The Last Place

by Laura Lippman

  “Did he make love to you that night?” The men looked at Tess, appalled at her tactlessness. But she knew it was important to ask.

  “Yes. Yes, he did.”

  “Normally?”

  Mary Ann lifted her chin. “I’m not sure what you mean by normally, but it was normal as far as I’m concerned.” Then, wistful: “He was the best at that. Very considerate, if you know what I mean.”

  Tess did. The men in the room thought they did.

  “Did you use birth control?”

  “Miss Monaghan!” Major Shields had gone beyond appalled to shocked.

  “I don’t have to. I had a baby when I was seventeen and something went wrong. They had to give me an emergency hysterectomy.”

  “What happened to the baby?”

  “My mama’s got her. Simma’s better off down there, because they live out in the country a little ways, in a good school district, and my mama doesn’t have to work like I do.”

  “Did Charlie—” but Major Shields had decided that Tess had asked enough questions. He cut her off with a look, as stern a look as anyone had ever given her, and Tess had been on the receiving end of some pretty harsh looks in her time. He then transformed himself with almost disturbing speed back into the gentle, friendly inquisitor.

  “Tell us what happened next, Miss Melcher.”

  “Two days later, I leave for work, and Charlie’s here. When I get home at midnight, he’s gone and there’s a note, saying, ”I had to go. Please don’t hate me. This is the only way to say good-bye.“ I’m sad, but I think he’s gone to his family, wherever they are. I never knew. But a week goes by and the police come around. Seems they’ve found Charlie’s car and his boat trailer, the one he had for his boat, at Point Lookout. It’s been there for a week, since just before a big storm come up on the bay. He filled out a float plan—they found it in the little box. He said he was going all the way out to sea to go fishing. Then, at the bottom, he wrote, And I’m never coming back.”

  “Did they find the boat?”

  “Just p-p-pieces.” She began sobbing. “It was all a lie. Charlie didn’t have any family to go to. He decided to kill himself rather than die slowly, using up all his savings. Turns out he transferred ten thousand dollars into my account the night before he left. It must have been all the money he had in the world.”

  It also, Tess knew, was the largest gift you could make to another person without having to pay a gift tax. “What did you do with it?”

  “Paid off some bills. Bought a new car. My old one was on its last legs. Know something odd? Turns out that Charlie’s car was in my name. When they found his van at Point Lookout, it was registered to me. So the title was clear, and I was able to sell that too.”

  Major Shields turned to Tess and Carl. “We talked to the local police and the DNR police. Charlie Chisholm is missing and presumed dead.”

  “Presumed,” Carl said. “Yeah, I’m sure he’s counting on just that. Presumption.”

  “It’s been two years,” Major Shields said. “Two years, and we don’t have another open homicide in all of Maryland that resembles the first two. He never faked his death before. Why would he? He just takes another identity and moves on, knowing the real so-and-so—Eric Shivers, Alan Palmer—will seal off the trail. The real Charlie Chisholm, in fact, is in Veterans Hospital in Baltimore. Been there on and off since the Persian Gulf War. Same date of birth as the others, same general description.”

  “Another hospital,” Carl said. “Another chronic patient who’s not going to get in the way of anyone who wants to appropriate his identity. It’s not like there’s any shortage of hospitals in the state of Maryland. And there’s a large supply of men born thirty-two years ago.”

  Major Shields stood up. “I know, I know. You have a thousand arguments for why this guy is still alive. That’s why you didn’t even bother to pass along Miss Melcher’s name and number when she called you on the tip line last week. If she hadn’t called back, we still might not know about this. We’d be spinning our wheels and wasting our time and money, all because you think you know this guy better than the rest of us.”

  “I do,” Carl said. “I met him. I talked to him. He wouldn’t commit suicide.”

  “And maybe he didn’t. But the boat was found, remember? Dashed to pieces in the storm. He let this girl live, for whatever reason. Maybe he began to experience genuine remorse, I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that he seems to be dead for all intents and purposes, and the cases are closed.”

