Last Look

by Mariah Stewart

  “Even though he was doing it slowly enough to make very clean, very even wounds.”

  Fuller nodded. “Right. Still, as you know yourself, things aren’t always what they seem.”

  Dorsey studied the still figure for a long moment, her eyes trailing the length of the left arm, then moving down to the thigh, then to the opposite side of the body where her gaze lingered on the right thigh and arm. Andrew watched her without comment. When she raised her eyes to his, she said softly, “She was a cutter.”

  “You saw that, too?”

  “Probably used a razor blade-see how very thin the scars are?” She pointed with a gloved index finger to the lines that went up and down the woman’s arms and the tops of her thighs like the pale, uneven rungs of a ladder.

  “Judging by the scars, I’d say she’d been doing it for a very long time,” Andrew noted. “Some scars have long healed, some have been reopened more than once. Some recently, I’d say.”

  “Interesting that it appears she might have stopped for a while, then started again.” She pointed to several long marks on Shannon Randall’s upper thigh.

  “Right. These are fresh. And here, on her upper arm, close to her shoulder?” Andrew studied the scars intently. “Almost all of the others are old.”

  “I noticed those,” Fuller nodded, “but I don’t recall having had this type of thing before. Read about cutting, but haven’t ever seen it firsthand. We don’t get a whole lot of kids in here, not like this. Most young people have left town, moved on before they reached this age.”

  “She cut for a long time, then stopped long enough for all those old scars to heal over and stay healed. Then something happened to make her start cutting again.” Dorsey seemed to mull it over. “So maybe whatever caused her to start cutting in the first place, whatever it was she’d gotten over sufficiently that she didn’t feel she had to hurt herself anymore-somehow, that whatever was back in her life.”

  Both men stared at her. She stood up straight and pulled off the gloves.

  Andrew did the same, turned to Doctor Fuller. “We really appreciate your time, Doctor Fuller.”

  “Anytime, Agent Shields. I’m going to have to release the body to the family soon-thought they’d be wanting it sooner than this, frankly. I suspect there’s some kind of to-do going on right about now, what with the young lady having been a hooker and one of her sisters being a preacher-”

  “Her sister?” Dorsey frowned. “I thought her father was the minister.”

  “He had been, up until just a couple of years ago. Car accident left him paralyzed. Heard all about it from the director of the funeral home up there in Hatton, where the Randalls are from.” Fuller covered the body with the sheet and slid the shelf back into the refrigerated drawer. “Hit and run. Car ran him off the road, then disappeared. Never even stopped. They figured it must have been a drunk driver. The man never saw it coming, apparently. Hasn’t walked since. It was the youngest daughter who took over the church.”

  “I think I remember more than two children in the family,” Dorsey said, trying to think back to her early teens when the story was fresh in her mind.

  “There are three sisters. Four daughters altogether. Oldest’s a state senator up in South Carolina now-she’s the one who identified the body. Another sister does something on television. And of course, the minister. Can’t recall the funeral director saying much more than that.”

  “Quite an accomplished family,” Andrew remarked as he and Dorsey headed toward the door.

  “Yes, so it would seem.” Fuller peeled off his gloves and dropped them into the wastebasket next to his desk. “It’s had me wondering how a girl from a family like that ends up like this girl did.”

  “Girls from all kinds of backgrounds end up like Shannon Randall, Doctor Fuller. There’s no easy answer why,” Andrew replied.

  “True enough.” Fuller nodded.

  “What was the sister’s demeanor when she came to make the identification?”

  “Solemn, I’d say,” the doctor replied after pondering the question for a moment. “Sober. Respectful.”

  “Emotional?”

  “No, wouldn’t have called her emotional.” Fuller shook his head from side to side. “She didn’t cry, just sort of looked at the body for a while. Asked me to raise it on the left side at the shoulder, and I did. She leaned down to take a look, and said something under her breath like, ‘Yes, that’s it.’”

  “She was looking for a birthmark,” Andrew said.

  “That’s right. On the back of the left shoulder, she has a little mark, sort of looks like a cigar. I’d noted it in my report, but she wanted to see for herself.”

  “What did she do, after she saw the mark?” Andrew asked.

  “She just sort of nodded and said thanks.”

  “And she just left, just like that?”

  “Pretty much,” Doctor Fuller told him. “Oh, one thing she did do. After she’d looked and I let the body back down on the gurney, she tucked some hair behind the girl’s ear. Sort of gentle, like. I remember thinking that was nice, her being the older sister and all.”

  “Thanks again, Doc.” Andrew waved from the door, and after he and Dorsey passed through, allowed it to close quietly behind them.

  The receptionist had left for the day while they’d been with Doctor Fuller, and she’d closed up the office on her way out, but there was sufficient light from the windows for them to find the front door. They walked to the parking lot in silence.

  Andrew stopped at the front of Dorsey’s car and looked at his watch.

