The Last Place

CHAPTER 1

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tess Monaghan was sitting outside a bar in the Baltimore suburbs. It was early spring, the mating season, and this bland but busy franchise was proof that birds do it, bees do it, even Baltimore County yuppies in golf pants and Top-Siders do it.

“Kind of a benign hangout for a child molester,” Tess said to Whitney Talbot, her oldest friend, her college roomie, her literal partner in crime on a few occasions. “Although it is convenient to several area high schools, as well as Towson University and Goucher.”

“Possible child molester,” Whitney corrected from the driver’s seat of the Suburban. Whitney’s vehicles only seemed to get bigger over the years, no matter what the price of gas was doing. “We don’t have proof that he knew how young Mercy was when this started. Besides, she’s sixteen, Tess. You were having sex at sixteen.”

“Yeah, with other sixteen-year-olds. But if he came after your cousin-”

“Second cousin, once removed.”

“My guess is he’s done it before. And will do it again. Your family solved the Mercy problem. But how do we keep him from becoming some other family’s problem? Not everyone can pack their daughters off to expensive boarding schools, you know.”

“They can’t?” But Whitney’s raised eyebrow made it clear that she was mocking her family and its money.

The two friends stared morosely through the windshield, stumped by the stubborn deviancy of men. They had saved one girl from this pervert’s clutches. But the world had such a large supply of girls, and an even larger supply of perverts. The least they could do was reduce the pervert population by one. But how? If Tess knew anything of compulsive behavior-and she knew quite a bit-it was that most people didn’t stop, short of a cataclysmic intervention. A heart attack for a smoker, the end of a marriage for a drinker.

Their Internet buddy was in serious need of an intervention.

“You don’t have to go in there,” Whitney said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“And then what?”

“You tell me. This was your plan.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think it would get this far.”

It had been six weeks since Whitney had first come to Tess with this little family drama, the saga of her cousin and what she had been doing on the Internet late at night. Correction: second cousin, once removed. The quality of Mercy was definitely strained, weakened by intermarriage and a few too many falls in the riding ring.

And perhaps Mercy would have been a trimester into the unplanned pregnancy she had been bucking for, if it weren’t for a late-night hunger pang. Mercy was foraging for provisions in the kitchen when her computer-illiterate mother had entered her bedroom just in time to hear the sparkly thrush of music that accompanies an IM and seen this succinct question: “Are you wearing panties?” Within days, Mercy’s hard drive had been dissected, revealing a voluminous correspondence between her and a man who claimed to be a twenty-five-year-old stockbroker. Mercy’s parents had pulled the plug, literally and figuratively, on her burgeoning romance.

But by Whitney’s calculation, that left one miscreant free to roam, continuing his panty census.

It had been Tess’s idea to search for Music Loverr in his world. With the help of a computer-savvy friend, they created a dummy account for a mythical creature known as Varsity Grrl and began exploring the crevices of the Internet, looking for those places where borderline pedophiles were most likely to stalk their prey.

Whitney and Tess had both taken turns at the keyboard, but it was Tess who lured Music Loverr, now rechristened GoToGuy, into the open. She had finally found him in a chat room devoted to girls’ lacrosse. They had retreated to a private room at his invitation-an invitation that followed her more or less truthful description of herself, down to and including her thirty-six-inch inseam. Then she had watched, in almost grudging admiration, as this virtual man began the long patient campaign necessary to seduce a high school girl. As she waited for his messages to pop up-he was a much slower typist than she-Tess thought of the movie Bedazzled, the original one, where Peter Cook, a most devilish devil, tells sad-sack Dudley Moore that a man can have any woman in the world if he’ll just stay up listening to her until ten past four in the morning. Tess figured a teenage girl could be had by midnight.

Not that GoToGuy knew her pretend age, not at first. He had teased that out of her, Tess being evasive in what she hoped was a convincingly adolescent way. She made him wait a week before she admitted she was under twenty-one. Well, under eighteen, actually.

Can we still be friends? she had typed.

