The Last Policeman

5.

The expansion of Concord Hospital was announced with much fanfare eighteen months ago: a public–private partnership to add a new long-term-care wing and make wide-ranging improvements to pediatrics, to obstetrics/gynecology, and to the ICU. They broke ground last February, made steady progress through the spring, and then financing dried up and construction slowed and then stopped entirely by the end of July, leaving a maze of half-built hallways, towers of skeletal scaffolding, lots of awkward temporary arrangements made permanent, everybody walking in circles and giving one another wrong directions.

“The morgue?” says a white-haired volunteer in a cheerful red beret, consulting a handheld map. “Let’s see … the morgue, the morgue, the morgue. Oh. Here.” A pair of doctors rushes past, clutching clipboards, while the volunteer gestures at her map, which I can see is covered with scrawled emendations and exclamation points. “What you need is Elevator B, and Elevator B is … oh, dear.”

My hands are twitching at my sides. One thing you don’t want to do, when you’re meeting Dr. Alice Fenton, is be late.

“Oh. That way.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Elevator B, according to the sign written in black permanent marker and taped above the buttons, goes either up—to oncology, to special surgery, to the pharmacy—or down, to the chapel, the custodial department, and the morgue. I step off, checking my watch, and hustle down the hallway past an office suite, past a supply closet, past a small black door with a white Christian cross on it, thinking, oncology—thinking, you know what would really be awful right about now? Having cancer.

But then I push open the thick metal doors of the morgue, and there’s Peter Zell, his body laid out on the table in the center of the room, spot-lit dramatically by the arching bank of hundred-watt autopsy lights. And standing beside him, waiting for me, is the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire. I stick out a hand in greeting. “Good morning, Dr. Fenton. Afternoon, sorry. Hello.”

“Tell me about your corpse.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I say, letting my proffered hand float dumbly back to my side, and then I just stand there like an idiot, speechless, because Fenton is here, in front of me, standing in the stark white light of the morgue, one hand resting on the front end of her sleek silver cart like a captain at the tiller. She stares out from behind her famous perfect-circle glasses, waiting with an expression I’ve heard repeatedly described by other detectives, owlish and expectant and intense.

“Detective?”

“Yes,” I say, again. “Okay.” I get my act together and give Fenton what I’ve got.

I tell her about the crime scene, about the expensive belt, the absence of the victim’s cell phone, the absence of a suicide note. As I speak, my eyes are flicking back and forth from Fenton to the items on her cart, the tools of the pathologist’s trade: the bone saw, the chisel and the scissors, rows of vials for the collection of various precious fluids. Scalpels of a dozen different widths and keennesses, arrayed on clean white fabric.

Dr. Fenton remains silent and still through my recitation, and when at last I shut up she continues to stare, her lips pursed and her brow minutely furrowed.

“Okay, then,” she says at last. “So, what the hell are we doing here?”

“Ma’am?”

Fenton’s hair is steely gray and cut short, bangs running in a precise line across her forehead.

“I thought this was a suspicious death,” she says, her eyes narrowing to two flashing points. “What I’m hearing from you does not comprise evidence of a suspicious death.”

“Well, yes, no,” I stammer. “Not evidence, per se.”

“Not evidence, per se?” she echoes, in a tone that somehow makes me keenly aware of the basement’s unusually low ceiling, the fact that I’m standing slightly stooped so as not to bang my forehead on the bank of overhead lights, whereas Dr. Fenton, at five foot three, stands fully upright, her spine military-straight, glaring at me from behind the glasses.

“Per Title LXII statute 630 of the criminal code of New Hampshire, as revised in January by the general court sitting in combined session,” Fenton says, and I’m nodding, vigorously nodding to show her that I know all this, I’ve studied the binders, federal, state, and local, but she keeps going, “the OCME will not perform autopsies when it can be reasonably ascertained at the scene that the death was the result of suicide.”

“Right,” I say, muttering “yes” and “of course,” until I can respond. “And it was my determination, ma’am, that there may have been some question of foul play.”

“There were signs of struggle at the scene?”

