The Last Place

“Not great,” she said. “But it seldom does at the begi

“What does it look like?”

“Seedy. Sad.”

“Would you feel that way if you didn’t know someone had been murdered there?”

If she didn’t already love Crow, such a question would have clinched the deal.

“It looks like a place that had big plans for itself, you know? Plans based on dreams that didn’t materialize. It has such a pretty location- it backs up to the Monocacy River-but the town houses have fallen on hard times.”

Studying the complex in the fading light, Tess decided the very touches that had been designed to give the town houses an upscale look-the wall sconces, the ceramic address tiles-were its downfall. Most of the sconces hung crookedly by their wires, and the tiles had faded until the numbers were barely legible. There were other telltale signs of neglect and carelessness. Deck furniture was cracked and dirty from sitting out all winter, the Dumpsters were overflowing, and some windows had newspaper for shades.

“Maybe the murder changed everything,” Crow suggested. “People sometimes shun a place if they know a homicide has been committed there.”

“It’s really off the beaten path,” Tess said. “One of those places that sprang up like mushrooms when the economy seemed invincible.”

“What goes up must go down.”

She knew Crow was talking about the stock market and the dot-com bust, but the observation applied to Tiffani as well. She had been on her way up-new job, new man, new house, new life-and someone had brought her down. Just one of those things, the Frederick sheriff said. In the wrong place at the wrong time.

Yet the wrong place had been her own kitchen, the wrong time had been the middle of the night. “If that’s wrong,” Tess said out loud, “then no one’s ever safe.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just stay on the phone with me until I cross the Potomac, okay?”

“Okay.”

CHAPTER 7

Sharpsburg was pretty in a bed-and-breakfast kind of way: red-brick houses that glowed in the morning sun, large shade trees, window boxes full of pansies and petunias.

But the unsolved homicide of Hazel Ligetti had taken place in less gracious precincts, away from the main streets that tourists saw. Her neighborhood was plain, verging on desperate, block after block of boxy wood-frame houses. Rentals, by the looks of the yards, which were shaved closer than a new marine’s skull.

Except for the lot where Hazel Ligetti’s house had stood. Two years after the fire, nature had taken back this patch of land. Ailanthus trees staked their claim at the edges of the property, while the foundations were wrapped in furry thorns of wild roses, like the brambles that surrounded Sleeping Beauty’s castle. Tess picked her way through the weeds, gathering burrs with every step.

She knew, from the newspaper accounts she had found on-line, that no accelerant had been found, just evidence of an ordinary small campfire built inside a storage shed a few yards from the house. The shed was gone too, of course. Tess paced it off, trying to figure out where the blaze had started. It had been March, an unseasonably bitter night. The supposition was that a passing vagrant, or maybe some teenage boys, had built a bonfire. The winds had been high and the flames needed little encouragement to race toward the house. The neighbor who called the fire department seemed almost awed by the fireball next door, according to the 911 transcript. On paper, the caller’s words seemed flat and thoughtful, punctuated by the occasional “Golly!” and “There it goes!”

The caller could afford to be blasé. He had lived upwind and across the street. No sparks on his roof, Tess thought.

Hazel Ligetti died from smoke inhalation, probably in her sleep. It was arson because the fire had been set by a trespasser. It was a homicide because someone had died, but that did not make it a murder, an act of intent: Problem Number One.

Problem Number Two: Tess could not make this case fit any domestic paradigm. Hazel Ligetti, according to her landlord, had lived alone and died alone. She had no spouse, no partner. No boyfriend, no girlfriend, no friends. The lack of survivors in her obituary had not been an oversight.

“She wasn’t what you would call… an attractive woman,” the landlord, Herb Proctor, said later that morning, settling behind his desk with a sigh and taking a long pull on a Big Gulp. “Walleyed. Fat. Hair so thin it was like she was going bald in spots.”

Tess wished she could recite back a list of Proctor’s notable features. Paunchy. Pitted skin. Toupee so bad you might as well glue Astroturf to your head and paint it brown.

Instead, she asked, “Could the fire have been an intentional one, made to look like a stupid accident? I’ve seen the other houses on the street. It doesn’t take a genius to realize how easy they’d burn. They’re little more than kindling.”

Proctor rolled his eyes and patted his hair cautiously, as if any movement might disrupt the alignment of his fake hair with the fringe of real hair at his neck.

“No one ever did figure that out. My money’s on some kid playing with matches. He panicked and ran.”

“A kid would have a hard time keeping a secret like that.”

“Well, it had to be an accident. Believe me, the insurance investigators were all over it. It was awful, what they put me through. You’d think I’d set the fire. As if I’d kill a woman to collect fifty thousand bucks. You saw the lot; it wasn’t even worth my while to rebuild. And Hazel Ligetti was like a good municipal bond fund, paying off a little every month. A dream tenant. Now, some properties you wish you could burn down because of what the renters do to them. But Hazel was neat as a pin. When you’re a landlord, there’s no downside to a woman who doesn’t entertain, doesn’t smoke, and has good hearing.”

“Good hearing?”

“Doesn’t play the television or radio loud, so you don’t have any neighbor complaints. Why, Hazel didn’t even have a cat, the way so many of these single women do.”

“Where did she work?”

“For the state. She was a secretary at the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene up in Hagerstown. Administrative assistant is what she called herself. Why do you think that is?”

“Because everyone wants to sound important,” Tess said, fingering the embossed business card that read HERBERT L. PROCTOR, CEO, HALCION PROPERTIES INC. She wondered if he had meant to name his company after the prescription drug, or if he was simply a poor speller. “Did anyone claim her body or make arrangements for the funeral?”

“I did.” Tess felt a stab of guilt for her harsh thoughts about Proctor. “She had a little life insurance policy, and I do mean little. I had to dip into my own pocket to make up the difference.” Tess no longer felt guilty.

“Where she’s buried?”

“Local cemetery.”

“Is there a marker?”

“A little one, very plain.” Tess frowned, and Proctor rushed to defend his cheapness. “That’s the way they do it, that’s their custom. Plain boxes, plain stones.”

“They?”

“Jews.”

“Hazel Ligetti was Jewish? Was it her husband’s name?”

“No. I told you, she was never married. I assumed she was Eye-talian myself, and I asked her one time if she was a good cook. She explained to me that the name was Hungarian, but it was supposed to be spelled slightly different-L-E-G-E-T-E, pronounced Le-get. Immigration changed the e to an i.”

“And changed a Jew into an Italian.”

“Well, who could complain about that? It’s not much of an improvement, but it’s definitely a step up.”

“Umph,” Tess said. It was a noise she had learned to make when she didn’t know what to say. Tess’s mother’s maiden name was Weinstein, and Tess’s own middle name was Esther, from the queen of the Jews- not the one in the Bible, but her grandmother’s sister, the oldest and most imperious female in a family of imperious females. “That Essie,” Gramma Weinstein always said, “thought she was the queen of the Jews.” But with the surname of Monaghan and her summer crop of freckles coming in, Tess looked like the good Irish Catholic girl she never was.