  “How do you read the older sister?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. She came alone to make the identification. Why didn’t the mother or two younger ones come with her? And odd, don’t you think, that she was so unemotional about it? You think your sister has been dead for more than twenty years, then you find out she’s been alive all that time, but now she really is dead. Wouldn’t you show more feeling when you see her for the first time after all those years and she’s laying dead on a gurney in the morgue, all carved up? Wouldn’t you cry for her, just a little?”

  “At the very least.” Dorsey nodded. “It certainly makes you wonder about the relationships among the sisters. I wonder if the other two stayed away from the morgue because they’re more emotional than the oldest one.”

  “Maybe. But maybe there’s more to it than that.” Andrew checked his watch. “Look, it’s almost seven. How about we find you a place to stay tonight, then grab some dinner. There’s no point in trying to see the roommate tonight. Chances are she’s already out on the street.”

  Dorsey nodded somewhat absently.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked.

  “The Deptford Inn, it’s right as you come into town. Want to try there?”

  She nodded again. “I’ll follow you.”

  He started around the front of his car, then turned back to her.

  “You’re thinking that a family like the Randalls-a minister, a state senator, and someone involved in television-wouldn’t be happy to have this story break right about now.”

  “Three siblings, all in well-respected professions. And then all of a sudden, Shannon, who was supposed to have been dead all those years, turns up a hooker? You see something wrong with this picture?”

  “Oh, yeah. But I think the real question is, when did the long lost sister turn up? Before or after she was killed?”

  6

  A knocking sound from someplace far away drew Dorsey from a deep sleep. She opened her eyes and blinked several times until she remembered where she was: in a small third-floor room in the Deptford Inn, and the knocking sound was coming from the door.

  “Who’s there?” she asked cautiously.

  “Shields.”

  She got up slowly and went to the door.

  “Sorry.” She covered her yawn with both hands. “I must have conked out.”

  “You’ve been doing a lot of traveling these past few days. Tra
vel always makes me tired, too.” He leaned against the door frame.

  “Come on in.” She waved him inside and closed the door behind him. “Have a seat.”

  “No thanks. I didn’t intend to stay. I just wanted you to have a chance to look over Edith Chiong’s statement along with my notes before we sit down with her tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to try to find her tonight?”

  “Waste of time. We stand a better chance of catching her at her apartment in the morning. We’ll have a better shot at getting her to sit down and talk with us during the day, too. Tonight, she’s going to have her eye on the clock, time being money in her business.”

  “Good point.” Dorsey nodded.

  He handed her the file he’d had tucked under his arm.

  “This can’t be everything.” She frowned.

  “Not by a long shot, but this is the file on Edith Chiong. Her statement, notes from the Deptford police regarding the visits she’d made to the station trying to report Shannon ’s disappearance. It’s all in there.”

  He moved to the door. “I guess I’m going to turn in.”

  She walked to the door and held it open for him. “Thanks for everything today. Especially for letting me go with you to see the body and speak with Doctor Fuller. Up until today, Shannon Randall was just a name out of my past. Now…”

  He studied her face for a moment, and she had the feeling there was something right on the tip of his tongue. What he said instead was, “I’m in room 317 if you need me for anything. How about we meet in the lobby around eight in the morning, and we drive into the city together?”

  “Great. Thanks. I’ll see you then. And thanks for the reading material. I appreciate it. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “You’re welcome. I figured you ought to be up-to-date. Besides, like I said, she might open up to you more than to me.”

  Andrew walked through the open door and she closed it behind him, wondering what it was he’d wanted to say.

  Dorsey sat on the edge of the bed and read over the room service menu, then called and placed an order for a light supper. She piled the pillows behind her and sat back against them, the manila file on her lap. She opened it and thumbed through the contents.

  Edith Chiong’s statement was on the bottom, and there were reports from a number of police officers relating their conversations with her. Notes written on scraps of paper confirmed she’d called the station five times over a two-week period, starting with the morning Shannon had gone missing. The notes skipped a few days, but the statement indicated that Edith had also gone to the station on three separate occasions to inquire about her missing roommate. It didn’t take a genius to see that no effort had been made to locate Shannon Randall. “Missing hooker reported three days ago, still missing” was the extent of the notes one officer had scribbled. Dorsey could only begin to imagine how frustrated Shannon ’s roommate must have been.

  Room service was quick and good, and Dorsey sat cross-legged on her bed with her shrimp, which had been served with grits. She pushed the white mound to one side of her plate. Even after six years of living in the south, she had yet to develop a taste for grits.

  When she finished eating, she left her tray outside the door, then tried her father’s cell phone. When he didn’t pick up, she left a message asking him to call her, then lay back against the pillows with her eyes closed. She tried to reconcile the sweet face of the young girl she remembered seeing in newspapers and on television all those years ago with that of the woman whose lifeless eyes had stared unseeing at Doctor Fuller’s ceiling. What, Dorsey wondered, had forced her from her home without a trace?

  It occurred to her, not for the first time, that perhaps Shannon had been kidnapped. But surely that possibility would have been considered back in 1983, when no trace of her had been found. And if she’d been kidnapped, but alive all these years, why had she not contacted her family? Why, if she’d been free to live and work in Deptford, had she never gone home?