“No.”

“Signs of forced entry?

“No.”

“Missing valuables?”

“Well, the, uh, he didn’t have a phone. I think I mentioned that.”

“Who are you again?”

“We haven’t met, officially. My name is Detective Henry Palace. I’m new.”

“Detective Palace,” says Fenton, pulling on her gloves with a series of fierce movements, “my daughter has twelve piano recitals this season, and I am, at this very moment, missing one of them. Do you know how many piano recitals she will have next season?”

I don’t know what to say to that. I really don’t. So I just stand there for a minute, the tall and stupid man in the brightly lit room full of corpses.

“Okey-dokey then,” says Alice Fenton with menacing cheer, turning to her cart of equipment. “This better be a goddamn murder.”

She takes up her blade and I stare at the floor, feeling distinctly that what I’m supposed to do, here, is stand very quietly until she is through—but it’s hard to do that, it really is, and as she begins the meticulous stepwise progression of her work, I look up and inch forward and watch her do it. And it is a glorious thing to watch, the cold and beautiful precision of the autopsy, Fenton in motion, a master moving meticulously through the steps of her craft.

The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.

Carefully Dr. Fenton cuts free the black leather belt and slips it off Zell’s neck, measures the width of the band and the length from end to end. With brass calipers she takes the dimensions of the bruising beneath the eye, and the bruise from the belt buckle, digging up beneath the chin, yellowish and dry like a patch of sere terrain running up on either side toward his ears, an angry ragged V. And she’s pausing, moment to moment, to take pictures of everything: the belt while it’s still on the neck, the belt alone, the neck alone.

And then she cuts away the clothes, rinses off the insurance man’s pallid body with a damp cloth, her gloved fingers moving rapidly over his midsection and his arms.

“What are you looking for?” I venture, and Fenton ignores me; I fall silent.

With a scalpel she tucks into the chest, and I take another step forward, now I’m standing beside her under the bright halo of the mortuary light, peering wide-eyed as she makes a deep Y-shaped incision, peels back the skin and the flesh beneath. I’m leaning way over the body, pushing my luck, as Fenton draws the dead man’s blood, piercing a vein near the center of the heart, filling three vials in quick succession. And I realize at some point during all this that I’m barely breathing, that as I’m watching her go point by point through this process, weighing the organs and recording their weights, lifting the brain from the skull and turning it in her hands, I’m waiting for her impassive expression to sharpen, waiting for her to gasp or mutter “hmm” or turn to me in astonishment.

To have found whatever it is that will prove that Zell was killed, and not by his own hand.

Instead, at last, Dr. Fenton puts down her scalpel and flatly says, “Suicide.”

I stare at her. “Are you sure?”

Fenton doesn’t answer. She’s moving rapidly back over to her cart, opening a box containing a thick roll of plastic bags, and peeling the top one off.

“Wait, ma’am. I’m sorry,” I say. “What about that?”

“What about what?” I can feel myself growing desperate, a heat building in my cheeks, a squeak sneaking into my voice, like a child’s voice. “That? Is that bruising? Above his ankle?”

“I saw that, yes,” Fenton says coolly.

“Where did it come from?”

“We shall never know.” She doesn’t stop bustling, doesn’t look at me, her flat voice glazed with sarcasm. “But we do know he didn’t die from a bruise to the calf.”

“But aren’t there are other things we do know? Just in terms of determining the cause of death?” I’m saying this and I’m fully conscious of how ridiculous it is to be challenging Alice Fenton, but this can’t be right. I scour my memory, flipping frantically in my mind through the pages of the relevant textbooks. “What about the blood? Do we perform a toxicity screening?”

“We would if we’d found anything to indicate it. Needle marks, muscles atrophied in suggestive patterns.”

“But we can’t just do it?”

Fenton laughs dryly, shaking open the plastic bag. “Detective, are you familiar with the state police forensic lab? On Hazen Drive?”

“I’ve never been there.”

