The Last Place

CHAPTER 37

They drove straight to Lancaster from the Wolman Building. Normally, Tess might have detoured by her office and crisscrossed the block first, compiling a list of longtime residents. Older people were more prone to notice who came and went or to complain about parking. But she didn’t want to waste a single minute of the late spring light. Tess knew she didn’t like to see anyone’s shadowy figure on her doorstep past dinnertime, even if it was just a Jehovah’s Witness or a child selling band candy.

And she had felt that way before she knew someone wanted to kill her.

“You take the south side of the street,” she told Carl. “I’ll take the north.”

“We only have one photo,” he said, unfolding the enlarged driver’s license, the one that showed “Alan Palmer” with a heavy beard and shaggy hair.

“It’s the van that counts. On a narrow street like this, people will remember that behemoth because it takes up so much space. When you live in a neighborhood where parking is hard to come by, you find yourself cursing the big vehicles.”

“Okay, but don’t go into anyone’s house alone,” Carl said. “Wave to me, and I’ll come over.”

“What, do you think our fellow is a mad genius who has a hidden dungeon beneath his Baltimore rowhouse?”

Tess was trying to make a joke, but Carl’s sheepish look made her realize that he had not quite outrun his cinematic fantasies. That was exactly what he feared, some subterranean lair beneath the city streets, with bottomless pits and Gothic implements of torture.

“We’ll be no farther apart than the length of the street,” she assured him. “As for either one of us going inside-this is East Baltimore, hon. We’ll be lucky if anyone unlatches the screen door.”

Architecturally, this block of Lancaster was hit-and-miss, its partial gentrification arrested by the latest dip in Baltimore’s perpetual boom-and-bust cycle. About half the houses had been redone-the brick repointed, the doors painted striking Colonial colors, wooden shutters refastened to the windows in defiance of the damp harbor breezes that would require the owners to repaint them every year.

The others, however, still had painted screens and Formstone siding. No self-respecting yuppie would leave this fake stone siding on his or her house, Tess knew, although she supposed a few artistic types adored it for its pure camp value. Still, her money was on the Form-stone as a place where Billy Windsor might have lived, or at least visited on a regular basis.

She was wrong. In less than thirty minutes, she and Carl had worked the entire block, from west to east. People had been helpful, especially when they heard that Tess and Carl were city employees who were assigned to evaluate the efficacy of parking regulations. Many a resident had leaned into the doorjamb and complained long and loud about the interlopers who parked on Lancaster. People from well outside the residential parking district. People from the other side of Ann, said one older woman, her head bristling with the kind of wire curlers that Tess hadn’t seen in years.

“Or even”-the woman paused, lowering her voice as if she were about to say something truly slanderous-“Wolfe Street.”

But no one remembered the van as a standout among the block’s repeat offenders. After all, it had been several months since the vehicle had received a ticket. Maybe Billy Windsor had moved on-as Tess had.

Tess and Carl met on the corner to compare notes. The sky overhead was shot through with pink now. They had maybe thirty minutes of light left.

“See, Tess?” Carl said. “He didn’t live around here. Probably came down to have a meal or something. I mean, lots of people come to Fells Point. This would have been a good place to meet women, if you think about it.”

“Not for our guy. He couldn’t make the connection he needed in a bar, shouting over the din of music and other people. He moved slowly. He courted his women.”

“At any rate, he didn’t live here.”

“Not on Lancaster, no.” Tess sighed. “But maybe on one of the surrounding blocks, outside the parking district.”

“It’s getting late, Tess.”

“Then let’s hurry.”

This time, however, they decided to go door-to-door in tandem. They worked Wolfe, moving north, then turned onto Eastern. The farther out they went, the less hospitable people were-and the less likely to speak English. A lot of Dominicans had settled in the neighborhood, and they spoke a rapid staccato Spanish that Tess couldn’t begin to follow. They thrust INS documents at her and Carl, assuming they were from immigration. Just the sight of strange Anglos made them nervous and defensive.

