Excerpt of The Last Place You Look by Kristen Lepionka

“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 no- ticed 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 con- cealed 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 traf- fic 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 impos- sible.

“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 be- lieve 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.”

I could tell she believed that. But her question about God
made me think that faith came easy to her. “What does that
have to do with God?”

“I don’t know what really went down or where she’s been,”
Danielle said. “Believe me, the police tried to find her,
the investigator for Brad’s lawyer tried to find her—she
was gone. But then, all this time later, two days after
they scheduled Brad’s execution I see her? It had to be
for a reason.”