  “You can’t close a case when you don’t even know his real name,” Carl protested. “He’s not Eric Shivers. He’s not Alan Palmer. He’s not Charlie Chisholm. He’s alive out there, somewhere.” Then to Mary Ann, his voice cracking with an odd hysteria that Tess had never heard before, “Do you have a photograph? Maybe it’s not even the same guy. It could be a totally different guy?”

  Mary Ann, still crying, shook her head. “He didn’t like to have his photo taken.”

  Major Shields turned to Tess. “Did he tell you about the call?”

  She shook her head numbly, remembering Carl slumped at the computer the day she returned from Dr. Armistead’s office. Any calls come in? None that mattered.

  “Carl—” Major Shields’s voice was almost as gentle as it had been with Mary Ann. “I know you want to face this guy one more time. I know you wish you could confront him, settle all these scores. That’s part of your sickness.”

  Carl stood, heading to the door, as if he planned to walk back to Baltimore. “I don’t have a sickness.”

  “Post-traumatic stress disorder is a legitimate illness. Cops get it. Paramedics. You see horrible stuff, it can affect you. But it doesn’t give you the right to skew an investigation the way you did. You lied to us. We only knew about Mary Ann’s call because the phone we gave you is tapped.”

  “The phone is tapped?” Tess couldn’t help thinking about the calls she had made home during the day, the embarrassingly kissy-face conversations she had with Crow from the state police barracks.

  Major Shields nodded. “The phone is tapped and the computer is set up so we can track every keystroke. We know you’ve been chasing down all sorts of leads you didn’t bother to share with us. We know you didn’t go to Spartina the other day, although we don’t know where you did go. You want to tell us?”

  “I don’t think so,” Tess said, almost instinctively, guarding what she knew.

  “It doesn’t matter. We know you went back to see the Gunts family, despite our instructions. Those infractions could have been forgiven because they didn’t interfere with the investigation.

  “But this girl, sitting in front of us, is key. Our killer stopped as suddenly as he started. We’ll learn his name, one day. But for now the important thing is that he stopped. And death is the only plausible explanation for that.”

  “Serial killers have periods of dormancy—” Carl began, but stopped when he saw Tess’s sorrowful gaze.

  “I trusted you,” she said. “I thought we were working together.”

  “We were,” he said. “But this isn’t important. Really.”

  “Carl,” Major Shields said, “you need help. You ought to think about going back to that place in Havre de Grace, the one where the state sent you last time.”

  No longer the center of attention, Mary Ann was crying even harder now. “Would he really have killed me? Truly?”

  “I hope not,” Major Shields said. “It’s our belief that something changed his mind. Maybe he was dying, as he told you. Maybe he realized the sickness inside him was as deadly as any cancer.”

  “Then do you think… do you think…” Her voice was so choked with heaving sobs she could barely get the words out. She struggled to get control of herself and looked at the major with glistening eyes. “Do you think Lifetime Television would want to make a movie out of this?”

  CHAPTER 26

  Tess moved through the next week in a strange fog. Technically, she was still wor
king, even if she no longer had an office at the state police barracks. After all, the brief career of Eric-Alan-Charlie was perfect for the needs of her contractors. Whitney had whooped with pleasure when Tess told her the bare outlines of what they had learned. The state police were not going public, not yet, but they would eventually give the story to the press. The consortium would be able to make a lot of political hay, once everything was sorted out.

  “Especially with this nut, this Carl Dewitt guy, who almost screwed up the investigation because of his own obsession,” Whitney had said over the phone. Her bell-clear voice had never sounded quite so hard to Tess, so cruel. “He’s practically a walking example of why all branches of law enforcement need training.”

  “I don’t know,” Tess had demurred. “I think he had some good ideas.”

  “How do you figure? He couldn’t see the killer had been sitting in front of him—until you came along. Then, once he realized the right guy had slipped through his fingers, he couldn’t accept the fact that he might be dead. But why was a Toll Facilities cop investigating a homicide at all? The state police need to be prepared to step in and help these incompetents.”

