The Last Policeman

5.

It’s a beautiful morning, and there’s something galling about it, how suddenly, just like that, the winter ends and springtime begins—rivulets of snowmelt and twists of green grass pushing up from under the rapidly thinning layer of snow in the farmland outside my kitchen window. This is going to be trouble, just in terms of law enforcement. It will work like black magic on the public spirit, this new season, the dawn of the last springtime we’re going to get. We can expect a ratcheting up of desperation, fresh waves of anxiety and terror and anticipatory grief.

Fenton said that if she could pull it off, she would call me at nine o’clock with her report. It’s 8:54.

I don’t really need Fenton’s report. Don’t need the confirmation, I mean. I’m right, and I know I’m right. I know that I’ve got it. It’ll help though. It’ll be necessary in court.

I watch one perfect white cloud drift across the blue of the morning, and then, thank God, the phone rings, and I snatch it up and say hello.

No answer. “Fenton?”

There’s a long silence, a rumbling of deep breathing, and I hold my breath. It’s him. It’s the killer. He knows. He’s toying with me. Holy moly.

“Hello?” I say.

“I hope you’re happy, Officer—excuse me, Detective.” There’s a noisy cough, a tinkling noise, ice in a glass of gin, and I look up at the ceiling and exhale.

“Mr. Gompers. This is not a good time.”

“I found the claims,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard me. “The mysterious missing claims you wanted me to find. I found them.”

“Sir.” But he’s not going to stop, and anyway I did tell him he had twenty-four hours, and here he is, reporting in, the poor bastard. I can’t just hang up. “Right,” I say.

“I went to the overnight cabinet, and I pulled that stretch of case numbers. There’s only one in the bunch with Zell’s name on it. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”

“That’s right.”

His voice sloshes with drunken sarcasm. “Hope so. Because it’s all going to happen, just like I said it was. Just like I said.”

I’m looking at the clock. 8:59. What Gompers is telling me doesn’t matter anymore. It never mattered in the first place. This case was never about insurance fraud.

“I’m in the conference room in Boston, digging through the overnights, and who sidles in but Marvin Kessel. Do you know who that is?”

“No, sir. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gompers.”

It was never about insurance fraud. Not even for one second.

“Marvin Kessel, for your information, is the assistant regional manager for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, and he was awfully interested in what the heck is going on up in Concord. And so now he knows, and now Omaha knows, we’ve got missing files, we’ve got suicides. We’ve got it all!” He sounds like my dad: Because it’s Concord!

“And so now I am going to lose my job, and everybody in this branch, they’re going to lose their jobs, too. And we’ll all be out on the street. So, I hope you have a pen handy, Detective, because I’ve got the information.”

I do have a pen, and Gompers gives me the information. The claim that Peter was working on when he died was filed in mid-November by a Ms. V. R. Jones, a director of the Open Vista Institute, a nonprofit corporation registered in the state of New Hampshire. Its headquarters are in New Castle, which is on the coast, near Portsmouth. It was a comprehensive life-insurance policy on the executive director, Mr. Bernard Talley, and Mr. Talley committed suicide in March, and Merrimack Life and Fire was exercising its right to investigate.

I write it all down, old habit, but it doesn’t matter and it never mattered, not even for a second.

Gompers is done and I say, “Thanks,” looking at the clock, it’s 9:02—any minute Fenton will call, she’ll give me the confirmation I need, and I’ll get in the car and go get the killer.

“Mr. Gompers, I recognize that you have made a sacrifice. But this is a murder investigation. It’s important.”

“You have no idea, young man,” he says morosely, “You have no idea what’s important.”

He hangs up, and I almost call him back. I swear to God, with all that’s going on, I almost get up and go over there. Because he’s not—he’s not going to make it.

But then the landline rings again, and I snatch it up again, and now it is Fenton, and she says, “Well, detective, how did you know?”

I take a breath, close my eyes, and listen to my heart pounding for a second, two seconds.

“Palace? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I say, slowly. “Please tell me exactly what you’ve found.”

“Why certainly. I’d be happy to. And then at some point you are going to buy me a steak dinner.”

“Yep.” I say, opening my eyes now, peering at the crisp blue sky just beyond the kitchen window. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

“You’re a lunatic,” she says. “MassSpec on the blood of Naomi Eddes confirms presence of morphine sulfate.”

“Right,” I say.

“This does not come as a surprise to you.”

“No, ma’am,” I say. No, it does not.

“Cause of death is unchanged. Massive craniocerebral trauma from gunshot wound in mid-forehead. But the victim of this gunshot had ingested a morphine derivative within the six- to eight-hour period prior to her death.”

It does not surprise me at all.

I close my eyes again, and I can picture Naomi leaving my house in her red dress in the middle of the night and going home to get high as a satellite. She must have been getting toward the end of her stash, too, must have been getting anxious about that, because now her dealer was dead. McGully had shot him. My fault.

Oh, Naomi. You could have told me.

I pull out my SIG Sauer from its holster and lay it on the kitchen table, open the magazine, empty out and count the dozen .357 bullets.

In the Somerset Diner, a week before, Naomi eating French fries, telling me that she had to help Peter Zell when she saw that he was suffering, that he was in withdrawal. She had to help him, she said, looked down, looked away.

I could have known it right then, had I wanted to know.

“I wish I could tell you more,” Fenton says. “If the girl had some hair on her head, I could tell you if she’s been using morphine for a long time.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I’m not really listening. Here’s a girl who felt compelled to help this random coworker, this man she barely knew, when she saw that he was suffering. Here’s a girl with her own long experience of drug addiction, who’s put her parents through hell, so much so that her father hangs up the phone as soon as he hears her name, hears the word policeman.

“If you’ve got a long enough piece of hair, you can cut it into quarter-inch sections, break them down and test them one by one,” Fenton says, “figure out what substances were metabolized, month by month. Pretty fascinating stuff, actually.”

“I’ll see you over there,” I say. “And I will. I’ll buy you that dinner.”

“Sure you will, Palace,” she says. “Around Christmas, right?”

