Laura Lippman - The Last Place

Unless, she thought, he knows I’m here. I’m the one he wants, after all. And she slid her right hand beneath her black linen jacket, felt for her holster and her gun. It was hot in the church, and the unaccustomed bulk of the leather and metal beneath her arm felt like some strange tumor. She would have to get used to it.

The young are difficult to bury under the best of circumstances. But Julie Carter presented additional challenges. Her life had not only been short, it had been stupid and shiftless. She hadn’t even seemed particularly nice. The priest worked gamely through the service, and it was hard to know if his red face was glistening from the heat in the small church or if he was just covered in flop sweat. Julie’s family appeared to be seething, muttering among themselves, shifting in their seats impatiently. The funeral, rather than providing solace, seemed only to remind them of all the ways she had disappointed them in life. Julie had found one last way to humiliate them.

Or perhaps it was merely Julie Carter’s penultimate disappointment. For there was no room in the church’s graveyard for Julie Carter, although there was plenty of space left in that peaceful tree-lined acreage. When the service finally, thankfully, ended, it turned out that Julie was to be laid to rest in a sprawling antiseptic cemetery on the outskirts of Baltimore. Julie would be happy to be that much closer to the excitement for which she had yearned, Tess thought. At least she wouldn’t be stuck out in the sticks for eternity.

Only a few mourners made the trip to the gravesite, which made Tess more conspicuous than she had been in the church. She was standing a few feet back, as befitted a stranger, wondering how to approach the family, when the decision was made for her. An older sister-she had Julie’s coloring and the same pert features, although they were congealed in an extra hundred pounds-walked over to her after the casket had been lowered and the final prayers chanted.

“I don’t believe I know you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that she considered this a bad thing.

“My name is Tess Monaghan. I met Julie recently, through my work.”

“What kind of work?”

“I’m a private investigator.”

The sister rolled her eyes. “What’d she do, shoplift something? It wouldn’t have been the first time, although I bet she told you different. Did she cry-she could cry on cue, you know-and tell you it would never happen again? Because all that meant is she wouldn’t do it again in your store.”

“I’m a private investigator, not a security guard.”

“Oh.” The sister was perplexed, trying to figure out the connection. “Did she have to pass a drug test for a job? Or was she fooling around with some married man?”

“Julie wasn’t doing anything. She was… an innocent party.”

This provoked a derisive snort. “That would be a first.”

Tess almost wished she could tell the sour-faced sister just how innocent Julie was, how undeserved her death. But how could you ever convey such information? For all the Carter family’s anger and fury at their wayward daughter, they had not wished her dead. They were angry because she had not lived long enough to straighten up.

“I liked her,” Tess said, and it was true enough, under the circumstances. “It was interesting, actually, how we met. I was compiling some information about domestic violence, working with some local foundations that are trying to figure out why it’s so hard for women to break the cycle. Because a lot of women do get out of abusive or unhealthy relationships, only to start afresh in new relationships that are just as bad.”

“I’m not sure you could call what Julie had relationships. Men were just a means to an end for her, a way to get money so she could get drugs.” The sister sighed. The heat was hard on her, overweight as she was, and she was almost wheezing. A burden years in the making seemed to be escaping her, asthmatic breath by breath.

“She was an addict?”

“She was a pain in the ass. I know I sound harsh, but everyone-my parents, me, my brothers and sisters-we’ve been cleaning up behind her for six years. Trying to make amends with teachers, then with bosses, getting her into programs. Then she’d come out and start all over again. If anything, Julie was the abusive one. Emotionally, I mean. She destroyed every opportunity she got, and she got more than she deserved.”

“Still, I bet she had bad luck with men.”

“Bad luck? I’d trade my right arm for her kind of bad luck. There was always someone around she was playing, some guy who was too good for her by half. She had one boyfriend when she was just eighteen who woulda done anything for her. He was perfect.”

“Perfect?” It was what she had wanted to hear. It was what she had dreaded to hear.

“Well, maybe a little old for her, but that’s not a bad thing. He was steady. Nice and polite, drove a nice car, had a good job, although he had to travel all the time. Selling something.”

Sure, Tess thought. He was always selling something.

“When he found out she was a junkie, he tried to get her into rehab, paid for it even, and stayed by her through it all-and she went back to drugs the first chance she got. He finally just gave up on her and left.”

“Do you remember his name?” Not that it matters, Tess thought. It would be another man’s name, another fortuitous match of an unused life and a sociopath’s inexplicable mission.

“Alan Palmer,” the sister said promptly, surprising Tess. It had not occurred to her that he would use the same name twice. But then-he hadn’t killed Julie Carter, not then, so he was free to move on, to keep using the stolen identity. “Oh, he was such a nice man. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him here today.”

“Has he called?”

“No,” the sister said, her voice wistful. “I think he moved out of state. He said something about going west. It was almost three years ago.”

So Julie had fallen in the interval between Tiffani and Lucy. Which meant that, for all his planning, the man did not know where he would end up next. He knew only who he would be when he moved on. But did he know, from the moment he met them, that he intended to kill them? Why would he kill women like Tiffani and Lucy, who had never disappointed him, only to spare Julie?

“Where was Julie working when she met”-she had to grope for the name, remind herself which persona would have presented himself in the little town of Beckleysville-“Alan?”

The sister looked at Tess. It was an odd question, but Tess was beyond caring.

“She was working at a High’s Dairy Store, and he came in one night to buy a soda. The job at Mars came later. He just kept coming back. Like I said, he was the best thing that ever happened to my sister.”

No, Tess thought, the best thing that ever happened to Julie Carter was that he decided to leave. Julie had defeated this man on some level, had driven him away. Her addiction, her fierce self-involvement, had kept him from getting what he wanted.

There was a lesson to be learned in Julie’s initial survival-and one from her ultimate demise as well.

Tess picked up the tail as she headed home from her office that night. This time it was a dark van, a minivan, which might have struck her as mildly comical under other circumstances. Death by soccer mom. But the driver, although nothing more than a silhouette through the windshield, was clearly no one’s mother. The shoulders were too broad, the neck too thick. She first noticed him as she was turning on the Jones Falls Expressway from Fayette. He raced the amber light, risking a ticket in an intersection rigged with those new red-light cameras. Who would do that?