The Last Place

CHAPTER 38

Inside the warehouse, he ripped the torn leg of her jeans and pressed a clean rag to her knee-but only after tying her to a wooden chair, a battered bentwood.

He fastened her to the chair’s curves with a jump rope. Her own, Tess realized, the one she kept in the trunk of her car. She hadn’t even noticed it was missing. It had been there in Sharpsburg, the night she checked into the Bavarian Inn, but she hadn’t thought to look for it since. There had been so little time for jumping rope. Or for rowing, for running, for long walks with her dogs. There had been so little time for everything, and now there might not be time for anything ever again. When had he taken her jump rope? Figuring out this one thing suddenly seemed crucial. Had he taken it as she slept that night in West Virginia and then continued to the graveyard to leave the stones on Hazel’s grave? How long had he been a part of her life, how long had he been watching her, waiting for her? She had been so easy for him to follow.

But then, he had mapped her course through Maryland. He knew where she was going because he had sent her there.

When he tightened the knot on the leather rope, Tess tried to swell her chest as much as possible, so there might be some slack when he was done, but she was weak and light-headed. Had she lost that much blood? Was she in shock? He wore a denim work shirt over his white T-shirt and he took it off, tying the arms around her leg to make a bandage. All this time he had not spoken, but he had removed his baseball cap, so she could finally see his face. He had a nice build, not unlike Crow’s: slender but muscular. He looked to be her age, but then that was one of the few things they had known about him. He was thirty-two. From identity to identity, Billy Windsor had been consistent about his age. He picked men with the same birth year as his, which gave him one less lie to keep track of.

Did he live here? There was a cot, neatly made, with a lightweight blanket and a pretty patchwork pillow. There was an old card table, and he had rigged up electricity and hung a floodlight that threw a circle of light over them. But there was no sign of a bathroom and the rest of the space was stacked with canisters and boxes.

“Shouldn’t I be lying down? In case of shock?”

“Possibly,” he said. “But that would interfere with what I have to do.”

Even now, with her trussed up, he was taciturn about his motives.

“Carl’s not really alive, is he?”

He considered her question. “I doubt it. If he is, it won’t be for long. He’s probably busted up good, inside. But I didn’t want to kill you out there.”

Again, she tried to divine his intentions. Did he not want to kill her? Or was it simply that he didn’t want to kill her out there? He had never tortured his victims, she had that faint consolation, and his witting victims-Tiffani, Lucy-had been granted the quickest deaths. He was good to the women he loved.

“Still, you can’t be sure he’s dead. People do survive getting hit by cars.”

She wanted him to go back outside and check and-well, then what? The jump rope was leather and leather had some give, even when knotted. But Billy had grown up on the water, knew his way around boats. He was probably excellent at tying knots.

“It’s a method that hasn’t failed me yet.”

“You mean with Michael Shaw.”

He smiled. It was a fond smile, warm and affectionate, as if he knew her. She thought, for a moment, that he might reach out and tousle her hair. “Not just Dr. Shaw.”

“Who-?” But she knew the answer. It was the answer that explained everything, or began to. Jonathan Ross. She was sitting opposite the man who had killed Jonathan Ross. Billy Windsor had driven the Marathon cab that foggy morning. Tess had told herself that only Luisa and Seamon O’Neal knew how Jonathan had been killed. But of course they had hired someone. They had hired Billy Windsor, and he had used that tit for tat: to blackmail Luisa O’Neal into being his accomplice when he decided to track Tess down. Even with Seamon dead and her own life almost over, Luisa O’Neal would not want anyone to know what her husband had done.

“How did you and the O’Neals ever meet?”

“Seamon O’Neal helped me out of a jam. It was a little more than two years ago, and I was trying to turn over a new leaf.”

“After you burned down Hazel’s house.”

He let that pass, but he didn’t protest or deny the fact. “I got picked up for criminal trespass on a job. And it turned out the name I was using, Ben Colby, had a prior for robbery. I don’t know how Hazel missed that. I told her to run criminal checks.”

“Is that why you killed her?”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “So what was I going to do? I couldn’t say I wasn’t Ben Colby because then I’d have had to say who I was. But the prior meant I might serve time, and I’d never survive that. O’Neal was my lawyer.”

“O’Neal didn’t do that kind of petty criminal work. He represented asbestos manufacturers, big firms involved in civil suits.”

“We had a client in common, O’Neal and I. A local developer who cut some corners-hired kids to haul asbestos away, wasn’t careful about the way he stripped lead paint from old buildings. He didn’t want me going into court, telling why I was found on private property. Because I was there on his behalf, and I knew too much about how he did business. He got me O’Neal, and O’Neal got me off. But O’Neal knew I was keeping secrets. So when he asked me to make one of his problems disappear, I had to return the favor. It was business.”

