss Melcher’s name and number when she called you on the tip line last week. If she hadn’t called back, we still might not know about this. We’d be spinning our wheels and wasting our time and money, all because you think you know this guy better than the rest of us.”

“I do,” Carl said. “I met him. I talked to him. He wouldn’t commit suicide.”

“And maybe he didn’t. But the boat was found, remember? Dashed to pieces in the storm. He let this girl live, for whatever reason. Maybe he began to experience genuine remorse, I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that he seems to be dead for all intents and purposes, and the cases are closed.”

“You can’t close a case when you don’t even know his real name,” Carl protested. “He’s not Eric Shivers. He’s not Alan Palmer. He’s not Charlie Chisholm. He’s alive out there, somewhere.” Then to Mary Ann, his voice cracking with an odd hysteria that Tess had never heard before, “Do you have a photograph? Maybe it’s not even the same guy. It could be a totally different guy?”

Mary Ann, still crying, shook her head. “He didn’t like to have his photo taken.”

Major Shields turned to Tess. “Did he tell you about the call?”

She shook her head numbly, remembering Carl slumped at the computer the day she returned from Dr. Armistead’s office. Any calls come in? None that mattered.

“Carl-” Major Shields’s voice was almost as gentle as it had been with Mary Ann. “I know you want to face this guy one more time. I know you wish you could confront him, settle all these scores. That’s part of your sickness.”

Carl stood, heading to the door, as if he planned to walk back to Baltimore. “I don’t have a sickness.”

“Post-traumatic stress disorder is a legitimate illness. Cops get it. Paramedics. You see horrible stuff, it can affect you. But it doesn’t give you the right to skew an investigation the way you did. You lied to us. We only knew about Mary Ann’s call because the phone we gave you is tapped.”

“The phone is tapped?” Tess couldn’t help thinking about the calls she had made home during the day, the embarrassingly kissy-face conversations she had with Crow from the state police barracks.

Major Shields nodded. “The phone is tapped and the computer is set up so we can track every keystroke. We know you’ve been chasing down all sorts of leads you didn’t bother to share with us. We know you didn’t go to Spartina the other day, although we don’t know where you did go. You want to tell us?”

“I don’t think so,” Tess said, almost instinctively, guarding what she knew.

“It doesn’t matter. We know you went back to see the Gunts family, despite our instructions. Those infractions could have been forgiven because they didn’t interfere with the investigation.

“But this girl, sitting in front of us, is key. Our killer stopped as suddenly as he started. We’ll learn his name, one day. But for now the important thing is that he stopped. And death is the only plausible explanation for that.”

“Serial killers have periods of dormancy-” Carl began, but stopped when he saw Tess’s sorrowful gaze.

“I trusted you,” she said. “I thought we were working together.”

“We were,” he said. “But this isn’t important. Really.”

“Carl,” Major Shields said, “you need help. You ought to think about going back to that place in Havre de Grace, the one where the state sent you last time.”

No longer the center of attention, Mary Ann was crying even harder now. “Would he really have killed me? Truly?”

“I hope not,” Major Shields said. “It’s our belief that something changed his mind. Maybe he was dying, as he told you. Maybe he realized the sickness inside him was as deadly as any cancer.”

“Then do you think… do you think…” Her voice was so choked with heaving sobs she could barely get the words out. She struggled to get control of herself and looked at the major with glistening eyes. “Do you think Lifetime Television would want to make a movie out of this?”