The Last Place You Look

by Kristen Lepionka

  “Richard,” I repeated.

  “You remember Richard. Wealthy, pathetic Richard. He got a bit, you know.” Alejandro shrugged. “We parted ways during the summer and he’s having some trouble accepting it. I mean, I can hardly blame him, but still—annoying.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. I remembered Richard. I’d encountered him once a few months ago, drunk and crying on the steps just inside the building, muttering about the remains of his shattered heart. I’d ordered an Uber ride for him and texted Alejandro to be on the lookout for ex-lovers lurking around. But shattered heart or no, a man like Richard would never be caught dead wearing a hunting jacket, so even though it would make me feel better, my neighbor’s love troubles were hardly a reasonable explanation for the person hanging around the building. “Well, let me know if you see him. Him, or anyone else.” I waggled my gun. “You know I’m carrying.”

  We went back into our apartments. I switched the safety back on my gun and set it down on my desk. “Well, that was interesting,” I said.

  Tom watched me from the doorway. “That’s one way to put it,” he said. “You’re worried.”

  I shrugged. “I’m paying attention, although I don’t even have enough information to know what to worry about. But looking in someone’s window—you don’t do that if you’re just stopping by to chat, do you.”

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t. So who is this guy? Assuming it’s not Richard.”

  “No, it’s not,” I said. “And, I have no idea. I just have a weird feeling about this case. That probably sounds stupid.”

  “Hey, no,” he said. “Actually, that sounds like Frank too. He was very intuitive that way. He’d say, When you feel it, you feel it. We could have the whole murder on videotape but if Frank didn’t feel it, we weren’t making an arrest. If you have a feeling about something, don’t ignore it.”

  I might have preferred he just said it sounded stupid.

  I didn’t mind listening to Tom talk about my father; many evenings over the last nine months had passed that way. But I started to mind when he talked about my father and me. I made sure all three dead bolts on the front door were locked and then I went over to him and hooked my fingers around the buckle of his belt, ready to be done with the entire conversation. “You’re looking pretty tough and unapproachable today,” I said, “what with all this hardware.”

  He caught my hand and squeezed gently. “You’re trying to change the subject.”

  “So what?” I tried to undo the belt, but he squeezed my hand tighter.

  “You don’t have to,” he said.

  “What, change the subject? Or put out?”

  Tom’s eyebrows knit together. “What’s wrong with you today?”

  “Today?” I said.

  * * *

  The sex was a high-speed pursuit, breathless, lights and sirens. Afterward we retreated to opposite sides of the bed, silent and panting. The stars on the ceiling seemed to pulse. My hair was damp on the back of my neck.

  “I’m sorry,” Tom said finally. “About before. It got weird.”

  I wiped perspiration off my upper lip and listened to the quiet outside, relieved. “I think we sorted it out.”

  “It’s just that—” he said, and stopped. A few more beats of silence passed. “Sometimes I’m not sure how to talk to you,” he continued. He turned to me. I didn’t look over. “You’re so direct, but then there are just places you won’t go, you just don’t even want to hear it.”

  I said nothing. He was right, of course, and also, this seemed like one of those places. “Honestly, I do better when no one is talking.”

  He sighed. “If we weren’t doing this, what would happen if I said something you didn’t want to hear? Would you just throw me out?”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said. It wasn’t. “But we are. So it doesn’t matter.” I thought for a second. “Or does it?”

  “So there’s this woman,” he said.

  I sat up on my elbow, refusing to acknowledge to myself how much I didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re a slut,” I said. “A different lady every night! Tell me about her.”

  I saw a flash of his teeth as he smiled in the dark. “I’ve been out with her a handful of times. A guy from the squad set me up with her. She works for the school district.”

  “What’s her name?” I said.

  He looked at me like he thought I would probably Google her, which I would. “Pamela. Pam.”

  Tom and Pam. Nope. “What’s she like.”

  He thought about that. “Upbeat,” he said.