“Killing Jonathan Ross was business.”

“Yes. I didn’t like it much. But it had to be done. I do unpleasant things, sometimes, in my work.”

“And in your life.”

“It’s not the same. Don’t confuse what I do for money, or out of necessity, and what I do for love.”

Billy Windsor walked over to the small card table by his cot and began rummaging through an old canvas bag. He pulled out a black leather case and unzipped it, revealing a pair of scissors and a razor. They picked up what little light there was, giving off a shine that was almost blue.

“It’s better wet,” he said. “But I can do it dry, if I have to.”

Tess worked her mouth, but no words came out. This was not what he did, she reminded herself. He did not slash throats, he had never done any ritualistic cutting or stabbing. Lucy Fancher’s head had been removed postmortem.

He looked at her, perplexed by her expression. Then he understood.

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Tess. I’m just going to cut your hair.”

If her arms had not been pinned by the coils of rope, her hands would have flown to her head. As it was, she felt her arms strain against their bindings. There was a little slack there, but not much. Not enough.

“Don’t worry. I’m quite good. I cut my mother’s hair as a boy. Then Becca’s. I had to talk her into it-she liked tossing her curls around. But she was much more beautiful with her hair short. I cut all their hair, and they were all more beautiful for it. You will be, too. Women’s faces are like flowers. When you cut their hair, they open up.”

“But they”-she did not want to characterize them as his girlfriends. Such normalcy seemed obscene. “They didn’t all have short hair.”

“Not when I met them, sure. But you must not have looked at the autopsy photos. I cut Tiffani’s hair three days before, Lucy’s about a month before. I left Julie before we got that far. As for Mary Ann- well, she said she’d rather be dead than have short hair. And I thought, No, you wouldn’t. But I didn’t give up on her until I found out she wasn’t raising her own child. I found that unnatural. That was over two years ago, and I decided I’d never have what I really wanted, that I had to live a different kind of life. Then I met you.”

He came around behind her. She flinched at his touch, but it could not have been more gentle. Apparently, he really did intend to cut her hair. He was unbraiding it, sectioning it, running his fingers through it. Soon enough, she heard the scissors’ husky rasp and saw a hank fall to the floor. The brown locks looked so alive, so vital, so much a part of her. It was going to take a long time for him to cut this unruly mass.

“I don’t really understand you,” she said. “What you’ve done. Why you do it. You get so close you’re ready to start a family. And then you leave.”

“I’m used to women not getting it. The important thing is, I understand you.”

“The way you understood Becca? And Tiffani? Lucy?”

His touch roughened. He pulled hard enough on the next section to bring tears to her eyes.

“I loved them,” he said, his voice even. “I loved them more than anything. I invented them. Especially Becca. My love gave her the confidence she needed to discover her gifts.”

“Her gifts? You mean her voice?”

“Exactly.”

“But she couldn’t be an opera singer on Notting Island.” She groped for a name, but couldn’t begin to think what she should call him. Billy? Charlie? Alan? Eric? The names were all so boyish, so innocent. “She had to leave if she was going to do anything with her talent.”

“I know that. I was prepared to go with her. But she wanted to study at Juilliard, the one place I couldn’t go. I might have survived a few years in a city like Baltimore, if I had to. Or even Boston. But not New York, never New York.”

Smart Becca. She had probably chosen Juilliard for just that reason.

“So you killed her.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.” He sounded exasperated, in a mild way. “I tried to get her to stay, yes. But she was the killer, she was the one who wanted to destroy a human life.”

“What do you mean?” But even as she spoke, Tess thought of the calendars, the careful records he had kept for Tiffani and Lucy. “You got her pregnant.”

“We conceived a child.” He was leaning in close, his breath warm on her neck. “She asked me to take her to the mainland for an abortion. When I said I wouldn’t, she said she’d go without me. When I said I’d stop her, she said it might be another boy’s, so I had no say in it.”

“Eric Shivers.”

“She threw that name out. I was never convinced, though. She may have flirted with him but she loved me. She wouldn’t have betrayed me.”

“Still, you killed him.”

He had moved around to the front of her face and was working on creating a fringe of wispy bangs, high on her forehead. “You have a widow’s peak,” he said. “I never noticed that.”

“Did you kill Eric Shivers?”

He sighed. She wanted to wrinkle her nose at the feel of his warm breath so close to her face, but she willed her features to stay still.

