Laura Lippman: The Last Place

Tess picked up the gun, held it in two hands, aimed carefully at Billy Windsor’s midsection, and fired. The 9-millimeter had more kick than her.38 and it jerked up, so her first shot tore through his throat. She held tighter with her trembling hands and the shots that followed hit him at chest level, again and again and again. She shot him first for Becca-whose only crime was to think well of herself, to believe she had a say in her own future. For Tiffani, and for Lucy. She shot him for Hazel and Michael Shaw and Eric Shivers. For Julie, the stupid little drug addict who had almost escaped him. And for Jonathan, who had been nothing to him but a shape in the morning fog, a means to an end, another person to be sacrificed for Billy Windsor’s survival. The gun had ten shells; she had two left. She shot him one more time. For Carl.

Done, she stuck the gun in her own empty holster and limped out to the parking lot. She found Billy Windsor’s cell phone in his van. She dialed 911 as she made her way to Carl’s body. He was lying faceup under the stars, his eyes still open. She tucked the phone under her chin as she waited for the dispatcher to answer, placing her hand on Carl Dewitt’s neck. For a moment, she thought she felt a pulse, but it was her own thumb, sending the news of her beating heart back to her. She was the only one who was still alive.

“Congratulations,” Dr. Armistead said. “I see the stitches have come out.”

He gestured toward her leg, which was still a little stiff but otherwise back in working condition. Tess had even rowed that morning, for the first time in almost two months. But she had been wearing shorts all that time, sitting in a lounge chair by the Roland Park Pool, so there was a white stripe where the bandage had been. The cut had required thirteen lucky stitches, two inside and eleven outside, and the scar on her left kneecap was still red and angry-looking. It was as if a begrudging teacher had scrawled a checkmark on her knee: good work.

Now Dr. Armistead was saying the same thing, in effect. Congratulations. Good job. But was it?

“Are you congratulating me for being no-billed by the grand jury? I told you they always do, when self-defense is alleged.”

“Alleged?” His bushy eyebrows shot up. “But it was self-defense.”

“Officially. The newspapers didn’t report the detail that I used nine shots out of a clip that held ten.”

“I don’t understand the significance.”

“The homicide detectives did. And the state police.” She had left one bullet in the gun to show them she was in her right mind, she hadn’t lost control. She wanted them to know the deliberation she brought to her task. She had chosen to take a man’s life. But she had told Dr. Armistead that much.

“How do you-”

“Please don’t finish that question. I feel fine. I did what I had to do.”

Or had she? The cops considered her a hero, but she didn’t feel like one. Carl was the hero, and he had been given a proper hero’s funeral, although she was too numb at the time to appreciate it. Later, his name was read at the annual memorial service of law officers killed in the line of duty. Tess wasn’t sure she believed in an afterlife, but she hoped Carl had made it to one, if only because he would have been so pleased by his posthumous glory. She liked to think he and Lucy Fancher had met at last, and Lucy finally had her body back. Maybe her hair, too. If hair and fingernails can grow after death, they should grow in heaven as well.

Tess’s own hair was now just long enough to be impossible. She had forgotten how much curl it had when it was short. Her mother said, almost hopefully, that it would never grow back, that Tess should settle for a grown-up cut. But Tess was determined to reclaim her braid if it took five years, ten, twenty. Unlike Billy’s other women, she didn’t have the delicate features to carry such short hair. Whitney, being Whitney, had told her she looked like shit. Crow, being Crow, had said she was beautiful.

Neither one was right. But neither one was wrong.

“What are you thinking?” Dr. Armistead asked.

She sighed but told the truth. “About my hair.”

“Ah, yes. Your hair. I suppose you’ve thought about the inherent irony-how you were sent here because you decided to denude a man, like a modern-day Delilah, only to have another man do the same thing to you.”

“Well, duh.” She still couldn’t help tweaking the doctor at times. “Although your analogy falters. I didn’t lose my strength when my hair was gone. I was stronger than ever.”

“Yes. But have you stopped to consider the true source of your strength? Do you credit anyone, or any process in particular, with the fact that you were strong and resilient in the face of danger? That you used your anger properly?”

“Me.” He actually looked hurt. “Well, you might have helped.”

She wasn’t sure if she believed that or not. She knew having Dr. Armistead as a sounding board had been instrumental over the last several weeks. But she never forgot that her visits here were probationary, the result of another man thinking he knew what she needed. Three months to go, three months to go, three months to go. She was halfway to the end.

“Have you stopped to think that, if Billy Windsor hadn’t fixated on you, he might have continued killing these small-town girls who had the bad luck to look like his first love?”

“You’re trying to make me feel better that Carl’s dead and I’m alive. But I can’t rationalize things that way. I don’t think that’s what Carl wanted.”

“Do you think Billy Windsor was evil?”

They had been here before. “No. He was sick. He even tried to get help, but I don’t think he really wanted to be helped. He wanted to matter. From the day he killed Becca and faked his own death, he sentenced himself to a shadow existence. Killing was the one way he asserted his reality, strange as it sounds. Restored to his true identity, placed in a hospital for the criminally insane, he might have gotten better.”

“Yet you didn’t give him that chance.”

“No. I killed him.”

“One might even say you executed him.”

The more he pushed her, the more she felt compelled to defend herself. Perhaps there was a method to Dr. Armistead’s madness.

“When I’m feeling charitable about myself, I think that I put Billy Windsor out of his misery. He wanted to stop what he was doing, but he couldn’t. He was going to keep killing because no woman was ever going to satisfy him.” Tess tried for a light tone. “Not even me.”

She felt the dreaded thickness in her throat. She always blinked back her tears when they started in this office because she hated the automatic question, “What are those tears about?” Besides, she didn’t want to cry anymore. She didn’t want to be anyone’s hero, she didn’t want to talk to true-crime writers, from the sleazy to the sober, who kept leaving messages at the office she hadn’t visited for the past seven weeks. She didn’t want to spend all her time assuring solicitous friends and family members that she was fine, really fine, just fine, damn it. But mostly she didn’t want to cry, and she found she was crying quite a bit-in her car, at the grocery store, and every time she watched The Wild Bunch. The mere sight of William Holden and that damn scorpion was enough to make her break down.

This was the one place she had managed not to lose it. Until now.

She began to cry so hard that she had to grope for the box of Kleenex like a blind woman.

“Tess, I know you still don’t like coming here. And maybe you never belonged here, maybe the judge was wrong. But you’ve been through a lot. It’s a propitious time for you to be in therapy.”