Which was why the seventh Spanish-speaking man stood out. His Spanish was equally rapid but smooth. He wasn’t scared, Tess realized, he was just trying to build a wall between them, so they would go away. He was shaking his head, chanting, “No’sé, no’sé,” before they asked a single question. When they showed him the license number for the van, he didn’t bother to look, just pushed the paper away and continued shaking his head. “No’sé, no’sé, no’sé.”

Only someone who knew something he shouldn’t would be so quick to claim ignorance.

Tess thanked him politely, turned to Carl and said, “Well, I guess we’re done.”

“I thought we were-”

“No,” Tess said. She was speaking directly to Carl, as if her words were meant only for him, but she used a clear ringing tone that was much louder than her normal speaking voice. “We’re not going to find that van tonight. But we’ll find it eventually-and we’ll tow it when we do, and then he’ll have to pay us what he owes us.”

She smiled at the man over her shoulder. “We did tell a white lie.

We’re skip tracers, and this guy’s been giving us the slip for a long, long time.“

Nothing in his face betrayed comprehension. But Tess didn’t doubt that he understood every word she had said.

She tugged Carl away by the sleeve and retreated, heading east. When they reached the cut-through to the alley, she glanced casually over her shoulder to see if the man had come out on the steps to watch them leave. Good, he wasn’t on the stoop. She ducked down the alley and worked her way back, counting so she could match the rear of the house to the front.

“Look,” she told Carl, craning her neck, “it has a rooftop deck.”

“Not much of a deck, more a platform.”

“That’s how you build a deck if you have a rowhouse down here. It’s not like you’ve got a backyard. But the point is-that shitty little rental house has a deck, no more than a year or two old, judging by the lumber, and the workmanship looks pretty sound.”

“So?”

“He has a view of the water, Carl. Remember? Wherever he goes, he lives in sight of the water.”

“You think he lives here?”

“Or stayed here on and off, when he wasn’t living with a woman. Illegal aliens aren’t inclined to call the police, so it would be a safe place for him to come and go. Señor No Sé is probably calling him right now, telling him of our visit.”

“Then he won’t come back. Not tonight, at least.”

“No. But his landlord may go to him. Chances are, Billy Windsor has stuff he can’t afford to have found.”

“Like what?”

“The handgun he used to kill Julie Carter, for example. Anything that links him to Tiffani Gunts and Lucy Fancher. If there’s a single incriminating item in that apartment, he needs to get it out now. He can’t risk the fact that we might go to the cops and they’ll come back with a warrant.”

“You think-”

She handed him the keys. “Go get the car, Carl, and I’ll meet you at the corner of Eastern and Wolfe. You get your wish. We’re going to do a little surveillance.”

“Isn’t it safer if you get the car and I stand here?”

“I’m the one with the gun, remember? I’ll be okay.”

And she would. Because she was going to press her back against the rear of the rowhouse on the far side of the alley so no one could sneak up on her.

It seemed like forever, it seemed like no time at all. They didn’t speak while they sat in Carl’s car, didn’t listen to the radio, didn’t notice how their bodies stiffened in their long-held positions. Tess’s stomach was empty, her mouth was dry, and she felt she could hear tiny discrete sounds that were normally lost in the buzz of daily life: the ticking of her watch, a can bouncing along the gutter after it was thrown from a passing car, the blood in her eardrums. She wondered if Carl was experiencing the same sensations. But she did not want to speak, did not want to move, did not want to do anything that would risk this willed vigilance.

She realized they had been going all day, with virtually no break unless one counted the hour at Sheppard Pratt. Haste makes waste. But Billy Windsor was a moving target and she had a feeling he was moving faster and faster, so they had to keep up with him.

Finally, about 8:30 P.M., Señor No Sé left the house and, with a quick glance around the street, climbed into a faded blue El Camino that needed muffler work. He headed east, toward the interstate.

“He’ll be easy to follow, at least,” Tess said. “You could almost do it with your eyes closed.”

