“I do,” Carl said. “I met him. I talked to him. He wouldn’t commit suicide.”
“And maybe he didn’t. But the boat was found, remember? Dashed to pieces in the storm. He let this girl live, for whatever reason. Maybe he began to experience genuine remorse, I don’t know. I don’t care. All I know is that he seems to be dead for all intents and purposes, and the cases are closed.”
“You can’t close a case when you don’t even know his real name,” Carl protested. “He’s not Eric Shivers. He’s not Alan Palmer. He’s not Charlie Chisholm. He’s alive out there, somewhere.” Then to Mary Ann, his voice cracking with an odd hysteria that Tess had never heard before, “Do you have a photograph? Maybe it’s not even the same guy. It could be a totally different guy?”
Mary Ann, still crying, shook her head. “He didn’t like to have his photo taken.”
Major Shields turned to Tess. “Did he tell you about the call?”
She shook her head numbly, remembering Carl slumped at the computer the day she returned from Dr. Armistead’s office. Any calls come in? None that mattered.
“Carl-” Major Shields’s voice was almost as gentle as it had been with Mary Ann. “I know you want to face this guy one more time. I know you wish you could confront him, settle all these scores. That’s part of your sickness.”
Carl stood, heading to the door, as if he planned to walk back to Baltimore. “I don’t have a sickness.”
“Post-traumatic stress disorder is a legitimate illness. Cops get it. Paramedics. You see horrible stuff, it can affect you. But it doesn’t give you the right to skew an investigation the way you did. You lied to us. We only knew about Mary Ann’s call because the phone we gave you is tapped.”
“The phone is tapped?” Tess couldn’t help thinking about the calls she had made home during the day, the embarrassingly kissy-face conversations she had with Crow from the state police barracks.
Major Shields nodded. “The phone is tapped and the computer is set up so we can track every keystroke. We know you’ve been chasing down all sorts of leads you didn’t bother to share with us. We know you didn’t go to Spartina the other day, although we don’t know where you did go. You want to tell us?”
“I don’t think so,” Tess said, almost instinctively, guarding what she knew.
“It doesn’t matter. We know you went back to see the Gunts family, despite our instructions. Those infractions could have been forgiven because they didn’t interfere with the investigation.
“But this girl, sitting in front of us, is key. Our killer stopped as suddenly as he started. We’ll learn his name, one day. But for now the important thing is that he stopped. And death is the only plausible explanation for that.”
“Serial killers have periods of dormancy-” Carl began, but stopped when he saw Tess’s sorrowful gaze.
“I trusted you,” she said. “I thought we were working together.”
“We were,” he said. “But this isn’t important. Really.”
“Carl,” Major Shields said, “you need help. You ought to think about going back to that place in Havre de Grace, the one where the state sent you last time.”
No longer the center of attention, Mary Ann was crying even harder now. “Would he really have killed me? Truly?”
“I hope not,” Major Shields said. “It’s our belief that something changed his mind. Maybe he was dying, as he told you. Maybe he realized the sickness inside him was as deadly as any cancer.”
“Then do you think… do you think…” Her voice was so choked with heaving sobs she could barely get the words out. She struggled to get control of herself and looked at the major with glistening eyes. “Do you think Lifetime Television would want to make a movie out of this?”
CHAPTER 26
Tess moved through the next week in a strange fog. Technically, she was still working, even if she no longer had an office at the state police barracks. After all, the brief career of Eric-Alan-Charlie was perfect for the needs of her contractors. Whitney had whooped with pleasure when Tess told her the bare outlines of what they had learned. The state police were not going public, not yet, but they would eventually give the story to the press. The consortium would be able to make a lot of political hay, once everything was sorted out.
“Especially with this nut, this Carl Dewitt guy, who almost screwed up the investigation because of his own obsession,” Whitney had said over the phone. Her bell-clear voice had never sounded quite so hard to Tess, so cruel. “He’s practically a walking example of why all branches of law enforcement need training.”
“I don’t know,” Tess had demurred. “I think he had some good ideas.”
“How do you figure? He couldn’t see the killer had been sitting in front of him-until you came along. Then, once he realized the right guy had slipped through his fingers, he couldn’t accept the fact that he might be dead. But why was a Toll Facilities cop investigating a homicide at all? The state police need to be prepared to step in and help these incompetents.”
“He wasn’t incompetent,” Tess said. “Just… inexperienced. And the state police were in charge all along. Carl Dewitt kept investigating this homicide on his own time, even after he retired on disability, because he cared.”
“Or because he had fucked up,” Whitney said, “and was psycho to boot. Look, don’t take it so personally. No one’s accusing you of messing up. The point is, we have reams of stuff to take to the judicial committee next session. You’re working for advocates, remember? When you write your report, be sure to gear it to our needs. Who knew that five seemingly unrelated homicides would actually yield such a rich find?”
Who did know? Tess wondered as she hung up the phone. She had been so focused on Tiffani and Lucy that she had forgotten about the other three names: Hazel Ligetti, Michael Shaw, Julie Carter. Were they significant in some way? Carl had said it wasn’t accidental that their paths had crossed. But Carl was crazy. Well, not crazy, but obsessed.
The day they had returned from Saint Mary’s, Major Shields had taken her into his office for a final conversation.
“I want you to know, we don’t blame you,” he said. “You’re not responsible for Carl’s mistakes.”
“Gee, thanks,” she said.
“But you are responsible for your own. You were insubordinate. In our organization, we need people to follow instructions. I told you we could overlook your visit to the Gunts family. But you should not have tried to interview the little girl, Darby.”
“Why not?”
“Interviewing children is a specialized skill. It requires training.” He allowed himself a one-sided grin. “Just like the domestic violence cases that were supposedly your focus.”
“Point taken.”
Major Shields was not insensitive. He realized that Tess’s sourness was not about being cut out of the official investigation.
“Don’t blame Carl,” he said.
“Why not? You do.”
“Carl suffered a breakdown while working on the Fancher case. That’s why he’s on permanent disability from the state.”
“He told me he screwed up his knee in a fall.”
“He may have, but that’s not why he got early retirement.”
“If he’s such a nut, why did you let him work on this?”
Major Shields was still wearing his trooper hat, which was disconcerting. It made his eyes harder to see.
“That was Sergeant Craig’s idea. He thought it might help Carl. If we made an arrest and he could feel he was part of it, it could have helped him put the whole matter behind him.”