The Last Place

CHAPTER 30

Tess picked up the tail as she headed home from her office that night. This time it was a dark van, a minivan, which might have struck her as mildly comical under other circumstances. Death by soccer mom. But the driver, although nothing more than a silhouette through the windshield, was clearly no one’s mother. The shoulders were too broad, the neck too thick. She first noticed him as she was turning on the Jones Falls Expressway from Fayette. He raced the amber light, risking a ticket in an intersection rigged with those new red-light cameras. Who would do that?

Someone who didn’t lose a lot of sleep over traffic tickets.

Funny-even as Tess had embraced Carl Dewitt’s contention that the killer they sought might still be alive, she had not recalibrated her thoughts about his other conspiracy theories. She had assumed, after the fact, that their close encounters on the highway had been nothing but Carl’s paranoia-fueled imagination. Besides, the man they wanted had no need to follow them. He not only knew where Tess had been, he often knew where she was going.

Yet here was a dark van, hanging back a few car lengths on the expressway but keeping steady with her speed, no matter how erratically she drove. And she had begun to drive quite erratically, doing her best impersonation of the archetypal Baltimore driver. Local drivers were not so much aggressive as absentminded, seemingly indifferent to reaching a destination. The average Baltimore driver gave the impression of a sleepwalker who had regained consciousness behind the wheel, baffled and disoriented.

Tess clicked her turn signal, then didn’t budge from the right lane for two miles. She turned off the signal, only to drift into the middle lane, then the left. At the Cold Spring Lane exit, she abruptly veered into the far right lane at the last possible moment, which forced her to brake so hard at the top of the exit ramp that her wheels squealed and the Toyota sent up a cloud of brown smoke.

Still, the van managed to hang with her, lurking in the pack of vehicles stuck at the first light on Cold Spring. Tess still could not make out much of the driver’s face and features. He wore dark glasses and a baseball cap. He also had on a windbreaker, suspicious on such a warm day, and he dipped his chin into its collar so the lower part of his face was obscured.

The light had changed, time to make a decision. Tess didn’t want to lead her stalker to her home. Yet if he had been following her all this time, he already knew where her home was. If she tried to lead him to a different, neutral location-the Northern District police precinct, for example-he might decide to wait for her at the house. Crow could be in the house, possibly lost in one of the endless renovation projects the bungalow kept demanding, like some possessed house in a Stephen King novel. She felt for her gun and looked around for her cell phone, peeking out of the knapsack on the passenger seat. Time to break my own rules, she decided, steering with one hand and dialing with the other.

Shit. The voice mail engaged after three rings, which meant Crow was out. If he had been on the phone, or on-line, the machine would have picked up on the first ring. He was probably walking the dogs. Which meant he could arrive home at any moment, unprepared for their mystery guest.

“You think you know me? You think you want me?” She still had the cell phone cradled to her mouth, so if any other driver glanced at her, it would appear as if she were speaking to someone. “Okay, let’s see if you do know where I live.”

She shot through the intersection, then dawdled up the hill to the next intersection, knowing it was a relatively long light. Perfect-she had timed it right, reaching the light just as it turned amber. She bolted even as it turned red and, Baltimore being Baltimore, one more car sneaked through the light as well. But the van was stuck several cars back. She would reach her house with at least a five-minute head start.

Home. Normally, she exulted in the semi-isolation of East Lane, which was more alley than street. But in the greenish-gray twilight, her block was too private. The neighbors’ houses were dark and quiet behind the evergreens that screened them from the street, and the informal dog play group that met in the park behind her house must have dispersed, for she did not hear the usual barks and yips. She let herself in, calling for Crow and the dogs, but no one came out to greet her. On a walk, she told herself, it has to be a walk. No single person could overcome that trio. Not with Crow’s common sense and Miata’s Doberman instincts. Esskay’s breath alone could fell an attacker.

But if Crow and the dogs came back in the next few minutes, and the man in the van had found his way here, things could get dangerously out of control. She had to figure out a way to keep everyone safe.

Leaving her front door standing open, she went to the rear of the house, unlocking the dead bolt on the French doors that led to the deck off the bedroom, then locking them from outside with her key. Now what? The house was built into a hill, so the ground was a half-story down-less, when one slid from the deck and hung from it before dropping to the ground below. Still, the landing was harder than she expected, sending shocks through both knees.

Tess crawled under the deck until she was as close as she could get to the house while still able to see a slice of the gravel driveway. The ground here never saw the sun, and it was cool where it rubbed into the white shirt she had worn with her linen funeral suit. Her black skirt was hiked up almost to her hips, her low-heeled shoes had slipped from her feet while she was hanging from the deck. At least she had thought to leave the jacket back in the house, flung over a chair in the dining room to help create the illusion that she was inside.

Of course, this meant her gun was no longer concealed. She didn’t want it to be. The Smith amp; Wesson was out of the holster. She held it in two hands, arms extended on the ground, and waited.

And waited. Then waited some more, feeling increasingly ridiculous with each passing second, which seemed to be ticked off by the blood that pounded in her ears. If the van’s driver had been intent on following her, he surely would be here by now. She remembered a game she had played growing up, German tanks. They had stretched out on the ground just like this, pretending to shoot the cars moving along the streets of Ten Hills. But then the guns had been fingers and sticks, nothing more. God, she felt like an idiot. Her neighbors already thought she was a strange and somewhat outré addition to the Roland Park zip code. If the local swim club got wind of this, they would never let her join.

