The Last Place You Look Read online

  The gas station where the Sarah sighting occurred was on Clover Road, the main drag through the city. I stopped there and went inside and asked the kid behind the counter if the security cameras worked.

  “What cameras?” the kid said.

  I pointed. There were four cameras that I could see: one in each corner of the rear of the store, one above the door, one behind the counter.

  “Oh,” he said. He looked embarrassed now, as if the thought of his every waking move being captured on film had never occurred to him.

  “Yeah,” I said. “So do they work?”

  “Hang on.” He disappeared through a door marked Private and then reappeared a moment later. “Yes,” he said, “they work.”

  “Do you think I could take a look at the recorded footage?” I said.

  He went behind the door again. When it opened, the kid had a young woman with him. “Can I help you?”

  “Hi,” I said. “I was hoping to get a look at your security cameras.”

  They both stared at me. They were probably eighteen or nineteen. I took out my license and told them who I was. “Just for one day, a couple weeks ago. I’m looking for a woman who was here, and I was thinking maybe your cameras would show her or if she was with anyone.”

  “Are you,” the boy said, “a cop?”

  “She’s not a cop,” the girl said quickly.

  I gave them the most responsible smile I could manage. “I work with the cops all the time.”

  “She has a badge.” The boy’s eyes flicked toward my license on the counter.

  “That’s not a badge.”

  “Should we call Dave?”

  “No,” the girl said.

  “Is Dave your manager?” I said. “Maybe I could talk to him.”

  They both looked at me, stricken. No one wanted Dave involved.

  “Do you have a picture of her or something?” the boy said. “We could probably look at a picture.”

  I tapped my fingernails lightly on the counter. I did not have a picture, unless you counted Sarah’s old yearbook photo, which was obviously going to make canvassing difficult. “Well,” I said, “I was hoping her picture is on your security tape.”

  The girl shook her head. “We’re not supposed to let anyone in the back.”

  I didn’t press it. Instead I bought a cup of tea for the road and sat in the car, thinking. Tracking down someone who hadn’t been seen for fifteen years had many challenges, but especially the fact that I didn’t have a photo to flash around. So I called Catherine Walsh at her studio at home. Her husband answered. My instinct was to hang up, but I was calling on business for a change. “May I speak with Catherine, please?” I tried to sound polite and artistic.

  Her husband thumped the phone down and a few beats passed before Catherine came on the line.

  “Is this Catherine Walsh, the world-renowned professor and artist?” I said in my polite artistic voice. “I have some pressing business to discuss with her.”

  Catherine sighed. “Roxane, we have caller ID.”

  She didn’t sound happy to hear from me.

  “Aren’t you curious about the pressing business?” I said.

  “I’m kind of in the middle of something.” Such as, her life. “Or is there actually business?”

  “I need a sketch artist,” I said.

  “Really.”

  “No expense spared.”

  “And what would I be sketching?”

  I filled her in briefly on Sarah Cook.

  “I don’t know,” Catherine said, but her tone was warming up the tiniest bit. “Sounds intriguing but I’m not sure it’s a good idea right now.”

  “I can just give my client your info and have her call you,” I said. “And you can set it up with her directly. You wouldn’t even have to see me. It might be easier that way, although less fun.”

  “Indeed,” Catherine said. “Okay.”

  “I’ll have Danielle get in touch.”

  “Okay.”

  Neither of us said anything but neither hung up.

  Then Catherine finally spoke. “Is there anything else?”

  I hadn’t seen her since my father’s funeral. She’d surprised me by coming, since she had decided the previous fall to go back to her husband again. Meanwhile, I went back to a few men and women myself, and now there was just a sense of unfinished business between us. “Nope,” I said. “Thanks.”

  After we hung up, I called Danielle and left her a voice mail with instructions. Then I drove down 23 with Elliott Smith playing on the stereo of my car, an old blue Mercedes 300D from five years before I was born. I’d gotten it a few years ago in trade when a used-import dealer needed help figuring out who was stealing parts from his shop and I needed a new car. Someone had taken good care of it—the vehicle had forty thousand miles on it when it came to me. Now it had over a hundred. The old-fashioned odometer showed only five digits, so it looked like it only had three. It drove like a car was supposed to, smooth and fast and sturdy. I loved my car. I spent more time in it than in my apartment.

  The Chillicothe Correctional Institution sat near the Scioto River on a few acres that could have been mistaken for a small liberal arts college if not for the barbed wire and the watchtowers and the metal detectors and security checkpoints. My letter from Donovan & Calvert cut through a bit of the usual administrative bullshit, but the prison system was still a bureaucracy and I still had to wait for well over an hour in a beige room that felt like the loneliest bus terminal in the world.

  Finally I was ushered into a narrow corridor lined with Plexiglas booths, where I waited some more on a rickety metal folding chair. It smelled like disinfectant and basement and grease all at once. A guard on the other side of the glass led Bradford Stockton over to me. Brad sat down and frowned.

