The Last Dead Girl Read online

  She smelled of cigarette smoke, and pot, but there was something else too. Something sweet. He thought she must have snuck a breath mint from her purse.

  “I know why you brought me here,” she said.

  “Do you?”

  “It’s a pretty place. Out of the way. Perfect.”

  “It is perfect, isn’t it?” said K. “You know, there’s something I have to do later and I’ve been worrying about it all day. I need to relax. And being with you has helped.”

  “That’s cool. That’s what I want too, to help you relax. Just the two of us out here, I think we can make that happen. It might be easier if we had a blanket, but we’ll make do.” She wiggled her bottom into him. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought so.”

  He rested his chin on her shoulder. “But I don’t know if I should.”

  “Oh, I think you should.”

  “It’s complicated. There are a lot of things to consider.”

  “Keep it simple,” Jolene said. “Think about the things I can do for you, to get you to relax.”

  K’s hands slipped under her shirt and she drew in the muscles of her stomach. Then she yawned, a big yawn that arched her back. She giggled at the end of it. “Pot does that to me sometimes. Tires me out.”

  “What else does it do?” K asked. “Does it ever affect your memory?”

  “No. It never has.”

  “What about drinking—does that make you forget?”

  She laughed. “How much drinking do you think I’ve done today?”

  K looked down at the still surface of the water. “So you’re not going to forget me? You’re not going to wake up tomorrow with just the haziest idea of what I look like or where you saw me?”

  Jolene rubbed herself against him. “Not a chance,” she said. “I’m definitely gonna remember you.”

  K took one of his arms from her middle, put it around her neck.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  9

  In the room with the white-tile walls—after Jana Fletcher died, after I found her body—I watched Detective Frank Moretti pinch the bridge of his fleshy nose between his fingertips, I heard him draw a deep breath.

  “A popsicle stick?” he said.

  “In the woods behind Jana’s apartment,” I said. “I can show you where.”

  He laid his palm on the table between us. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I need to know everything about her, whatever you can tell me. Start with the day you met and we’ll go from there.”

  And we did. I told him everything I could remember about the Night of the Doe, and the night in the moonlight when Jana thought she was being watched. I told him about Simon Lanik, the landlady’s grandson. We talked about every time I’d seen Jana, every place we’d gone together. Sometimes Moretti took notes. Once in a while, one of his colleagues would knock on the door and call him out into the hallway, and I’d hear snatches of their conversation—as the door closed when Moretti left and as it opened when he came back.

  We talked about Sophie Emerson too. I would have left her out of it, but Moretti already knew about her—knew we were engaged. And he could see the cut on my temple and wanted to know how it happened. When I told him, he laughed. “You got off easy,” he said.

  Sophie had regretted hitting me as soon as it happened—at least, she said she was sorry. I don’t know if she really was, or should have been. She offered to stitch up the cut for me or drive me to the hospital where someone else could do it. I wound up tending it myself—swabbing it with alcohol in the bathroom of our apartment, covering it with gauze and tape.

  At that point, Jana had a few hours left to live, and nothing I did in those hours was any use to her at all.

  I slipped out of the apartment without another word to Sophie. Easy enough—it’s not as if she wanted to stop me. I ate lunch in a diner downtown. After that, I drove out to a subdivision with an artificial lake and a nine-hole golf course and did a home inspection for an insurance salesman and his pregnant wife. Four bedrooms, three baths, finished basement—all in good shape, apart from a roof that needed to be reshingled.

  I collected a check from the insurance salesman, took it to my bank. Stopped for coffee. By then it was going on five o’clock, and I was scheduled to meet Jana for dinner at seven-thirty at The Falcon, the restaurant with the canoe hanging from the ceiling.

  That was the plan. But I could’ve deviated from the plan. I could’ve gone to her and done the thing I’d been putting off—I could’ve told her about Sophie.

  I went driving instead, to think it over, to plan it out. You could say the cut on my temple had left me skittish about talking to women. Or you could say I was a coward and my cowardice cost Jana her life.

  It’s hard to remember everywhere I drove—though Frank Moretti wanted me to remember; in the room with the white-tile walls, he questioned me about every detail. I know I went out to Quaker Hill Road. There was nothing to mark the spot where Jana met the deer, except for a few specks of glass from the shattered windshield of her Plymouth.

  At seven-thirty I was sitting in our usual booth, the one beneath the canoe. I peeled the tape and gauze from my temple, because I figured however bad the cut might look, it wouldn’t be as noticeable as having a white square stuck to my head. I waited.

  When Jana didn’t show by seven forty-five, I used my cell phone to call her apartment. No answer. I left a message on her machine. At eight o’clock I called again. Same thing.

  At ten after eight I finished off the drink I’d ordered and left some money on the table for the waitress. I drove to Jana’s apartment—fast, but not too fast. Because on the one hand someone had given her a bruise and maybe spied on her from the woods, but on the other hand I didn’t want to overreact. Maybe something unexpected had come up, maybe she had car trouble.

