Last to Die

“My birth certificate says I was born in Virginia. I guess my mom came home to have me.”

They turned more pages, saw more images of the same handsome couple smiling at a dinner, holding up champagne glasses at a cocktail party, waving from a motorboat. Living la dolce vita, her mother used to say. The sweet life. And that’s what Claire saw in these photos, a record of what seemed to be a never-ending string of good times with colleagues and friends. But that’s what photo albums were meant to show, the best moments in life. The moments you wanted to remember, not the ones you wanted to forget.

“Look. That’s gotta be you,” said Will.

It was a photo of Claire’s mother, smiling from her hospital bed as she cradled an infant. She saw the handwritten date and said, “Yeah, that’s the day I was born. My mom said it happened really fast. She said I was in a hurry to get out and she almost didn’t make it to the hospital in time.”

Will laughed. “You’re still in a hurry to get out.”

She turned the pages, past more boring baby photos. In a stroller. In a high chair. Clutching a bottle. None of this helped her remember anything because these were all taken before her memories had been laid down. It could just as well be another child’s album.

She reached the last page. In the final two photos, Claire did not appear. These featured yet another cocktail party, another set of smiling strangers holding wineglasses. That was the burden of the diplomat’s wife, her mom used to joke. Always smiling, always pouring. Claire was about to shut the album when Will’s hand suddenly closed over hers.

“Wait,” he said. “That picture.”

“What about it?”

He took the album from her and leaned in close to study one of the party photos. It showed Claire’s dad, cocktail glass in hand, caught in midlaugh with another man. The handwritten caption said, 4TH OF JULY. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, USA!

“This woman,” murmured Will. He pointed to a slim brunette standing to the right of Erskine Ward. She was wearing a low-cut green dress with a gold belt, and her gaze was fixed on Claire’s father. It was a look of unabashed admiration. “Do you know who she is?” Will asked.

“Should I?”

“Look at her. Try to remember if you’ve ever seen her.”

The harder she stared, the more familiar the woman seemed, but it was just a wisp of a memory, one she couldn’t be sure of. One that might not even exist, except through a trick of effort. “I don’t know,” she said. “Why?”

“Because I do know her.”

She frowned at him. “How could you? This is my family album.”

“And that,” he said, pointing to the woman in the photo, “is my mother.”

TWENTY-SIX

 

ANTHONY SANSONE ARRIVED AT EVENSONG UNDER COVER OF DARKNESS, as he had before.

From her window, Maura saw the Mercedes park in the courtyard below. A familiar figure climbed out, tall and cloaked in black. As he swept past, beneath the courtyard lantern, he briefly cast a long, sinister shadow across the cobblestones and then disappeared.

She left her room and headed downstairs to intercept him. At the second-floor landing she paused and looked down into the shadowy entrance hall, where Sansone and Gottfried were speaking in hushed voices.

“… still unclear why she did it,” said Gottfried. “Our contacts are deeply troubled. There’s too much we didn’t know about her, things we should have been told.”

“You believe it was a suicide?”

“If not suicide, how do we explain …” Gottfried froze at the creak of a step. Both men turned to see Maura standing above them, on the stairs.

“Dr. Isles,” said Gottfried, instantly forcing a smile. “Having a touch of insomnia?”

“I want to hear the truth,” she said. “About Anna Welliver.”

“We’re as baffled about her death as you are.”

“This isn’t about her death. It’s about her life. You said you had no answers for me, Gottfried.” She looked at Sansone. “Maybe Anthony does.”

Sansone sighed. “I suppose it is time to be honest with you. I owe you that much, Maura. Come, let’s talk in the library.”

“Then I’ll say good night to you both,” said Gottfried, and he turned to the stairs. There he paused and looked back at Sansone. “Anna’s gone, but that doesn’t break our promise to her. Remember that, Anthony.” He climbed the steps, disappearing into shadow.

“What does that mean?” Maura asked.

“It means there are some things I cannot tell you,” he said as they entered the gloomy passage leading to the library.

“What’s the point of all the secrecy?”

“The point is trust. Anna revealed things to us under the strictest confidence. Details we’re unable to share.” He paused at the end of the passageway. “But now we wonder if even we knew the truth about her.”

During the day, sunlight flooded the library’s Palladian windows and gleamed on polished wood tables. But now shadows cloaked the room, transforming alcoves into dark little caves. Anthony switched on a single desk lamp, and in intimate gloom they sat facing each other across a table. All around them loomed rows and rows of bookcases in scholarly formation, two millennia’s worth of knowledge. But it was this man she now struggled to read, a man as unknowable as a closed book.

“Who was Anna Welliver?” Maura asked. “I saw her autopsy. Her body is covered with old scars from torture. I know her husband was murdered, but what happened to Anna?”

He shook his head. “Will it always be this way between us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why can’t we have normal conversations, like other people? About the weather, the theater? Instead we talk about your work, not the most pleasant of subjects. But I suppose that is what keeps bringing us together.”

“Death, you mean?”

“And violence.” He leaned forward, his eyes as intense as lasers. “We’re so much alike, you and I. There’s a darkness in you, and that’s the bond we share. We both understand.”

“Understand what?”

“That the darkness is real.”

“I don’t want to see the world that way,” she said.

“But you see the evidence every time a corpse lands on your autopsy table. You know the world isn’t all sunshine, and so do I.”

“And that’s what we bring to this friendship, Anthony? Doom and gloom?”

“I sensed it in you the first time we met. It runs deep in you, because of who you are.”

Who I am. Queen of the dead. The daughter of monsters. The darkness extended as deep as the blood in her veins, because it was the same blood that ran in her mother Amalthea, a killer who would spend the rest of her life in prison.

His gaze was so intent that she could not bear to maintain eye contact. She focused, instead, on his briefcase. They had known each other for almost two years, yet with just a look, he could still throw her off balance and make her feel like a specimen under glass, examined and exposed.

“I’m not here to talk about myself,” she said. “You promised you’d tell me the truth about Anna.”

He nodded. “What I can tell you, anyway.”

“Did you know that she was a victim of torture?”

“Yes. And we knew she was still deeply haunted by what happened to her and her husband in