“It was more of a prank, really. I was working the grill for the Kiwanis Club. It was easy enough to put a chunk of crab in the burger I made for Eric. I meant to scare Becca, to show her how weak Eric was. I didn’t know she would run away and he would die. At any rate, it didn’t work. For some reason, it just made her more determined to leave the island, to get rid of our baby.”

Of course it did, Tess thought. Her baby’s father was either dead or a killer. What kind of choice was that for an eighteen-year-old girl?

“So what happened?”

He was on her left side now, his breath tickling her ear. “We were out on my skiff. We quarreled. She said she would do what she had to do without my help. She jumped out of the boat, as if it were some big dramatic scene, as if it were one of her damn operas. There was a big piece of driftwood and I grabbed it, held it out to her, meaning only to pull her in. But the water was rough and she was flailing. She bobbed up suddenly, where I didn’t expect her, and it caught her on the head. I got her out, took her to Shanks Island, tried to work the water out of her lungs, but it was too late.”

Good story. Tess didn’t believe a word of it. But he seemed to.

“You weighed her body down so it wouldn’t be found. Then you faked her disappearance, with your mother’s help, and your own death. It all sounds pretty calculated for a teenage boy who’s supposedly beside himself with grief.”

“Mother helped me… arrange a few things. She knew no one would understand that it had been an accident.”

Because it wasn’t. But Tess didn’t bother to say this out loud. Billy Windsor had spent his life arranging and rearranging these facts into a myth he could live with. Deprived of his true love by a cruel fate, he wandered the earth, alone and rootless. But how did he rationalize the deaths that had followed?

“I got the impression your mother never knew about the others you killed.”

Several pieces of hair fell before he spoke again.

“I wouldn’t want to burden her. But if I told Ma everything, I think she would understand.”

“She would have to, wouldn’t she?” Tess took a deep breath. “You pay for her place.”

“Yes.”

“How? That’s a pretty expensive development.”

“There’s a lot of money in what I do.”

“Which is-?” She still didn’t understand how he made a living.

“Hauling and transporting. I take what I like to call unfriendly substances and find them homes. This is a temporary holding place, sort of my distribution center if you will. These canisters are filled with various things, things you wouldn’t want to touch or inhale. I will relocate them later to more permanent resting places. It can be expensive, doing this kind of work by regulation, getting the proper permits. It’s very burdensome for small businessmen. So I help them out.”

“By illegally dumping toxic substances.”

He allowed himself a one-syllable laugh, not much more than a snort. “It’s not as if a lot of the earth isn’t already spoiled, Tess. Take Baltimore, for example. The people here live like pigs. They breathe dirty air. They live in houses with lead paint. Or, like you, they row on that filthy water. They don’t care how they live. Why should I?”

“I saw your home, Notting Island. It’s not a pristine sanctuary. There were rusting appliances and cars in a huge pile.”

“Trash is different on an island. It’s much harder to haul away. What’s the excuse here, where they come to your door and pick up your trash twice a week? Just think. If people were neater, if they didn’t litter and throw their garbage on the ground, you wouldn’t be in the predicament you are in now.”

He gestured toward her leg, pointing at her wound with the scissors.

“Besides, I had to find work in a cash business. Once I was dead, I couldn’t make money the way most people do. I was just trying to get by.”

“But you kept dying. After you killed Tiffani, you took another identity. Then a third identity, and now, presumably, a fourth or a fifth. Hazel gave you those. Why?”

“Hazel and I became friends,” he said. “I don’t expect you to understand that, but I genuinely liked her. And she liked me. I told her I had made a mistake as a young man, but I had paid for it, and all I wanted was a chance to outrun my past. She believed me. She wanted to believe me. She often said I was the most interesting thing that ever happened to her.”

Hazel didn’t know the half of it.

“Hazel led us to you. She put your name-your real name-as her beneficiary.”

“Really? Well, that only proves how much she loved me. I didn’t want to kill her, but I was turning over a new leaf. I needed to break with my past. Out with the old, in with the new.”

Tess’s hair kept falling in shining clumps-on the floor, over her shoulders, in her lap.

“You killed her because she knew too much.”

“No. I needed a fresh start, and Hazel was part of my old life. I didn’t want to keep doing what I was doing. That’s why I went to Dr. Shaw. But he never understood. He thought I was just another guy who couldn’t find a relationship. Which wasn’t my problem at all. It was easy to find women. But it was horrible, discovering how inadequate they were. They weren’t ready for my love. They refused it.”

“But they didn’t refuse-except for Julie, and she was an addict. They loved you. They told everyone you were perfect. You changed their lives, you were their Prince Charming.”