  “He wasn’t incompetent,” Tess said. “Just… inexperienced. And the state police were in charge all along. Carl Dewitt kept investigating this homicide on his own time, even after he retired on disability, because he cared.”

  “Or because he had fucked up,” Whitney said, “and was psycho to boot. Look, don’t take it so personally. No one’s accusing you of messing up. The point is, we have reams of stuff to take to the judicial committee next session. You’re working for advocates, remember? When you write your report, be sure to gear it to our needs. Who knew that five seemingly unrelated homicides would actually yield such a rich find?”

  Who did know? Tess wondered as she hung up the phone. She had been so focused on Tiffani and Lucy that she had forgotten about the other three names: Hazel Ligetti, Michael Shaw, Julie Carter. Were they significant in some way? Carl had said it wasn’t accidental that their paths had crossed. But Carl was crazy. Well, not crazy, but obsessed.

  The day they had returned from Saint Mary’s, Major Shields had taken her into his office for a final conversation.

  “I want you to know, we don’t blame you,” he said. “You’re not responsible for Carl’s mistakes.”

  “Gee, thanks,” she said.

  “But you are responsible for your own. You were insubordinate. In our organization, we need people to follow instructions. I told you we could overlook your visit to the Gunts family. But you should not have tried to interview the little girl, Darby.”

  “Why not?”

  “Interviewing children is a specialized skill. It requires training.” He allowed himself a one-sided grin. “Just like the domestic violence cases that were supposedly your focus.”

  “Point taken.”

  Major Shields was not insensitive. He realized that Tess’s sourness was not about being cut out of the official investigation.

  “Don’t blame Carl,” he said.

  “Why not? You do.”

  “Carl suffered a breakdown while working on the Fancher case. That’s why he’s on permanent disability from the state.”

  “He told me he screwed up his knee in a fall.”

  “He may have, but that’s not why he got early retirement.”

  “If he’s such a nut, why did you let him work on this?”

  Major Shields was still wearing his trooper hat, which was disconcerting. It made his eyes harder to see.

  “That was Sergeant Craig’s idea. He thought it might help Carl. If we made an arrest and he could feel he was part of it, it could have helped him put the whole matter behind him.”

  “So instead you humiliated him by dragging him down to Saint Mary’s.”

  “That was for you,” Major Shields said. “We wanted you to understand how serious this is. And we wanted you to know the investigation is, for all intents and purposes, over.”

  “They never found a body.”

  “But that’s where you’re wrong.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Several men about the right age have surfaced in the bay since Charlie Chisholm disappeared, including two John Does. Remember, Charlie Chisholm wouldn’t come up as Charlie Chisholm, because the real one is alive. We’re looking at these drowning victims. We’re sure one of them is our guy.”

  “But if Charlie had surfaced, wouldn’t someone have brought Mary Ann Melcher in to make the ID? After all, the DNR police knew he had gone missing because of the float report.”

  “These bodies were found in such an advanced state of decay that visual ID was—to put it nicely—no longer feasible. But the medical examiner had dental records on file that Mary Ann thought belonged to her boyfriend. She found them in the apartment after he disappeared. Here’s the odd thing: The dental records matched the real Charlie Chisholm, the one in the VA hospital.”

  “How did he get those?”

  “Believe me, we’re trying to find out. But it explains why they didn’t match up to a John Doe.”

  “But what if Carl is right? What if the killer just faked his suicide and he’s still out there? What if he’s moved to another state?”

  “We’ve been all over that, Tess. We cannot find a single unsolved homicide that matches. The guy’s either dead or he’s Houdini. Do you believe in criminal masterminds? Do you honestly think that serial killers are geniuses, toying with law enforcement officials? In many cases, they’re the lowest of the low, with barely functional IQs.”

  “Still—”

  “Go home, Tess.” His voice was not unkind. “Let Carl be an example to you of what can happen when you get obsessed with something.”