“Well, it is the only forensic laboratory in the state, and right now there is a new person running the show over there, and he is an idiot. He is an assistant to an assistant who is now chief toxicologist, since the real chief toxicologist left town in November to go study life drawing in Provence.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. Oh.” Fenton’s lip curls up with evident distaste. “Apparently it’s what she’s always wanted to do. It’s a mess over there. Orders getting left on the table. It’s a mess.”

“Oh,” I say again, and I turn to what remains of Peter Zell, the chest cavity yawning open on the table. I’m looking at him, at it, and I’m thinking how sad it is, because however he died, whether he killed himself or not, he’s dead. I’m thinking the dumb and obvious thought that here was a person, and now he’s gone and he’s never coming back.

When I look up again, Fenton is standing beside me, and her voice has changed a little, and she’s pointing, directing my gaze to Zell’s neck.

“Look,” she says. “What do you see?”

“Nothing,” I say, confused. The skin is peeled back, revealing the soft tissue and muscle, the yellow-white of the bone beneath. “I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly. If someone had snuck up behind this man with a rope, or strangled him with bare hands, or even with this extremely expensive belt you’ve become fixated on, the neck would be a mess. There would be tissue abrasion, there would be pools of blood from internal hemorrhaging.”

“Okay,” I say. I nod. Fenton turns away, back to her cart.

“He died by asphyxiation, Detective,” she says. “He leaned forward, on purpose, into the knot of the ligature, his airway was sealed, and he died.”

She zips the corpse of my insurance man back into the body bag from whence it came and slides the body back into its designated slot in the refrigerated wall. I’m watching all this mutely, stupidly, wishing I had more to say. I don’t want her to leave.

“What about you, Dr. Fenton?”

“Excuse me?” She stops at the door, looks back.

“Why haven’t you left, gone off to do whatever it is you’ve always wanted to do?”

Fenton tilts her head, looks at me like she’s not exactly sure she understands the question. “This is what I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Right. Okay.”

The heavy gray door swings closed behind her, I rub my knuckles into my eyes, thinking, what next? Thinking, what now?

I stand there alone for a second, alone with Fenton’s rolling cart, alone with the bodies in their cold lockers. Then I take one of the vials of Zell’s blood off the cart, slip it into the inside pocket of my blazer, and go.

* * *

I find my way out of Concord Hospital, weaving my way through the unfinished corridors, and then, because it’s already been a long and difficult day, because I am frustrated and exhausted and confused, and wanting to do nothing but figure out what I’m going to do next, my sister is waiting for me at my car.

Nico Palace in her ski hat and winter coat is seated cross-legged on the sloping front hood of the Impala, undoubtedly leaving a deep dent, because she knows I will hate that, and tapping ash from her American Spirit cigarette directly onto the windshield. I trudge toward her through the snow-crusted emptiness of the hospital parking lot, and Nico greets me with one hand raised, palm up, like an Indian squaw, smoking her cigarette, waiting.

“Come on, Hank,” she says, before I can say a word. “I left you, like, seventeen messages.”

“How’d you know where I was?”

“Why’d you hang up on me this morning?”

“How’d you know where I was?”

This is how we talk. I pull the sleeve of my jacket up over my hand and use it to brush ash off the car down into the snow.

“I called the station,” says Nico. “McGully told me where I could find you.”

“He shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “I’m working.”

“I need your help. Seriously.”

“Well, I’m seriously working. Would you climb down off the vehicle, please?”

Instead she casts out her legs and settles back on the windshield like she’s spreading out on a beach chair. She’s wearing the thick army-issue winter coat that was our grandfather’s, and I can see where the brass buttons are etching little trails into the paint job of the department’s Impala.

I wish Detective McGully hadn’t told her where to find me.

“I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but I’m freaking out, and what’s the point of having a brother who’s a cop if he won’t help you?”

“Indeed,” I say, and look at my watch. The snow has started again, very lightly, stray slow drifting flakes.

“Derek didn’t come home last night. I know you’re going to be like, okay, they had another fight, he disappeared. But that’s the thing, Hen: we didn’t fight this time. No argument, nothing. We made dinner. He said he had to go out. Said he wanted to take a walk. So I said sure. I cleaned up the kitchen, smoked a joint, and went to bed.”