“But it was never quite right. I picked poorly, I admit. They were too young, or too dumb, to appreciate what I was offering them. They would come so far, so quickly, but then their development would stop. They wanted such ordinary things, they dreamed such tiny dreams. I had been looking for a physical type, but it’s the spirit that matters. You’re more like Becca than any of them, even if you don’t look like her.”

Tess felt something on the back of her neck that she had not felt for almost twenty years-a breeze. Then the battery-powered razor whirred on and began nipping at her skin. She had grown her hair long in protest of just this kind of barbershop cut, which she had been forced to wear throughout grade school because her mother hated trying to work a comb through Tess’s snarls and tangles. She had worn her hair in a braid since high school, getting two inches cut from the tip every six months or so. Which meant that the hair on the floor wasn’t that old, in all likelihood. But it felt that way. It felt as if Billy Windsor had just cut much of her life from her head.

Finished now, he stooped to gather armfuls of her hair. Then, to Tess’s amazement, he carried these tendrils to his cot. He took the patchwork pillow, removed the cover, and unzipped the inside casing. The pillow was stuffed with hair, masses and masses of dark hair. From Becca, perhaps. Almost certainly from Tiffani and Lucy. And now from her. So Carl had been right about something else. Billy Windsor had kept trophies after all. He had just collected them while his victims were still alive.

“Now let me even up the front,” he said, coming at her with scissors in hand, peering so closely at the fringe of bangs he had given her that he seemed almost cross-eyed in his concentration.

“Why?” Tess asked. “Why me?”

He drew back, so he could make eye contact. “Why? Because I made you. Even more than the others. You’re my creation. I’ve read the papers these past two years, I’ve seen how successful you’ve become. None of it would have happened if I hadn’t killed that man.”

His logic infuriated her as much as it sickened her. How dare he? She was not his creation. She owed him nothing. It was just the kind of condescension she and Carl had discussed earlier that day, which now seemed a lifetime away. Blood rushed to her face and she yearned to protest.

But she should agree, she knew she should agree. Perhaps the others had argued with him, rejected his counsel. He had built up Tiffani and Lucy until they were strong enough and smart enough to have their own opinions about who they were and what they should be. Then he had killed them, for the sin of thinking they knew themselves.

“The others weren’t properly grateful, then, for all you had done for them.”

“I put them out of their misery. They were imperfect, malformed. They knew just enough to know they didn’t measure up.” He put the scissors on the concrete floor, then stepped back to admire his handiwork. “Did it ever occur to you that Epimetheus hurried, while Prometheus was guilty of nothing more than having the patience to get it right?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a Greek myth-”

“I know Greek mythology. Epimetheus made the animals and finished before Prometheus, who made mankind. That’s why he had to steal fire from the gods, because his brother had given all the best gifts to the animals. But he didn’t destroy his creations, far from it. He loved them. He risked everything for them.”

“As far as we know,” Billy Windsor said. “But what if part of the reason that Prometheus took so long is because he started over again? And over. And over. I’ve come to believe he made several attempts, destroying his earlier work, until he got it right. That’s why Epimetheus was done first. Because Prometheus had the integrity to strive for perfection.”

“You think you made us? That you’re our creator?”

“Not exactly. But you would be less without me. Can you deny that?”

“I’ll concede you set some events in motion,” Tess said.

“I set everything in motion. I am motion. We’re soulmates, Tess. You can live with me or die with me. If you want to die, I’ll kill you now-and join you in death. One quick shot to the heart, and it will all be over. But if you choose life-if you choose me-it will be a love like no one’s ever known. I’ll hold you forever, the way the jimmy holds the sook, floating on the tide. We’ll be beautiful swimmers. Together.”

He was leaning in so close she wanted to shut her eyes. His breath was surprisingly sweet, minty, as if he had rinsed with mouthwash before she arrived. The Dominican man must have called Billy Windsor on his cell phone after she knocked on his door. Billy Windsor had told him to come here, knowing she and Carl would follow, improvising this plan. He could not plan everything in advance.

“You have to admit, I took advantage of those events you set in motion. I built up my own business. I got better at what I did. You don’t get the credit for all that.”

“True. But without me, you never would have crossed the starting line. What would have happened if I hadn’t killed that man?”

“His name,” Tess said, struggling for control of her voice, the one thing left for her to control, “was Jonathan Ross.”

“I know. But he didn’t matter to me. Neither did you, at first. But when I realized how you were blossoming, how you began to thrive-then I knew you were ready. And I knew what I had to do.”