  “And what if Carl is right?”

  The question caught her off guard, but only because it was strange to hear Dr. Armistead say what was inside her head. He had a way of sneaking into her thoughts when she least expected it.

  She hated it when he did that.

  “I don’t think he is,” she said. “And even if he is—it’s up to the police. I don’t investigate homicides.”

  “But you were investigating homicides. Or so you insisted when I made the same point two weeks ago.”

  “I was hired to examine the police work on five—well, four—open homicides. I did that. Game over.”

  “You think of it as a game?”

  “That’s just an expression. From video games, you know? You play for ten or fifteen minutes—or, in my case, more like ninety seconds— and then that’s what it says on the screen: GAME OVER.”

  “Are you angry at Carl?”

  She sighed. “That word’s never far from us, is it?”

  “It’s the reason we’re here.”

  “No, I’m not angry, although he undermined me when he didn’t tell me everything he knew. I feel sorry for him. He did the best he could. He had his reasons. They were the reasons of a damaged man, who can’t think things through very well, but they were reasons. I’m sad about Carl. I liked him. I liked working with him. I didn’t want him to be a nut.”

  “So someone who spends a few weeks in a mental hospital as the result of a situational trauma is a nut? Or is it the fact of Carl’s obsession that makes him—again, I’ll use your term—a nut?”

  “Sorry.” Except she wasn’t. She liked mocking his work, liked being politically incorrect about mental illness.

  “Whether he is right or wrong, Carl believes the killer is still at large. What if he’s right?”

  “He’s not.”

  “But imagine if he were. In his mind, he was in a position to try and prevent another woman’s death. How do you think you’d feel if another woman died now?”

  “No one’s going to die. The killer’s dead. Are you saying Carl was right?”

  “I’m not saying who’s right or who’s wrong. I’m asking you to show some empathy for this man you claim to like so much. Even if the supposition is false—or even som
ewhat self-aggrandizing—how would you feel if you thought there was even a chance you could have saved someone’s life if you had done something differently?”

  Dr. Armistead’s deep, rumbling voice was extremely mild. He was learning, Tess realized, that she was quick to take offense if he was too sharp, too pointed. Tyner Gray hadn’t mastered that trick, despite knowing her for almost a decade.

  “I would feel awful,” she said, “but I would get over it.”

  “The same way you got over the death of your boyfriend, Jonathan Ross?”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “You mentioned it, at one point.”

  Had she? She couldn’t remember. She thought she had kept Jonathan to herself, even here.

  “I wasn’t at fault in Jonathan’s death. I didn’t cause it, I couldn’t stop it.”

  “Did that keep you from feeling guilty?”

  “No.”

  “So imagine if you were at fault. How would you feel? That’s all I’m asking, Tess. Imagine how you would feel if you believed someone’s death was on your hands, as we used to say.”

  “There are no deaths after Lucy Fancher’s. So Carl doesn’t have to feel guilty about anything.”

  “Then maybe he feels incomplete.”

  “If you use the word closure I’m going to get up and walk out.”

  “You can’t walk out,” Dr. Armistead said serenely. “You’re here under court orders. You’re mine for five more months. Do you realize today marks our first-month anniversary?”

  The syntax bothered her. It bothered her quite a bit. You’re mine for five more months.

  “I’m not yours,” Tess said. “I’m not anyone’s.”

  “My apologies. I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. All I’m trying to do is get you to be more empathetic. You say you liked this man, Carl Dewitt. Why can’t you see he may have had reasons to do what he did? Why can’t you try and understand him?”

  “You’re saying that, even if he’s wrong, his conviction that the killer is still at large would explain why he did what he did.”

  “Something like that. I don’t know anything about Carl other than what you’ve told me. But it seems to me that a man who couldn’t solve one woman’s murder might feel better about himself if he could at least bring the man to justice. He’s been denied that. And imagine how he would feel—how you would feel—if someone else were to die now?”