The Last Dead Girl (38 page)

“I've been expecting to see you,” he said as I sat beside him.

“Have you?”

“I like coming here. Maybe because it's quiet.” He paused, to demonstrate how quiet it could be. “But I knew I'd see you eventually.”

“Why?”

“Because people don't learn. No matter how smart they are. They always return to the scene of the crime.”

Moretti pulled a clump of grass from the ground at the edge of the blanket. He kept the longest blade and tossed the others away. He wound the blade around his finger.

“It could've been my case,” he said wearily. “When we found the wife with a broken arrow in her heart, the chief offered to let me take the lead. I didn't want it. So he gave it to O'Keefe. And when we found the husband, that one went to O'Keefe too.”

I looked off at the distant birch trees. Their leaves had just started to turn.

Moretti said, “I went down in that room, though. Just about every detective in the department went down there. Whoever killed Neil Pruett did an amateurish job. They got some things right. No shell casings left behind—that was good. But other things they screwed up. If you're going to kill a man, you kill him. You don't leave him to die.”

He played with the blade of grass, winding it and unwinding it.

“The M.E. couldn't say how long Pruett lasted, down there alone in the dark,” Moretti said. “Maybe a few hours, maybe a day. But before he died, he tried to scratch a message in the floor. He used a key. That was another rookie move, leaving him his keys. He didn't get very far, just one letter, an M. O'Keefe thinks he was trying to name his killer.”

“M could mean anything,” I said. “M for Megan. Maybe it was a message for his wife.”

“Maybe he was crying for his mother. But I thought you'd want to know: O'Keefe has his eye out for an M. He's curious about the keys too. So am I. There were a lot of them. Some of them—O'Keefe doesn't know what they open. But he'd like to know.”

I wasn't worried about the keys. I'd changed the locks at Sophie's apartment. At Jana's too.

“There's nothing I can tell you about keys,” I said.

Moretti held up the blade of grass and let the wind take it. He draped his tie around his neck.

“Do you have time for a walk?” he asked.

We strolled down the hill, Moretti with his blanket folded under his arm. As we approached the pond he said, “Warren Finn's wife had her baby.”

I knew. I'd already been for a visit. They had a boy, seven pounds. I noticed that Warren tended to cradle the kid with his right arm. His left was still a little stiff around the shoulder.

“I drove there the weekend before last,” Moretti said. “They seem happy. Lydia too. She loves the boy like he's her own grandson. I think that's good.”

We came to the pond and Moretti picked his way through some tall weeds and led me to a dock I hadn't seen before—the wood weathered and bleached by the sun. We walked out almost to the end.

“Lydia has questions, about Jana,” he said. “She asked me about these new murders, if I thought they were connected in any way with Jana's death. I told her no, I didn't see how they could be.”

Warren and I had told her the same thing when she asked us.

“I don't like lying to her,” Moretti said. “But I don't want her to know the truth. I wish I didn't know. When I went down in that room, I saw the gap in the wall, the missing board. I know what it means. I've got that piece of two-by-four sitting in evidence—the candleholder from Jana's apartment. O'Keefe hasn't made the connection. Maybe he never will. He's about as dense as you could hope for. But there are other things that might give it away.”

We watched a heron flying low over the pond.

“I've spent some time with Lydia,” Moretti said. “I've listened to her stories. Jana's trip to New York City, and how she came back on the bus because she had to sell her grandmother's car.” He rubbed the nape of his neck. “What do you think happened to that car?”

“I don't know.”

“I think it's here,” he said, looking out at the water. “It never turned up anywhere else. It's somewhere under the surface, maybe under the lily pads out there. But if we have a dry spell and the water goes down far enough, somebody might find it. And then everything comes out in the open. I won't be able to keep it from Lydia,” he said, turning to face me. “So should I tell her now? That's the question that's been troubling me. I want to do the right thing.”

He was looking for an answer and I didn't have one. I had something else, something that had been building inside me for a long time: a pressure, white-hot. I was thinking of the chain of events that began with one bad decision by Frank Moretti: if he hadn't framed Gary Pruett and sent him to prison, then Jana wouldn't have needed to save him, and she never would've gone to see Neil Pruett, and she would still be alive.

I thought the desire to do the right thing had come to Frank Moretti a bit too late.

The pressure had been building. It needed to go somewhere.

I made a fist and punched him in the jaw.

•   •   •

T
he night of the storm, after I gathered all the shell casings and retrieved my cell phone from the puddle in the barn, I waited for Sophie in the shelter of Luke Daw's trailer. She came for me around four in the morning and brought me back to her apartment, where Warren Finn, stitched up and bandaged, was recovering on the sofa.

Sophie checked on him, and then she and I went into the bedroom. We lay together in the darkness and she told me about waking up with Neil Pruett in the room. She asked me what I'd done to him and I told her.

“I would've put the bullets in the other gun,” she said.

At dawn she fell asleep. I stayed with her.