  There was nothing funny about it, but we both laughed a little.

  “She’s very nice,” Tom added. “Normal.”

  “Well, that has to be a blessed relief.”

  “I don’t want to be unfair to you, Roxane.”

  “No,” I said, “no, there’s no fair here, no one is keeping score. We’re just two people, helping each other out.”

  “Helping,” he repeated.

  “Are you saying I’m not helpful?”

  “You’re very helpful.”

  “Thank you.” I leaned toward him and kissed him. I suddenly needed a drink, and to not talk about this Pam any more. There was a whiskey bottle on the nightstand, but no glass. And the bottle might have been empty.

  I couldn’t help myself.

  “So, Pam,” I said. “Is she what they call the one?”

  “Oh, shut up,” Tom said. “I just met her like a month ago.”

  I really needed that drink now. I said, “Do you like her?”

  “Yes, I do,” he said after a beat.

  “When are you seeing her again?”

  “Saturday. She said she has tickets to some chamber music thing.”

  “Oh, she’s a lady of culture, then,” I said.

  “She’s, I don’t know, she’s a grown-up. She has her life together. It’s nice to date someone like that for a change.” He looked down at me. “I’m sorry,” he said quickly, “I’m not talking about you, obviously you have your life together.”

  Did I? “I’m getting us a drink,” I announced, crawling over him. “Plus, this isn’t dating,” I called as I walked down the hall.

  “Right,” Tom said from the bedroom. “It’s—what did you say? Helping?”

  I swallowed a shot in the kitchen and finally closed that window, gazing out at the alley. Nothing was out there this time. “Exactly,” I said, loud enough for him to hear me. “And when it stops being helpful, either because of this Pam or you just get tired of wondering if your car will get boosted when you come over here, we’ll stop and it’s not a big deal. The last thing I want is to interfere with your life.” I did another shot and put the glass in the sink, then grabbed two clean ones from the dish rack.

  “You know I like you, too,” Tom said when I got back to the bedroom.

  “And I like you,” I said. This was a conversation we’d had before. “But that’s different.”

  “How?”

  I climbed back into bed and sat cross-legged against the wall. “It just is,” I said. I poured some whiskey into our glasses and took a sip of mine and tried to imagine it was my first of the day.

  “Yeah,” Tom said finally. He looked at me in the dark and I looked back for a long time.

  “So it’s fine, everything’s fine,” I said. I downed the rest of the whiskey and set the glass on the headboard. “It’s just sex. It’s not like you have to turn it into something just because we’ve fucked twenty-five times.”

  “But who’s counting?” he said. He patted the mattress beside him. “Would you come here?”

  I lay next to him and let him pull me into his chest. I was going to miss this. “It’s just that you’ve been the only good thing,” he said.

  “Stop right there,” I said, but I didn’t move away.

  * * *

  After Tom left, I lay in bed and tried not to assume that every creak and sigh in the hundred-year-old foundation of the building meant that my v
isitor was back. The radiator was hissing again and I was hot, but I’d already closed all the windows and had no intention of opening any of them, no matter how hot it got. Finally, unable to sleep, I got up and dragged my father’s notebooks down the hall to my bedroom.

  Tom had given me the key to deciphering them: they were numbered, a small numeral inside a circle drawn on the first page of each one. There were, it seemed, 243 of them in total. I went through them quickly, skimming through dozens and dozens of names.

  Finally, in the middle of notebook number 71, I found the one I wanted. Evans, Mallory. I let out a long breath.

  Missing 7 months frm hm, infant daughter Shelby. Last seen leaving hm after argument re: housework w husband Josh. *Incl MPR from Belmont PD 5/29 in IR. Hm w infant night of, cnfrm by 2 neighbors. J. Evans employed Meigert Auto, North Cbus.