He leaned toward her, his mouth open, as if he meant to kiss her. Tess swallowed hard, then parted her lips. She had no choice. She had to do what he wanted, had to stay alive every second she could. She opened her mouth, opened herself, allowed his lips to fasten on hers. His kiss was shockingly familiar, not unlike Crow’s-probing but polite, not gnawing greedily as some men did. He was waiting for permission. She opened her mouth wider still, drew his tongue inside- and then she bit him.

She drove her teeth into his lips with all the force she could muster, biting through the lower lip until his blood spurted into both their mouths. She bit down and she held on the best she could, until she tore a strangled scream from his throat, shocking him in her betrayal as he had shocked woman after woman in his. She used her teeth like knives, but the human face was surprisingly resilient. She was not strong enough to rip another person’s flesh, although she was bearing down so hard she felt a sharp, metallic pain in her molar, the one that was tender because she ground her teeth at night.

But she was strong enough not to let go, to fasten on his mouth like some vicious parasite, sending wave after wave of pain into his face, his head, his body. He slapped her, boxing her ears until they rang. Still, she didn’t let go, just kept holding on to his lip with her teeth even as she raised her right leg, the one that wasn’t hurt, and landed her knee exactly where her eighth-grade gym teacher had told her to kick a man if she was ever in real trouble.

It worked, it actually worked. He fell back, writhing. Tess calculated she had bought herself ten, maybe twenty seconds at the most. She rocked on the legs of her wooden chair, tucking her chin to her chest, hoping she didn’t lose consciousness. The chair fell backward with a thud that knocked the breath out of her-and, as she had hoped, cracked its wooden frame, so the rope was now slack and the chair in pieces. She struggled free and looked around the room. He had a gun, he had said he had a gun. Where was it?

But she was out of time. He was on his knees, those strange guttural sounds still coming from his throat, his eyes slitted in pain and revenge. She saw the glint of the scissors on the floor and dove for them. He grabbed her left leg-high, on purpose, on the very bandage he had made for her-and the pain was searing. Now he was on top of her, he had her left arm, but not her right, which she held away from him, like a kid in a game of keep-away. Her right hand had the scissors.

She didn’t want to do it. She knew the nightmares over this act would eclipse everything she had ever known before, would make her yearn for her old night terrors, where she was only a witness, not a player. But this was a nightmare too, and there was only one way to wake from it.

She drove the scissors into his left eye, plunging the blade as far as it could go. New blood-richer blood, thicker blood-flowed over her and into her eyes. He was still making those horrible noises. Which meant she had not driven the scissors deep enough. He was breathing; he was alive. But she was free, she was crawling away from him, her hands sliding along the blood-slick floor.

She stood, her legs shaking. She couldn’t run, she could barely walk, and he showed no signs of dying. He was tougher than she was, a cockroach, a scavenger. He had come back from the dead twice so far, and he would come back again if she let him. She staggered to the card table, to the gym bag from which he had pulled the scissors and razor. A 9-millimeter was on top, loaded.

Billy Windsor was sitting up, blood spurting from his face, the scissors jutting out, his voice full of pain and outrage as he screamed incomprehensible threats at her. She watched in a kind of sickened admiration as he took a deep breath, grabbed the scissors by the handle, and pulled them from his eye, releasing yet more blood. She couldn’t believe he had any blood left in him at this point. He didn’t look real to her. He didn’t look human. Good. She couldn’t afford to think of him as human.

Tess picked up the gun, held it in two hands, aimed carefully at Billy Windsor’s midsection, and fired. The 9-millimeter had more kick than her.38 and it jerked up, so her first shot tore through his throat. She held tighter with her trembling hands and the shots that followed hit him at chest level, again and again and again. She shot him first for Becca-whose only crime was to think well of herself, to believe she had a say in her own future. For Tiffani, and for Lucy. She shot him for Hazel and Michael Shaw and Eric Shivers. For Julie, the stupid little drug addict who had almost escaped him. And for Jonathan, who had been nothing to him but a shape in the morning fog, a means to an end, another person to be sacrificed for Billy Windsor’s survival. The gun had ten shells; she had two left. She shot him one more time. For Carl.

Done, she stuck the gun in her own empty holster and limped out to the parking lot. She found Billy Windsor’s cell phone in his van. She dialed 911 as she made her way to Carl’s body. He was lying faceup under the stars, his eyes still open. She tucked the phone under her chin as she waited for the dispatcher to answer, placing her hand on Carl Dewitt’s neck. For a moment, she thought she felt a pulse, but it was her own thumb, sending the news of her beating heart back to her. She was the only one who was still alive.