I know what the hair test would have revealed. Naomi had been using, this time, for three months. I don’t know about her past usage, her periods of addiction and recovery and relapse, but this time she was using for almost three months exactly. Since Tuesday, January 3, when Professor Leonard Tolkin of the Jet Propulsion Lab went on television and gave her the same bad news he gave everybody else. My guess is, if she didn’t renew her active use of controlled substances that night, it was the day after, or the day after that.

I reload the magazine, snap it into place, depress the safety, and return my sidearm to the holster. I’ve already done this exercise in its entirety—open the magazine, check the bullets, close it up—several times since waking this morning at seven thirty.

Peter Zell had made his risk assessment and taken his plunge months before, gone through his whole cycle of attraction, experimentation, addiction, and withdrawal as the odds climbed steadily through the months. But Naomi, along with a lot of other people, took her own plunge only when it was official, when the odds of impact jumped all the way to one hundred percent. Millions of people all around the world deciding to get high as satellites and stay that way, scrambling for whatever they could—dope or junk or NyQuil or whippets or stolen bottles of hospital painkillers—and slip into pure pleasure mode, tune out the terror and the dread, in a world where the idea of long-term consequences had magically disappeared.

I will myself back in time, back to the Somerset Diner, reach across the table and take Naomi’s hands in my own, and I tell her to go ahead and tell me the truth, tell me about her weakness, and I’d tell her I don’t care and I’m going to fall for her anyway. I would have understood.

Would I have understood?

My father taught me about irony, and the irony here is that in October, when it was still fifty-fifty, when there was still hope, it was Naomi Eddes who had helped Peter Zell kick his stupid habit—helped him so well that when the end of the world was officially announced he fought through it, stayed clean. But Naomi, whose own addiction was deeper bred, whose habit was lifelong, not the result of a cold calculation of the odds … Naomi wasn’t that strong.

Another irony: it wasn’t so easy, in early January, to get ahold of drugs, especially the kind Naomi needed. New laws, new cops, demand spiking wildly, new choke points on supply, all the way up and down the line. But Naomi had known just where to go. She knew from her nightly conversations with Peter about his ongoing temptation: his old pal J. T. was still dealing, still getting morphine, in some form, from somewhere.

So that’s where she went, to the squat dirty house on Bow Bog Road, started buying, started using, never told Peter, never told anyone, and the only people who knew were Toussaint and the person who was his new supplier.

And that person—that person is the killer.

In the dark, at my house, frozen in the doorway, she almost told me the whole truth. Not only the truth about her addiction, but the truth about insurable interest, fraud claims, I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case. If I’d gotten out of bed, taken her wrists, kissed her and pulled her back into bed, she’d still be alive.

If she’d never met me, she’d still be alive.

I feel the weight of the gun in the holster, but I don’t take it out, not again. It’s ready, it’s loaded. I’m ready.

* * *

My Impala rolls through the gigantic parking lot, the asphalt painted black and wet with runoff. It’s 9:23.

There is only one thing left that I don’t understand, and that’s why. Why would someone do something like this—why would this person do these things?

I get out of the car and walk into the hospital.

I have to apprehend the suspect. And even more so, I have to know the answer.

In the crowded lobby I loiter behind a column, hunched over to minimize my height, my bandaged face hidden behind the Monitor like a spy. After a few minutes I see the murderer coming, striding purposefully down the hall, right on time. It’s urgent, important, work to be done in the basement.

I’m hunched in the hospital hallway, twitching with nervousness, ready for action.

The motive, on the one hand, is obvious: money. The same reason anybody steals and then sells controlled substances and commits murders to cover up those activities. Money. Especially now, high demand, low supply, the cost-benefit analysis on drug sales is skewed, someone is going to take the risk, someone is going to put together a small fortune.

But—somehow—it’s wrong. For this killer, for these crimes. These risks. Murder and then double murder, and worse than murder, and for what, for money? The risk of jail, of execution, of throwing away what little time is left? Just money?

Soon I’ll know all the answers. I’m going to go down there, it’s going to work, and then this will be over. The thought of it, the whole thing being over, rolls over me, inevitable, joyless, cold, and I clutch my newspaper. Peter’s killer—Naomi’s killer—gets on the elevator, and a few seconds later, I go down the stairs.

* * *

The morgue is cold. The autopsy lights are off, and it’s dim and hushed. The walls are gray. It’s like being inside a refrigerator, inside a coffin. I step into the chilling silence just in time to see Erik Littlejohn shake hands with Dr. Fenton, who gives him a curt, businesslike nod.

“Sir.”

“Good morning, Doctor. As I believe I mentioned on the phone, I do have a visitor coming at ten, but in the meantime I am happy to be of service.”

“Of course,” says Fenton. “Thanks.”

Littlejohn’s voice is hushed and sensitive and appropriate. The director of Spiritual Services. The gold beard, the big eyes, the aura of respect. A handsome new-looking jacket of creamy mahogany leather, a gold watch.

But money’s not enough—a gold watch—a new jacket—to do all that he’s done, the horrors that he has committed. It’s not enough. I can’t accept it. I don’t care what’s coming toward us in the sky.

I tuck myself against a wall, in a far corner, close by the door, the door leading back down the hallway, to the elevator.

Littlejohn turns now and nods his head deeply, respectfully, to Officer McConnell, who is supposed to be looking bereaved, in character, but who instead looks irritated, probably because she is following my instructions, wearing a skirt and blouse and carrying a black pocketbook, wearing her hair down, no ponytail.

“Good morning, ma’am,” says Peter Zell’s murderer. “My name is Erik. Dr. Fenton has asked me to be present this morning, and I understand that that is your wish.”

McConnell nods gravely and launches into the little speech we wrote for her.

“My husband, Dale, he went and he shot himself with his old hunting rifle,” says McConnell. “I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I do know, but I thought—” and then she plays at being unable to continue, her voice trembles and catches, me thinking, there you go, very impressive, Officer McConnell. “I thought we’d have the rest of it together, the rest of our time together.”