•   •   •

I
spent a lot of time with her that summer and fall. I didn't move back into the apartment—she never asked me to—but she called me when she needed me. She didn't feel safe alone at night, especially in those first few weeks after the storm.

Our engagement was called off by unspoken agreement. The wedding invitations never went out. We'd once scheduled the ceremony for a day in late September. I didn't hear from Sophie that day, but she called me the day after—the day I punched Frank Moretti.

We watched a movie on TV that night, something with Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks or both. I kept an ice pack on my hand; the knuckles were scraped and swollen. The punch had caught Moretti off-guard. It knocked him down. If the dock had been narrower, he might have gone into the water.

He sat rubbing his jaw and his expression showed me everything: shock and betrayal and regret. I wanted to help him up. He got up on his own.

“I wish I hadn't done that,” I said.

Moretti turned away and walked back along the dock. I watched him go. His feet shuffled and he looked tired. He had always looked tired.

I never talked to him again.

When Sophie asked about my hand, I told her the truth. She said I should keep icing it and it would be fine. It wasn't what I wanted to hear. I wanted her to tease me about it. I wanted to go back. I wanted her to say, “Dave, promise me you'll stop punching policemen.”

Later in the fall she started seeing someone—another intern at the hospital. Not Brad Gavin. A different one.

•   •   •

T
here's one last thing to tell. It happened in October, on a Sunday afternoon. I was walking on the hill at the farm.

In another year everything would be grown over, but on that day I could still see the long rectangular footprint where the barn had stood and the square plot that had held the ruined farmhouse. I paced back and forth between them, my shoes dragging through the grass.

Moretti had come here looking for quiet, and if I wanted to fool myself I could say I hoped to find quiet too, and a measure of peace. But what I wanted was to find Jana.

There were nights in her apartment when I woke up and lit the candles on the mantel and walked out onto the patio and into the grass, and if the moon was out I could almost feel her there. Almost.

I'd had the same feeling here on the hill. Once. I stood at twilight and watched the first stars appearing in the sky. I closed my eyes and she was next to me, as real as a touch on my shoulder.

Now I came to the footprint of the barn and turned back, and in the distance, at the edge of where the farmhouse used to be, I saw a crow.

It was on the ground, but it hovered over the grass, as if it didn't weigh anything, as if the tips of the blades of grass could hold it up. I walked toward it. I thought it would fly, but it stayed. As I got closer I realized it was perched on something: the wagon wheel.

The wheel had been torn from the ground, but no one had hauled it away. It lay on its side in the grass, and the crow sat on the rim.

I stopped a few feet short of the wheel, not wanting to startle the bird.

It took off.

It flew a circle in the air and headed for the pond. I followed, jogging down the slope through a scattering of autumn leaves, red and orange.

The crow made its landing on the dock.

I lost sight of it until I stepped through the weeds and onto the sun-bleached planks. Then I saw it: shaking out its black wings and hopping over the boards to the end of the dock. It looked down into the water.

I walked out to join it. Slow, careful steps. It let me get close. I got down and crossed the last distance on hands and knees. I stretched out along the dock on my stomach. I looked into the water.

I heard the wind stirring through the cattails on the other shore. I saw the blue-gray sky below me. I saw my own face in the water and the crow beside me.

The crow leapt into the air.

I watched it fly through the sky's reflection until it passed out of sight.

I reached down and my fingers broke the surface of the water. It felt cold. The ripples spread. They passed through the image of my face. And that's when I saw her. Jana. She was there in the water, only for a moment. I saw those brown eyes looking up at me. Those high exotic cheekbones. She had no bruise. Her mouth looked like it was laughing.

In that moment, I reached for her, even though I knew I could never touch her.

I knew.

But I could swear she was reaching back.

When I was a kid growing up in Rome, New York, hardly anyone ever got murdered there. Things are a little different in this book.

In the course of setting this story in my hometown, I've gone beyond tinkering with the crime rate; I've sometimes altered the geography of the place to suit my purposes. People familiar with Rome will recognize the many liberties, large and small, that I've taken in describing the city.

That kid who grew up in Rome had a moderately wild imagination, but he never would have guessed that he would one day have the good fortune to work with people like Amy Einhorn and Victoria Skurnick. I'd like to thank them on his behalf, and mine.

Thanks also to Tom Colgan, Ivan Held, Leslie Gelbman, Ashley Hewlett, Glory Plata, Elizabeth Stein, Tom Dussel, David Chesanow, Melissa Rowland, Lindsay Edgecombe, Elizabeth Fisher, and Miek Coccia.

This book is dedicated to my brother and sister, but I'm grateful for the support of all my family: the Dolans in New York and the Randolphs in Michigan. And always, especially, Linda.

Harry Dolan is the bestselling author of
Bad Things Happen
and
Very Bad Men
. He graduated from Colgate University, where he majored in philosophy and studied fiction writing with the novelist Frederick Busch. A native of Rome, New York, he now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his partner, Linda Randolph.