The Last Place You Look (Roxane Weary #1)
Kristen Lepionka
To my parents,
who listened to my never-ending stories
No one’s ever lost forever.
—Amanda Palmer
ONE
“Matt said you find things. For a living,” the woman said on the phone.
I was lying on the carpet underneath my desk. I’d only answered the call to make the shrill ringing stop. The inside of my mouth tasted like whipped cream and whiskey, and the sound of my breathing was like a roaring thunderstorm in my head, but at least I was alone and in my own apartment. “That’s right,” I said.
“What kind of things?” Her tone was suspicious, like her main objective was to debunk whatever my oldest brother told her.
“Objects. People. Answers. Whatever needs to be found.”
“You good at it?”
I hadn’t worked much in the last nine months and didn’t want to start now. But my bank balance had other ideas. “I am. Matt doesn’t like me much, so it’s a vote of confidence he gave you my number in the first place.”
That was the best sales pitch I could manage. Illusions didn’t serve anybody in the detective business—not the client, and not me.
The woman chuckled. “He said you’d say that. Can you help?”
I thought it over. People give the worst advice about lost things. Retrace your steps. Pray to Saint Anthony. Think about where you last saw it. But that doesn’t apply to the things that matter. Those are right in front of you, except they can’t be found by looking for them. Only by looking at everything else. “What do you need to find?” I said, finally.
“The girl who can get my brother off death row.”
Ninety minutes later, we were sitting in the front room of my apartment, which served as an office of sorts. Three cups of green tea with mint had fortified me enough to turn on a single lamp. I still chose to sit in the armchair farthest away from it. Midday Monday light streamed in from the west-facing window near the ceiling but I kept the miniblinds firmly closed on the others. If my new client noticed the cave-like atmosphere of the place, she didn’t let on.
“Until that night,” Danielle Stockton was saying, “I hadn’t seen her in fifteen years. Nobody had.”
She was about thirty or so, pretty and put-together in a royal-blue cardigan and jeans. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ballerina bun and she had a leopard-print scarf looped artfully around her slim neck. She wore no makeup except for a dark red lipstick. She worked at American Electric Power, she had told me, and was here on her lunch break. “Sarah Cook,” Danielle added. “That’s her name. White girl. She and my brother were going out—that’s what they claimed this was over, her nice white family not liking him.”
They were the prosecutors in her older brother’s case, which Danielle had just finished briefing me on. Bradford Stockton was almost twenty when he had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend’s mother and father fifteen years ago. Of stabbing them to death in their living room with a Kershaw folding knife that the police found in the trunk of his Toyota hatchback, wrapped in one of Sarah’s shirts. The seventeen-year-old Sarah, meanwhile, disappeared that night. The prosecution alleged that Brad had killed her, too, and had concealed her body somewhere.
The defense hadn’t put up much of a fight, ignoring the built-in alternate theory of the crime, that the absent Sarah had committed the murders and then run. Brad had just finished his shift at a Subway at the time Elaine and Garrett Cook were killed, and he claimed he was waiting for Sarah in his car in the parking lot. She’d been in the restaurant earlier that evening—confirmed by Brad’s coworkers—and the pair had plans to see a movie when he got off work. But Sarah never came back, and by the time Brad went to the Cook house to see if she was at home, the police were already there and his life was already over. He was convicted on two counts of aggravated murder and had been on death row ever since.
“She still looks the same,” Danielle said.
She’d brought me a binder of newspaper clippings and photos, a grim scrapbook of her older brother’s troubles. A yearbook picture of Sarah smiled up at me from the coffee table. She looked like a Girl Scout, honey-blond hair cut into blunt bangs, a faint spray of freckles across her nose.
“I mean, she didn’t look seventeen anymore,” Danielle continued between sips of tea. “And she’s put on weight. But it was absolutely her. Not a doubt in my mind. Kenny saw her too—Kenny Brayfield, he’s one of Brad’s friends from school.”
I raised my eyebrows. I’d heard crazier stories, but not recently. “And when was this?”
“Ten days ago. November second. Maybe seven thirty. Kenny and I were meeting for dinner at Taverna Athena and we both just got there when I happened to look across the street and saw her at the gas station, walking out of the little store. I ran over there but the traffic was blocking my view. By the time I made it across the street, she was gone. She must have driven away.”
“Any idea what she might have been driving?”
Danielle’s mouth twitched. “It’s a pretty busy intersection. There were a lot of cars around.”
I drew a bullet point in my notebook but didn’t write anything else. Other than the blue dot, the page so far was blank. “Can you remember any of them?”
“Well,” Danielle said, “I saw a red four-door leaving when I got over there. And like a green pickup, one of those big new ones. And someone on a motorcycle, too. But it was already dark, and I was looking for her, not at the cars. So I can’t say for sure about that.”
“What was she wearing?”
“A coat, a long wool one. I think.”
It was a lot of uncertainty, in an encounter not strong on the details to begin with. I wrote down red sedan, big green pickup, long wool coat. “But you’re sure it was her.”
“I’m positive,” Danielle said.
I said nothing, just paged silently through the binder. It seemed unlikely that Sarah would have been so easily recognizable—fifteen years was a big time jump, and Danielle had only seen her for a split second. In the dark, at that. Besides, where had she been all along?
I studied Danielle in the chair across from me. Although we’d just met, she struck me as levelheaded and smart. Maybe it wasn’t impossible.
“So suppose I can find her,” I said.
Danielle nodded.
“What do you think will happen? How can she help? What makes you think she’d want to?”
My new client was quiet for a minute. Then she said, “Do you believe in God, Roxane?”
I smiled. “No comment.”
Danielle smiled too. “Well,” she said. “Brad is innocent, okay? I believe him one hundred percent when he says he didn’t do it. He’d never hurt anybody. He’s a good person—not perfect, but who is? My brother didn’t do this.”