  I turned onto her street around eight-thirty and saw her beat-up Plymouth in the drive—with the brand-new windshield, the one the shop had put in after the deer shattered the old one. All the lights in the apartment seemed to be off, but beyond that nothing looked wrong. Even the front door looked normal at first. But when I went to put my key in the lock the door swung inward and I saw that part of the jamb had splintered away.

  And I was wrong about the lights. There was a light burning inside. A single tea-light candle on the living room floor, about eighteen inches from Jana’s left foot.

  • • •

  I flipped a switch and the overhead light came on, and if there had been any doubt in my mind that Jana was dead, it went away.

  She lay on her back with her eyes open, her face tipped toward her right shoulder. I remember thinking that the crescent bruise on her cheek was gone.

  (It’s fading. In a few more days you won’t be able to see it.)

  She had other bruises now: ugly ones on her neck where someone had pressed his thumbs into her throat. Her blouse had been torn open. Her jeans and underwear had been pulled down to her knees. Her feet were bare.

  The two-by-four from the mantel over the fireplace lay on the floor beside her. It was four feet long—longer than a baseball bat—and she might have used it as a club. I’d like to think she did; I’d like to think she got in at least one good swing at her killer.

  If she did, it would explain what happened to the tea-light candles. They would have been burning on the mantel, nestled in the shallow holes drilled into the two-by-four. Now they were scattered across the hardwood floor, three of them extinguished, one still glowing.

  I can still recall the scene, but what I can’t picture now is the expression on Jana’s face, and that’s a blessing. I can only remember that it was wrong. Like when you catch a glimpse of someone you know on the street and they don’t know you’re watching them, and they’re miserable or angry or depressed, and you’re seeing them
in an unguarded moment. They don’t look right; they don’t look like themselves.

  That’s not it exactly, but it’s close. As close as I can come.

  • • •

  So you never checked for a pulse,” Frank Moretti said.

  “No.”

  “Some people would have.”

  “I didn’t need to,” I said. “She was gone.”

  “And you didn’t cover her.”

  “Cover her?”

  “With a sheet or a blanket.”

  “Should I have done that?”

  “It’s better you didn’t. It tends to screw up the forensics.”

  “Then why—”

  “Because it’s something people do,” Moretti said. “She’s there on the floor, exposed, vulnerable. Someone who cared about her might have been tempted to cover her up.”

  “Meaning I didn’t care about her.”

  “I haven’t said that.”

  • • •

  For what it’s worth, I held her hand. I called 911 on my cell phone and knelt beside her to wait, and her hand, when I took it, was neither cold nor warm. It felt empty as a glove, but I held on to it anyway. I’m not sure how long—as long as it took for the first cop to show up.

  He was young, a patrolman on traffic duty. I met him at the door and he caught sight of the body right away and brushed past me. I stood in the archway to the kitchen watching the back of him as he looked down at Jana. I think it must have been his first murder. When he finally turned around, his face looked ashen. I stepped backward into the kitchen and gestured toward the sink. I thought he might need it.

  He didn’t, in the end. He bent over it with his mouth open and gulped air, but that was all. When he straightened up, he wiped his sleeve across his mouth, though it looked dry enough to me.

  “You’re all right,” I told him.

  The wrong thing to say, because it reminded him that I’d been there all along. He’d been careless. Who knows what I could’ve done while he had his back to me? I could’ve clocked him over the head and swiped his gun and gone for a joyride in his car. He decided to get tough retroactively.

  “Put your hands on your head.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “Do it.”

  He unsnapped his holster and touched the grip of his gun, and I put my hands on my head. When he told me to turn around, I did that too. I was facing the wall beside the archway. I could hear cars pulling into the drive, more cops coming. I felt his hand on the back of my collar, heard him say I had the right to remain silent. He shoved me forward roughly and if I hadn’t turned my head I think he would have broken my nose. As it was, the side of my face hit the wall and the impact opened up the cut on my temple.

  • • •

  In the room with the white-tile walls, my fingers kept returning to the cut. It had its own topography: a long, thin ridge. Moretti had given me a Band-Aid to cover it, but it wasn’t big enough. I could feel the ends of the cut on either side.

  Moretti saw me fussing at it. He closed his notebook and said, “All right. We’ll take a break. Ten minutes. Then we’ll start again at the beginning.”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I’m leaving.”

  The idea amused him. “You’re not leaving.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  “I still have questions.”

  It was almost three in the morning and I had questions too. Not the kind that could be answered in that room. I was tired and I needed to know where I stood. The only way to find out was to press the issue.

  “This has gone on long enough,” I said. “You can let me go or you can charge me with something. And I don’t think you’re going to charge me.”

  “Why not?” said Moretti.

  “Because by now you’ve had a chance to figure out what time Jana died.” I was guessing, but it seemed likely. It was probably the subject of one of his conversations in the hallway. “And if it happened while I was sitting in The Falcon waiting for her, that’s something you can verify. You might have done it already.”

