The Last Dead Girl Read online

  • • •

  The cigarette burn was a small red circle. K studied it on the drive home. In time, it would leave a scar, he thought.

  He flexed his hand on the steering wheel, just so he could feel the pain again. The burn was a punishment for his recklessness. He would need to be more careful. He had been wrong to go after the girl in the lot. He had crossed a line. It was hubris. Like Icarus with his wax wings, flying too close to the sun. You shouldn’t overreach. That was the lesson.

  Or was it? There could be another way to look at it, K thought. The girl in the lot was a prostitute. She was nothing. So when he tried to take her, he wasn’t overreaching. He wasn’t aiming too high; he was aiming too low. Aiming too low was a waste. A sin. What if that was the real lesson?

  The more K considered it, the more he thought he was onto something.

  He would need to remember. He had the red mark on his hand to remind him.

  Next time he would aim higher.

  K made the turn onto his street. He saw one of his neighbors picking up her newspaper from the sidewalk. He saw his house in the distance. Saw someone sitting on the front steps. Saw the man rise to his feet, haltingly, as if he might be in pain.

  David Malone.

  For a split second, K forgot himself. He had an urge to hide his face, to keep driving. The urge passed. He eased on the brakes and parked at the curb. Cut the engine of Malone’s pickup truck.

  He took the bag with him—his beer—and crossed the street. He called out a greeting. He touched his own car as he walked past it. And traded keys with David Malone.

  38

  Neil Pruett was a chatterbox.

  He apologized for using my truck. He’d had some errands to run. He hoped it was okay. I told him it was.

  He wanted to know about Moretti—if I’d been able to follow him, and where he had gone, and if I’d learned anything useful. I didn’t feel like talking. There was a storm coming. The woman at Summerbrook Manor had warned me. The sky was still light, but I could see the clouds gathering. They looked unnatural, like clouds on an alien planet.

  I still had that gored-by-a-bull feeling. It hurt to stand and it hurt to walk. I felt unsteady on my feet—and more than that: I felt like the world was an unsteady place. So those alien clouds made sense; they were the right clouds for the world I was living in.

  I told Neil Pruett I was sick and we would have to talk another time. I left him standing on his lawn with his grocery bag and climbed into the truck and drove out of there. I drove slow, the way you would if you were traveling along the edge of a cliff.

  Halfway home I felt nauseous. That’s not true: I felt nauseous the whole trip, but it peaked when I was halfway home. I pulled into the lot of a fast-food joint and stood by the side of the truck with my hands on my knees and didn’t throw up. Then I went inside, into the men’s room, and bent over a sink and didn’t throw up again. After a while I went into a stall and unzipped and peed for a very long time. It came out a vivid yellow, maybe too vivid, like the color of the sun on that alien planet. But not pink or red. Not bloody.

  I got back on the road and the world seemed steadier. The ground stayed solid and no chasms opened underneath me. I reached Jana’s apartment and pulled into the driveway. The wind blew through the leaves of the oak as I stumbled to the front door. The storm was coming. I turned my key in the lock and went in and found Napoleon Washburn sitting in my kitchen.

  • • •

  A haze of cigarette smoke hovered in the air. I saw that Washburn had taken the clay bowl down from the mantel—the one that held Jana’s quarter. He was using it as an ashtray. He sat with one elbow resting on the table, his long, lanky frame sprawled in his chair. He wore jeans and a gray fleece shirt, the sleeves pushed up to his elbows. His dark hair was unruly.

  He had his feet up on a second chair. His work boots were worn and stained. I recognized them. I’d seen one of them up close.

  “Come on in,” Poe Washburn said. “Shut the door. Sit down.”

  He was mellower than I remembered—but the last time I’d seen him, his house had been on fire. I heard confidence in his voice, along with a trace of menace. He gestured at the chair across from him with the hand that held his cigarette.

  I could have gotten angry, but I didn’t have the energy. I sat.

  “I’m glad you’re here,” I said.

  He drew on the cigarette, let out a plume of smoke. “I bet.”

  “How’d you get in?”

  “Back door. I broke the window and reached through.”

  I looked back there and saw the remnants of the glass in the frame. I had to lean sideways in the chair to do it. The effort made the room sway a little. I felt sweat breaking out on my forehead.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “Tell you the truth, I kinda wanted to.” He tapped ash into the clay bowl. “I came here thinking I would bust some things up, maybe kick your ass. I thought it would make me feel better. But now that I see you, I don’t know. You look like you’re barely holding it together. What happened to you?”

  “I’ve had a rough day.”

  “It shows.” He brought the cigarette up. Inhaled. Exhaled from the side of his mouth.

  He said, “Do you have any money?”

  “Why?”

  “I could use some.”

  I thought of all the bills from my wallet, torn in pieces, lost in the grass of Summerbrook Manor.

  “I don’t have any.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Poe Washburn said. “I was looking around before. You’ve got a thirteen-inch TV that might get me ten bucks at a flea market. You’ve got a computer, but it’s not a laptop. It’s a desktop and it’s probably four or five years old—”

  “Six.”

