Mariah Stewart - Last Look

“Good point.” Dorsey nodded.

He handed her the file he’d had tucked under his arm.

“This can’t be everything.” She frowned.

“Not by a long shot, but this is the file on Edith Chiong. Her statement, notes from the Deptford police regarding the visits she’d made to the station trying to report Shannon ’s disappearance. It’s all in there.”

He moved to the door. “I guess I’m going to turn in.”

She walked to the door and held it open for him. “Thanks for everything today. Especially for letting me go with you to see the body and speak with Doctor Fuller. Up until today, Shannon Randall was just a name out of my past. Now…”

He studied her face for a moment, and she had the feeling there was something right on the tip of his tongue. What he said instead was, “I’m in room 317 if you need me for anything. How about we meet in the lobby around eight in the morning, and we drive into the city together?”

“Great. Thanks. I’ll see you then. And thanks for the reading material. I appreciate it. You didn’t have to do that.”

“You’re welcome. I figured you ought to be up-to-date. Besides, like I said, she might open up to you more than to me.”

Andrew walked through the open door and she closed it behind him, wondering what it was he’d wanted to say.

Dorsey sat on the edge of the bed and read over the room service menu, then called and placed an order for a light supper. She piled the pillows behind her and sat back against them, the manila file on her lap. She opened it and thumbed through the contents.

Edith Chiong’s statement was on the bottom, and there were reports from a number of police officers relating their conversations with her. Notes written on scraps of paper confirmed she’d called the station five times over a two-week period, starting with the morning Shannon had gone missing. The notes skipped a few days, but the statement indicated that Edith had also gone to the station on three separate occasions to inquire about her missing roommate. It didn’t take a genius to see that no effort had been made to locate Shannon Randall. “Missing hooker reported three days ago, still missing” was the extent of the notes one officer had scribbled. Dorsey could only begin to imagine how frustrated Shannon ’s roommate must have been.

Room service was quick and good, and Dorsey sat cross-legged on her bed with her shrimp, which had been served with grits. She pushed the white mound to one side of her plate. Even after six years of living in the south, she had yet to develop a taste for grits.

When she finished eating, she left her tray outside the door, then tried her father’s cell phone. When he didn’t pick up, she left a message asking him to call her, then lay back against the pillows with her eyes closed. She tried to reconcile the sweet face of the young girl she remembered seeing in newspapers and on television all those years ago with that of the woman whose lifeless eyes had stared unseeing at Doctor Fuller’s ceiling. What, Dorsey wondered, had forced her from her home without a trace?

It occurred to her, not for the first time, that perhaps Shannon had been kidnapped. But surely that possibility would have been considered back in 1983, when no trace of her had been found. And if she’d been kidnapped, but alive all these years, why had she not contacted her family? Why, if she’d been free to live and work in Deptford, had she never gone home?

Dorsey recalled several cases where kidnap victims never did contact their loved ones, even though they had many opportunities to do so. The explanations were as varied as the kidnappings themselves. None were ever exactly the same, the human psyche being what it is.

Then again, how could she be certain Shannon had never contacted her family?

She sat straight up in bed. Was it possible that someone in the Randall family could have known that Shannon had been alive all this time?

But who would keep such a secret, and why? And there was the matter of Eric Beale. Surely, if someone knew the girl had not been killed, they would have stepped forward before this, wouldn’t they?

Wouldn’t they…?

A chill ran up her back and into her scalp.

Yes, of course. Of course they would tell. She shook off the obscene possibility that anyone could have had such knowledge yet kept it to themselves. A young boy’s life had been at stake. Surely no one would have watched him go to his death and not said anything.

She closed her eyes again and thought about the role her father had played in this drama, of the irony that she had stood over Shannon Randall’s dead body twenty-four years after the girl had supposedly been murdered. Twenty-four years after her father had arrested Eric Louis Beale for her death.

She thought about the Beale family, and wondered if word had gotten to them yet. As difficult as it must have been for the Randall family to learn that Shannon had been alive all these years, how much more terrible it must be for the family of the young boy who’d been executed for a murder that had never been committed.

Dorsey tried her father again, and was almost relieved when he didn’t pick up. It would be difficult to speak with him tonight. It all weighed too heavily on her heart, Shannon and Eric, their parents, their siblings, along with so many unanswered questions.

She fell asleep with the light on, the possibilities playing free and loose in her head.

“Good morning,” Andrew said when Dorsey walked into the lobby at two minutes past eight the next morning.

“Hi.” She smiled and walked past the front desk to the door. “You driving or am I?”

“I’ll drive, if it’s all the same to you.”

She shrugged and followed him out the door and into the parking lot.

“So. Did you have your eggs and grits this morning?” He unlocked the car with the remote and walked to the driver’s side.

“I don’t do grits.” She opened the passenger door and got in, dropping her bag on the floor with one hand and slamming the door with the other.

Andrew laughed and started the car without comment.

“Do you know where we’re going?” she asked as the car turned left at the exit.

“Got directions from the police department. Seems Shannon and Edith were no strangers to the locals.”

“Their paths had crossed in the past?”

“On more than one occasion. Loitering, mostly. Solicitation a time or two.” Andrew checked his rearview mirror, then pulled into the lane of traffic that was headed downtown. “I thought we’d spend some time with the roommate this morning, then I want to head up to Hatton, talk to the family.”

“Sounds good.”

They rode in silence for a few minutes, then Andrew said, “You read the file last night?”

“Several times.”

“Then you know there’s no love lost between Edith and the cops. She had to have been royally pissed when her friend went missing and she couldn’t get the cops to give her the time of day.”

“Hey, what’s one less hooker in Deptford, right?”

“Exactly. So I was thinking, she sees us coming, she’s going to try to bolt. Our best bet is to wake her out of a sound sleep; at least we’ll know she’s there.”

“Maybe. Or maybe she won’t answer the door at all.”

“In which case, we’ll have to resort to plan B.”

“Which is?”

“I’m still working on it.”

He drove into the city, past block after block of nondescript neighborhoods, some slightly nicer than others, before stopping in front of a tan brick building that might have been a fashionable address in the 1920s. Out front, there was a small patch of grass overdue for a cutting and a single white pot with some dried flowers that might once have been geraniums in cement-hard dirt. Andrew parked in a spot marked Reserved and turned off the engine.