Laura Lippman - The Last Place

“Shouldn’t I be lying down? In case of shock?”

“Possibly,” he said. “But that would interfere with what I have to do.”

Even now, with her trussed up, he was taciturn about his motives.

“Carl’s not really alive, is he?”

He considered her question. “I doubt it. If he is, it won’t be for long. He’s probably busted up good, inside. But I didn’t want to kill you out there.”

Again, she tried to divine his intentions. Did he not want to kill her? Or was it simply that he didn’t want to kill her out there? He had never tortured his victims, she had that faint consolation, and his witting victims-Tiffani, Lucy-had been granted the quickest deaths. He was good to the women he loved.

“Still, you can’t be sure he’s dead. People do survive getting hit by cars.”

She wanted him to go back outside and check and-well, then what? The jump rope was leather and leather had some give, even when knotted. But Billy had grown up on the water, knew his way around boats. He was probably excellent at tying knots.

“It’s a method that hasn’t failed me yet.”

“You mean with Michael Shaw.”

He smiled. It was a fond smile, warm and affectionate, as if he knew her. She thought, for a moment, that he might reach out and tousle her hair. “Not just Dr. Shaw.”

“Who-?” But she knew the answer. It was the answer that explained everything, or began to. Jonathan Ross. She was sitting opposite the man who had killed Jonathan Ross. Billy Windsor had driven the Marathon cab that foggy morning. Tess had told herself that only Luisa and Seamon O’Neal knew how Jonathan had been killed. But of course they had hired someone. They had hired Billy Windsor, and he had used that tit for tat: to blackmail Luisa O’Neal into being his accomplice when he decided to track Tess down. Even with Seamon dead and her own life almost over, Luisa O’Neal would not want anyone to know what her husband had done.

“How did you and the O’Neals ever meet?”

“Seamon O’Neal helped me out of a jam. It was a little more than two years ago, and I was trying to turn over a new leaf.”

“After you burned down Hazel’s house.”

He let that pass, but he didn’t protest or deny the fact. “I got picked up for criminal trespass on a job. And it turned out the name I was using, Ben Colby, had a prior for robbery. I don’t know how Hazel missed that. I told her to run criminal checks.”

“Is that why you killed her?”

He didn’t rise to the bait. “So what was I going to do? I couldn’t say I wasn’t Ben Colby because then I’d have had to say who I was. But the prior meant I might serve time, and I’d never survive that. O’Neal was my lawyer.”

“O’Neal didn’t do that kind of petty criminal work. He represented asbestos manufacturers, big firms involved in civil suits.”

“We had a client in common, O’Neal and I. A local developer who cut some corners-hired kids to haul asbestos away, wasn’t careful about the way he stripped lead paint from old buildings. He didn’t want me going into court, telling why I was found on private property. Because I was there on his behalf, and I knew too much about how he did business. He got me O’Neal, and O’Neal got me off. But O’Neal knew I was keeping secrets. So when he asked me to make one of his problems disappear, I had to return the favor. It was business.”

“Killing Jonathan Ross was business.”

“Yes. I didn’t like it much. But it had to be done. I do unpleasant things, sometimes, in my work.”

“And in your life.”

“It’s not the same. Don’t confuse what I do for money, or out of necessity, and what I do for love.”

Billy Windsor walked over to the small card table by his cot and began rummaging through an old canvas bag. He pulled out a black leather case and unzipped it, revealing a pair of scissors and a razor. They picked up what little light there was, giving off a shine that was almost blue.

“It’s better wet,” he said. “But I can do it dry, if I have to.”

Tess worked her mouth, but no words came out. This was not what he did, she reminded herself. He did not slash throats, he had never done any ritualistic cutting or stabbing. Lucy Fancher’s head had been removed postmortem.

He looked at her, perplexed by her expression. Then he understood.

“Don’t be so melodramatic, Tess. I’m just going to cut your hair.”

If her arms had not been pinned by the coils of rope, her hands would have flown to her head. As it was, she felt her arms strain against their bindings. There was a little slack there, but not much. Not enough.

“Don’t worry. I’m quite good. I cut my mother’s hair as a boy. Then Becca’s. I had to talk her into it-she liked tossing her curls around. But she was much more beautiful with her hair short. I cut all their hair, and they were all more beautiful for it. You will be, too. Women’s faces are like flowers. When you cut their hair, they open up.”

“But they”-she did not want to characterize them as his girlfriends. Such normalcy seemed obscene. “They didn’t all have short hair.”

“Not when I met them, sure. But you must not have looked at the autopsy photos. I cut Tiffani’s hair three days before, Lucy’s about a month before. I left Julie before we got that far. As for Mary Ann- well, she said she’d rather be dead than have short hair. And I thought, No, you wouldn’t. But I didn’t give up on her until I found out she wasn’t raising her own child. I found that unnatural. That was over two years ago, and I decided I’d never have what I really wanted, that I had to live a different kind of life. Then I met you.”

He came around behind her. She flinched at his touch, but it could not have been more gentle. Apparently, he really did intend to cut her hair. He was unbraiding it, sectioning it, running his fingers through it. Soon enough, she heard the scissors’ husky rasp and saw a hank fall to the floor. The brown locks looked so alive, so vital, so much a part of her. It was going to take a long time for him to cut this unruly mass.

“I don’t really understand you,” she said. “What you’ve done. Why you do it. You get so close you’re ready to start a family. And then you leave.”

“I’m used to women not getting it. The important thing is, I understand you.”

“The way you understood Becca? And Tiffani? Lucy?”

His touch roughened. He pulled hard enough on the next section to bring tears to her eyes.

“I loved them,” he said, his voice even. “I loved them more than anything. I invented them. Especially Becca. My love gave her the confidence she needed to discover her gifts.”

“Her gifts? You mean her voice?”

“Exactly.”

“But she couldn’t be an opera singer on Notting Island.” She groped for a name, but couldn’t begin to think what she should call him. Billy? Charlie? Alan? Eric? The names were all so boyish, so innocent. “She had to leave if she was going to do anything with her talent.”

“I know that. I was prepared to go with her. But she wanted to study at Juilliard, the one place I couldn’t go. I might have survived a few years in a city like Baltimore, if I had to. Or even Boston. But not New York, never New York.”

Smart Becca. She had probably chosen Juilliard for just that reason.

“So you killed her.”

“It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like that at all.” He sounded exasperated, in a mild way. “I tried to get her to stay, yes. But she was the killer, she was the one who wanted to destroy a human life.”

“What do you mean?” But even as she spoke, Tess thought of the calendars, the careful records he had kept for Tiffani and Lucy. “You got her pregnant.”