  The friendly, long-eyelashed kid from the pictures in Danielle’s scrapbook was gone. He was thirty-four now, tall and lean and serious-looking in orange prison garb that seemed to glow against his smooth, dark skin. His angular face was still handsome, but now it was also a little bit mean.

  I picked up the grimy handset next to the glass and waited for Brad to do the same. When he did, his movements were slow and fluid like we both had all the time in the world.

  “Who’re you?” he said.

  “Roxane Weary. Your sister hired me—”

  “What happened to the other guy?”

  “Novotny?” I said.

  Brad nodded.

  “He retired.”

  “So Dani’s paying for the lawyer and for you now?”

  It was a strange thing to be concerned about, given his circumstances. “Yes, I guess so.”

  “How much?” He slouched low in his seat. “How much is she paying you?”

  “You can ask her that,” I said.

  He glared at me some more. “Where the hell did she find you, anyway? Because you look a little, I don’t know, like you might not be doing all that much better than me.”

  “Thank you for that,” I said. I tucked the handset between my ear and my shoulder and I folded my arms across my chest. It was cold in the prison, like the heat was set to about forty-five degrees.

  “Are you here to ask me if I did it? Try to see if you can tell if I’m lying or not?”

  I ignored the attitude. “Did your sister tell you she saw Sarah?”

  Brad gave a slight nod. “So she said.”

  “You don’t believe her?”

  “She wants everything to be okay,” he said. “She tries real hard. And she can believe whatever she wants, if it makes her feel better. But it doesn’t have to make me feel better.”

  “You don’t think I can help you.”

  “No offense, lady, but no, I do not.”

  I couldn’t blame him for that. Fifteen years of white strangers trying to help him hadn’t done fuck-all for Brad Stockton. But I wasn’t sure that I believed he meant the no offense. I wanted to hear his side of the story but I wasn’t about to beg him for it if he was
going to sit there and insult me. “Listen, it’s up to you,” I said. “The date’s been set. You’re almost done, Brad, and your sister wants to feel like she did every fucking thing she could. Because even though you’ll be dead, she’s still going to have to live the rest of her life. So you talk to me or you don’t, but I’m doing this for her, not for you. And I’m getting paid regardless.”

  He looked a bit startled and said nothing for a while, as if he was trying to decide about me. Then he straightened up a little, brows knitting together.

  “Okay,” I said. “Where do you think Sarah is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know you don’t know, Brad. But help me out here. Speculate.”

  “Help you?” He sighed heavily before he answered. “I think she must be gone.”

  “Gone?” I repeated.

  “Passed on. It took me a long time to accept that she wasn’t going to come back, because that meant she had to be gone. But there’s no way Sarah would leave me here, to face what I face.” He sighed, a short forceful burst of air through the phone. “I don’t want to talk about Sarah. How is that going to help?”

  “You let me worry about that. This is the easiest thing you’ll do all day. It’s just answering questions.”

  He shook his head but eventually he shrugged.

  “Did you ever meet her parents?”

  “A few times.”

  “And?”

  Another shrug. “They were, I don’t know, nice. Polite to me. That’s why it was such a shock, everything Mrs. Cook’s sister said at the trial. That they were afraid of me? We played Scrabble together once.” He sighed. “But, I guess you never know what people say behind your back. My mom used to say, What people say about you behind your back is none of your business.”

  Unless it gets you convicted of murder. “Do you think Mrs. Cook really said those things?”

  “I don’t know what I think anymore,” Brad said.

  “I talked to Kenny Brayfield yesterday,” I said. “He told me you guys used to get into some trouble together. The kind of trouble that makes people afraid of you?”

  He shrugged. “Vandalism, whatever. Kenny used to sell weed around school. Figures he would bring up that shit—dude still wants to be a gangster. But his parents are loaded. He never got in trouble for anything.”

  We were starting to get off topic. “Tell me about what went on that day, when you saw her last.”

  He let out a long breath. “I don’t want to think about it. Every time, it’s like it rips me open again.” He started shaking his head again. “Do you really think you’re going to be able to do something nobody could do for fifteen years? Prove anything that nobody could prove? You act like it should be so easy for me to sit here and talk to you, but it isn’t. Maybe I’m done talking now. I don’t like my sister spending more money anyway.”

  “You don’t like her spending money on trying to get you not executed?” I said. “That doesn’t sound like an innocent man talking.”

  He flinched. “Fuck you.” He leaned forward, jabbing an index finger in my direction. “You don’t know anything about me or my sister.”

  “I’m on your side.”

  “You think sides are going to help me now?” Brad said.

  He had a point there.

  “Listen. When I got in here at first,” he said, “I was so depressed. Everyone said I did these terrible things I didn’t do, and it wasn’t like some situation that would pass, it was forever. I tried to make a, you know, a noose, from my sheets. Like, no sense in waiting around.” He looked up at the ceiling. “But I couldn’t do it—I mean, I tried, but I couldn’t get it right, what the fuck do I know about making a noose from sheets. Then they put me in the hospital here and I was all fucked up on lithium, and all I could do was stare up at the ceiling. When I went back to my cell after that, I was like, okay, this is happening. It’s like that song, you sing it when you’re a kid. About a bear hunt.”

