Laura Lippman: The Last Place

He has never been quite sure of the color of her eyes, in part because they are as changeable as sky and water. Besides, it’s hard for him to get close to her in public, harder still to look her in the eye when he does.

Here on the water, a baseball cap shadowing his face, binoculars concealing his eyes, this is as close as he dares to come.

For now.

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Tess Monaghan was sitting outside a bar in the Baltimore suburbs. It was early spring, the mating season, and this bland but busy franchise was proof that birds do it, bees do it, even Baltimore County yuppies in golf pants and Top-Siders do it.

“Kind of a benign hangout for a child molester,” Tess said to Whitney Talbot, her oldest friend, her college roomie, her literal partner in crime on a few occasions. “Although it is convenient to several area high schools, as well as Towson University and Goucher.”

“Possible child molester,” Whitney corrected from the driver’s seat of the Suburban. Whitney’s vehicles only seemed to get bigger over the years, no matter what the price of gas was doing. “We don’t have proof that he knew how young Mercy was when this started. Besides, she’s sixteen, Tess. You were having sex at sixteen.”

“Yeah, with other sixteen-year-olds. But if he came after your cousin-”

“Second cousin, once removed.”

“My guess is he’s done it before. And will do it again. Your family solved the Mercy problem. But how do we keep him from becoming some other family’s problem? Not everyone can pack their daughters off to expensive boarding schools, you know.”

“They can’t?” But Whitney’s raised eyebrow made it clear that she was mocking her family and its money.

The two friends stared morosely through the windshield, stumped by the stubborn deviancy of men. They had saved one girl from this pervert’s clutches. But the world had such a large supply of girls, and an even larger supply of perverts. The least they could do was reduce the pervert population by one. But how? If Tess knew anything of compulsive behavior-and she knew quite a bit-it was that most people didn’t stop, short of a cataclysmic intervention. A heart attack for a smoker, the end of a marriage for a drinker.

Their Internet buddy was in serious need of an intervention.

“You don’t have to go in there,” Whitney said.

“Yeah, I do.”

“And then what?”

“You tell me. This was your plan.”

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t think it would get this far.”

It had been six weeks since Whitney had first come to Tess with this little family drama, the saga of her cousin and what she had been doing on the Internet late at night. Correction: second cousin, once removed. The quality of Mercy was definitely strained, weakened by intermarriage and a few too many falls in the riding ring.

And perhaps Mercy would have been a trimester into the unplanned pregnancy she had been bucking for, if it weren’t for a late-night hunger pang. Mercy was foraging for provisions in the kitchen when her computer-illiterate mother had entered her bedroom just in time to hear the sparkly thrush of music that accompanies an IM and seen this succinct question: “Are you wearing panties?” Within days, Mercy’s hard drive had been dissected, revealing a voluminous correspondence between her and a man who claimed to be a twenty-five-year-old stockbroker. Mercy’s parents had pulled the plug, literally and figuratively, on her burgeoning romance.

But by Whitney’s calculation, that left one miscreant free to roam, continuing his panty census.

It had been Tess’s idea to search for Music Loverr in his world. With the help of a computer-savvy friend, they created a dummy account for a mythical creature known as Varsity Grrl and began exploring the crevices of the Internet, looking for those places where borderline pedophiles were most likely to stalk their prey.

Whitney and Tess had both taken turns at the keyboard, but it was Tess who lured Music Loverr, now rechristened GoToGuy, into the open. She had finally found him in a chat room devoted to girls’ lacrosse. They had retreated to a private room at his invitation-an invitation that followed her more or less truthful description of herself, down to and including her thirty-six-inch inseam. Then she had watched, in almost grudging admiration, as this virtual man began the long patient campaign necessary to seduce a high school girl. As she waited for his messages to pop up-he was a much slower typist than she-Tess thought of the movie Bedazzled, the original one, where Peter Cook, a most devilish devil, tells sad-sack Dudley Moore that a man can have any woman in the world if he’ll just stay up listening to her until ten past four in the morning. Tess figured a teenage girl could be had by midnight.

Not that GoToGuy knew her pretend age, not at first. He had teased that out of her, Tess being evasive in what she hoped was a convincingly adolescent way. She made him wait a week before she admitted she was under twenty-one. Well, under eighteen, actually.

Can we still be friends? she had typed.

Definitely, he replied.

The courtship only intensified. They soon had a standing date to chat at 10 P.M. Tess would pour herself a brimming glass of red wine and sit down to her laptop with great reluctance, opening up the account created for just this purpose. Afterward, she showered or took a hot bath.

Do you have a fake ID? GoToGuy had IM’d her two nights ago.

Finally. He had been slow enough on the uptake, although not so slow that he had revealed anything about his true identity, which was what Tess really wanted.

No. Do you know how I can get one?

Sure enough, he did. Last night, informed that she had gone and obtained the fake ID, he had asked if she knew of this bar, which happened to be within walking distance of the Light Rail-in case she didn’t drive or couldn’t get the family car.

And I can always drive you home, he promised.

I bet you can, Tess had thought, her fingers hovering above the keys before she typed her assent. Her stomach lurched. She wondered if he had gotten this far with Mercy. The girl swore they had never met, but the tracking software was not perfect. E-mails could have been lost, along with some of the IM transcripts. Besides, she could have corresponded with him from school as well as from home, using a different account.

Tess had met Mercy only once, and it had been at least two years ago. But even in junior high, the girl had the kind of voluptuous body that adds years to a parent’s life. She also had heavy-lidded green eyes that gave her a preternatural sophistication, and straight blond hair almost to her waist. She was juicy, no other word for it, even with all the nicks and scars left by a lifetime of field hockey. Did Music Loverr troll for young girls because he liked the innocence of high school girls or because he relied on their stupidity? Did he know how young his prey was or simply not care?

In Tess’s day, such predators had the candor to wait in their cars near the high school bus stop. They showed their faces early, tipping their hands. It was harder to create the illusion of being a successful man if you had to approach from a busted-down Impala, eyes red with the pot you just smoked, spit dried in the corners of your mouth, little telltale flakes of desire.

Yeah, they really knew how to do pedophilia in my day, Tess had thought.

Varsity Grrl typed: I’ll meet you there at 8.

GoToGuy: I’ll be at the bar. I’ll have on a flowered tie.

Go figure: There were three men in flower-patterned ties at the bar.

“Three flowered ties,” Whitney said. “Only in Hunt Valley. These people give preppies a bad name.”