Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Well, I can’t open the file to you-it’s an open case, you know. Homicides stay open forever. But it’s the kind of thing that’s not gonna get solved until the man who did it gets taken in on some other charge, decides to confess. Could be years. Could be never. That’s how it works sometimes. Public doesn’t like to hear it, but we’re human. There’s only so much we can do.”

“Can you at least tell me if her former boyfriend was questioned, the one who fathered her child?”

He looked at the file. “Troy Plunkett? Oh, most certainly. Troy’s well known in our offices.”

“What about the fiancé, Eric Shivers?”

“Appears so. Two deputies drove down to Spartina that morning, where he was staying in a motel. One of the deputies had to drive his vehicle back. Boy just fell apart. He was a mess. I’ve heard that part of the reason they looked so hard at the old boyfriend is because they didn’t want the new one to go after Plunkett. They had to convince him it wasn’t anyone he knew. Between us, they looked at her father and her brother, her co-workers from the Sheetz store. Whatever these boys were, they weren’t sloppy and they weren’t lazy.”

“What about the crime scene? Investigators who don’t have a lot of experience with homicide can disrupt crucial evidence.”

The sheriff drew himself up. “Look, miss, I didn’t care for the gentleman who had this job before me. That’s why I ran against him. But we’re not a bunch of dumb hicks out here. We know how to do our jobs. Sometimes a person’s just in the wrong place at the wrong time. If your insurance company wants to fight a claim, that’s between you and your conscience. But don’t drag us into it.”

It wasn’t what Whitney’s board wanted to hear, Tess realized, but she wasn’t being paid to bring home what they wanted. That’s why being a private investigator was better than being a reporter. The bosses couldn’t fault you when reality didn’t match the story they envisioned in their heads.

Tess had decided to spend the night closer to where she would begin her next day, in Sharpsburg. There was an overdone inn on the West Virginia side of the Potomac with wonderful German food. The only problem was that it didn’t allow dogs, which meant she would need the cover of darkness to smuggle Esskay into her room. To kill a little time on her way out of Frederick, she stopped at the development of town houses where Tiffani Gunts had died and called Crow on her cell phone. “How’s it going?”

“Not great,” she said. “But it seldom does at the beginning. I’m sitting outside the place where the first woman was killed.”

“What does it look like?”

“Seedy. Sad.”

“Would you feel that way if you didn’t know someone had been murdered there?”

If she didn’t already love Crow, such a question would have clinched the deal.

“It looks like a place that had big plans for itself, you know? Plans based on dreams that didn’t materialize. It has such a pretty location- it backs up to the Monocacy River-but the town houses have fallen on hard times.”

Studying the complex in the fading light, Tess decided the very touches that had been designed to give the town houses an upscale look-the wall sconces, the ceramic address tiles-were its downfall. Most of the sconces hung crookedly by their wires, and the tiles had faded until the numbers were barely legible. There were other telltale signs of neglect and carelessness. Deck furniture was cracked and dirty from sitting out all winter, the Dumpsters were overflowing, and some windows had newspaper for shades.

“Maybe the murder changed everything,” Crow suggested. “People sometimes shun a place if they know a homicide has been committed there.”

“It’s really off the beaten path,” Tess said. “One of those places that sprang up like mushrooms when the economy seemed invincible.”

“What goes up must go down.”

She knew Crow was talking about the stock market and the dot-com bust, but the observation applied to Tiffani as well. She had been on her way up-new job, new man, new house, new life-and someone had brought her down. Just one of those things, the Frederick sheriff said. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet the wrong place had been her own kitchen, the wrong time had been the middle of the night. “If that’s wrong,” Tess said out loud, “then no one’s ever safe.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just stay on the phone with me until I cross the Potomac, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sharpsburg was pretty in a bed-and-breakfast kind of way: red-brick houses that glowed in the morning sun, large shade trees, window boxes full of pansies and petunias.

But the unsolved homicide of Hazel Ligetti had taken place in less gracious precincts, away from the main streets that tourists saw. Her neighborhood was plain, verging on desperate, block after block of boxy wood-frame houses. Rentals, by the looks of the yards, which were shaved closer than a new marine’s skull.

Except for the lot where Hazel Ligetti’s house had stood. Two years after the fire, nature had taken back this patch of land. Ailanthus trees staked their claim at the edges of the property, while the foundations were wrapped in furry thorns of wild roses, like the brambles that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Tess picked her way through the weeds, gathering burrs with every step.

She knew, from the newspaper accounts she had found on-line, that no accelerant had been found, just evidence of an ordinary small campfire built inside a storage shed a few yards from the house. The shed was gone too, of course. Tess paced it off, trying to figure out where the blaze had started. It had been March, an unseasonably bitter night. The supposition was that a passing vagrant, or maybe some teenage boys, had built a bonfire. The winds had been high and the flames needed little encouragement to race toward the house. The neighbor who called the fire department seemed almost awed by the fireball next door, according to the 911 transcript. On paper, the caller’s words seemed flat and thoughtful, punctuated by the occasional “Golly!” and “There it goes!”

The caller could afford to be blasé. He had lived upwind and across the street. No sparks on his roof, Tess thought.

Hazel Ligetti died from smoke inhalation, probably in her sleep. It was arson because the fire had been set by a trespasser. It was a homicide because someone had died, but that did not make it a murder, an act of intent: Problem Number One.

Problem Number Two: Tess could not make this case fit any domestic paradigm. Hazel Ligetti, according to her landlord, had lived alone and died alone. She had no spouse, no partner. No boyfriend, no girlfriend, no friends. The lack of survivors in her obituary had not been an oversight.

“She wasn’t what you would call… an attractive woman,” the landlord, Herb Proctor, said later that morning, settling behind his desk with a sigh and taking a long pull on a Big Gulp. “Walleyed. Fat. Hair so thin it was like she was going bald in spots.”

Tess wished she could recite back a list of Proctor’s notable features. Paunchy. Pitted skin. Toupee so bad you might as well glue Astroturf to your head and paint it brown.

Instead, she asked, “Could the fire have been an intentional one, made to look like a stupid accident? I’ve seen the other houses on the street. It doesn’t take a genius to realize how easy they’d burn. They’re little more than kindling.”

Proctor rolled his eyes and patted his hair cautiously, as if any movement might disrupt the alignment of his fake hair with the fringe of real hair at his neck.

“No one ever did figure that out. My money’s on some kid playing with matches. He panicked and ran.”