Definitely, he replied.

The courtship only intensified. They soon had a standing date to chat at 10 P.M. Tess would pour herself a brimming glass of red wine and sit down to her laptop with great reluctance, opening up the account created for just this purpose. Afterward, she showered or took a hot bath.

Do you have a fake ID? GoToGuy had IM’d her two nights ago.

Finally. He had been slow enough on the uptake, although not so slow that he had revealed anything about his true identity, which was what Tess really wanted.

No. Do you know how I can get one?

Sure enough, he did. Last night, informed that she had gone and obtained the fake ID, he had asked if she knew of this bar, which happened to be within walking distance of the Light Rail-in case she didn’t drive or couldn’t get the family car.

And I can always drive you home, he promised.

I bet you can, Tess had thought, her fingers hovering above the keys before she typed her assent. Her stomach lurched. She wondered if he had gotten this far with Mercy. The girl swore they had never met, but the tracking software was not perfect. E-mails could have been lost, along with some of the IM transcripts. Besides, she could have corresponded with him from school as well as from home, using a different account.

Tess had met Mercy only once, and it had been at least two years ago. But even in junior high, the girl had the kind of voluptuous body that adds years to a parent’s life. She also had heavy-lidded green eyes that gave her a preternatural sophistication, and straight blond hair almost to her waist. She was juicy, no other word for it, even with all the nicks and scars left by a lifetime of field hockey. Did Music Loverr troll for young girls because he liked the innocence of high school girls or because he relied on their stupidity? Did he know how young his prey was or simply not care?

In Tess’s day, such predators had the candor to wait in their cars near the high school bus stop. They showed their faces early, tipping their hands. It was harder to create the illusion of being a successful man if you had to approach from a busted-down Impala, eyes red with the pot you just smoked, spit dried in the corners of your mouth, little telltale flakes of desire.

Yeah, they really knew how to do pedophilia in my day, Tess had thought.

Varsity Grrl typed: I’ll meet you there at 8.

GoToGuy: I’ll be at the bar. I’ll have on a flowered tie.

Go figure: There were three men in flower-patterned ties at the bar.

“Three flowered ties,” Whitney said. “Only in Hunt Valley. These people give preppies a bad name.”

“Well, Flower Tie Number One looks like he’s leaving, and Flower Tie Number Two appears to be with that other guy. Ladies, meet our lucky bachelor, Flower Tie Number Three! He likes music, sailing, watching sunsets, and picking up underage girls on the Internet.” Tess began to sing the Herb Alpertesque theme to the old Dating Game, pounding out her own accompaniment on the dashboard.

“Will he be a dream,” Whitney trilled, “or a dud?”

“This guy aspires to dud status. Look at him.”

He was sitting sideways at the bar, watching the basketball game on the set mounted in the corner. His pink shirt ballooned a little on his narrow shoulders, while his disproportionately large ass ballooned over the stool.

“He drinks frozen margaritas,” Whitney said. “Never trust a man who drinks frozen margaritas. He’s probably already bribed the bartender to give you doubles of whatever you order. I’ll bet you twenty dollars he recommends a piña colada or a daiquiri.”

“Can I pass for seventeen?” Tess asked, leaning forward to study her face in the rearview mirror.

“You’ll squeak by in that light, if only because he wants to believe you’re seventeen,” Whitney said, not unkindly, for her. “Besides when was the last time a man ever looked at your face upon first meeting?”

Tess glanced down. She was wearing a pale pink T-shirt and a flowery skirt, both borrowed from Whitney. It wasn’t easy, being a thirty-one-year-old woman who was trying to pass for a seventeen-year-old girl who was trying to pass for twenty-one. She had unbraided her hair and let it fly loose around her face, a feeling she hated. But she hoped the hair would create a soft frame, offsetting the faint lines by her mouth and eyes. She also had on more makeup than she had ever worn in her life. Here, she hadn’t had to fake a seventeen-year-old’s ineptness.

GoToGuy-he had provided a first name, Steve, during that last exchange, although with seeming reluctance-stood up when she entered the bar.