“The wound is rather severe,” says Dr. Fenton, “and so Ms. Taylor and I agreed that she might benefit from your presence in viewing her husband’s body for the first time.”

“Of course,” he murmurs, “absolutely.” My eyes flicker over his body, top to bottom, looking for the bulge of a firearm. If he’s got one, it’s well hidden. I don’t think he does.

Littlejohn smiles at McConnell with radiant kindness, places a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and turns to Fenton.

“And where,” he asks in a delicate undertone, “is Ms. Taylor’s husband now?”

My stomach tightens. I place a hand over my mouth to control the sound of my breathing, to control myself.

“This way,” Fenton answers—and here we are, this is the pivot point of the whole affair, because now she’s leading the two of them—Littlejohn with his gentle hand guiding McConnell, the fake widow—leading the two of them across the room, toward where I am, toward the hallway.

“We’ve laid the body out,” explains Dr. Fenton, “in the old chapel.”

“What?”

Littlejohn hesitates, a small stutter step, his eyes flashing with fear and confusion, and my heart catches in my throat, because I’m right—I knew I was right, and yet I cannot believe it. I’m staring at him, imagining those soft hands winding a long black belt around Peter Zell’s neck, slowly tightening. Imagining a pistol trembling in his hand, Naomi’s big black eyes.

A moment more, Palace. A moment more.

“I believe you are mistaken, Doctor,” he says quietly to Fenton.

“No mistake,” she replies briskly, smiling tightly, reassuringly at McConnell. She’s enjoying this, Fenton. Littlejohn keeps pushing, what choice does he have? “No, you are incorrect, that room is out of service. It is locked.”

“Yes,” I say, and Littlejohn jumps, in this instant he knows exactly what’s going on, he looks around the room and I step out of the darkness with my sidearm raised. “And you have the key. Where is the key, please?”

He looks at me, dumbstruck.

“Where is the key, sir?”

“It’s—” he closes his eyes, opens them again, the blood draining from his face, hope dying in his eyes. “It’s in my office.”

“We’ll go there.”

McConnell has drawn her weapon from her black pocketbook. Fenton stays put, her eyes glinting behind her round glasses, enjoying every second.

“Detective.” Littlejohn steps forward, he’s making an effort, his voice trembling, but he’s trying. “Detective, I can’t imagine—”

“Quiet,” I say. “Quiet, please.”

“Yes, but Detective Palace, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you … if you think …”

Feigned confusion distrorts his handsome features. It’s there, the truth is there, even in the fact that my name comes so easily to mind: he’s known exactly who I am since the day I caught this case, since I called his wife to arrange an interview, he’s been on to me, tailing me, interposing himself between me and my ongoing investigation. Encouraging Sophia, for example, to evade my questions, selling her on the attenuated notion that it would upset her father. Selling me on how depressed his brother-in-law was. Watching outside the house, waiting, while I interviewed J. T. Toussaint. And then, a Hail Mary, unhooking the chains on my snow tires.

And he was at Toussaint’s again, the house on Bow Bog Road, scrabbling around looking for the leftover merchandise, the phone numbers, client lists. Looking for the same things I was, except he knew what we were looking for and I didn’t, and then I chased him off before he could think to search the doghouse.

But he had one more trick to play, one more way to shove me in the wrong direction. One more brutal trick to play, and it almost worked.

Officer McConnell steps forward, drawing handcuffs from the small pocketbook, and I say, “Wait.”

“What?” she asks.

“I just—” my gun still leveled on Littlejohn. “I’d like to hear the story first.”

“I am sorry, Detective,” he says, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I release the safety. I think that if he keeps lying, I might kill him. I might just do it.

But he does, he talks. Slowly, softly, his voice dead and toneless, staring not at me but into the barrel of my firearm, he tells the story. The story that I already know, that I already figured out.

After October, when Sophia discovered that her brother had stolen her prescription pad and was using it to score pain pills—after she confronted him and cut him off—after Peter slipped into the brief painful period of withdrawal, and Sophia thought the whole thing was at an end—after all of that, Erik Littlejohn went to J. T. Toussaint and made him a proposition.

At that time, with Maia in conjunction and the odds of impact hovering at an agonizing fifty percent, the hospital was working at half staff: pharmacists and pharmacists’ assistants were quitting in droves, and new people were being hired, glad for a salary backed by government money. Security was, and remains, all over the map. Some days, armed guards with machine guns; other days, the doors to locked wards propped open with folded-over magazines. Pyxis, the state-of-the-art mechanized pill dispensary, stopped working in September, and the technician assigned by the manufacturer to Concord Hospital could not be located.

The director of Spiritual Services, in this time of desperation and wildness, has remained at his post, a trusted and constant figure, a rock. And he was, as of November, stealing vast quantities of medicine from the hospital pharmacy, from the nurses’ stations, from patients’ bedsides. MS Contin, Oxycontin, oxytocin, Dilaudid, half-empty bags of liquid morphine.

Through all of this, my gun does not waver, pointed at his face: his golden eyes half closed, the mouth set, expressionless.

“I promised Toussaint that I would keep him supplied,” he says. “I told him I would take the risk of procuring the pills, if he would take the risk of selling them. We split the risk, and we split the profit.”

Money, I’m thinking, just stupid money. So small, so squalid, so dull. Two murders, two bodies in the ground, all those people suffering, doing with half doses of their pills, with the world about to end? I gape at the murderer, looking him up and down. Is this a man who does all that for gain? For a gold watch and a new leather jacket?

“But Peter found out,” I say.

“Yes,” Littlejohn whispers, “he did,” and he lowers his head and shakes it slowly, sadly, back and forth, as if remembering some regrettable act of God. Someone had a stroke, someone fell down the stairs. “He—it was last Saturday night—he showed up at J. T.’s house. It was late. I only went there very late.”