Then she thought of Julie Carter and Lucy Fancher and Tiffani Gunts, and she didn’t feel quite so ridiculous. If someone had given them a chance, if they had known what or who was coming for them in the final hours of their lives, they would have fought back. Despite her self-destructive habits, Julie was scrappy and tough. Lucy Fancher was beginning to find her place in the world, she had told her ex-boyfriend as much. Tiffani was a mother. She would have done anything to keep Darby from growing up without her. Given the chance, these women wouldn’t have worried about whether they seemed strange or odd. They would have tried to live.

Someone’s vehicle was pulling up front. It was a dark van, its wheels crunching on the gravel.

Tess heard the door slam, saw a pair of sneakered feet approach her front door. She glanced over her shoulder, making sure Crow and the dogs weren’t coming up the path through the woods. If they arrived now, she would have to shout and warn him away and risk losing her quarry. But the woods were quiet. Everything was quiet. She listened for footsteps, but the rock foundation of her house was too solid. Had he crossed her threshold, ventured deep enough into the house? Was he in the bedroom yet, looking for her-throwing open her closet and bathroom doors, trying the locked French doors? She needed him to get as far inside as possible.

Her plan was to lock him in her house by racing to the front door and turning the dead bolt with her key from the outside. She then would call the police from her cell, reporting an intruder. He would be stuck inside and she would be safe outside, keeping a watch for the police and Crow, whoever arrived first.

A board creaked. His footsteps were headed toward her. She inched forward on her stomach, ready to go.

And then she saw a second pair of legs, running up her hill in a strange hobbled step. Khaki’d legs, with nerdy dress shoes and no octet of doggie legs alongside them. In other words, not Crow legs. So where had these come from? Who was this? She had not heard another car door slam, and there had been no passenger in the van that she saw. Two men? Why would there be two men? Yet the second man was now in the house, he had just crossed the threshold. If he heard her coming, he would have time to get out, ruining everything. She would have to lock them both inside, ask questions later. She wiggled a few more inches up the hill, gun still extended, wondering how fast she could move. She wasn’t built for speed, as the old blues song said. Adrenaline was going to have to power her through.

But even as she catapulted herself forward, a muffled shout came from her house, followed by what appeared to be the sounds of a scuffle. Had a well-intentioned neighbor seen the open door and gone to confront the stranger? Tess only knew that she heard objects falling, something shattering on the floor.

Then a terrible scream, a man’s scream but high-pitched, as shrill and pain-filled as anything Tess had ever heard.

She surged up from the ground and sprinted toward the door, still prepared to lock the intruders inside and let them sort it out. Then she saw Carl Dewitt writhing on the floor just inside the foyer, holding his left knee and moaning. Another man stood over him, his back to her, a baseball bat in hand. Unsteadily, he began to raise it over his head, as if to bring it down on Carl’s ginger-orange head.

“Stop it!” Tess screamed.

The man with the baseball bat froze for a second, then shrugged, almost as if he could not help himself, as if the bat were alive and had a will of its own. She aimed her gun at the small of his back, but she could no longer find her voice, could not tell him what she needed to say. It was like one of those nightmares where you cannot find your voice to scream or call 911. Only she wasn’t going to die. This man was.

Carl caught the bat in both hands as the man swung it toward him. The swing was weak, halfhearted, easily stopped, but the man pulled the bat out of Carl’s hands as if he meant to swing again. He stepped back, stumbling a bit. Tess thought about how her shots at the range tended to end up high and right. She adjusted her hold, so her gun was level with the man’s hamstring, slightly to the left. She had never fired a gun this close to her target before. It was only a.38, it probably wouldn’t kill him if she didn’t jerk up the way she often did-

“Jesus Christ, put down the fucking bat and put your hands above your head or you’re going to lose most of your large intestine. There’s a gun on you.”

But it was Carl who had spoken, not Tess. Surprisingly, the man did as he was told. But he still didn’t step away from Carl, and his weaving posture made him seem more dangerous, not less. Was he on drugs? Psychotic? Tess had expected to find a calm stone-cold killer in her house. This confused, shambling man was much more terrifying. It was impossible to judge what he might do next.

So she ran straight at him. Ran at him as if she were one of the defensive stars on the Ravens and he was one of the hapless quarterbacks they intimidated. She threw her shoulders at his knees, wanting to hear them crack, wanting the tendons to shred and pull from the bone.

All she accomplished, however, was to knock them both to the floor. The force of the tackle sent his cap and dark glasses flying, but his flesh was disappointingly silent and whole beneath the weight of her body. He didn’t scream, as Carl had, or yell. He landed with a thud and a sharp exhalation of air, nothing more.

She jerked him by the shoulder, rolling him over so she was staring into a pair of watery blue eyes. She was so close to the man that her chin brushed the straggly beard he was trying to cultivate.

But the hair on his head was more interesting than the hair on his face. The intruder’s scalp was covered with short sprouts of fluffy hair, interspersed with a few pale pink scabs that would soon disappear.

“Mickey Pechter,” Tess said. “My computer buddy.”

It took him a few more seconds to catch his breath. Once he did, all he said was: “I hope you know that Judge Halsey and the Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s office are going to hear about what you’ve done.”

Then, with surprising force, he pushed Tess off him and stumbled toward the door.