The Last Place

“And he went to Mondawmin,” Sergeant Craig said. “Those are some surly-”

He caught himself, but Tess’s head snapped up. This remark she couldn’t let pass. “Go ahead, Sergeant. Feel free to finish the racial slur. Or is it the gender of the DMV workers that gets under your skin?”

“I’m not a racist.” Then, a beat later. “Or a sexist.”

“Let’s chalk that up as a moot point. The fact is, you’re probably right.”

Carl, Major Shields, and Lieutenant Green looked at Tess in horror.

“No, I mean the pseudo-Alan Palmer probably chose Mondawmin because the government work force in the city tends to be exclusively African American. And you know what? We do all look alike to them.”

“Who’s the racist now?” Sergeant Craig asked.

“I have a friend, Jackie Weir, who has a three-year-old toddler. The other day she saw Julia Roberts on television and began pointing at her, yelling, ”Tesser! Tesser! Tesser!“ All because she was wearing her hair in a braid.”

The troopers saw her point with unflattering speed. Sergeant Craig even sneered a little and repeated the actress’s name to himself, then shook his head in disbelief.

“You’re so much bigger-” he muttered.

Tess decided she didn’t need to let him finish that sentence.

“Look, he’s a clever guy, whoever did this. He can’t control everything, but he plays the percentages. By using a living person who was incapacitated, he got himself a whole new life. There was little risk he would be caught as long as Alan Palmer’s in a vegetative state-and as long as he didn’t do anything to attract attention to himself. He’s like a parasite who’s just passing through. You don’t notice the tick that jumps off you after sucking up only a little blood.”

The major and the lieutenant nodded. Tess may not have won all of them over, but she now had a quorum.

“You’re on the money,” Major Shields said. “Identity theft is usually committed to rip other people off: open a charge account, get some stuff, move on. Alan Palmer had exactly one charge account, with a relatively small line of credit, and he paid the bills promptly. I’m not sure why he bothered to get a credit card at all.”

“He needed to rent a car,” Tess said. “To do that, you need a driver’s license and a credit card. Tell me this: Does Alan Palmer still have any open accounts?”

“He closed out the credit card a little over two years ago,” Lieutenant Green said.

Sergeant Craig leaned forward, eager to assert himself. “Which turns out to be a month after I got a call from a woman who said she was a caseworker with the state and wanted us to know he was in a hospital out of state.”

“She called me too,” Carl said. Tess poked his leg under the table again.

“Did you call the hospital to check?”

“Of course.” Sergeant Craig had the good grace to look sheepish. “I confirmed the Social Security number and DOB but let it go. I didn’t think to ask when he was admitted.”

“You didn’t find it odd, getting a call from some unidentified woman?”

“No, because Alan had been calling every month, asking if I knew anything. In fact, he was becoming a pest. The only thing I thought was, That is one unlucky guy.”

“Follow-up questions,” Major Shields said. “You have to remember to ask those simple questions, the ones that seem so dull and obvious. That’s where you find the inconsistencies.”

“It was a woman who called me too,” Carl said.

Everyone in the room looked at him, wondering why he was stuck on this point.

“Indicates an accomplice,” he said.

Score one for Carl, Tess thought. But it didn’t fit with what she thought she knew about this man. He was a loner, peripatetic, moving from town to town, woman to woman.

“Or a new girlfriend,” she suggested. “Another sweet dark-haired girl who wouldn’t ask too many questions if her new perfect-in-every-way boyfriend asked her to make such a call. Maybe he told her it was a prank, that the sergeant and Carl were old friends he wanted to fool.”

They sat in glum silence at the idea that the man was with a new girlfriend. Or would be, until the pattern kicked in. Why did he kill, why did he move on, what set him off?

“What about his other identity, Eric Shivers?” Tess asked. “Is that his real name, or did he steal that too?”

“Eric Shivers died fifteen years ago, at the age of seventeen,” Major Shields said. “But, sure enough, he had a valid Maryland driver’s license ten years after he died. It expired about a year after Tiffani Gunts did. Still in the system, but no one renewed it. Issued originally on the Eastern Shore.”

“How did Eric die?” Tess asked.

“Massive asthma attack, apparently. It was in a hospital over in Salisbury, although his family lived in Crisfield.”

“Hospitals.” Carl’s voice was too loud, almost a bark. “That’s one link between Eric and Alan: a place where someone with access to records can get Social Security numbers. You’ve got to look at hospitals.”

The major’s voice was not unkind. “We’re checking into that. We also searched registration records, but neither Eric Shivers nor Alan Palmer had a car in his name, not in this state.”

“Yet he drives,” Tess said. “More evidence of an accomplice-or yet another identity, a fixed one that he returns to in between…”

“Dormancy periods.” Lieutenant Green supplied the term again, but Tess no longer felt the urge to mock him. Clearly, there were dormancy periods, long ones.

“You gotta give him credit,” Carl said. “His organizational skills are formidable. Most people can’t get through the DMV with the right documents. Here our guy is, zipping through with phonies.”

“I don’t know,” Tess said, thinking of Mickey Pechter. “There’s a booming business in fake IDs out there. Even nerds from Towson know how to get them. What bothers me is the degree of pla

“Maybe he has a fear of commitment,” Sergeant Craig offered. It wasn’t meant as a joke, Tess realized, which only made it worse.

“You know what I think? He’s always pla

Her question was for Carl, not Craig. She didn’t think the sergeant was the best judge of human emotion. Of course, Carl was only marginally better.

He thought for a moment, shook his head.

“No, I never did. Which bothers me to this day. He was devastated. Now I may not have a lot of experience in homicide”-his eyes shot around the table, daring the troopers to note he had assisted on exactly one such investigation-“but I don’t get this: How did he manufacture grief for a woman he killed? A woman he butchered?”

“Postmortem,” Tess said. “Both women died from gunshot wounds to the chest.”

“The guns-” Major Shields began, a note of hope in his voice.

“No match,” Lieutenant Green said glumly.

“He sawed off Lucy’s head so his breakdown would be more credible.” Tess realized she had begun speaking in Carl’s definitive fashion-no “I think” or “what if.” She was creeping inside the killer’s skin, although not in the fashion of a profiler. She felt the way she did when she had crushes in junior high school, the kind where you slowly assembled a dossier on the object of your affections. You learned his class schedule, watched what he ate in the cafeteria, figured out who his friends were-all so you could time an accidental meeting at the water fountain, impress him with your wit and flipping hair.

Major Shields looked skeptical. “He shoots a woman, then cuts off her head and keeps her body with him a couple of days. In water. Someone that sick can’t pass for normal.”