I exhale, grit my teeth. No escaping the fact that if Peter was at J. T.’s very late on a Saturday night—a meeting J. T. had not mentioned to me—then he was there for a fix. He had his nightly call with Naomi, his support system who was herself secretly using morphine; he told her he was doing fine, holding up, and then he went to J. T.’s to get high as a satellite; and then his brother-in-law of all people shows up, his brother-in-law who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a fresh supply.

Everybody with secrets, squirreled away.

“He sees me, I’m holding a duffel bag for God’s sake, and I just said, ‘please, please, please don’t tell your sister.’ But I knew—I knew he—” He stops himself, brings a hand to his mouth.

“You knew you had to kill him.”

He moves his head very slightly up and down.

He was right: Peter would have told Sophia. In fact, he had called her for that purpose the next day, Sunday, March 18, and again on Monday, but she didn’t answer. He sat down to write her a letter, but couldn’t find the words.

So, on Monday night, Erik Littlejohn went to see Distant Pale Glimmers at the Red River, where he knew he would find his brother-in-law, the quiet insurance man. And there he is with their mutual friend J. T. Toussaint, and after the movie Peter tells J. T. to take off, he wants to walk home—Littlejohn caught a break on that one—because now Peter is alone. And what do you know, here’s Erik, and Erik says, let’s have a beer, let’s catch up—let’s make amends before everything happens.

And they’re drinking their beers, and from his pocket he takes a small vial, and when Peter has passed out he drags him from the theater, nobody notices, nobody cares, he takes him to the McDonald’s to hang him in the bathroom.

* * *

McConnell puts the suspect in the handcuffs and I guide him by the bicep to the elevator, Fenton trailing behind us, and we ascend in silence: coroner, murderer, cop, cop.

“Holy crap,” says Fenton, and McConnell says, “I know.”

I don’t say anything. Littlejohn doesn’t say anything.

The elevator stops and the doors open onto the lobby and it’s crowded and among the crowd is a preadolescent boy, waiting there on one of the sofas, and Littlejohn’s whole body goes tense, and mine does, too.

He had told Fenton that he could come down to the morgue to help with a body at 9:30, but he had a visitor coming at 10.

Kyle looks up, stands up, stares, wide-eyed and baffled, his father in handcuffs, and Littlejohn can’t take it, he hurls his body out of the elevator, and I’m holding fast to his arm, and the force of his body in motion pulls me forward, too, both of us together. We land on the floor and go into a roll.

McConnell and Fenton spill out of the elevator, the lobby is full of people, doctors and volunteers, dodging out of the way and hollering as Littlejohn and I go end over end. Littlejohn bangs his forehead up and slams it into mine just as I’m drawing for my sidearm, and the force of the impact sends an explosion of pain into my wounded eye, throws a sky full of stars up in front of the other one. I slump down on top of him, he’s wriggling underneath me, McConnell is shouting, “Freeze!” and then someone is yelling, too, a small scared voice saying, “Stop, stop.” I look up, my vision is wavering back into place, and I say, “Okay.” He’s got my sidearm, the kid has got it, the service-issue SIG 229, pointed right at my face.

“Son,” says McConnell, and she’s got her gun out, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She aims it, uncertainly, at Kyle, then at Littlejohn and me, slumped together on the floor, and then back at the boy.

“Let him—” Kyle sniffs, whimpers, and I’m seeing myself, I can’t help it, of course, I was eleven once. “Let him go.”

God.

God, Palace.

You dunce.

The motive was staring me in the face the whole time, not just money but what you can get for it. What you can get for money, even now. Especially now. And here’s this funny-looking kid, the wide smile, a princeling, the boy I first saw the second day of my investigation, tromping across a lawn of unbroken snow.

I saw it in Littlejohn’s eyes when he was hollering affectionately up the stairs, telling his boy to go ahead and get ready, boasting quietly about what a whiz he is out there on the ice.

Let’s say, in our present unfortunate circumstances, I was the father of a child; what would I not do to shield that child, to whatever degree I could, from the coming calamity? Depending on where that thing comes down, the world is either ending or descending into darkness, and here is a man who would do anything—who has done awful things—to prolong and protect the life of his child should the latter eventuality arise. To mitigate the hazards of October and after.

And no, Sophia wouldn’t have called the police if she had found out, but she would have taken him, taken the boy and gone away, or at least that’s what Erik Littlejohn was afraid of—that the mother would not have understood what the father was doing, how important it was, how it had to be done, and she would have snatched him away. And then what would have become of him—and her—in the aftermath?

And tears are welling up and falling from the boy’s eyes, and tears are falling from Littlejohn’s eyes, and I wish I could say, being a professional detective in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult arrest, that I maintain my composure and focus, but they are, they are, tears are rolling down my face like the flood.

“Give me the gun, young man,” I say. “You should give the gun to me. I’m a policeman.”

He does. He walks over, and he puts it in my hand.

* * *

The little chapel in the basement is stacked with boxes.

They are labeled as containing medical supplies, and, in fact, some of them do: three boxes of syringes, six score to a box, two boxes of protective face masks, a small box of iodine pills and saline solution. IV bags, drip chambers. Tourniquets. Thermometers.

There are pills, too, the same variety I found at the doghouse. Stored here till he had enough to be worth smuggling them out of the hospital and to Toussaint’s.

There is food. Five boxes of canned goods: chipped beef and baked beans and chunky soup. Cans like this disappeared many months ago from the supermarket, and you can find them on the black market if you’ve got the money, but no one has the money. Not even cops. I lift a can of Del Monte pineapple chunks and feel its familiar weight in my hand, comforting and nostalgic.

Most of the boxes, however, are full of guns.

Three Mossberg 817 Bolt Action hunting rifles with twenty-one-inch barrels.

A single Thompson M1 submachine gun, with ten boxes of .45 caliber bullets, fifty bullets in a box.

A Marlin .30-06 with a scope on the top.

Eleven Ruger LCP .380s, little ten-ounce conceal-carry automatic handguns, plenty of ammunition for these, too.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of guns.

He was just getting ready. Getting ready for afterward. Although, when you look at it from inside this cramped room with the cross on the door, full of boxes of guns and canned foods and pills and syringes, you start to think: well, afterward has started already.

