Laura Lippman: The Last Place

Tess thanked him politely, turned to Carl and said, “Well, I guess we’re done.”

“I thought we were-”

“No,” Tess said. She was speaking directly to Carl, as if her words were meant only for him, but she used a clear ringing tone that was much louder than her normal speaking voice. “We’re not going to find that van tonight. But we’ll find it eventually-and we’ll tow it when we do, and then he’ll have to pay us what he owes us.”

She smiled at the man over her shoulder. “We did tell a white lie.

We’re skip tracers, and this guy’s been giving us the slip for a long, long time.“

Nothing in his face betrayed comprehension. But Tess didn’t doubt that he understood every word she had said.

She tugged Carl away by the sleeve and retreated, heading east. When they reached the cut-through to the alley, she glanced casually over her shoulder to see if the man had come out on the steps to watch them leave. Good, he wasn’t on the stoop. She ducked down the alley and worked her way back, counting so she could match the rear of the house to the front.

“Look,” she told Carl, craning her neck, “it has a rooftop deck.”

“Not much of a deck, more a platform.”

“That’s how you build a deck if you have a rowhouse down here. It’s not like you’ve got a backyard. But the point is-that shitty little rental house has a deck, no more than a year or two old, judging by the lumber, and the workmanship looks pretty sound.”

“So?”

“He has a view of the water, Carl. Remember? Wherever he goes, he lives in sight of the water.”

“You think he lives here?”

“Or stayed here on and off, when he wasn’t living with a woman. Illegal aliens aren’t inclined to call the police, so it would be a safe place for him to come and go. Señor No Sé is probably calling him right now, telling him of our visit.”

“Then he won’t come back. Not tonight, at least.”

“No. But his landlord may go to him. Chances are, Billy Windsor has stuff he can’t afford to have found.”

“Like what?”

“The handgun he used to kill Julie Carter, for example. Anything that links him to Tiffani Gunts and Lucy Fancher. If there’s a single incriminating item in that apartment, he needs to get it out now. He can’t risk the fact that we might go to the cops and they’ll come back with a warrant.”

“You think-”

She handed him the keys. “Go get the car, Carl, and I’ll meet you at the corner of Eastern and Wolfe. You get your wish. We’re going to do a little surveillance.”

“Isn’t it safer if you get the car and I stand here?”

“I’m the one with the gun, remember? I’ll be okay.”

And she would. Because she was going to press her back against the rear of the rowhouse on the far side of the alley so no one could sneak up on her.

It seemed like forever, it seemed like no time at all. They didn’t speak while they sat in Carl’s car, didn’t listen to the radio, didn’t notice how their bodies stiffened in their long-held positions. Tess’s stomach was empty, her mouth was dry, and she felt she could hear tiny discrete sounds that were normally lost in the buzz of daily life: the ticking of her watch, a can bouncing along the gutter after it was thrown from a passing car, the blood in her eardrums. She wondered if Carl was experiencing the same sensations. But she did not want to speak, did not want to move, did not want to do anything that would risk this willed vigilance.

She realized they had been going all day, with virtually no break unless one counted the hour at Sheppard Pratt. Haste makes waste. But Billy Windsor was a moving target and she had a feeling he was moving faster and faster, so they had to keep up with him.

Finally, about 8:30 P.M., Señor No Sé left the house and, with a quick glance around the street, climbed into a faded blue El Camino that needed muffler work. He headed east, toward the interstate.

“He’ll be easy to follow, at least,” Tess said. “You could almost do it with your eyes closed.”

“If you ask me, he’s almost too easy to follow,” Carl said. “Do you think he’s leading us somewhere?”

The thought had occurred to Tess as well. “He could be. Then again, if he thinks we’re gone, this is how he would drive, right? If he starts acting more erratic-running red lights or making sudden turns-we’ll know he’s trying to elude us.”

“Yeah,” Carl said. “I guess so.”

Once on I-95, the El Camino headed south, through the Fort McHenry tunnel. Then he took Hanover Street south, crossing the Patapsco and weaving south along Route 2, then cutting east into the Curtis Bay area. These were roads that ultimately led nowhere and it was trickier to follow him here. In a few blocks, he made a turn into the parking lot of an old industrial park that was surrounded by a high fence with razor wire across the top. He got out, yanking on a padlock that appeared to be unlocked, slid the gate open, and drove through, leaving it open behind him.

“Keep driving, as if we’re headed somewhere else,” Tess hissed at Carl. She was hunched down, so only Carl’s head showed. If their prey looked back, he would see only one silhouette. “We can’t pull in there behind him.”

They continued a few blocks up, then turned left, parking on a side street. They had gone so far east they were back to the water. The site was off one of the tiny inlets off the Patapsco, Tess calculated, near where she rowed. Quietly they crept toward it, trying to stay in the shadows. It was almost too easy. Two out of every three streetlamps along this abandoned industrial stretch had been smashed.

“I don’t see the van in there,” Carl whispered, as they approached the open gate. “Just that El Camino.”

“Motor’s not running, though,” Tess said. “What I can’t tell is if he’s still in his car.”

There was a Dumpster near the gate and they ducked behind it as soon as they got through the gate. But they must have been seen, for the El Camino’s motor roared on and, before they could react, the El Camino made a quick U-turn and headed out of the lot. The man didn’t bother to get out and close the gate behind him.

“Did he see us?” Tess asked Carl. “What was that about? He didn’t have time to get out of the car, much less meet anyone.”

Carl couldn’t crouch as deeply as she did, so he had braced himself against the Dumpster with his forearms. “He led us on a goddamn wild-goose chase. While we’re chasing him, Billy’s probably back on Eastern Avenue, clearing out his stuff. Shit. We should have split up, left you behind to watch the house while I followed this guy. But I didn’t want to leave you alone.”

“And I didn’t want to be left alone,” Tess admitted. “We could have called Crow and Whitney. They’ve helped me before, but never when… never when-”

She could not bear to finish the thought out loud. Never when it might get one of them killed. Billy Windsor killed the women he loved for reasons she couldn’t fathom. But he killed for sheer convenience too. She had been keeping Whitney and Crow at arm’s length for the past few days without realizing it.

Carl straightened up, massaging his lower back as if it were tender. Tess was beginning to feel her body again too, noticing all the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders.

“It took us a few minutes to park and work our way over. Let’s look around just for the hell of it, make sure he didn’t throw something out of the car before we got here.”

They glanced into the top of the Dumpster but saw nothing but mounds and mounds of bagged trash, black and wet-looking in the moonlight. They began to pick their way through the littered parking lot, scuffing their feet through the broken bottles and smashed cans, looking for something that might have recently come to rest there.