I scowl. My sister, I believe, loves the fact that she can smoke pot now, that her policeman brother can no longer lecture her sternly about it. For Nico, I think, this is a silver lining. She takes a last drag and pitches the butt into the snow. I crouch down and pick up the doused stub of cigarette between two fingers and hold it in the air. “I thought you cared about the environment.”

“Not so much, anymore,” she says.

Nico swivels back to a sitting position, wrapping the thick collar of the coat around her. My sister could be so beautiful if she just took care of herself—combed her hair, got some sleep every once in a while. She’s like a picture of our mother that someone crumpled up and tried to smooth out again.

“So then it’s midnight, and he’s not back. I called him, no answer.”

“So he went to a bar,” I offer.

“I called all the bars.”

“All of them?”

“Yes, Hen.”

There are a lot more bars than there used to be. A year ago you had Penuche’s, the Green Martini, and that was pretty much as far as it went. Now there are lots of places, some licensed, some pirated, some just basement apartments where someone has got a bathtub full of beer, a cash register, and an iPod set on shuffle.

“So he went to a friend’s house.”

“I called them. I called everyone. He’s gone.”

“He’s not gone,” I say, and what I’m not saying is the truth, which is that if Derek really had pulled a runner on her, it would be the best thing to happen to my sister in a long time. They had gotten married on January 8, that first Sunday after the Tolkin interview. That particular Sunday had set the record, apparently, for the most weddings on a single day, a record unlikely ever to be beaten, unless it’s on October 2.

“Are you going to help me or not?”

“I told you, I can’t. Not today. I’m on a case.”

“God, Henry,” she says, her studied insouciance abruptly gone, and she’s hopping off the car and jabbing me in the chest with a forefinger. “I quit my job as soon as we knew this shit was really happening. I mean, why waste time at work?

“You worked three days a week at a farmers’ market. I solve murders.”

“Oh, excuse me. I’m sorry. My husband is missing.”

“He’s not really your husband.”

“Henry.”

“He’ll be back, Nico. You know he will.”

“Really? What makes you so sure?” She stamps her foot, eyes blazing, not waiting for an answer. “And what are you working on that’s so important?”

I figure, what the heck, and I tell her about the Zell case, explain how I’ve just come from the morgue, that I’m developing leads, trying to impress upon her the seriousness of an ongoing police investigation.

“So wait. A hanger?” she says, sullen, peevish. She’s only twenty-one years old, my sister. She’s just a kid.

“Maybe.”

“You just said the guy hung himself at the McDonald’s.”

“I said it appeared that way.”

“And that’s why you’re too busy to take ten minutes to find my husband? Because some jerk-off killed himself at the McDonald’s? In the goddamn bathroom?”

“Nico, come on.”

“What?”

I hate it when my sister uses foul language. I’m old-fashioned. She’s my sister.

“I’m sorry. But a man has died, and it’s my job to find out how and why.”

“Yeah, well, I’m sorry. Because a man is missing, and it’s my man, and I happen to love him, okay?”

There’s a hitch in her voice all of a sudden, and I know that’s it, that’s game over. She’s crying, and I’ll do whatever she wants.

“Oh, come on, Nico. Don’t do that.” It’s too late, she’s sobbing, open mouthed, violently pushing tears from her eyes with the back of her hands. “Don’t do that.”

“It’s just, all of this.” She gestures, a vague and woeful gesture encompassing all of the sky. “I can’t be alone, Henry. Not now.”

A bitter wind courses across the parking lot, flicking drifting snow upward into our eyes.

“I know,” I say. “I know.”

And then I’m gingerly stepping forward, gathering my little sister in my arms. The family joke was that she got the math genes and I got all the height. My chin is a good six inches up from the top of her head, her sobs burying themselves somewhere in my sternum.

“All right, kid. All right.”