  His entries were written in a jerky shorthand. I had to think about some of the abbreviations: missing persons report, investigative report, home. He drew a line when his notes switched from one case to another, and I had to read through several other investigations to find the place where Mallory’s case picked up. He had a list of camping-supply stores in the area, because the tarp her body was wrapped in had been brand-new. Another list of registered sex offenders in the southeastern quadrant of the county, spanning six pages, most of the names checked off and a few crossed out. He had two maps of the woods where her body was found, one scribbled over and redrawn to be oriented north. It had a note in the margin that said FUCK YOU, HARPER. I remembered Wallace Harper vaguely; they’d worked together only briefly when I was right out of high school, before Harper dropped dead of an aneurysm in the elevator at the police department headquarters downtown. I had to put the notebook down for a second, spooked.

  Ten pages later, the Evans thread resumed. I picked through the messy shorthand to get the gist of it: among the many useless, anonymous tips to the homicide squad, there’d been one report that one of Mallory’s former classmates was involved. If she hadn’t dropped out, she would have been a senior. I was just thinking that Brad Stockton would’ve been a senior too when I turned the page and saw his name, written out in my father’s handwriting.

  I took a deep breath.

  That was unexpected.

  His name appeared in a list of three others under a heading that said Follow-up? Brad’s entry read: Suspended—retaliation? No charges. All of the names were crossed out. There was no further explanation for it, like there wasn’t for most of what Frank wrote down. I thought about what Sergeant Derrow had told me, about Brad slicing up a teacher’s car.

  I didn’t like the sound of anything today.

  I paged through the rest of the notebook and the one that Frank started after it was full, but there were no other mentions of Brad and few mentions of Mallory. The case got replaced by newer, easier-to-solve homicides and was eventually forgotten, at least in terms of active investigations.

  I got out of bed again, this time for a bottle of whiskey and a glass. I forced myself to look again out through the kitchen window, but the coast was still clear. That didn’t really make me feel any better, though. Not about anything. I was beginning to regret falling down this rabbit hole in the first place. Frank had probably crossed out Brad’s name for a good reason. But less than a year later, two more people were dead and the murder weapon was found in his car. What did that mean?

  “Shit,” I said.

  Danielle was going to be pissed.

  ELEVEN

  I was dreaming about my father: a wren had flown into the picture window on the front of the house, and we were burying it in a Crown Royal bag. I woke up gasping, some kind of noise yanking me out of sleep. I listened hard for the source of it, then realized it was just the phone vibrating somewhere in the bed. Late-morning light streamed into the room. I dropped back to the pillow and covered my eyes with my hand. I hadn’t slept well, and I wasn’t keen to start the day with a call from the unknown breather. But I felt around under the covers for the device, finally locating it near my feet.

  Danielle Stockton again.

  I sighed toward the ceiling. I could still see Brad’s name written in my father’s handwriting. I still didn’t want to talk to my client, not when I’d all but proven she hadn’t seen Sarah after all and I’d also just found at least some kind of connection between her brother and another murder. But I had taken her money—I couldn’t hide from her forever. So I made a cup of tea and ate a handful of Goldfish crackers at my desk while I called her back and gave her the update she asked for.

  “I’m not saying this means your brother belongs in prison,” I said, wincing at my own words. “But I am saying it seems likely that the person you saw wasn’t Sarah Cook. Two separate people looked at the sketch and identified her as this other woman, Jillian Pizzuti.”

  Danielle didn’t answer for a few beats. “But what do they know? They haven’t spent the last fifteen years hoping to see Sarah, that’s the thing.”

  That didn’t exactly help her cause. “I spoke to her myself,” I said. I got up and cracked the window in my office and then, remembering what had happened last night, closed it again just as quickly. “The resemblance is very, very real.”

  Danielle sighed. “So you don’t believe me either. Great.”

  “It’s not about believing you. It’s about what we can prove.”

  “So that’s it.”

  “No, not necessarily,” I said. I filled her in on the murder of Mallory Evans, leaving out the parts about her brother’s name in my father’s notebook for now, until I had even the slightest clue what it meant.