  Dorsey recalled several cases where kidnap victims never did contact their loved ones, even though they had many opportunities to do so. The explanations were as varied as the kidnappings themselves. None were ever exactly the same, the human psyche being what it is.

  Then again, how could she be certain Shannon had never contacted her family?

  She sat straight up in bed. Was it possible that someone in the Randall family could have known that Shannon had been alive all this time?

  But who would keep such a secret, and why? And there was the matter of Eric Beale. Surely, if someone knew the girl had not been killed, they would have stepped forward before this, wouldn’t they?

  Wouldn’t they…?

  A chill ran up her back and into her scalp.

  Yes, of course. Of course they would tell. She shook off the obscene possibility that anyone could have had such knowledge yet kept it to themselves. A young boy’s life had been at stake. Surely no one would have watched him go to his death and not said anything.

  She closed her eyes again and thought about the role her father had played in this drama, of the irony that she had stood over Shannon Randall’s dead body twenty-four years after the girl had supposedly been murdered. Twenty-four years after her father had arrested Eric Louis Beale for her death.

  She thought about the Beale family, and wondered if word had gotten to them yet. As difficult as it must have been for the Randall family to learn that Shannon had been alive all these years, how much more terrible it must be for the family of the young boy who’d been executed for a murder that had never been committed.

  Dorsey tried her father again, and was almost relieved when he didn’t pick up. It would be difficult to speak with him tonight. It all weighed too heavily on her heart, Shannon and Eric, their parents, their siblings, along with so many unanswered questions.

  She fell asleep with the light on, the possibilities playing free and loose in her head.

  “Good morning,” Andrew said when Dorsey walked into the lobby at two minutes past eight the next morning.

  “Hi.” She smiled and walked past the front desk to the door. “You driving or am I?”

  “I’ll drive, if it’s all the same to you.”

  She shrugged and followed him out the door and into the parking lot.

  “So. Did you have your eggs and grits this morning?” He unlocked the car with the remote and walked to the driver’s side.

  “I don’t do grits.” She opened the passenger door and got in, dropping her bag on the floor with one hand and slamming the door with the other.

  Andrew laughed and started the car without comment.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” she asked as the car turned left at the exit.

  “Got directions from the police department. Seems Shannon and Edith were no strangers to the locals.”

  “Their paths had crossed in the past?”

  “On more than one occasion. Loitering, mostly. Solicitation a time or two.” Andrew checked his rearview mirror, then pulled into the lane of traffic that was headed downtown. “I thought we’d spend some time with the roommate this morning, then I want to head up to Hatton, talk to the family.”

  “Sounds good.”

  They rode in silence for a few minutes, then Andrew said, “You read the file last night?”

  “Several times.”

  “Then you know there’s no love lost between Edith and the cops. She had to have been royally pissed when her friend went missing and she couldn’t get the cops to give her the time of day.”

  “Hey, what’s one less hooker in Deptford, right?”

  “Exactly. So I was thinking, she sees us coming, she’s going to try to bolt. Our best bet is to wake her out of a sound sleep; at least we’ll know she’s there.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe she won’t answer the door at all.”

  “In which case, we’ll have to resort to plan B.”

  “Which is?”

  “I’m still working
on it.”

  He drove into the city, past block after block of nondescript neighborhoods, some slightly nicer than others, before stopping in front of a tan brick building that might have been a fashionable address in the 1920s. Out front, there was a small patch of grass overdue for a cutting and a single white pot with some dried flowers that might once have been geraniums in cement-hard dirt. Andrew parked in a spot marked Reserved and turned off the engine.

  “Agent Shields, you do take me to the nicest places.” Dorsey stared out the window, taking it all in.

  “Nothing’s too good for a fellow agent.” He un-buckled his seat belt. “Ready?”

  She swung open her door and stepped out onto broken pavement. Candy wrappers and fast food bags lay on the ground close to the steps leading into the building, and chalked squares for hopscotch were barely visible on the sidewalk.

  “Do kids still play hopscotch?” Andrew glanced down as he caught up with Dorsey.

  “Guess so.” She started up the steps.

  “You play when you were a kid, Dorsey?”

  “No.” She pushed open the unlocked door. “Did you?”

  “My sister played. She loved colored chalk, the brighter the better.”

  “We didn’t have sidewalks where I grew up,” she told him as she read the names on the mailboxes.

  “No sidewalks?” He frowned.

  “ Hathaway Beach, where I was born, had sandy paths. No concrete.”

  “I thought you were from around Philly.”

  “How would you know that?” It was her turn to frown.

  “I know that’s where your father lives. He’s on TV all the time, and he always mentions it. Besides, you have the accent.”

  “I do not have an accent.” She tapped on one of the mailboxes. “Second floor, apartment 2G.”

  She headed toward the steps and Andrew followed.

  “We’ll knock on the door, and when she answers, you tell her you’re here to talk about Shannon,” he said.