Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“You dream about her?”

He nodded, his face doleful. “Every few nights.”

“Is that why you cracked up on the job, got disability?”

“I got disability for my knee.”

“That’s not what Major Shields told me.”

“Then he’s a liar.”

“So you didn’t have a nervous breakdown at work?”

“Oh, I cracked up.” Carl’s tone was mild, as if he were telling a funny story on himself. “But when I cracked up, I screwed up my knee, and that’s why I had to take disability. You see, I really did slip on the ice in the parking lot, in January the year after Lucy was killed. I was out a month. By the time I came back to work, the state police had pretty much taken over the investigation. They didn’t need me. As Sergeant Craig was quick to point out.”

“But you didn’t stop, did you?”

“I just couldn’t stop talking to people, thinking about it. They warned me, told me to back off, and maybe if I had kept going the way I was going, they would have disciplined me.”

“So what happened?”

“One day-I’m still in a brace, on pain medication, walking like Walter Brennan-I drove to the bridge where I found her. I started walking. I crossed the Susquehanna: about a mile, I guess, no more. I turned back and did it again. Then again. About the fifth or sixth time, I’m in so much pain I keep thinking I’m going to pass out. Apparently I was talking to myself too, muttering like some old man on the street, although I don’t remember that part. I was trying to figure out how the head came to be there, how he had slowed to leave it there, without anyone seeing him. Even in the middle of the night, another car could have come along. He was risking so much-” His voice trailed off.

“What happened?”

“One of my old co-workers called our supervisor. I was admitted to the hospital in Havre de Grace that night. They released me forty-eight hours later, although they recommended I try some post-traumatic stress counseling. It’s not like I was nuts. But my knee was so screwed up I had to get replacement surgery, young as I am. I was out the rest of the year.”

“Carl, if that’s not obsessive, I don’t know what is.”

“Well, why shouldn’t I be obsessed? I found a severed head on a bridge. I think I’ve come by my obsession pretty honestly.”

“Yet when Mary Ann Melcher called the tip line and tried to tell you her ex-boyfriend matched the description of Alan Palmer, only he was dead-”

Carl shook his head. “I knew more by then. I knew the guy we were looking for wouldn’t kill himself. He might be dead, but not on purpose. I was just stalling for time, trying to figure it out.”

“But it did make sense. There were no killings after Mary Ann, no evidence of any activity on his part.” Until Julie Carter was shot and killed.

“Everything always makes sense with this guy. What’s the one thing we know about him? He plans things out in advance, in minute detail. I think he decided to stop, for some reason, and he wanted to cut off his own trail if the cops ever came looking for him. I don’t think he’s dead or reformed.” He gave her a level look. “And neither do you.”

“So why does he make sure I get this list? Why draw attention to himself?”

“He’s decided he wants to be found, for some reason. Found by you.”

The words might have chilled Tess more if she hadn’t repeated them to herself, over and over, since the death of Julie Carter. She stared into the bottom of her glass. She was drinking wine as if it was water, and yet she couldn’t feel its effects. Fear was a great sponge for alcohol.

“Let’s go back to that original list,” Tess said. “There are three deaths since Mary Ann Melcher’s boyfriend ”disappeared‘ at sea. Julie Carter, shot and killed this past Friday night. Alan Palmer once dated her, although he left when she wouldn’t kick her drug problem. Okay, that makes sense. But the other two don’t. Hazel Ligetti, a forty-something spinster, burned up in a house fire. And Dr. Michael Shaw, hit by a car while jogging. Not young women, not gunshot victims.“

“Doesn’t sound like our guy, does it?”

It made her feel safer, somehow, to have Carl back, to have him speak as if they were partners. Carl, after all, had seen this man in person. With Carl at her side, how close would he dare to come?

“No, it doesn’t. Then again, maybe he knew he had to change the pattern. Or maybe these were people who could have identified him, who knew what he had done.”

“So where do we start?”

“The emergency room at Union Memorial, to make sure you haven’t screwed up your knee again. You’re no good to anyone if they put you on crutches.”

“Can I ask you one thing?”

They were driving through Tess’s neighborhood, the passenger seat pushed back as far as it could go, so Carl’s left leg was more or less extended and he could still hold the makeshift cold compress on it. Night had fallen, and there were no streetlamps here, so Tess could not see the expression on his face.

“Sure.”

“Why would it have been ridiculous?”

“What?”

“That guy said he thought we were having an affair. And you said, ”Don’t be ridiculous.“ ”

“Oh.” She understood what he was asking. Was it so impossible to think she might be interested in Carl Dewitt, with his freckles and his orange-red hair and his bowlegged stride? Yes, actually, it was. Only not because of the freckles and the orange-red hair and the bowlegs, but because of something else, some ineffable lack, the thing that people called chemistry.

But she did not think he would find that reason particularly comforting.

“I meant I wouldn’t cheat. Not on Crow.”

“How can you be so sure? Have you ever cheated?”

The simple thing was to say no. Tess did not owe Carl Dewitt that much honesty. After all, he had not always been truthful with her. But she felt caught on the question, as if she had stumbled into a bramble bush and needed to pull away with great care, separating herself one thorn at a time.

“I had a boyfriend who ran around on me. A lot. We broke up. But when he got engaged to someone else, I became the person he cheated with. I justified it at the time-I was his first love, I was his real love, blah, blah, blah-but there’s not any justification for what I did. To make things worse, he was killed one night. After we were… together. And I saw it. He died right in front of me.”

“Some people would see that as a fitting punishment.”

“Yes, I suppose they would. But Jonathan didn’t die because he was sleeping with me. It was… just a dumb accident.”

She lied because the story wearied her, she did not want to tell it again. Every time she told it, she ran the risk that it would be waiting for her when she closed her eyes. Assuming she ever closed her eyes again.

“So he died, and that made you decide you would never cheat again.”

“Yes.” No. Crow had left her once, when her yearning for another man became so pronounced that she told him about it for fear she would act on it. Carl didn’t need to know this either. “It’s complicated, being in a committed relationship that falls short of marriage.”

“So why don’t you get married?”

“I have a hunch that marriage becomes an excuse for people to start taking each other for granted.”

“I wouldn’t know. I never made it to marriage.”

“Scientists are beginning to say monogamy isn’t natural to any species. Not even swans. It’s a struggle, something you have to work at every day.”

“I never had to work at it when I dated. I didn’t date much, but when I did, I liked being with just one person.”

“Well, then, you’re better than most people I know. Crow and I have agreed to talk, if we start having feelings for someone else. That’s the best we can do-pledge to be honest about our weaknesses.”