  “—which means maybe I could donate it to the Salvation Army. They’d be happy to have it. No one else would. You’ve got a clock radio and an electric toothbrush. You’ve got jack shit. Some people keep a roll of cash in a coffee can or in a baggie in the freezer, but not you. How long have you been living here?”

  “Not very long.”

  “It’s kind of a dump. You know that, don’t you?”

  I didn’t answer him.

  He shrugged. “I grew up living in dumps. So I’m not judging.” He tapped the cigarette out in the clay bowl. “I did find one good thing,” he said, “in your nightstand.” He reached below the table and pulled out Agnes Lanik’s pistol. It had been resting on his lap, out of sight.

  “It’s got a foreign name,” he said. “Markov.”

  “Makarov,” I told him.

  He leveled it at me across the table. “I’ve never seen one like it.”

  “Funny story about that gun—”

  “Yeah?”

  “I borrowed it from a woman I know, after I left that note at your house. I figured I should have it in case you came here with the wrong attitude.”

  “That is funny.”

  “You can put it away,” I said. “You don’t need it. We’re not enemies.”

  “We sure as hell aren’t friends.”

  “I didn’t set the fire at your house.”

  “Somebody set it. I don’t believe it was an accident.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Washburn brought his feet down off the chair, kept the gun trained on me.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let me have your wallet.”

  He didn’t say I should reach for it slowly, but it was implied. I brought it out and pushed it across the table. Every little movement hurt.

  He opened the wallet with his left hand and looked inside.

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I already told you.”

  “You don’t have any.”

  “Funny story about that—”

&nb
sp; “Save it,” Washburn said. He snapped the wallet shut and slammed it on the table, but it was too small a gesture. It didn’t soothe him. He aimed the gun at the ceiling and I thought he might fire off a round. He rocked it back and forth instead. A bobblehead motion. Letting off steam.

  “I don’t want to hear stories,” he said. “I don’t ask for much. Honestly, I don’t. All I’m looking for is some traveling money.”

  The words might have been for me or for the world at large. He delivered them with downcast eyes.

  “Where are you headed?” I asked him.

  He looked up sharply. “Away from here.”

  “How much do you need?”

  He scowled the way you might if a homeless person offered you a loan. But I could tell he was thinking about it. I watched the gun rocking back and forth.

  “Five hundred,” he said.

  “I have questions about Gary Pruett.”

  “I know.”

  “If you answer them I can give you five hundred.”

  “So says the man with the empty wallet.”

  “It won’t be cash,” I said. “I’ll write you a check.”

  He sneered and shook his head. “I don’t take checks.”

  “I heard you used to steal bicycles.”

  “So?”

  “So what’s harder, fencing a bike or cashing a check?”

  “A check could bounce.”

  “This one won’t.”

  “Or you could stop payment.”

  “That won’t happen either. You’ll get the five hundred.”

  The gun stopped moving. “Just for talking to you?” Poe Washburn said. “Because I’m not talking to anyone else, and I’ll never testify to anything.”

  “Just you and me.”

  I watched him thinking and then I watched him open my wallet again and fish out my ATM card. He pointed the gun at me and said, “If you’ve got five hundred in your checking account, then I could take you to an ATM right now and make you withdraw it.”

  “You could.”

  “And I wouldn’t have to answer any questions.”

  “That’s true.”

  “So why don’t we do it that way?”

  I didn’t relish the idea of going for a ride with him. Out there with the storm growing and the ground threatening to give way.

  “We could,” I said, “if I were afraid of that gun.”

  Washburn’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not afraid of guns?”

  “Not that one.”

  “I know it’s loaded. I checked.”

  “If it were a real Makarov I’d be worried,” I said. “But it’s a cheap East German knockoff. It’s been sitting in a drawer for thirty years. If you pull the trigger, maybe it’ll fire. Or maybe nothing’ll happen. Or maybe it’ll blow up in your hand. If I were you, I wouldn’t be too eager to find out.”

  He turned the gun sideways, examined it, aimed it back at me. “You’re bluffing,” he said. “If you don’t think it’ll fire, why did you keep it in your nightstand?”

  “I wanted it around, for show. I’d never be crazy enough to use it.” I stared past the muzzle of the pistol and focused on Washburn’s face. “Maybe you should think about why you’re trying so hard to steal the money that I’m offering to give you voluntarily. I’m going to get up now and go to the desk and bring back my checkbook. You can keep that thing pointed at me if it makes you happy.”

  I got up without waiting for him to respond. The floor stayed level. He didn’t try to shoot me. I dug my checkbook out of a drawer and came back and wrote a check to Napoleon Washburn in the amount of five hundred dollars. I tore it out and started to pass it across the table to him, but at the last moment I held it back.

  “The gun’s not mine,” I said.

  “So?”

  “So you’ll have to leave it. That’s part of the deal.”

  Washburn chuckled. “Do you think I’m dumb enough to hand you this gun?”

  “You don’t have to hand it to me. You just can’t take it with you.”

  We passed a moment in silence while he decided I wasn’t trying to trick him. Then he aimed the gun toward the living room and popped the clip. He ejected the remaining round from the chamber and laid the gun on the table. For good measure he used his thumb to flick each bullet from the clip until they were scattered like marbles over the floor. He tossed the empty clip after them.