  I knew the song he meant. “Can’t go over it,” I said. “Can’t go under it.”

  “Can’t go around it,” Brad said, smiling very faintly. “Gotta go through it.”

  We watched each other for another long while.

  “So I read every single word of every legal document about my case I could get my hands on. I read law books. I got enrolled in this print-based college degree thing, you know, a correspondence course. Wrote about a thousand poems, wrote letters to the lawyers, the cops, everyone I could think of. Trying to keep busy, right? Busy busy busy, fight fight fight.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “But busy doesn’t mean shit. There is no through it. Through it means I’m dead. And no amount of fighting is going to change that.” He shrugged. “The only real way through it is to accept it. Otherwise, it’ll just tear me up all over again every single day.”

  I wanted to believe that I was working for an innocent man. I also wanted to believe that if I was wrongfully accused of a crime, I’d be fighting every minute. But there was a sad kind of wisdom to his words. “Okay,” I said. “Forget all the other questions, forget every other person who has tried to help you or hurt you or whatever. Nobody knows as much about this case as you do, right?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “So let’s start totally fresh. Just educate me about your case. Pretend I don’t know anything.”

  He finally seemed to accept I wasn’t going anywhere. “It was a Thursday,” he said. “I worked till nine at Subway. Sarah came by after school, it was just a short bike ride. Maybe three thirty, she got there. I took my lunch and we sat in the car and talked. We made plans to see a movie later—the theater’s in the same plaza as Subway. She was going home for dinner but she’d come back. And that was it. She got back on her bike and I went into the restaurant.”

  “What about after your shift?”

  “I waited, in the car,” he said. “I waited for a long time. I thought maybe she was just running late. I called her house from a pay phone in the parking lot but there was no answer. By then it was probably ten thirty. I drove over to her house, and there were ambulances and all these cop cars, it was just insanity. No one would tell me what happened. They asked me to come to the station and they said I was free to go whenever I wanted, but it didn’t feel like that.”

  “How long were you there?”

  “They talked to me for hours, I mean, hours. They still wouldn’t tell me what had happened, exactly. I thought Sarah was hurt or something, I thought that’s what it was, they were only asking me questions about her. In the morning they gave me a lift back to my car, and I went home, and it wasn’t until I saw the news with my mom that I heard what really happened. We were shocked. Like, we just stared at the TV—and then the cops came to the door. They wanted me to come answer more questions, and their tone was all different, asking me all about knives, do you own any, did you ever go hunting, all this crap. They’d gotten a warrant to search my room and my car, while I was talking to them. And I thought they were making it up, that they found a knife in there. I never had a knife. I honestly didn’t believe it.”

  “So how’d the knife get there?” I said. “What actually happened that night?”

  “If I knew, you think I’d be sitting on that information?”

  “I think you’ve had an awful long time to formulate some kind of opinion, Brad.”

  He looked up at the ceiling again, shaking his head. “I saw this episode of Dateline one time, okay? Where this family was killed and there was absolutely no explanation, no reason whatsoever. No one could figure it out. But then, it turned out these guys had been hired to kill some other family, and they had a similar kind of address, like Court instead of Street or something. But they went to the wrong house and killed the wrong family.”

  “And you think it’s like that.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was just a mistake.”

  “I mean, what else was it? They were nice people. There’s no reason for them to be dead, and no reason
for Sarah to be gone, and no reason for me to be in here. It’s just a mistake.”

  “But the knife, Brad. The universe got the address wrong,” I said, “but somehow got the right car?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how it got there. Like, I was in the prison hospital all doped up and staring at the ceiling and I got to thinking that aliens put the knife there. And that sounds stupid, but that’s as good a guess as any.”

  “Where was your car when you were talking to the police? At Sarah’s house and then at your house?”

  He nodded.

  “When was the last time you were in it?”

  “Like after I talked to the cops the first time,” he said. “I got a ride back to the car from the station, and then I drove it home.”

  “And you didn’t notice anything weird, like someone had been in there?”

  “No.”

  “Doors locked?”

  “The locks were busted. So I had to leave it unlocked.”

  “Anyone else know the locks were busted?”

  “Whoever I gave a ride to or whatever. Sarah knew, obviously. Kenny. My sister. Lots of people.”

  “And there’s no way Sarah was involved,” I said.

  “No, there’s no way. There isn’t much I can say for sure, but I can say that. She was a good person. Fundamentally good. The lawyer was like, Come on, I know you think you were in love with her, but the fact is, she’s not in here, and you are, so be realistic. But I’d rather die than try to save my skin by saying she did something she didn’t do.”

  “Literally.”

  “Literally,” he said.

  “I don’t think most people could stick to that.”

  “I’m not most people.”