Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“How’d the evening end up?”

“The way it usually did with me and her.” Bonner Flood was smirking, proud of himself. “Lucy with her legs in the air, asking for more.”

Tess studied the man. It was unfathomable to her that he could be sexually desirable to anyone, under any circumstances. There weren’t enough white wine spritzers in all of Cecil County.

“You know,” she said, “Oliver Twist didn’t ask for more because the gruel was good.”

“Huh?”

“If Lucy was always asking for more, maybe it was because she never got enough.”

Flood reached his blue-purple right arm toward the soiled creases of his blue-jeaned crotch. “You wanna see what I got in here? You wanna see?”

“God, no.”

“All right, then,” he said, as if he had won some debate. Tess didn’t have many flashes of intuition, and she didn’t trust many of the ones she did have. But she knew, in that instant, that Bonner Flood had not reconnected with his old flame. She saw Lucy-or Lucy as she imagined her, for she had never seen so much as a photograph of the girl- arrayed in her version of business attire, primly shaking Flood’s hand outside the bar. Lucy had turned Flood down.

Which would explain why the ex-cop, Dewitt, had been dogging him all this time. It wasn’t a bad motive, not that motives counted for anything. And Flood worked in a marina. He could keep a body in water for a couple of days.

“You didn’t sleep with her. Not that night.”

“I did.” Moral outrage, as if lying about sleeping with another man’s girlfriend was worse than doing it.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Look, I’d take it back if I could. Believe me, I’d take it back. If I knew that some crazy cop was going to dog me until the end of my life, asking me over and over again about the last time I saw her, what she said, how she looked, if she mentioned anything unusual.”

“Carl Dewitt.”

“Carl Dewitt,” he said wearily.

Tess gave up. She gave up on her cheeseburger, which tasted like compressed cardboard. She gave up on her fries. She gave up on her beer, which was flattish and briny, as if it had been mixed with river water. She gave up on Bonner Flood. Whatever had happened here, the police had not been lax or indifferent. She threw some money on a table, enough to cover both their meals, and stalked out. Job over. What a waste of time and mileage.

She hated to admit it to herself, but she was disappointed. Despite her cynical protestations, she had wanted this job to be what Whitney had promised. She wanted to work for the good guys. She wanted-did she dare say this out loud?-to be a force for good. Part of the solution. She wasn’t so sure the state’s laws needed to be changed and revised, but she knew Maryland’s mind-set did. Miriam Greenhouse was right: Every time a man killed a woman, it was reported as another love story gone bad, especially if the man then finished himself off. Where was the love in this?

A light rain had started to fall. April was a petulant month in these parts. Tess sat in her car, anxious to get home, too weary to turn the key in the ignition. From here, the diner looked charming and cozy. Talk about a trompe l’oeil. A young couple sat in one of the front booths, leaning toward each other, laughing at some shared joke, the kind of laugh that was almost like a kiss, only better. The young man reached out and touched her face. It made Tess ache, and she had someone at home.

There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. That had been the lunatic neighbor’s theory. By the light of day, it had seemed ridiculous. People killed for a lot of reasons, but rootless envy was not on that list to Tess’s knowledge. Besides, if you yearned to be part of a happy couple, wouldn’t you kill the man and make a play for the woman? No, it made no sense.

Still, something was bugging her. She dug through the folders in the passenger seat and found Tiffani Gunts, the grainy reproduction of her high school graduation photo. Lots of dark hair, tiny face. Lucy Fancher’s physical particulars were the same, before the haircut. The life was even more similar. Abusive ex-boyfriend, followed by a new life, full of promise, a new place to live, a fiancé. Then a sudden violent force rips through the happy household with the power and rage of a natural disaster, a hurricane coming to shore at the spot it is least expected. The woman is dead, the man is destroyed.

The storm moves on, implacable, searching for another place to come aground.

Tess went back into the diner, found the phone book, and tore the page she wanted from its residential listings. Dome light on, map propped on her steering wheel, she drove haphazardly through the streets of North East, running into the same dead ends and cul-de-sacs that had plagued her throughout the afternoon. North East nights were darker than Baltimore ones. Even with a full moon, it was like swimming through black water. Tess began to fear she would end up in a ditch or miss the curve on one of these back roads and slam into a tree.

But eventually she found the house she wanted, a white bungalow with a front porch and only a sliver of land between it and the water. There was a dock, the silhouette of a sailboat visible in the moonlight. The house was dark except for the throbbing blue-white glow of a television set, the light pulsing through lace curtains.

The man who opened the door had gingery hair, sad blue eyes, and so many freckles crowded onto his round, placid face that he gave the impression of being striped, like a red tabby cat.

“My name is Tess Monaghan. I’m a private investigator from Baltimore, and I think there may be a new angle on the Lucy Fancher case.”

“About time,” said Carl Dewitt.

“I saved everything,” Carl Dewitt said. “Copies of everything, I mean. I didn’t take away anything official, not even my own notes. But I xeroxed everything I could find.”

He was digging through a cardboard box, looking at various papers, frowning at them, clearly in search of something in particular. The box was sitting in the middle of his small living room as if he had, in fact, been waiting for Tess’s knock. Or anyone’s knock. Judging by the faint circles on the top, he had been using it as a makeshift coffee table, setting glasses on the box as he sat in his Barcalounger and watched the enormous flat-screen television that dominated one wall.

When he came upon photographs, he would thrust them at Tess and continue his methodical search. She wished he wouldn’t. The only thing more unsettling than photographs of Lucy Fancher’s head were photographs of Lucy Fancher’s body. But Carl didn’t seem to notice. He hummed tunelessly as he sifted through papers. He didn’t seem the least bit perturbed that a stranger had shown up on his doorstep in the dark, babbling about the possibility that the Fancher homicide could be related to one in Frederick several years earlier. If Tess had to describe his mood, she would say he was happy, almost excited.

“Did you know Lucy Fancher before-” Tess stopped, groping for the right words.

He lifted his eyes from the box. “Before I found her head on the bridge?”

“Yes.”

“North East isn’t that small. Sometimes I think I might have seen her once or twice in town. But that’s wishful thinking.”

“Wishful thinking?”

“Wouldn’t you rather know someone as a whole living, breathing person instead of just a head?” His voice was mild, no different from someone expressing a preference for chocolate over broccoli. He had found whatever he wanted and settled back into the Barcalounger, the only piece of furniture in the small living room that seemed to fit him-literally. Its contours had molded to his body over the years so it was almost like a tailored suit. The rest of the decor tended toward flowers and doilies and chintz.