“If you ask me, he’s almost too easy to follow,” Carl said. “Do you think he’s leading us somewhere?”

The thought had occurred to Tess as well. “He could be. Then again, if he thinks we’re gone, this is how he would drive, right? If he starts acting more erratic-running red lights or making sudden turns-we’ll know he’s trying to elude us.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “I guess so.”

Once on I-95, the El Camino headed south, through the Fort McHenry tunnel. Then he took Hanover Street south, crossing the Patapsco and weaving south along Route 2, then cutting east into the Curtis Bay area. These were roads that ultimately led nowhere and it was trickier to follow him here. In a few blocks, he made a turn into the parking lot of an old industrial park that was surrounded by a high fence with razor wire across the top. He got out, yanking on a padlock that appeared to be unlocked, slid the gate open, and drove through, leaving it open behind him.

“Keep driving, as if we’re headed somewhere else,” Tess hissed at Carl. She was hunched down, so only Carl’s head showed. If their prey looked back, he would see only one silhouette. “We can’t pull in there behind him.”

They continued a few blocks up, then turned left, parking on a side street. They had gone so far east they were back to the water. The site was off one of the tiny inlets off the Patapsco, Tess calculated, near where she rowed. Quietly they crept toward it, trying to stay in the shadows. It was almost too easy. Two out of every three streetlamps along this abandoned industrial stretch had been smashed.

“I don’t see the van in there,” Carl whispered, as they approached the open gate. “Just that El Camino.”

“Motor’s not running, though,” Tess said. “What I can’t tell is if he’s still in his car.”

There was a Dumpster near the gate and they ducked behind it as soon as they got through the gate. But they must have been seen, for the El Camino’s motor roared on and, before they could react, the El Camino made a quick U-turn and headed out of the lot. The man didn’t bother to get out and close the gate behind him.

“Did he see us?” Tess asked Carl. “What was that about? He didn’t have time to get out of the car, much less meet anyone.”

Carl couldn’t crouch as deeply as she did, so he had braced himself against the Dumpster with his forearms. “He led us on a goddamn wild-goose chase. While we’re chasing him, Billy’s probably back on Eastern Avenue, clearing out his stuff. Shit. We should have split up, left you behind to watch the house while I followed this guy. But I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

“And I didn’t want to be left alone,” Tess admitted. “We could have called Crow and Whitney. They’ve helped me before, but never when… never when-”

She could not bear to finish the thought out loud. Never when it might get one of them killed. Billy Windsor killed the women he loved for reasons she couldn’t fathom. But he killed for sheer convenience too. She had been keeping Whitney and Crow at arm’s length for the past few days without realizing it.

Carl straightened up, massaging his lower back as if it were tender. Tess was beginning to feel her body again too, noticing all the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders.

“It took us a few minutes to park and work our way over. Let’s look around just for the hell of it, make sure he didn’t throw something out of the car before we got here.”

They glanced into the top of the Dumpster but saw nothing but mounds and mounds of bagged trash, black and wet-looking in the moonlight. They began to pick their way through the littered parking lot, scuffing their feet through the broken bottles and smashed cans, looking for something that might have recently come to rest there.

The old industrial park appeared to be abandoned, a series of vacant warehouses with bay doors rusted shut. They went up one aisle, down another, turning into the third and final row without finding anything.

“We could come back tomorrow,” Tess said. “Look in the daylight.”

“If we found a weapon, I suppose the state police could use it to shake our Dominican friend down. Assuming he’s still on Eastern Avenue come tomorrow.”

They were halfway up the last aisle when they realized a bay door was open. They picked up their pace, heading toward it. But as soon as they got there, they heard a motor engage and saw two huge headlights snap on, drowning them in light. Then a van burst from the bay, heading straight toward them.

Not again, was Tess’s first thought and she may have screamed it out loud. “Not again.”

“Run,” Carl shouted, as if she needed encouragement. He was moving with surprising speed, given his bad knee.

