The Last Place

CHAPTER 29

Even junkies have to be buried.

Tess scanned the Sunday edition of the Beacon-Light, looking for the classified obituary notice that would tell her if there was a funeral service for Julie Carter. She knew Julie would not qualify for what the paper’s writers privately called the mort du jour, one of the lengthier obituaries, reported and written by a staff writer.

You didn’t have to be rich or socially prominent to warrant a fullblown mort, although it didn’t hurt. Getting shot and killed in an apparent drug deal was pretty much guaranteed to keep you off the obituary page, with its soft-focus photography and distilled hagiography.

She found, at last, the tiny paid death notice. For a Catholic, Julie was going in the ground fast. The Rosary was scheduled for that very evening, with the funeral mass and burial set for tomorrow. Tess tore out the information and tried to remember if she had a dark dress that was lightweight enough for warm weather.

She also wondered if she was the only nonrelative who was searching the paper this morning for Julie’s obituary, if she would be the only stranger who showed up at the service and the graveside. It was 5 A.M., and she was reading the paper after a sleepless night, her gun lying next to her on the dining room table. Her doors and windows were double-bolted, shutting out the balmy spring air that she so loved. The only sound in the house was the trio of slumbering breaths coming from the bedroom-Esskay, Miata, and Crow, who had finally fallen asleep about 3 A.M.

She had a black linen suit, she remembered, something she hadn’t worn for years. Could you wear linen before Memorial Day, or did that rule apply only to white linen?

Julie Carter’s people probably didn’t make those kinds of distinctions anyway.

Tess had more experience with death than she did with its attendant rituals. Julie Carter’s funeral, held in a pretty stone church out in what people insisted on calling the country, was only the third or fourth that Tess had attended in her adult life. She counted them up: Her maternal grandfather. An older colleague from the Star, who had died of cancer in her fifties. A service for the grandchild of one of her mother’s best friends, killed in a fall, the saddest by far.

And Jonathan Ross.

Sometimes, she thought the scar tissue over that wound was almost too hard, too complete. It was as if her very ability to heal had revealed just how half-assed, how sleazy, their relationship had been. The nightmares came from being an eyewitness to his death, not because he was the love of her life. She had never mistaken him for that. She had envied him, however, in life and death. Jonathan’s funeral had been crowded, his legacy as a journalistic star unquestioned. Later, when Tess had faced her own near-death, her first thought was of how skimpy her obituary would be. A superficial thought, but it had helped her fight for her life, and here she was-at the most awkward funeral she could imagine, a service of long silences and stammered clichés. What can you say about a twenty-one-year-old woman who died? That she was a junkie and a con artist.

In the front pews, Julie’s family-parents, brothers and sisters, a few elderly people who might have been grandparents or even great-grandparents-appeared sullen and disgruntled, as if they had better places to be on the unseasonably warm day. Julie’s friends were scattered among the rear pews, party girls and boys, at once sleepy and restless at 11 A.M. The in-between pews were empty. There was no middle ground in Julie’s life. You were either family or you were one of her fucked-up friends.

Tess took a seat in the last pew and tried to study the men. Even from the backs of their necks, she could tell the man she was looking for was not here. These young men were mullet heads, their longish hair straggling over shirt collars that were not as clean as they should be, reaching down to jackets that looked as if they had been dragged from some cramped closet and shaken to remove the wrinkles. They were young, too, these men, not much older than Julie. The parking lot outside, with its Trans Ams and shiny pickups, attested to their youth as well. Tess had known before she walked in that her quarry was not here and probably would not be here.

Unless, she thought, he knows I’m here. I’m the one he wants, after all. And she slid her right hand beneath her black linen jacket, felt for her holster and her gun. It was hot in the church, and the unaccustomed bulk of the leather and metal beneath her arm felt like some strange tumor. She would have to get used to it.

The young are difficult to bury under the best of circumstances. But Julie Carter presented additional challenges. Her life had not only been short, it had been stupid and shiftless. She hadn’t even seemed particularly nice. The priest worked gamely through the service, and it was hard to know if his red face was glistening from the heat in the small church or if he was just covered in flop sweat. Julie’s family appeared to be seething, muttering among themselves, shifting in their seats impatiently. The funeral, rather than providing solace, seemed only to remind them of all the ways she had disappointed them in life. Julie had found one last way to humiliate them.

Or perhaps it was merely Julie Carter’s penultimate disappointment. For there was no room in the church’s graveyard for Julie Carter, although there was plenty of space left in that peaceful tree-lined acreage. When the service finally, thankfully, ended, it turned out that Julie was to be laid to rest in a sprawling antiseptic cemetery on the outskirts of Baltimore. Julie would be happy to be that much closer to the excitement for which she had yearned, Tess thought. At least she wouldn’t be stuck out in the sticks for eternity.