  I gave him the check and he looked it over and slipped it in his pocket.

  “Gary Pruett never confessed to me,” he said.

  “I know,” I told him. “Frank Moretti convinced himself that Pruett was guilty. He had his reasons. I understand that. He wanted to make sure Pruett was convicted. But he needed help. I’ve wondered how he contacted you in jail. Did he talk to you in person?”

  “He sent a message through a guard.”

  “Okay. So he asked you to get a confession from Pruett. And you gave him what he wanted. He didn’t want the truth, because in his mind he already knew the truth.”

  Outside, the wind picked up. A branch of the oak scraped the front window. I continued: “I want to know about what happened after, when you made the decision to come clean and tell the real story—when you decided to contact Roger Tolliver and his Innocence Project. Why did you do that?”

  Washburn was shaking his head. “I didn’t. That’s not what happened.”

  “Sure it is. You called Tolliver, and Jana Fletcher was the one who answered the phone.”

  He waved a hand dismissively. “You’ve got it wrong. I’m not the one who called. It was never my idea. Jana Fletcher called me.”

  39

  Poe Washburn left twenty minutes later. I stood in the doorway and watched him cross the street to the parking lot of Reed Terrace, where he had left his truck.

  We’d spent those twenty minutes talking. I’d asked him more questions, and the answers he gave me left me feeling even more like the world had turned unsteady. I shut the door and looked around and everything seemed to lean a little sideways. It needed to be set right.

  I started with the clay bowl that Washburn had been using as an ashtray. I fished out Jana’s quarter with its strange, sharp point. I dumped the cigarettes and ashes in the trash. Rinsed the bowl and the quarter and dried them. I’d grown used to having them around. I wondered if I could justify keeping them. I slipped the quarter in my pocket and returned the bowl to its place on the mantel.

  I gathered the clip and the bullets from the kitchen floor and reloaded the Makarov pistol. I put that on the mantel too.

  I swept up the glass from the broken window in the back door and used duct tape to secure a piece of cardboard over the opening. I began to feel better, to move easier. The bull that had gored me was still following me around; he nudged a horn into my back now and then. But he was a smaller, weaker bull. I wasn’t so afraid of him.

  I knew my next move. There was someone I needed to see.

  I thought about Warren Finn, who was supposed to have a friend drop him off here tonight so he could pick up Jana’s things and drive her car back to Geneva. I wrote a note for him and taped it to the front door on my way out: Back soon. Come in. The door’s unlocked.

  • • •

  I’d never been to Wendy Daw’s apartment; I had to look up the address. She lived in the basement of a house on Dominick Street, a few blocks from the IRS building where she worked. She had her own entrance, at the bottom of a set of concrete steps.

  She answered the door in sweatpants and a flannel shirt. Her brittle hair was parted down the middle. The wind blew strands of it across her face.

  I had Jana’s picture out, the one I’d been carrying in my wallet. I held it up and said, “I think you knew her.”

  Wendy Daw backed away from the picture and I took the opportunity to step inside. She had he
r television on, the sound muted, an old black-and-white movie on the screen. I saw a bowl of popcorn sitting on her sofa.

  “I don’t want you in here,” she said.

  “I’m already in.”

  “This isn’t fair. I never wanted to talk to you about Eli. You told me if I did, I’d never see you again.”

  I waved the picture. “You said you didn’t recognize her. You lied to me.”

  I hadn’t been sure before, but now I knew I was on the right track. The picture made Wendy uncomfortable. Afraid.

  “I want you to go,” she said. “I don’t have anything to say about her.”

  She held the door open for me, as if it might be that easy. I pushed it shut.

  “Sit down,” I told her. “You don’t have to say anything yet. Just listen. I’ll tell you about Jana. She was a law student, working with one of her professors on an Innocence Project, trying to exonerate people who were wrongly imprisoned. She got caught up in a case—that’s what her professor told me. Cathy Pruett’s murder. You know about Cathy Pruett. Her husband went away for killing her. The crucial testimony against him at his trial came from a thief named Napoleon Washburn. Washburn claimed that Gary Pruett confessed to him in jail.”

  Wendy had stayed on her feet. She backed away from me toward the television.

  “Washburn’s story was a lie,” I said, “and eventually he decided to set the record straight, so he got in touch with the Innocence Project. At least, that’s what Jana told her professor. I found out today it wasn’t true. Washburn didn’t call Jana. She called him.”

  I stepped closer to Wendy Daw.

  “That’s not the way it’s supposed to work,” I said. “Jana’s professor, Roger Tolliver, told me he gets requests for help from convicts and their families constantly. He has to turn most of them away. He never has to go looking for cases to get involved in. But that’s what Jana did.

  “She called Washburn in February. When he wouldn’t talk to her on the phone she went to his house. She told him she knew he had lied about Gary Pruett’s confession. Washburn stuck to his story and sent her away, but she wouldn’t give up. She kept coming back. Finally she wore him down. He admitted that Pruett never confessed.