“Are you-?”

“I guess I am.” She was nervous, which was good. Nervous was right. Nervous would work.

“What are you having to drink?”

“I don’t know. A beer?”

He sized her up. “A strawberry margarita would go well with your outfit.”

A strawberry margarita-that was even worse than a daiquiri. Plus, she had an instinctive dislike for men who ordered for their dates. Still, she nodded. The bartender swept his eyes over her and didn’t ask for an ID. Damn him. But Whitney was right. Steve, primed to see a seventeen-year-old, saw a seventeen-year-old, even if no one else did.

“After all that trouble for a fake ID,” he whispered wetly in her ear. His nonchalant supposed-to-be-suave chuckle sounded hollow and rehearsed, as if he were a little lost without his keyboard. “Want to go sit in a booth?”

“Sure, I guess.”

They took their drinks and she led him, without appearing to lead, to one of the booths along the windows, so Whitney would still have a good view of them over his shoulder.

“So, did that place work out for you?” he asked.

“What place?”

“The place I sent you to get a fake ID.”

“Oh, yeah, that place. Yeah, it was great.”

“Can I see it?”

She had not counted on this. “What?”

“Can I see the ID?”

“Sure, why not?” She pulled out her real Maryland driver’s license, and he studied it in the dim light. The licenses were supposed to be impossible to counterfeit, with their double-photo images, but it had been a few years since they were introduced. Tess was counting on the local forgers to have caught up. She couldn’t give him her private investigator’s license.

“Wow, he just gets better and better. This looks like the real thing.” Steve squinted. “Why does it say you’re thirty-one?”

She took it back, blushing. “I screwed up the math. Added fourteen years instead of four.”

“So, your real name’s Theresa?”

She was so startled to hear the longer version of her name, the one no one ever used, that she almost said no.

“Yes, but I go by… Terry.”

“On-line you sometimes called yourself Rose.”

That had been Whitney’s invention, Tess recalled, in the early days of the hunt. So he had been watching Varsity Grrl before he approached her, tracking her through sites devoted to sports and boy bands and the latest television shows.

“I’d like to be. Rose, I mean. It’s a much prettier name than Theresa.”

“You may be Rose, then.”

“And you will be-”

“Steve. That’s my real name.”

“Don’t I get to check your ID too?” She tried to be kittenish, the way she imagined a seventeen-year-old girl might be, although Tess had never been particularly coy, at that age or any other.

He laughed, but he didn’t produce his ID. Too bad. That was all she wanted. If she could get his full name, her plan was to excuse herself to the bathroom and wait for Whitney, who would meet her there and take down the information. Whitney would then drive to a nearby restaurant and use her cell phone to call their computer source on standby, who would run him through every database in the state to see what they could get on him: his home address, his debts, his criminal record. Once they had his identity, there was no shortage of things they could do to him. Tess would then fake a headache, or a seventeen-year-old’s forgivable cold feet, and disappear into the night. Her car was parked behind the bar, next to the Dumpster.

Steve folded his hands over hers.

“Terry, Terry, Terry,” he began, in what he appeared to think was a dreamy, romantic tone.

Tess had to fight the instinct to yank her hands out from under his, which were moist and sweaty. “I thought I got to be Rose.”

“Check. Rose. You’re really beautiful, you know that? I had no idea. I mean, I thought, I hoped-you think you can tell what someone will look like on-line. But you have so many moods, it was almost as if you were two different people.”

I was, Tess wanted to say. The Irish-Catholic German Jew you see before you and a blond WASP straight out of the pages of Town amp; Country. They had kept copies of their early forays, so they could be consistent. But they couldn’t quite mimic each other’s on-line voices. Whitney was a little clipped and brittle, a little too wary. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that Tess, with her breezy nonchalance about men, had been the one who had engaged him one-on-one.