In one long box, of the kind that might have been used to package and ship a vanity mirror or a large picture frame, lies an oversized cross-bow, with ten aluminum bolts tied in a neat bundle at the bottom of the box.

* * *

We’re in the unit, the suspect is in the backseat, we’re on the way back to headquarters. It’s a ten-minute drive, but that’s time enough. Time enough to know whether I’ve got the rest of the story straight, or don’t I.

Instead of waiting for him to tell me, I tell him, my gaze flicking back and forth to the rear-view mirror, watching Erik Littlejohn’s eyes to see if I’m right.

But I am—I know I’m right.

May I please speak to Ms. Naomi Eddes?

That’s what he said, that gentle and mellifluous voice, a voice she didn’t recognize. It must have been strange, much like the time I called her from Peter Zell’s phone. Now here was a strange voice calling from J. T. Toussaint’s phone. A number she knew by heart, the number she’d been calling for a few months now, every time she needed to get high, to get lost.

And now the strange voice on the other end began to give her instructions.

Call that cop, said the voice—call your new friend, the detective. Gently remind him of what he’s overlooked. Suggest to him that this sordid drug-murder case is about something else entirely.

And boy, did it work. Holy moly. My face burns at the thought of it. My lips curl back in self-disgust.

Insurable interest. False claims. It sounded like just the sort of thing that someone gets killed for, and I dove right in. I was a kid playing a game, overheated, ready to jump for the brightly colored ring dangled in front of me. The dumb detective pacing in excited circles around his house, a fool, a puppy. Insurance fraud! A-ha! That must be it. I need to see what he’s working on!

Littlejohn isn’t saying anything. He’s done. He’s living in the future. Surrounded by death. But I know that I’m right.

Kyle has remained at the hospital, sitting in the lobby with Dr. Fenton, of all people, awaiting Sophia Littlejohn, who is now hearing the news, who is about to begin the hardest months of her life. Like everybody else, but worse.

I don’t need to ask anymore, I’ve really got the whole picture, but I can’t help it, it can’t be helped. “The next day, you came to Merrimack Life and Fire, and you waited, right?”

I linger at a red light at Warren Street. I could blow the light, of course, I have a dangerous suspect in custody, a murderer, but I wait, my hands at ten and two.

“Answer me, please, sir. The next day, you came to her office, and you waited?”

“Yes.” A whisper.

“Louder, please.”

“Yes.”

“You waited in the hallway, outside her cubicle.”

“In a closet.”

My hands tighten on the wheel, my knuckles white, practically glowing white. McConnell looking at me from the shotgun seat, looking uneasy.

“In a closet. And then when she was alone, Gompers drunk in his office, the rest of them at the Barley House, you showed her the gun, you marched her into the storeroom. Made it look like she was digging for files, too, just to—to what? Turn the screw one more time, for me, make sure I thought what you wanted me to think?”

“Yes, and …”

“Yes?”

McConnell, I notice, has placed one of her hands over mine, on the wheel, to make sure I don’t run off the road.

“She would have told you. Eventually.”

Palace, she said, sat on the bed. Something.

“I had to,” moans Littlejohn, fresh tears in his eye. “I had to kill her.”

“No one has to kill anyone.”

“Well, soon,” he says, looking out the window, staring out. “Soon, they will.”

* * *

“I told you something was f*cked.”

McGully, in Adult Crimes, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Culverson sits on the opposite side of the room, somehow radiating dignity and poise though he is cross-legged, pant legs hitched up slightly.

“Where is everything?” I say.

The desks are gone. The computers are gone, the phones, the trash cans. Our tall bank of filing cabinets is gone from its space beside the window and has left behind an irregular pattern of rectangular indentations in the floor. Cigarette butts litter the ancient pale blue carpeting like dead bugs.

“I told you,” says McGully again, his voice a chilling echo in the hollowed-out room.

Littlejohn is outside, still cuffed in the backseat of the Impala, being babysat by Officer McConnell with a reluctant assist from Ritchie Michelson, until we do the official booking. I came into the station alone, ran upstairs to get Culverson. I want us to process the perp together—his murder, my murder. Teammates.

McGully finishes the cigarette he’s working on, twists it out between his fingers, and flicks the dead butt into the center of the room to join the others.

“They know,” says Culverson quietly. “Somebody knows something.”

“What?” asks McGully.

But Culverson doesn’t answer, and then Chief Ordler comes in.

“Hey, guys,” he says. The chief is in street clothes, and he looks tired. McGully and Culverson look up at him warily from their respective squats; I straighten up, bring my heels together and stand there expectantly, I am conscious of the fact that I have a suspected double-murderer downstairs in a parked unit, but strangely, after all this, it feels like it doesn’t matter anymore.

“Guys, as of this morning, the Concord Police Department has been federalized.”

Nobody says anything. Ordler’s got a binder under his right arm, the seal of the Justice Department stamped on the side.

“Federalized? What does that mean?” I ask.

Culverson shakes his head, slowly gets up, lays a steadying hand on my shoulder. McGully stays where he is, tugs out a fresh cigarette and lights it.

“What does that mean?” I ask again. Ordler looks at the floor, keeps talking.

“They’re overhauling everything, putting even more kids on the street, and they say I can keep most of my patrol officers, if I want and they want, but all under Justice Department jurisdiction.”

“But what does it mean?” I ask a third time, meaning, for us? What does it mean for us? The answer is obvious. I’m standing in an empty room.

“They’re shutting down the investigative units. Basically—”

I shake Culverson’s hand off my shoulder, drop my face down into my hands, look up again at Chief Ordler, shaking my head.

“—basically the feeling is that an investigative force is relatively unnecessary, given the current environment.”

He goes on for a while—it all gets lost for me, after that, but he goes on—and then at some point he stops talking and asks if there are any questions. We just look at him, and he mumbles something else, and then he turns and leaves.

I notice for the first time that our radiator has been shut off, and the room is cold.