Only a few mourners made the trip to the gravesite, which made Tess more conspicuous than she had been in the church. She was standing a few feet back, as befitted a stranger, wondering how to approach the family, when the decision was made for her. An older sister-she had Julie’s coloring and the same pert features, although they were congealed in an extra hundred pounds-walked over to her after the casket had been lowered and the final prayers chanted.

“I don’t believe I know you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that she considered this a bad thing.

“My name is Tess Monaghan. I met Julie recently, through my work.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

The sister rolled her eyes. “What’d she do, shoplift something? It wouldn’t have been the first time, although I bet she told you different. Did she cry-she could cry on cue, you know-and tell you it would never happen again? Because all that meant is she wouldn’t do it again in your store.”

“I’m a private investigator, not a security guard.”

“Oh.” The sister was perplexed, trying to figure out the connection. “Did she have to pass a drug test for a job? Or was she fooling around with some married man?”

“Julie wasn’t doing anything. She was… an innocent party.”

This provoked a derisive snort. “That would be a first.”

Tess almost wished she could tell the sour-faced sister just how innocent Julie was, how undeserved her death. But how could you ever convey such information? For all the Carter family’s anger and fury at their wayward daughter, they had not wished her dead. They were angry because she had not lived long enough to straighten up.

“I liked her,” Tess said, and it was true enough, under the circumstances. “It was interesting, actually, how we met. I was compiling some information about domestic violence, working with some local foundations that are trying to figure out why it’s so hard for women to break the cycle. Because a lot of women do get out of abusive or unhealthy relationships, only to start afresh in new relationships that are just as bad.”

“I’m not sure you could call what Julie had relationships. Men were just a means to an end for her, a way to get money so she could get drugs.” The sister sighed. The heat was hard on her, overweight as she was, and she was almost wheezing. A burden years in the making seemed to be escaping her, asthmatic breath by breath.

“She was an addict?”

“She was a pain in the ass. I know I sound harsh, but everyone-my parents, me, my brothers and sisters-we’ve been cleaning up behind her for six years. Trying to make amends with teachers, then with bosses, getting her into programs. Then she’d come out and start all over again. If anything, Julie was the abusive one. Emotionally, I mean. She destroyed every opportunity she got, and she got more than she deserved.”

“Still, I bet she had bad luck with men.”

“Bad luck? I’d trade my right arm for her kind of bad luck. There was always someone around she was playing, some guy who was too good for her by half. She had one boyfriend when she was just eighteen who woulda done anything for her. He was perfect.”

“Perfect?” It was what she had wanted to hear. It was what she had dreaded to hear.

“Well, maybe a little old for her, but that’s not a bad thing. He was steady. Nice and polite, drove a nice car, had a good job, although he had to travel all the time. Selling something.”

Sure, Tess thought. He was always selling something.

“When he found out she was a junkie, he tried to get her into rehab, paid for it even, and stayed by her through it all-and she went back to drugs the first chance she got. He finally just gave up on her and left.”

“Do you remember his name?” Not that it matters, Tess thought. It would be another man’s name, another fortuitous match of an unused life and a sociopath’s inexplicable mission.

“Alan Palmer,” the sister said promptly, surprising Tess. It had not occurred to her that he would use the same name twice. But then-he hadn’t killed Julie Carter, not then, so he was free to move on, to keep using the stolen identity. “Oh, he was such a nice man. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him here today.”

“Has he called?”

“No,” the sister said, her voice wistful. “I think he moved out of state. He said something about going west. It was almost three years ago.”

So Julie had fallen in the interval between Tiffani and Lucy. Which meant that, for all his planning, the man did not know where he would end up next. He knew only who he would be when he moved on. But did he know, from the moment he met them, that he intended to kill them? Why would he kill women like Tiffani and Lucy, who had never disappointed him, only to spare Julie?

“Where was Julie working when she met”-she had to grope for the name, remind herself which persona would have presented himself in the little town of Beckleysville-“Alan?”

The sister looked at Tess. It was an odd question, but Tess was beyond caring.

“She was working at a High’s Dairy Store, and he came in one night to buy a soda. The job at Mars came later. He just kept coming back. Like I said, he was the best thing that ever happened to my sister.”

No, Tess thought, the best thing that ever happened to Julie Carter was that he decided to leave. Julie had defeated this man on some level, had driven him away. Her addiction, her fierce self-involvement, had kept him from getting what he wanted.

There was a lesson to be learned in Julie’s initial survival-and one from her ultimate demise as well.