“You are beautiful,” he repeated, staring into her eyes with what he obviously intended to be a soulful look. If Tess had been seventeen, she might have experienced it as such. You’re beautiful. It should be illegal for men to say that to women under twenty-five, maybe women under forty-five. She knew she wasn’t beautiful. Attractive, yes. Striking, sure. Not beautiful, never beautiful.

But at seventeen, she had wanted to be, and she would have been suckered by any man who told her she was.

At thirty-one, she found it easy to see through this man opposite her, to detect the little signs that he was not the big success he was pretending to be. His pink shirt had pilled at the underarms, advertising its cheapness. His watch was too big and he wore an aggressively tacky ring on his right hand. His features were even, but his eyes were too close together, his mouth an ugly shape. And his hair was styled in what would no doubt be the first of many attempts to disguise a receding hairline.

“You are so beautiful,” he said again, as if it were a magic spell.

“I’m not-” She used her seeming embarrassment to pull her hands away and drop them in her lap. “I’m not beautiful.”

“Of course you are. Beautiful inside and out. That’s what makes you so special.”

A waitress came by to offer them menus. Steve looked impatient at the interruption, but Tess was grateful. She ordered the most adolescent meal she could imagine: a cheeseburger heavy with trimmings, onion rings, and a strawberry milkshake. Steve frowned slightly when she asked for the onion rings, and she longed to taunt him. See, this is what happens when you date children. They don’t know not to order the onions.

“Would you like another drink?”

“I’m not done with this one yet.” Indeed, she had taken only a sip. Tess could hold liquor, but she didn’t want her senses dulled one bit tonight.

“It’s happy hour, two-for-one, but only for a few more minutes.” A cheap bastard too; that was always a nice quality in a man.

“No, really, I’m fine.”

His hands fluttered to his waist, in a sudden reactive burst that Tess had learned to recognize as the Pavlovian response to a vibrating pager. Better than drooling, she supposed.

“My office,” he said. “Shit. An emergency.”

“An emergency at the investment firm?”

“The investment firm-yeah, exactly.”

“But doesn’t the stock market close at”-better not make it too specific; what teenager would know when the closing bell sounded-“at the end of the day?”

“Yes, but finance is a twenty-four-hour business. The… Indonesian markets are open now.”

“Oh.” Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. “Well, I guess you better take it then.”

“I guess I better.”

The pay phones were at the rear of the restaurant, down a long corridor that led to the bathrooms. As soon as Tess saw her date’s back disappear around the corner, she began rummaging through the leather jacket he had left hanging on the hook next to the booth. The night was cool, but not that cool. The jacket was clearly meant to impress. And it probably would have been impressive to anyone whose taste ran to suburban pimp. Tess found it sleazy and cheap, the alleged leather rubbery to the touch. She slipped her hands in the pockets, hoping he had left his wallet there. With one glance at his driver’s license, she would have his real name, which was the key to knowing everything. If he carried a Social Security card, they could destroy him.

The side pockets came up empty, however, with not so much as a piece of lint, as if the jacket were brand-new. She shook it slightly, hearing a rattle somewhere within its folds, then patted it again. There must be an inside pocket. She slipped her fingers inside the concealed breast pocket and pulled out an amber-colored prescription bottle. Bingo! This would have his name and address.

But the bottle was blank. She looked inside at the pills, and suddenly she knew why Steve wanted her to drink faster, to take advantage of the two-for-one special.

The pills were round and white, bland as aspirin. But they had a line on one side and the letters ROCHE on the other, with the number 1 beneath them. They were Rohypnol, roofies, the date-rape drug. She tried to remember what she had read about them since they had become prevalent on college campuses. The victim could lose consciousness within twenty minutes and would have no memory of what happened the night before after passing out. The drugs, legal in Mexico, could be purchased for as little as one to five dollars.

But what to do, how to proceed? The bottle looked full. Had he slipped one into her drink? No, she had watched the bartender make it and then carried it to the table herself. He had probably hoped she would excuse herself during the meal, at which point he would dose her drink. He had pushed that second margarita awfully hard, not unlike the wolf beckoning Red Riding Hood to come closer. The better to drug you and rape you, my dear.

