Laura Lippman - The Last Place

Major Shields looked skeptical. “He shoots a woman, then cuts off her head and keeps her body with him a couple of days. In water. Someone that sick can’t pass for normal.”

“But he did, didn’t he? He does.”

Tess had spoken as quietly and softly as possible, not wanting to sound as if she were contradicting the major. Because she wasn’t. He was right and yet he was wrong. The man they sought was capable of passing for normal. But only for a while. Then something happened and he had to escape. So why did the women have to die? Was it a foregone conclusion in his mind that he would kill them, or was he trying to have a normal life and failing?

“There’s a girl out there,” Tess said. “She has dark hair and light eyes. She’s petite, and if she’s not quite beautiful, she will be once he gets hold of her-fixes her teeth, convinces her to get a great new haircut. She works at a convenience store, as Tiffani did, and Lucy. Right now, in fact, this girl could be leaning forward on her elbows, laughing at the charming stranger who has started coming into the store regularly. If I could do anything, I would like to save this girl’s life.”

“You did,” Major Shields said, “just by picking up the phone and calling us. Now let us do what we do.”

Tess shook her head. “I can’t let it go. I just can’t. There have to be things that Carl and I can do, no matter how small.”

“Hell,” Sergeant Craig said, “you’re both as crazy as he is.”

Carl almost came to his feet on that, but Tess saw it coming and hooked her hand in the back of his waistband, jerking him back to the chair. Major Shields narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, as if that gesture told him something he needed to know.

“Okay,” he said. “You can come in every day, work from an office here. I’ll try to find ways to keep you involved and informed. But the ground rules are this: You tell us everything you know as soon as you know it. You don’t talk to anyone without clearing it through me. If I wake up and see even one detail of this in the local paper, your ass is out on Reisterstown Road. Can you live with that?”

Tess looked at Carl. He nodded a little grudgingly, as if he thought they could do better. Or perhaps he believed she was holding him back. But he had given his assent, so she reached her hand across the table and shook Major Shields’s hand, as her father had taught her to do-firmly, surely.

Sergeant Craig looked disgruntled, but Lieutenant Green reached over and shook Tess’s hand as well.

“You’ll bring the woman’s perspective to things,” he said. “That could be helpful.”

“Well,” Tess said, “there’s a first time for everything.”

Their first task was predictably small: Take a photograph of “Alan Palmer” to the private mail franchise where he had kept a box. The store was on Guilford Avenue, a stone’s throw from the city jail and state prison complex.

A stone’s throw was not necessarily a figure of speech in this neighborhood. Broken windshield glass crunched beneath their feet as they crossed the street, which was so pitted that the bones of Baltimore’s long-vanished trolley system peeked through in parts. Carl glanced around, unnerved.

“People live here?”

“It’s not so bad,” Tess said. “Walk two blocks west and you’ll be in some of the prettiest real estate in all of Baltimore.”

“And walk two blocks east and you’ll be dead.”

“Oh, not even. In fact, the neighborhood around the prison is probably safer than some, if only because cops are always coming and going. Now, go another mile east beyond there, and you’ll be in some serious trouble.”

The mail store was small to begin with, and the owner’s decision to stack empty boxes in ramshackle towers made it feel more cramped. Tess and Carl threaded their way through this cardboard maze and approached the counter, where a cheerful young man was listening to his Walkman and eating a sandwich, letting the crumbs fall into a box he was packing. He had a round face that was some unknowable stew of ethnic identities: almond-shaped green eyes that were flecked with amber, pale brown cheeks with a scattering of dark freckles. If Tess had to guess, she’d put him at part Japanese, part African American, with maybe a little Irish blood like her own.

Whatever his ethnic heritage, he was one hundred percent happy. Joyful even. He was perhaps the giddiest person Tess had ever seen on the business end of a cash register.

“Hello,” he practically sang at their approach.

Tess showed him the photograph of Alan Palmer. This had been taken from the driver’s license photo, enlarged on the computer, and then printed out, so the quality was good. But in the photo, Alan Palmer had a full beard, a telling detail. Carl didn’t remember the man having a beard at all; it was just another part of his plan, a way to confuse those who noticed he didn’t quite resemble what was supposed to be his younger self. The beard obscured his face shape, which both Carl and Sergeant Craig remembered as a simple oval. They didn’t know if Eric Shivers had been bearded when his driver’s license had been renewed; he had done that before the state went to the digital imaging system, and there was no copy to be found. But Tess would bet anything that he had, that he began to grow a beard whenever he planned to take on a new identity, shaving it once his transformation was complete.

Why, maybe he even let his new girlfriend cajole him into losing the beard.

“How long have you worked here?” Tess asked the man.

“Too long.” He sighed, but there was no pain in it. He was an actor, a clown.

“We’re working with the state police.” Funny, the truth sounded like a bigger lie than any she had told. “We want to know if this man is one of your customers.”

“Our customers,” the young man said, his tone still lilting with his innate joy of life, “receive a guarantee of confidentiality, just like the U.S. mail. Mail is private. Mail is sacred.”

Tess supposed that if one ended up working in a shipping-and-mail outlet, it helped to see the job as part of a higher calling.

“We don’t want to read his mail, we just want to know if he’s still a customer. We know he was using this address five years ago.”

“Five years ago? That’s a lifetime here.” But he removed the plastic headphones from his ears and studied the photo. Steel drum music, tinny but infectious, came bouncing out of his headset. “Maybe, maybe not. He’s definitely not someone who comes in now. You wouldn’t forget that face, would you?”

“You wouldn’t?” To Tess, their quarry was disturbingly normal. Not handsome, but not unattractive. Medium height, medium build. It would be too easy for him to move through life without drawing attention to himself.

“Man, he looks like the Unabomber.” He tapped the bushy beard in the photo, the only similarity that Tess could see between Alan Palmer and Ted Kaczynski. “Does he blow stuff up?”

“Only people’s lives,” Carl said.

They had other photos, just no places to distribute them. Major Shields had said they could drive back to Spartina, if they were so inclined, and check with Ashe to see if Alan Palmer’s driver’s license matched the man Ashe had known as Eric Shivers. But Tess was already certain of the answer-after all, Spartina was where they had found this link. She’d much rather go back and see what the Gunts family remembered. Of course, the state police had deemed that interview much too important for Tess and Carl to handle, or even observe.

“Eric Shivers,” she said. “Think he had a family?”

“Almost everyone does.”

“He was from Crisfield, right? Or around there.”