The Last Place

“You believe that bullshit? Whoever you are, there’s someone better than you and usually someone worse. Someone nicer, with better ma

“Having more money doesn’t make you superior.”

“Then why do we call it better off? Look, I’m not saying it’s right. I’m just saying it is. When you were bouncing Lucy off the walls every Saturday night-”

“Not every Saturday night,” Flood objected, a sudden stickler for accuracy.

“-you were on the same footing. You went to jail, Lucy started moving up in the world. Did you want her back?”

“No. I had a girl by then. I don’t have a problem getting women.”

Flood was probably telling the truth, a sad commentary on her gender. Tess found herself thinking about the boyfriend who had cheated on her. Actually, there were more than one, and Jonathan Ross had been a member of the club. But right now she was thinking about a particularly smarmy guy back in college, a guy who seemed to think his dick was like the root of a plant: If he didn’t get it damp on a regular basis, it was at risk of drying up and falling off. The last time she had caught him cheating-and it was to her everlasting shame that there was a last time, as opposed to a one-and-only time-the last time she caught him, he had explained that the woman in question was his old girlfriend. Apparently ex-girlfriends were like territories on which he held lifetime mineral rights.

“I’m not saying you wanted Lucy back,” Tess said. “But maybe once? For old times’ sake?”

“I called her the next day, told her how nice it was to see her, asked if we could have a drink some time. She liked that. She said it was civilized, having a drink with her old boyfriend. She said her fiancé- that was her word, fiancé-was out of town on business, and she’d meet me for a drink. I remember she ordered a white wine spritzer. Very fancy, she was, all full of herself.”

“How’d the evening end up?”

“The way it usually did with me and her.” Bo

Tess studied the man. It was unfathomable to her that he could be sexually desirable to anyone, under any circumstances. There weren’t enough white wine spritzers in all of Cecil County.

“You know,” she said, “Oliver Twist didn’t ask for more because the gruel was good.”

“Huh?”

“If Lucy was always asking for more, maybe it was because she never got enough.”

Flood reached his blue-purple right arm toward the soiled creases of his blue-jeaned crotch. “You wa

“God, no.”

“All right, then,” he said, as if he had won some debate. Tess didn’t have many flashes of intuition, and she didn’t trust many of the ones she did have. But she knew, in that instant, that Bo

Which would explain why the ex-cop, Dewitt, had been dogging him all this time. It wasn’t a bad motive, not that motives counted for anything. And Flood worked in a marina. He could keep a body in water for a couple of days.

“You didn’t sleep with her. Not that night.”

“I did.” Moral outrage, as if lying about sleeping with another man’s girlfriend was worse than doing it.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Look, I’d take it back if I could. Believe me, I’d take it back. If I knew that some crazy cop was going to dog me until the end of my life, asking me over and over again about the last time I saw her, what she said, how she looked, if she mentioned anything unusual.”

“Carl Dewitt.”

“Carl Dewitt,” he said wearily.

Tess gave up. She gave up on her cheeseburger, which tasted like compressed cardboard. She gave up on her fries. She gave up on her beer, which was flattish and briny, as if it had been mixed with river water. She gave up on Bo

She hated to admit it to herself, but she was disappointed. Despite her cynical protestations, she had wanted this job to be what Whitney had promised. She wanted to work for the good guys. She wanted-did she dare say this out loud?-to be a force for good. Part of the solution. She wasn’t so sure the state’s laws needed to be changed and revised, but she knew Maryland’s mind-set did. Miriam Greenhouse was right: Every time a man killed a woman, it was reported as another love story gone bad, especially if the man then finished himself off. Where was the love in this?

A light rain had started to fall. April was a petulant month in these parts. Tess sat in her car, anxious to get home, too weary to turn the key in the ignition. From here, the diner looked charming and cozy. Talk about a trompe l’oeil. A young couple sat in one of the front booths, leaning toward each other, laughing at some shared joke, the kind of laugh that was almost like a kiss, only better. The young man reached out and touched her face. It made Tess ache, and she had someone at home.

There are some men who would begrudge another man the love of a pretty woman. That had been the lunatic neighbor’s theory. By the light of day, it had seemed ridiculous. People killed for a lot of reasons, but rootless envy was not on that list to Tess’s knowledge. Besides, if you yearned to be part of a happy couple, wouldn’t you kill the man and make a play for the woman? No, it made no sense.

Still, something was bugging her. She dug through the folders in the passenger seat and found Tiffani Gunts, the grainy reproduction of her high school graduation photo. Lots of dark hair, tiny face. Lucy Fancher’s physical particulars were the same, before the haircut. The life was even more similar. Abusive ex-boyfriend, followed by a new life, full of promise, a new place to live, a fiancé. Then a sudden violent force rips through the happy household with the power and rage of a natural disaster, a hurricane coming to shore at the spot it is least expected. The woman is dead, the man is destroyed.

The storm moves on, implacable, searching for another place to come aground.

Tess went back into the diner, found the phone book, and tore the page she wanted from its residential listings. Dome light on, map propped on her steering wheel, she drove haphazardly through the streets of North East, ru

But eventually she found the house she wanted, a white bungalow with a front porch and only a sliver of land between it and the water. There was a dock, the silhouette of a sailboat visible in the moonlight. The house was dark except for the throbbing blue-white glow of a television set, the light pulsing through lace curtains.

The man who opened the door had gingery hair, sad blue eyes, and so many freckles crowded onto his round, placid face that he gave the impression of being striped, like a red tabby cat.

“My name is Tess Monaghan. I’m a private investigator from Baltimore, and I think there may be a new angle on the Lucy Fancher case.”

“About time,” said Carl Dewitt.