They gained ground at first, for the van had to turn sharply out of the narrow bay. But once they were in the parking lot, with a long straightaway between them and the gate, the van had no trouble picking up speed. If anything, it seemed to be toying with them, holding back so they would run harder.

Within yards of the gate, Carl veered to the left, intent on making it back to the Dumpster they had used for cover when they were hiding.

Tess had thought they would be better off getting out of the parking lot and closing the gate behind them, but she saw his logic: Once behind the Dumpster, she could get her gun out of the holster and set up for a shot. She picked up speed and was even with him, just inches away from reaching the haven they needed, when she felt the van on top of them, smelled its fetid exhaust.

Carl shoved her, knocking her down, but the momentum of his push carried her along the pavement. She felt something bite her left leg, nothing more than a minor scrape, although it was strong enough to tear the fabric of her jeans. She was there; she had made it. Now all she had to do was shoot at the van’s windshield, forcing it off course.

She tried to stand, only to see blood seeping through the hole in her pants. Through the hole in her leg. Shit, there was a gaping wound, deep enough to see a bit of bone staring back at her. Why did you have to push me so hard, Carl? She turned to ask him this, expecting to see him behind her. But Carl didn’t have the advantage of someone shoving him from behind. He had stayed in the open, drawing the van away from her. And now it was going to hit him.

It was just as she remembered when the cab struck Jonathan. The van seemed to hesitate, for a moment, rearing back, like a bull taking aim, and then impaling Carl on its flat snout, flinging his body through the air. What did a van weigh-3,000 pounds, 4,000 pounds, 5,000 pounds? How fast was it going? ten miles per hour, twenty, thirty? It didn’t matter. It wasn’t a physics equation. Carl was dead, he had to be. Strangely, crazily, she remembered the moment they had shared in the Suburban House. Noodles, I slipped. Noodles, I slipped.

But she was alive-and she had a gun. Even if she couldn’t seem to walk very well, she could shoot. She pulled her gun from the holster, steadying it in two hands and aiming toward the blinding headlights.

“I have a gun too,” came a voice from inside the van. “And I can see you clearly, while you have only a general idea of where I am. Throw your gun down, or I’m going to run you over. That’s not a nice way to die, let me assure you. I have some experience in these matters, as you probably know by now.”

She fired off one round, hitting the windshield.

The voice came back, mildly exasperated. “Tess, don’t be foolish. Put the gun down, or I’ll drive straight at you.”

If she could get to the gate and pull it shut behind her-and she had a chance, adrenaline alone might carry her that far, that fast-she could get away. He’d have to get out of the fucking van then, and she’d be in position, she’d have a shot.

“If you run, I’ll shoot you in the back,” the voice said. “It’s not what I want, but if I have to, I will. Also, you can’t see it from here, but I think your friend is alive. He’s breathing, Tess. Put your gun down and I’ll call for help. Don’t you want to save his life? I have a cell phone right here.” He pushed a button, and its ringer sounded, a chirpy little song in four notes: dee-dee-dee-dee. The tune was familiar. It was the one clocks played, in imitation of Big Ben. Oh, lord, our guide.

“Your gun, Tess. It’s your only chance-and his.”

She threw it, but not at the van. Instead, she threw it behind her, into the shadowy recesses along the razor-wire-topped fence.

“I guess that will do,” the voice said.

She heard the passenger door open and close, saw the figure come toward her, backlit in his headlights. It was a man, nothing more than a man, a man of average height and build, a man of average looks. But she had known that. She had known for some time how ordinary-looking Billy Windsor was.

He knelt alongside her, squeezing her left knee. She jerked back, but he pressed harder. He was trying to stanch the blood. Whatever she had fallen on had taken a neat crescent-shaped chunk out of her knee, almost like a bite.

Billy Windsor leaned his face close to hers. He wore a baseball cap, but he was no longer bearded and the hair visible at the edges was light brown, curly. He placed his palms on her cheeks, indifferent to the blood he left on her face. Her blood, from her knee.

“Well,” he said. “We’ve certainly come full circle.”