“They know,” Culverson says again, and we both pivot our heads toward him, like marionettes.

“They’re not supposed to know for more than a week yet,” I say. “April 9, I thought.”

He shakes his head. “Somebody knows early.”

“What?” says McGully, and Culverson says, “Somebody knows where the damn thing is going to come down.”

* * *

I open the front shotgun-seat door of the Impala, and McConnell says, “Hey. What’s the story?” and I don’t say anything for a long time, I just stand there with one hand on the roof of the car, looking in at her, craning my neck to look at the prisoner in the backseat, slouched down, staring up. Michelson is sitting on the hood, smoking a butt, like my sister did that day in the parking lot.

“Henry? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing. Let’s go ahead and take him in.”

McConnell and Michelson and I remove the suspect from the backseat and stand him up in the garage. There’s a little crowd watching us, Brush Cuts and a few of the vets, Halburton, the old mechanic who’s still kicking around the garage. We pull Littlejohn from the car in his handcuffs, in his sharp leather jacket. A concrete stairwell leads from this area directly down to the basement, to Booking, to be used in exactly this circumstance: the perp is brought in, in a squad car, and handed directly to the duty officers to be taken down for processing.

“Stretch?” says Michelson. “What’s up?”

I’m just standing there, one hand on the suspect’s arm. Someone wolf-whistles at McConnell, she’s still in the skirt and blouse, and she says, “Up yours.”

I’ve used the staircase for pickpockets, once for a suspected arsonist, for countless drunks. Never before for a murderer.

A double-murderer.

I feel nothing, though, I feel numb. My mother would have been proud of me, I think dumbly; Naomi might have been proud of me. Neither is here. In six months none of this will be here, this’ll be ash and a hole.

I start moving again, leading the little group in step toward the staircase. The detective brings in his man. My head hurts.

What happens next, under normal circumstances, is this: The on-duty processing officers take custody of the suspect and walk him down the steps to the basement, where the suspect is fingerprinted and reminded of his rights. Then he would be searched, photographed, the contents of his pockets collected and labeled. His options for legal counsel would be presented to him; someone like Erik Littlejohn, a man of means, would presumably have private counsel he could retain, and he would be afforded an opportunity to make those arrangements.

This top step of this concrete staircase, in other words, is in fact just the next step in a long and complicated journey that begins with the discovery of a corpse on a dirty bathroom floor and ends ultimately at justice. That’s under normal circumstances.

We’re lingering a few steps from the stairhead, Michelson says it again, “Stretch?” and McConnell says, “Palace?”

I don’t know what happens to Littlejohn once I give him over to the two kids, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, who are waiting with their dull eyes and their hands outstretched to guide my suspect down the stairs.

The due-process rules have been adjusted several times under IPSS and the corresponding state laws, and the truth is I don’t know what’s in the new statutes. What’s in the binder Chief Ordler was holding just now—what other provisions are included along with the suspension of detective-level criminal investigation?

I haven’t confronted the question, in my heart, of what happens next to the alleged murderer once he’s been brought in. Tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t think I ever believed I’d be standing here.

But now—I mean—what’re the options? That is the question.

I’m looking at Erik Littlejohn, and he’s looking at me, and then I say, “I’m sorry,” and I hand him over.





I’m rolling on a ten-speed bicycle down the sun-washed sidewalks of New Castle, New Hampshire, in search of Salamander Street. The sun is up there slipping in and out of patchy cloud cover, the breeze is warm and kind and salt-smelling, and I decide, what the heck, and I take a right and coast down a side street toward the water.

New Castle is a small and charming summer town out of season, with the chained-up souvenir shops, the ice-cream-and-fudge place, the post office, the historical society. There’s even a boardwalk, running for a quarter mile or so along the beach, a handful of happy beachgoers out on the dunes. An elderly couple hand in hand, a mom tossing a Nerf football with her son, a teenager sprinting, trying to get a bulky box kite up and off the ground.

A path from the far end of the beach leads back to the town square, where a green lawn surrounds a handsome dark-wood gazebo festooned with bunting and American flags. It looks like there was a small-town celebration last night, and it looks like there’s going to be another one tonight. A couple of locals are wandering into the square, even now, unpacking brass instruments and making small talk, shaking hands. I chain up my ten-speed bike by an overflowing garbage can surrounded by paper plates, uneaten bites of funnel cake drawing happy lines of ants.

There was a parade in Concord last night, also, and there were even fireworks launched from a barge in the Merrimack, bursting majestically and sparkling around the golden dome of the state house. Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They can’t or won’t name an impact spot with a hundred percent certainty, but the vicinity is the Indonesian archipelago, just east of the Gulf of Boni. Pakistan, with its eastern border just four thousand kilometers from the impact site, has renewed its promise to blast the rock from the sky, and the United States has renewed its objections.

In America, meanwhile, across the country, parades and fireworks and celebrations. And, at a suburban shopping mall outside Dallas, looting, followed by gunfire, ending in a riot; six people dead. A similar incident in Jacksonville, Florida, and one in Richmond, Indiana. Nineteen people dead at a Home Depot in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

* * *

Four Salamander Lane does not look like the headquarters of any kind of institute. It’s a little Cape Cod–style single-family residence, old wood painted in blue pastel, close enough to the water that I can smell the salt breeze, here on the front steps.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I say to the tremendously old woman who answers my knock. “My name is Detective Henry Palace.” It’s not, though. “Sorry, my name is Henry Palace. Is this the Open Vista Institute?”

The old woman turns silently and goes into the house, and I follow her, and tell her what I want, and at last she speaks.

“He was an odd duck, wasn’t he?” she says, of Peter Zell. Her voice is strong and clear, surprisingly so.

“I actually never met him.”

“Well, he was.”

“Okay.”

I just figured it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more about this file, this last claims investigation that my insurance man was up to, before he was killed. I’ve had to return my department-issued Impala, so I just biked out here, broke out my mother’s old Schwinn. It took me a little over five hours, including a stop to eat my lunch at an abandoned Dunkin’ Donuts at a highway rest stop.

