Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“That’s not exactly true. If you blurt out your intention to harm someone, the doctor does have an ethical obligation to alert the authorities. A psychiatrist has to make a clear distinction between delusion and true intent, but he couldn’t sit there and listen to a patient describe his plan to commit a criminal act and just shrug it off.”

“Okay, but Michael Shaw is, chronologically, the last on the list. He was killed in December. So what did our guy tell him that was so bad he had to kill him?”

Tess chewed on her pencil, looking at the list she had long ago memorized. The first victim was Tiffani, killed six years ago. Lucy had died eighteen months later. EAC-then in Alan guise-had met and courted Julie Carter between Tiffani and Lucy, dropping her, possibly because of her addiction. He staged his own death the summer after he killed Lucy. Hazel Ligetti’s house had burned down a few months earlier. And then-nothing for two years, not until Michael Shaw the past December.

“I bet anything he was the doctor’s patient,” Tess said. “But I don’t know where to go with that. Where does Hazel fit in?”

“Got me. What did she do?”

“She worked for the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene in Hagerstown, in some low-level paper-pushing job. You know, all the other women-the ones he killed and the ones he didn’t-they all had some joy in their life, even if it proved to be false. They got to have the illusion of being happy. But Hazel Ligetti had nothing. According to her landlord, she lived alone and seldom went out.”

“A paper pusher?”

“Yep.”

“What kind of paper do you think they push at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene?”

“I don’t know. Insurance claims?”

“Yeah, among other things. Also”-he paused, to give his words more weight-“disability programs.”

“So? He’s disabled, he sees a psychiatrist, he kills the doctor and the woman who sent him there. We’re back to where we started.”

“You don’t know much about disability programs, do you?”

Tess shook her head.

“Well, I do, sad to say. When I had… my problems at work, they tried to get me to apply for SSI-Supplemental Security Income. That’s the federal program. But to get that, you almost always have to go through the state and qualify for some sort of temporary support first. Nobody gets SSI the first time out. What do we know about our guy’s second two identities?”

“They’re men in hospitals who have suffered catastrophic injury.”

“Right. Which means their case files could have passed through the hands of a DHMH worker in Washington County. There’s a rehab hospital out there, but it’s short-term. What do you want to bet that the real Alan Palmer and Charlie Chisholm were hospitalized there before they found long-term care?”

It took Tess a few seconds to work it through for herself. Of EAC’s myriad identities, only the first alias belonged to someone who was dead, Eric Shivers. He had died as a teenager, old enough to have a driver’s license on record-and young enough not to have anything else on record. Frederick cops would have run Eric’s name and the date of birth and the Social Security number through the computers, but they wouldn’t have found anything suspicious. It never would have occurred to them to check Vital Records to see if Tiffani’s boyfriend was dead. After all, he was living and breathing, right in front of them.

She booted up her computer and plugged the next two names, Alan Palmer and Charles Chisholm, into a phone directory that searched every listed number in the nation. Dozens of hits came up, unusual names were harder to come by in this day and age. So if there ever was any confusion-if anyone ever said, “Hey, I knew an Alan Palmer back home”-EAC could laugh and say, “Yes, I’ve met a few Alan Palmers in my time too.”

Did he laugh? Did he smile? How normal-seeming was he? Very, according to his last girlfriend, Mary Ann. The perfect boyfriend. Until he killed you.

“He needs relatively common names,” Tess said, thinking out loud. “Names of people who have no connection to him. The men also have to be a certain age-they all had the same birth year-and have a physical description he can more or less fit. Caucasian, around six feet, light eyes. Hazel helped him get those. Why?”

“Beats me. If she knew what she was doing, it made her an accomplice to some pretty awful stuff. And from the way you said she lived, it doesn’t sound as if she was blackmailing him or anything.”

Tess chewed the inside of her mouth. “We can’t just sit here, speculating. We need to drive out to the office where Hazel worked, find out what records she had access to.”

“Same problem we have with the shrink. Why would anyone talk to us?”

Tess rummaged through her desk, finding letterheads from an insurance company, one that happened to exist only in her imagination: S amp;K Fire and Life, named for the greyhound. She loaded a sheet in the printer and began typing.

“To Whom It May Concern-”

“What are you doing?” Carl demanded.

“Lying.”

“I don’t think I can be a party to-”

“Carl, you’re not a cop anymore, remember? You’re never going to be a cop again. But you could be a private investigator, if you wanted to, or a security consultant. So step back and watch how it’s done.”

He walked over to her desk, looking over her shoulder at the template on her screen. “This works?”

“Fake letterhead is amazing. The thing that really sells it, however, is the motto.”

“Motto?”

She opened the printer tray and pointed. “There, under the name: Serving Baltimore families since 1938. For some reason, that clinches it. It’s the little extras that make a lie work, the superfluous details.”

“Did you always think like a criminal, or did you learn on the job?”

Tess stopped to think about this, fingers hovering above the keyboard. “I believe there was always a criminal in me, waiting to find a noncriminal way to express itself. So far, this arrangement is working out nicely.”

The letter, backed up by Tess’s real business card and license, worked its usual magic. Hazel Ligetti’s supervisor in Hagerstown had only to hear the words “possible Medicaid fraud” to pull the files requested by the two earnest investigators from the insurance company. After all, Tess had the men’s names, DOBs, Social Security numbers, even the Soundex numbers from their Maryland driver’s licenses. She knew the hospitals where they were now being treated.

She also knew it didn’t hurt that the person suspected of wrongdoing was dead. The department might have closed ranks around a living employee. But if giving up a dead one could make trouble go away, why not bend a few rules?

“Did Hazel have ready access to these files?”

The supervisor, Alice Crane, was a pale thin woman with frizzy bangs that belied the effort that had gone into straightening the rest of her highlighted hair. Or perhaps her hair was naturally straight and she tortured her bangs into those crimped waves. Tess found the things women did in the pursuit of beauty oddly endearing.

“Hazel had access to all the files. She entered the dates of each hearing, as the case moved from the state to the federal rolls. Once someone got SSI, the case was closed, but we kept the files. Part of Hazel’s job was transferring the paper files to computer.”

So Hazel sat there, her fingers moving over the keys as she recorded the particulars of hundreds of lives that had been interrupted or derailed. The medical files wouldn’t tell her everything she needed to know to find the right identities for her friend, but quick calls to the Motor Vehicle Administration and Vital Records would have filled in the gaps.