Impulsively, Tess dropped one into his frozen margarita, then a second one for good measure.

“You got everything you need?” the waitress asked, arriving with the food. A college student, she was treating Tess deferentially. Everyone seemed aware of Tess’s age. Everyone except Steve.

“Everything,” Tess said.

“Problem solved,” Steve announced, returning to the table a few minutes later. “I told them not to bother me again. Are we having fun yet?”

“I think so,” Tess said, snapping an onion ring in half with her teeth. It didn’t break cleanly, and she sucked the long translucent string of onion into her mouth with a loud lip-smacking flourish. Steve watched her, beaming goofily. It must be true love, because it was certainly too early for the drug to have taken hold.

“He’s heavy,” Whitney complained from her side. “For such a scrawny guy, I mean.”

“I know,” Tess said. They were like a team of oxen, trying to drag a rubbery, unpredictable yoke toward Whitney’s little cottage, a guest house on the grounds of her parents’ home. They had decided this afforded the privacy they needed, although they still weren’t sure what they were going to do with their unexpected catch. It was like going surf fishing and coming up with a live manatee. Impressive, but possibly illegal and definitely problematic.

The pills had taken almost forty minutes to hit him, and Tess had begun to wonder if she had misidentified them. But when they took hold, it was swift and sudden. His speech began to slur, his eyelids to flutter with sleep.

“I don’t know-maybe the tequila-”

“Let’s pay the check and get out of here,” Tess said, taking charge, no longer concerned with passing for seventeen. He had fumbled some bills and change out of his wallet and stumbled to his feet, grabbing for her hand in what was at once a gesture of intimacy and a desperate measure to stay upright.

“That’s not even ten percent,” she chided him.

“I tip twenty percent for food but not for booze. Booze is… jacked up, all profit for them. Besides, they… I think… they made me sick. I feel really woozy.”

Tess threw a few more dollars on the table and began to drag Steve toward the parking lot, hoping the restaurant staff didn’t notice how out of control his limbs were. No such luck. The host stopped them at the door.

“Certainly, he’s not going to drive.” Good, it was all about liability.

“No, I got the keys,” Tess said. “I’ll get him home.”

She had planned to rifle his pants pockets and leave him in the parking lot, but now that the staff was on full alert, she dragged him to Whitney’s Suburban and shoved him in the back.

“What the-?” Whitney had asked, her features contorted with loathing for the fast-fading man in the backseat.

“I don’t know,” Tess said. “Just drive somewhere.”

“My place,” Whitney said, with her usual conviction.

And now he was lying on his back on a patch of Whitney’s old pine floor, snoozing peacefully. He breathed through his mouth, like a little kid, but this did not inspire tenderness in the two women who stood over him.

Tess worked his wallet out of his back pocket, no mean feat, given how tight his pants were through the rear.

“Mickey Pechter,” she said. “Baltimore County address. And here’s an ID badge, a swipe card for one of those high-rises in Towson. What do you want to bet he’s not even a day trader, much less a stockbroker?”

She called the name, address, and birth date in to their computer liaison, Dorie Starnes, who had been standing by all evening-and charging them an hourly rate, she reminded them gleefully. But every check came up empty.

“Not even an overdue parking ticket,” Dorie said. “This guy’s a clean liver.”

“Or lucky enough not to get caught,” Tess said, hanging up the phone.

“Shit,” Whitney said. “I assumed we’d find something on him.”

“We’ve got his name and number,” Tess said. “Isn’t that enough? We’ll pay a call on him when he’s conscious, convince him to stop E-mailing little girls, and that’s that.”

“It’s not enough,” Whitney said. “We have to teach this guy a lesson, really throw a scare into him. He had those pills on him. If he hasn’t raped someone, it’s only a matter of time.”

Steve-no, Mickey-sighed in his drug-induced sleep. His middle shirt button had come undone as they dragged him about, exposing a furry expanse of fish-white belly.

Whitney leaned over the man, prodding his chest with the toe of her loafer. “Hairy little devil, isn’t he? I hate hairy men.”

