Laura Lippman - The Last Place

It didn’t escape his notice that her family, such as it was, was shunned on the island. Not in an obvious way, for the Coopers and the Winslips, the Pettys and the Seeleys, even the Goodwins, were not obvious people. Living at once so close and far apart, on top of each other and yet isolated from the rest of the world, they had developed a great economy of expression. A word, a look, told you all you needed to know.

But she and her father were newcomers. They did not realize, not at first, how unwelcome they were. Unwelcome generally, because everything new was suspect. And unwelcome specifically, because the father was said to be up to something. He was studying them, that’s what people said. He meant to write about them some day. Not like that fella who had written about Smith Island but in a different way-made up yet not made up. The names would be different but not much else was. It was going to be Days of Our Lives, but on the island.

One of the Winslips, Aggie, cleaned his house every other week, and she had seen some of the papers in the trash. They weren’t nice, the things he wrote. He treated them like animals in a zoo. He talked about who went to church and who tippled and who poached, and although he didn’t use the right names, it was easy for anyone from the island to know who was who. But mostly it was the tone, as reported by Aggie Winslip. “Sneery,” she said. “Not nice.” He used a lot of curse words, too.

Still, this revelation didn’t affect him and Becca. The island was generous enough to allow her to be more than her father’s daughter. “She’s like that duck who thought he was a cat,” his mother said once, harking back to a bit of island lore about the store cat who was found in the yard one day with four new kittens and a baby duck pressed against her. It was only later that he realized his mother thought Becca silly for not knowing she was a duck.

The island left them alone, as much as they could leave anyone alone. For the first time in his life he envied mainland kids, with their absent parents and abundance of roads to cruise. You could do things in a car you couldn’t do in a boat. He and Becca had nowhere to go, and hardly any time to go there. And they had both wanted to go, she as much as he, maybe more. She was urgent for it, and he realized she had done it before, but that just made her longing for him sweeter. She wasn’t settling. She knew what was what, and she still wanted him. “Again,” she would say, when they finally found a place. “Again.” It was as if she was saving it up, so she would have enough to hold her until the next time. “Again.”

One afternoon, they took his boat out to a small piece of land, too small to appear on any map. Certainly, no one had ever lived there-no person, no bird, maybe not even mosquitoes. They did it again and again and again, until he was sore and they were out of protection. Still, she wanted more, and he never said no to her.

He has reached the outskirts of Virginia Beach. He checks his directions beneath the dome light, realizes he missed his turn a few miles up. The job is in a bad neighborhood. His jobs were almost always in bad neighborhoods, or at least ended up there. If people knew-but they didn’t, not unless something went wrong. That’s why he got as much work as he did. So no one would discover the secrets hidden in plain sight. He made things disappear. He could make anything, anyone, disappear.

Five files, five dead women. No-one was a man, it turned out. How shrewdly egalitarian of the board members to throw in this case as a sop to the mostly male General Assembly. How happy Judge Halsey would be to see a male vic among the females. See, we know men can be affected by domestic violence too; women can be aggressors. Now give us some money, you assholes.

It was the day after Tess’s lunch with Whitney, who had wasted no time in providing these files. In fact, she had them in the backseat of her Suburban. She knew Tess that well and knew herself better: As recent events had proven, she could talk Tess into almost anything. Tess sat on the floor of her office, spreading the files around her, trying to figure out the most logical and efficient way to proceed. I’m not procrastinating, she told herself, I’m thinking. There really was a difference.

Her office had a quiet shabbiness that was conducive to deep thoughts. Or maybe it was the not-quite-vanquished fumes from its past lives, which included a stint as the Butchers Hill dry cleaners. Since she had bought a house in North Baltimore a year ago, this East Baltimore location no longer made much sense, but the rent was low, the paint was fresh, and it was convenient to several major bus lines. The customers of Keyes Investigations Inc. as it was known on its tax forms, tended to travel by bus. Besides, it amused her to think about how the Monaghan-Weinstein family had come full circle in just one century. She was back in the very neighborhood that both families had escaped before World War II.

Tess looked at the slender manila folders fanned out in front of her, labeled by name, dated by death. She could proceed chronologically, moving backward through the cases, saving the worst for last. The oldest case, which went back almost six years, would have the fewest living witnesses. Or, more accurately, the fewest sentient witnesses. Once she got beyond family members, she knew sources would be hard to find and their memories would be unreliable. People moved, people forgot. People didn’t really care about other people, once the short-term pleasures of gossip were past. Even in small towns. Especially in small towns.

Or Tess could start at the beginning and work forward, make her mistakes-and she was resigned to making mistakes, they were part of the process-on the cases that were least likely to yield results. That held even less appeal.

She wished she had real case files, not just these sad little folders of newspaper clippings and crude computer printouts, assembled by what was clearly an amateur researcher. Ah, well, these boards had to rely on volunteers. Tess had been spoiled in recent years, getting contraband copies of files through her source in Baltimore PD. She could go to the state medical examiner’s office, where all five cases would have been autopsied, and get those reports. But cause of death was not an issue here. The point was to make sure that each case had been investigated properly, that these homicides did not remain open because of raging incompetence or a police department’s myopia about domestic violence.

Three of the victims, all young women in their twenties, were gunshot victims-two in the chest, one in the head. The fourth woman, whose DOB placed her age at forty-eight at the time of her death, had died in a suspicious fire. The man had been struck by a car while jogging, but it wasn’t clear if the case was a hit-and-run or merely an accident. Funny, she had the most information on him, because he was a prominent doctor on the faculty at Johns Hopkins, and his death had prompted lengthy obituaries in the Beacon-Light and the Washington papers. Even The New York Times had taken note of his passing.

But the women had died quietly, or as quietly as victims of violence ever die. They had generated a few stories in their hometown papers and the kind of obituaries that funeral homes pay for, one line at a time. Among these death notices, the only detail that caught Tess’s eye was from the older woman’s, who had not a single survivor listed to her credit, not even the generic “host of friends and relatives.” The funeral home had asked that donations be sent to the Chesapeake Bay Trust in lieu of flowers. The youngest victim, and the most recent, didn’t even have an obit. All Tess had for her was a typewritten piece of paper providing her name, address, date of birth, and the cause of death. She was the one who had been shot in the head.