  I was hoping that might be true, but Moretti’s reaction—the terse shake of his head—made it clear I wasn’t going to be so lucky.

  “The medical examiner’s best guess is that Jana Fletcher died sometime between six and seven,” he said, “which means it happened while you were out driving and thinking. According to your story.”

  “It’s not a story.”

  “It is until I confirm it.”

  I shrugged. “You’re still not going to charge me. It’s too soon. You want to be sure. You don’t want to be proven wrong later—when you find out it was someone else. That would be embarrassing—”

  “I can live with the embarrassment.”

  “It would be bad for you, and for the entire police department. You’re forgetting who I am. My family’s name is on buildings in this city. If you get this wrong, I can make trouble for you.”

  Moretti frowned. “Are you threatening me?”

  “No. I’m done talking to you. If you plan to keep me here, I’ll need to call a lawyer.”

  I sat back and crossed my arms, and he glared at me from under his heavy brow. Up above us, the fluorescent lights hissed—a fitting sound track for our contest of wills. We might have gone on like that for a long time, but someone knocked on the door and Moretti stood up slowly and took his notebook and went out.

  He stayed away for twenty minutes. After the first ten, I got up and checked the door (locked) and stretched and paced around the table. I couldn’t hear any sound from the hallway, but I figured Moretti was out there talking to someone—maybe about whether I could really cause them trouble if they refused to let me go. I hoped they were talking about that, and I hoped the prospect made them nervous. But I didn’t think it would—not if they made any kind of inquiry about my family’s connections. Because everything I had said to Moretti was a bluff.

  Moretti had been the first to bring up Austin Malone, who had managed to get his name on some buildings at Bellamy University. Austin was my great-grandfather, true enough, and he had been a wealthy man in his day. He had inherited a business from his father: a mill that produced copper wire for telephone lines and copper pipe for plumbing. But a mill is a grubby place, and Austin Malone had no interest in spending time in grubby places. He sold the mill after his father died—to the Revere Copper Company in 1928—and used the money to buy as much prestige and refinement as it could buy.

  It bought quite a lot. Austin Malone kept his money out of the stock market and managed to weather the Great Depression and the Second World War. But when he died in 1949, he left behind five sons and three daughters—and a great fortune divided eight ways works out to eight rather modest fortunes. Flash forward two more generations and there was nothing much left, just a name carved into a stone façade here and there, and a comfortable middle-class existence. My father was a building contractor and sent me to college to study engineering. I had relatives with good careers—I even had a cousin who practiced law. But it was tax law, not criminal law. Not the kind that could help me.

  So my threat against Frank Moretti was empty talk: I couldn’t begin to make any trouble for him. And if he wanted to make trouble for me, there was no one in the Malone clan who could pick up a phone and make it go away.

  I don’t know if my bluff worked, or if Moretti was an honest cop who didn’t want to arrest someone for murder without being sure, but something changed in the twenty minutes he was gone. When he came back into the room the glare had gone out of his eyes and they looked tired again. He had a plastic bag that held my wallet and my phone and my other possessions. He tossed it on the table and held the door for me and said, “You’re free to go.”

  10

  The central police station in Rome is in the old courth
ouse building on North James Street. There are broad steps in front that lead down to a plaza with a pool and a fountain. There are cherry trees planted around the pool, and benches among the cherry trees.

  I’d been there before and I knew the fountain was something to see, especially after sundown when they turned on the lights around the pool. But at three in the morning there was no one to appreciate the spectacle: the lights had been dimmed and the water had gone still.

  I walked down the courthouse steps and through the plaza, past a sign that read NO LOITERING AFTER DARK. I didn’t loiter. I came to the street and thought about my truck, which would still be at Jana’s. I could get a cab to take me there, but there were no cabs in sight.

  I hiked a block to a bus stop and sat on one end of the bench under the shelter. An elderly black man in a trench coat sat on the other end. His coat had a tear along the shoulder that had been mended with duct tape.

  “Do you know when the next bus comes?” I asked him.

  “Somewhere ’round six a.m., I guess.”

  “Is that the one you’re waiting for?”

  “Might as well wait for that as wait for anything.”

  There was a map of the bus routes on the shelter wall, and a quick check confirmed that none of the routes would take me anywhere near Jana’s apartment, even if I wanted to wait until six. My back ached from sitting in the white-tile room, and the cut on my temple itched. I was tired. I took out my phone to call a cab, and the display revealed seven missed calls, all of them from Sophie.

  I tried to imagine what I might say to her, came up with nothing, put the phone down on the bench. I leaned my head against the plexiglass wall of the shelter and closed my eyes, just to rest them.

  The man in the trench coat said, “You got the wrong idea, son, sleepin’ in a bus stop. Cops’ll roust you for sure.”

  “I’m not going to sleep.”

  He laughed. “Think I know what a man looks like when he’s ’bout to sleep.”

  I slept. Had a dream too, though I don’t remember much of it. I know there was candlelight in it, and Jana Fletcher, and she was alive.