“Hairy body,” Tess corrected. “Head’s not going to be hairy for long. He’ll be bald in three years, tops. So then maybe he won’t be able to hit on teenagers anymore. All we have to do is let nature take its course.”

Whitney gave her a who-do-you-think-you’re-kidding look, then announced, “I have an idea.”

She went over to the old-fashioned planter’s desk, one of the cast-off family heirlooms that her mother stored here. Digging through the drawers, she soon unearthed a plastic stencil sheet.

“What, we’re going to make posters for the homecoming dance?” Tess asked.

“Wait, just wait.” Whitney disappeared in the small bathroom off the hall and came back with a can of Nair so ancient that it was rusted at the bottom. “Truth in labeling. Let’s tell the world what this guy really is.”

She flipped him on his stomach and removed his shirt, grimacing when she saw the thicker mat of hair on his back. “Perfect.” Carefully, she laid the stencil over his back, and filled one of the letters with foam. First a B, then an A, then a B again-

“Whitney, what are you doing?” Tess demanded.

“Spelling out Baby Raper on his back.”

“That’s ridiculous. After all, who’s going to see his back? It’s barely April.”

“As a matter of fact, it’s April Fool’s Day and we have caught ourselves the number one fool.” But when Whitney tried to change her design, the lines overlapped and she ended up taking all the hair from his back.

“Great,” Tess said. “A salon would have charged him thirty bucks for that.” She took the can from Whitney and applied it to the thinning hair on his scalp. No need for stencils here, she wanted to take all of it. She and Whitney rolled him on his back and did the front of his chest for good measure, using the stencil to spell out LOSER.

“The letters don’t really stand out,” Whitney said.

“We should have used a razor,” Tess conceded.

“Or Nads. I really want to try Nads, every time I see that infomercial.”

Tess unbuckled his pants and pulled them down to his ankles, applying what was left of the Nair to his thighs and calves. The aerosol had begun to rattle, close to empty. Here, the hair was paler and finer, more like a boy’s. He wore black nylon briefs, unflatteringly tight.

“He thought he was going to get some tonight,” Whitney said.

“That’s pretty much guaranteed when you drug your dates,” Tess said. “The problem is, they’re usually not conscious by the time you unveil your lingerie.”

It was after midnight when they left him, more or less denuded, in the parking lot of the restaurant, propped up against a blue Honda Accord. The restaurant was dark, having closed an hour ago. The Honda was the only car in the parking lot besides Tess’s Toyota, and his key fit the lock. Mickey Pechter still had on his briefs and socks, but Tess had thrown the rest of his clothes in a Dumpster behind a liquor store on York Road. She arranged his wallet, keys, and pager in a pile next to his head and draped his jacket over him.

At the last minute, she decided to keep the roofies, not wanting to return his weapon to him. She was unsure how difficult they were to procure, but why make anything easy for this predator?

“He looks awfully pink,” she said.

“We’re all pink,” Whitney said. “White is a misnomer if you think about it. Just like black.”

“But he’s red-pink,” Tess said. “He looks like he’s been dipped in crab boil. Or like Humpty-Dumpty, after his fall.”

Yes, that was it: Humpty-Dumpty. Tess wouldn’t describe him as broken, but he was pathetic, curled up in his slumber, his pale body exposed to the night air, prickly with gooseflesh. She felt a wave of sympathy for him, belated, to be sure.

And then she remembered his plans for the evening and revulsion twisted her stomach, where a cheeseburger and onion rings sat on a few sips of strawberry margarita.

“Let’s get out of here,” she said, standing. Then, without really understanding what she was doing, or why, she turned back and gave him a sudden swift kick in the ribs.

If she had been wearing boots, he might have wakened at the impact, but the flat ballet-soft shoe she had worn to minimize her height didn’t pack much of a punch. Still, it was hard enough to bruise his rib, to give him one last souvenir of their evening together.

Or so the Baltimore County cops told her the next day, when they took her into custody.