  “And you think all this might have something to do with my brother?” she said, somewhat incredulously.

  “Well, not exactly.” I chewed and looked up at the ceiling. “I don’t know. Did you know her?”

  “Me? No,” Danielle said. “I mean, she had a reputation as trouble. In middle school she got busted for drugs in her locker and had to go to this boot-camp program that the city runs for messed-up kids. And I remember she was kind of wild. Like, lots of boyfriends. But I didn’t know-her-know-her. I was two years behind her, I was a freshman when she dropped out. I heard she was pregnant.”

  “Did Brad know her?”

  “Probably just from being in class together.”

  “I’m just thinking, Belmont’s an awfully small town to have two—well, three—murders less than a year apart.”

  “I guess I never really thought about it like that.”

  “Really,” I said.

  “Mallory … I don’t know. That was different. I heard all kinds of things about her. Like I heard that she would have sex in exchange for drugs. And I’m not saying anyone deserves what happened to her, but you have to wonder. How careful she was. People didn’t really talk about it when she died. When Sarah’s parents were killed though, the whole town was just completely shaken. Listen, I have to say, this isn’t really what I expected when I hired you,” she finished. “I thought you’d, I don’t know, be talking to the police, talking to people about Brad.”

  “I did,” I said. “I am.” I sounded defensive. On top of that, I sounded exhausted and clueless. I didn’t know what else to tell her. I opened my laptop and Googled Columbus city schools Pamela. It was ridiculously easy, like all things that don’t matter. Pamela Gregorio. Tom’s new girlfriend. She was tagged in a photo on the Web site for an annual fund-raiser, caught in a camera-ready embrace with three other women and their glasses of wine. She was a pretty redhead with a coy smile, wearing those hip tortoiseshell glasses and a V-neck sweater. She seemed all right. I was disappointed. “This is just how I usually work.”

  “And how is that?”

  “Exploring whatever comes up,” I said as I searched on Pamela’s full name: thirty-eight next month, owned a condo in Grandview.

  “My brother doesn’t have time for you to explore whatever comes up,” she said next, and I winced again. She had a point. She was quiet for a bit before adding, �
�But he did tell me that he liked you.”

  I slammed the computer closed. “Did he,” I said.

  “He doesn’t like much these days.”

  “Danielle, I promise you, I’m trying.”

  She sighed. “I guess I just imagined this would be more like The Rockford Files or something.”

  I would have thought that fifteen years of visiting her brother in jail would have disabused her of any idealism about criminal cases, but maybe it was a coping mechanism of some kind. “What, a fistfight and a resolution in forty-five minutes flat?”

  “Something like that,” she said, but I could hear a smile in her voice now. “Just please remember. I hired you to help Brad, not anybody else.”

  “I’ll keep you posted,” I told her.

  When she didn’t tell me not to bother, I assumed that meant I was still employed.

  * * *

  Joshua Evans exuded unhappiness. He was a big guy, fortyish and tired-looking, wearing a faintly grease-stained polo shirt from the car dealership where he worked as a service advisor. He looked like he hadn’t shaved recently and hadn’t smiled in way longer. It was clear he hadn’t had an easy time since his young wife was murdered; even after sixteen years, the pain of it was still fresh on his face, evident in his body language and the state of affairs in his small bungalow house: a haphazard mess, the carpet around his chair barely visible for all the old mail, fast-food wrappers, dog toys, shoes. I was hoping he could give me something to go on as far as Mallory’s murder, hopefully something other than Brad Stockton, but I wanted to ease into that particular topic. So I went with a spiel about my father’s death prompting me to look into some of his old cases.

  “He seemed like a good guy, your dad,” he was telling me. “He called me every December. Just to check in, to tell me he hadn’t forgotten about her. I talked to a lot of cops when Mallory died. And I realized, cops are just people, doing a job, and some of them aren’t great at it. Frank though, he always made me feel like I had his full attention. When I heard about him on the news, I couldn’t believe it. I’m real sorry.”