“An odd duck. And he didn’t need to come here.”

“Why not?”

“Because.” She gestures to the file I brought, which rests on the coffee table between her and me, three pieces of paper in a manila folder: a claim, a policy, a summary of supporting documents. “There was nothing he asked that he couldn’t have asked me on the phone.”

Her name is Veronica Talley, it’s her signature on the files, hers and that of her husband, Bernard, now deceased. Mrs. Talley’s eyes are small and black and beady, like doll’s eyes. The living room is small and tidy, the walls lined with seashells and delicate seaweed still lifes. I am still seeing zero evidence that this is the headquarters of any kind of institute.

“Ma’am, I understand that your husband committed suicide.”

“Yes. He hung himself. In the bathroom. From the thing—” She looks irritated. “The thing? That the water comes out of?”

“The showerhead, ma’am?”

“That’s right. Excuse me. I’m old.”

“I am sorry for your loss.”

“Shouldn’t be. He told me he was going to do it. Told me to go for a walk along the water, talk to the hermit crabs, and when I got back he’d be dead in the bathroom. And that’s how it happened.”

She sniffs, appraises me with her tiny hard eyes. Bernard Talley’s death, I know from having read the papers on the table between us, netted her one million dollars, personally, and an additional three million for the Open Vista Institute, if there is such a thing. Zell had authorized the claim, released the money, after his visit to this place three weeks ago—though he had left the file open, as if he might have been intending to come back, follow up.

“You’re a bit like him, aren’t you?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re like your friend, the one that came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting.”

“As I said, ma’am, I never knew Mr. Zell.”

“Still, you’re like him though.”

There are wind chimes hung right out the back window, behind the kitchen, and I just keep still for as second, listen to their gentle crystal tolling.

“Ma’am? WIll you tell me about the Institute? I would like to know what all that money will go toward.”

“That’s just what your friend wanted to know.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not illegal. We’re a registered nonprofit. 501(c)3, whatever it’s called.”

“I’m sure.”

She doesn’t say anything else. The wind chimes go again, and then a drift of parade music, tubas and trumpets from the gazebo, warming up.

“Mrs. Talley, I can find out in other ways if I must, but it would be easier if you could just tell me.”

She sighs, stands up and shuffles out of the room, and I’m following her, hoping we’re going somewhere so she can show me, because that was pure bluff—I have no real way of finding out anything. Not anymore.

* * *

The money, as it turns out, has gone in large part for titanium.

“I’m not the engineer,” says Mrs. Talley. “Bernard was the engineer. He designed the thing. But the contents we chose together, and we solicited the materials together. We started in May, as soon as it became clear that the worst was a real possibility.”

On a worktable in the garage is an unadorned metal sphere, a few feet in diameter. Mrs. Talley tells me the outer layer is titanium, but that is only the outer layer: there are several layers of aluminum, levels of a thermal coating of Mr. Talley’s own design. He had been an aerospace engineer for many years, and he felt certain that the sphere would be resistant to cosmic radiation and to damage from space detritus, and it could survive in orbit around Earth.

“Survive for how long?”

She smiles, the first time she has done so in my presence.

“Until humanity recovers sufficiently to retrieve it.”

Packed carefully inside the sphere are a brick of DVDs, drawings, rolled-up newspapers in glass cases, and samples of various materials. “Salt water, a clump of clay, human blood,” says Mrs. Talley. “He was a smart cookie, my husband. A smart cookie.”

I go through the inventory in the little satellite for a few minutes, turning over the odd assemblage of objects, holding each thing in my hand, nodding appreciatively. The human race, human history, in a nutshell. While putting the collection together, they had contracted with a small private aerospace company to do the launch, scheduled it for June, and then they’d run out of money. That’s what the insurance claim was for; that’s what the suicide was for. Now the launch, says Mrs. Talley, is back on schedule.

“Well?” she says. “What do you want to add to the capsule?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Why do you ask that?”

“That’s what the other man wanted.”

“Mr. Zell? He wanted to put something in here?”

“He did put something in there.” She reaches into the accumulated materials, shifts through and removes an innocuous manila envelope, thin and small and folded over. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I actually think this is why he came up here, to tell you the truth. He pretended that he needed to investigate our claim in person, but I had told him everything, and then he showed up here anyway. Came up here with that little tape, and then he asked, kind of mumbling, if could he put it in here.”

“Do you mind?”

She shrugs. “He was your friend.”

I lift the small envelope and shake out what’s inside: a microcassette tape, the kind that was once used for answering-machine messages, the kind on which senior executives would make their dictations.

“Do you know what’s on it?”

“Nope.”

I stand there looking at the tape. It might take me some effort to find something that could play this tape, is what I’m thinking, but I could definitely make it happen. At the station house, in one of the storerooms, there were a couple of old answering machines. They might still be there, and Officer McConnell could maybe dig one out for me. Or I’m sure I could find a pawn shop, or maybe at one of the big outdoor markets they’re having down in Manchester now, every week, big public-space flea markets—I could find one, play the tape. Be interesting, if nothing else, just to hear his voice—be interesting—

Mrs. Talley is waiting, watching me with her head at an angle, like a bird. The little tape rests in my palm like my hand belongs to a giant.

“Okay, ma’am,” I say, slipping the tape back into the envelope, laying it back in the capsule. “Thanks for your time.”

“Okay.”

She walks me to the door and waves goodbye. “Watch yourself on the steps, there. Your friend slipped on the way out, banged up his face pretty bad.”

* * *

I unchain my bike from the green central square of New Castle, now crowded with merrymakers, and start out for home, the joyful clamor of the parade fading behind me until it sounds like a music box, and then is gone.

I ride along the shoulder of highway 90, feeling the breeze in my pant legs and up the sleeves of my coat, wavering in the wake of the occasional delivery truck or state vehicle. They suspended mail delivery last Friday, with a rather elaborate ceremony at the White House, but private companies are still delivering packages, the FedEx drivers with armed heavies riding shotgun. I have accepted an early retirement from the Concord Police Department, with a pension equal to eighty-five percent of my full salary at the time of retirement. In total, I served as a patrol officer for one year, three months, and ten days, and as a detective in the Criminal Investigations Unit for three months and twenty days.

