The Last Place

After almost five years at the Elkton Democrat, Margo Duncan almost quivered with ambition. When she heard that a private investigator from Baltimore wanted to talk to someone about the Fancher case, she crossed the small newsroom in three bounds, chattering before she reached Tess’s side.

“That was my story,” she said. “The editors totally screwed it up. They kept saying, You can’t have decapitations in a family newspaper! Why? It’s the news, it’s a fact. It’s not like I dwelt on the details. Do you know how hard it is to sever a human head?”

Tess nodded, fearful this young woman would tell her if she didn’t.

“So it’s her, right? I mean, they have the head and her driver’s license. But I’m not allowed to say they have just a head. They change it to ”North East woman has been found dead on the toll bridge, an apparent victim of foul play,“ blah, blah, blah. As if it could be a suicide! And then, when her body shows up, propped up on the back steps-”

“With a jack-o‘-lantern. Or so I’ve been told.”

“Well, how do you write that when they don’t let you say in the first place that all they had was a head? Besides, the cops were saying I couldn’t include the jack-o‘-lantern part because it’s something only the killer knows, and my bosses took their side. So small-town. I looked like an idiot. I think the publisher was just thinking about real estate values. That area was going up then. Visions of property taxes danced in his head.”

Margo’s rat-a-tat rhythms seemed to have been modeled, in equal parts, on Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday and the little chicken hawk who dogged Foghorn Leghorn through so many Saturday-morning cartoons. Tess felt weary. It had been a long day and she was at least sixty miles from home. She yearned for her bed, her boyfriend, and her dogs, in more or less that order.

She took Margo by the elbow. “Isn’t there a break room around here?”

There was, there always was. No newspaper could publish without a row of vending machines somewhere in the building, filled with salty snacks and sodas and scalded coffee that missed the paper cups three out of five times. Margo Duncan chose a box of Mike amp; Ikes and began tossing them back as if they were tranquilizers and she was the main character in a sex-and-shopping novel.

“Want one?” She rattled the box at Tess.

“No, thanks.”

“No fat. I’m not saying they’re good for you, or even low in calories, but it’s pure sugar. You burn it off.”

Margo clearly did. Although she was of medium height and build, she had the jangly nerves of a toy poodle.

“I used to be a reporter,” Tess said. “Down in Baltimore.”

“At the Beacon-Light? Can you get me an interview?”

“I worked for the competition before it went under.” The frown on Margo Duncan’s face indicated she had forgotten Baltimore was once a two-newspaper town. “But you can use my name to get your foot in the door. The editors know me.”

They also hated her, but let Margo discover this on her own.

“Why are you interested in the Fancher case? Is there a story in it for me?”

A typical reporter’s question. “No, it’s pretty boring stuff. I’m just looking at open homicide cases, chosen at random. It’s an exercise in statistical analysis.”

That shut her interest down. In fact, Margo became positively sullen. She slumped in her seat, fishing the green Mike amp; Ikes from the box.

“I’m curious to know if there’s anything else that didn’t make the paper-besides the head thing, I mean.”

“Does that suck or what? They said it didn’t pass the breakfast test. Postmortem, I kept telling them, postmortem.”

“I imagine it’s hard to remove someone’s head before death,” Tess said.

“Which isn’t to say it hasn’t been done. Let me tell you, I’ve read all the books, all the life stories: Bundy, Dahmer, and lesser-known ones like Maryland’s own Metheney. People do some seriously sick shit.”

But books were the only place where Margo had encountered the seriously sick. She was no more than twenty-seven, and she was a young twenty-seven, with a face so clear and untroubled that Tess knew she had seen very little of the world. Margo Duncan was all talk.

“In your opinion,” she began, and Margo sat up a little straighter, delighted someone wanted her opinion, “in your opinion, how’d the local cops handle the case?”

“The local guys were cool. The state cop was a little jerky, but it turned out he had never caught a case like that either. Carl Dewitt was the king of no comment. Like he had anything to say anyway.”

It was the second time Tess had heard that name in as many hours. “Carl Dewitt was an investigator?”

“Carl Dewitt was the Toll Facilities cop who found the head and was, you’ll pardon the expression, like a dog with a bone. He couldn’t let go of the case. To his detriment. The state police finally wrestled it away from him, after he had to take a leave for knee surgery.” She stopped to think, using her index finger to work a piece of candy out of her teeth. “Or maybe it was back surgery. Something bad enough to get him disability, I remember that much.”

“Did they have suspects? Was it one of those cases where they just couldn’t make the case?”

Margo shook her head. “They didn’t have anything.”

“Did they look at the boyfriend?”

“Sure. Alan Palmer was down the shore in Saint Michaels, camping out before a big estate sale.”

“Camping out?”

“Palmer was sort of like a go-between for decorators and high-end antique dealers in Baltimore, Wilmington-even Philadelphia. I think they call them pickers, something like that.”

“Scouts,” Tess said.

“Really?” Margo wrinkled her nose. “Anyway, he shopped the auctions and antique sales with their wish lists. A huge estate sale, the whole contents of the house of some one-hit wonder of a writer, was scheduled for eight A.M. October thirtieth. Palmer went down October twenty-ninth. They were going to start handing out numbers at five A.M., and he wanted to be in the first batch of people let in. He pla

“So the cops go down to Saint Michaels and find him shopping an estate sale?”

Margo nodded.

“How did he take it?”

“Better than you think, actually. At least, he was okay for Part One. Maybe he was still in shock, I don’t know. But he got through identifying her head. It was when the body showed up that… I think someone came to town and took him away, kind of quiet-like. Later, the cops told me he was hospitalized, in a rehab facility somewhere out of state.”

“Drugs?”

“No, it’s physical rehab. He broke his neck in a car accident. Might be DWI, I du

“Had Lucy been married before? Did she have an ex, or even family members that the police suspected?”

“There’s an ex-boyfriend, a super-scary guy. His arms are so tattooed he looks like he’s always wearing sleeves. But they never charged him. Best I can tell, the cops have given up.”

“The state police just gave up?”

“The case is still open. Homicides never-”

“Close, I know. Still, it doesn’t seem like the kind of case cops give up on.”

“They think it was a drifter, someone passing through. So it’s not as if it’s a public safety risk for the county. And it’s not as if it’s happened again. But my theory is the other investigators look at Dewitt and figure they don’t want to end up like that.” Margo looked thoughtful, which in her case meant she managed to still her twitching limbs and features for about five seconds. “The Fancher case is like one of those mummy’s tombs, you know? There’s a curse on everyone who had anything to do with it. Dewitt screws up his knee-or his back, whichever-the boyfriend cracks up his car. I wonder if I’m next.”

She hugged herself, delighted by her ghoulish theory. Margo was probably trying to calculate if there was a marketable first-person narrative in all this tragedy. After all, what was the use of proximity to a great case if it didn’t further your career?