I go ahead and take my bike right down the middle of I-90, ride it right along the double yellow lines.

You can’t think too much about what happens next, you really can’t.

* * *

I don’t get home until the middle of the night and there she is waiting for me, sitting on one of the overturned milk crates I keep on the porch for chairs: my baby sister in a long skirt and a light jean jacket, the strong bitter smell of her American Spirits. Houdini is giving her the evil eye from behind the other milk crate, teeth bared, trembling, thinking somehow that he’s invisible.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” I say, and I rush up toward her, leaving the bike in the dirt at the bottom of the porch steps, and then we’re hugging, laughing, I’m pressing her head into the bones of my chest.

“You total jerk,” I say, when we pull apart, and she says, “I’m sorry, Hen. I’m really sorry.”

She doesn’t need to say any more, that’s all I need to hear, in terms of a confession. She knew all along what she was doing, when she begged me, in tears, to help spring her husband.

“It’s okay. To be honest, I guess I’m rather impressed, retrospectively, with your cleverness. You played me like a—how did dad used to say it? Like an oboe? Something?”

“I don’t know, Henry.”

“Sure you do. Something about an oboe, with a bonobo, and—”

“I was only six, Henry. I don’t know any of the sayings.”

She flicks the butt of her cigarette off the porch and pulls out another one. Reflexively I scowl at her chain-smoking, and reflexively she rolls her eyes at my paternalism—old habits. Houdini gives a little tentative woof and pokes his snout out from under the milk crate. Officer McConnell has informed me that the dog is a bichon frisé, but I still like to think of him a poodle.

“So all right, but now you need to tell me. What did you need to know? What information did I unwittingly provide for you by worming my way into the New Hampshire National Guard?”

“Somewhere in this country there is a secret project under construction,” Nico begins, slowly, her face turned away from mine. “And it’s not going to be somewhere obvious. We’ve narrowed it down, and now our goal is to find the seemingly innocuous facility where this project is taking place.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Can’t tell you. But we have information—”

“Where’d you get the information?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Come on, Nico.”

I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone. I’m arguing with my little sister, like we used to over the last Popsicle, or over her boosting my grandfather’s car, except this time we’re fighting about some preposterous geopolitical conspiracy.

“There is a certain level of security in place to protect this project.”

“And, just so I’m clear, you don’t really believe that it’s a shuttle to take people to the Moon.”

“Well,” she says, draws on her cigarette. “Well. Some of us do believe that.”

My mouth drops open, the full ramifications of this thing—what she’s done, what she’s doing here, why she’s apologizing—all of it only now sinking in. I look at her again, my sister, and she even looks different, a lot less like my mother than she used to. She is thinner than before, and her eyes are sunken and serious, not an ounce of baby fat to soften the hard lines of her face.

Nico, Peter, Naomi, Erik—everybody hoarding secrets, changing. Maia, from 280 million miles, having her way with us all.

“Derek was one of the saps, huh? You were on the inside, but your husband really thought we were escaping to the Moon.”

“He had to. He had to believe he had a purpose in riding his ATV onto the base, but he couldn’t know the real purpose. Too untrustworthy. Too—you know.”

“Too stupid.”

She doesn’t answer. Her face is set, her eyes gleaming now with something familiar, something chilling, something like the aggressive religious types in Police Plaza, like the worst of the Brush Cuts, rousting their drunks for the thrill of it. All the true believers batting away the reality of all of this.

“So, the level of security you mentioned. If that had been the real facility, the place you’re looking for, I would have found him, what, in shackles?”

“No. You would have found him dead.”

Her voice is cold, brutal. I feel like I’m standing here with a stranger.

“And you knew he was going to be taking this risk when you sent him in there. He didn’t know, but you did.”

“Henry, I knew it when I married him.”

Nico looks off into the distance and smokes her cigarette, and I’m standing here shivering, not even because of what happened to Derek, not because of this crazy science-fiction madness that my sister has let herself become involved in, not even because I was unknowingly dragged into it, too. I’m shivering because this is it—when Nico takes off, tonight, we’re done—I’m never going to see her again. That’ll leave me and the dog, together, waiting.

“All I can tell you is that it was worth it.”

“How can you say that?” I’m remembering the last part of the story, too, the botched jailbreak, Derek left behind, left for dead. Expendable. A sacrifice. I pick up my bike, heave it onto my shoulder, and walk past her to the door.

“I mean—wait—do you want to know what it is we’re looking for?”

“No, thank you.”

“Because it’s worth it.”

I’m done. I’m not even angry, so much as exhausted. I’ve been biking all day. My legs hurt from my ride. I’m not sure what I’m doing tomorrow, but it’s late. The world keeps turning.

“You have to trust me,” says Nico to my back, I’m at the door now, the door is open, Houdini is at my heels. “It’s all worth it.”

I stop, and I turn and look at her.

“It’s hope,” she says.

“Oh,” I say. “It’s hope. Okay.”

I close the door.





THANK YOU





Dr. Tim Spahr, director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

Dr. Cynthia Gardner, forensic pathologist

The Concord Police Department, especially Officers Joseph Wright and Craig Leveques

Andrew Winters, Esq.

Jeff Strelzin, New Hampshire assistant attorney general

Steve Walters at Loyola University Maryland

Binyamin Applebaum at the New York Times

Dr. Judy Greene

David Belson at Akamai Technologies

Dr. Nora Osman and Dr. Mark Pomeranz

Jason and Jane and Doogie and Dave and Brett and Mary Ellen and Nicole and Eric and everyone else at Quirk Books

Molly Lyons and Joelle Delbourgo

Early readers Nick Tamarkin, Erik Jackson, and Laura Gutin

Michael Hyman (and Wylie the Dog)

And thanks very, very, very much to Diana and Rosalie and Isaac and Milly

* * *