She backs out of my awkward embrace, stifles a final moan, and lights herself a fresh American Spirit, shading a gold-plated lighter against the wind as she sucks the thing to life. The lighter, like the coat, like the brand of cigarettes, was my grandfather’s.

“So you’ll find him?” she asks.

“I’ll do my best, Nico. Okay? That’s all I can do.” I pluck the cigarette from the corner of her mouth and toss it under the car.

* * *

“Good afternoon. I’d like to speak to Sophia Littlejohn, if I could.”

I’ve got a nice strong signal, out here in the parking lot.

“She’s with a patient just now. May I ask who’s calling?”

“Uh, sure. No—it’s just—a friend of mine’s wife is a patient of … gee, what do you even call a midwife? Doctor Littlejohn, is that what I would—?”

“No, sir. Just the name. Ms. Littlejohn.”

“Okay, well, my friend’s wife is a patient of … of Ms. Littlejohn, and I understood that she had gone into labor. Like, early this morning?”

“This morning?”

“Yeah. Late last night, early this morning? My friend left me a message, early this morning, and I could’ve sworn that’s what he said. But it was garbled, his phone was all staticky, and—hello?”

“Yes, I’m here. There may be a mistake. I don’t think Sophia was delivering. You said this morning?”

“I did.”

“I’m sorry. What was your name?”

“Never mind. It’s not a big deal. Never mind.”

* * *

At headquarters I walk briskly past a trio of Brush Cuts in the break room, hanging around in a circle by the Coke machine, laughing like frat boys. I don’t recognize any of them, and they don’t recognize me. No one among them, I warrant, could quote from Farley and Leonard, not to mention the New Hampshire Criminal Code, not to mention the United States Constitution.

In Adult Crimes, I lay out what I’ve got for Detective Culverson: tell him about the house, the Dear Sophia note, Dr. Fenton’s conclusions. He listens patiently, his fingers steepled together, and then he doesn’t say anything for a long time.

“Well, you know, Henry,” he begins slowly, and that’s plenty, I don’t want to hear the rest.

“I get what it looks like,” I say. “I do.”

“Hey. Listen. It’s not my case.” Culverson inclines his head slightly backward. “If you feel like you’ve got to solve it, you’ve got to solve it.”

“I do, Detective. I really do.”

“Okay, then.”

I sit there for a second, and then I go back to my desk and pick up the landline and initiate my search for stupid Derek Skeve. First I repeat the calls that Nico has already made: the bars and the hospitals. I reach the men’s prison and the new, auxiliary men’s prison, I reach the Merrimack County sheriff’s office, I reach admitting departments at Concord Hospital and New Hampshire Hospital and every other hospital I know of in three counties. But no one’s got him, no one matching that description.

Outside, there’s a thick clutch of God people clustered in the plaza, thrusting their pamphlets at passersby, hollering in gospel cadences about how prayer is all we’ve got left, prayer is our only salvation. I nod noncommittally and I keep on moving.

* * *

And now I’m lying in my bed and I’m not sleeping because it’s Wednesday night, and it was Tuesday morning that I first looked into the dead eyes of Peter Zell, which means he was killed sometime on Monday night, and so maybe it’s almost forty-eight hours since he got killed, or maybe the forty-eight hours have already passed. Either way, my window is sliding closed and I am nowhere near identifying and apprehending his murderer.

So I’m lying in my bed and I’m staring at the ceiling with my fists clenching and unclenching at my sides, and then I get up and open the blinds, and I look out the window, into the cloud-fogged blackness, past the handful of visible stars.

“You know what you can do?” I say softly, raising one finger and pointing it at the sky. “You can go f*ck yourself.”





1.

“Wake up, sweetheart. Wakey-wakey-wakey.”

“Hello?”

Last night, before going to bed, I unplugged the phone from the wall but left my cell phone on and set to vibrate, so tonight’s pleasant dream of Alison Koechner has been interrupted not by the alarm-bell clamor of the landline, Maia shrieking into the windows and setting the world on fire, but by a gentle shivering rattle on the night table, a sensation that has inserted itself into my dream as the purr of a cat at ease in Alison’s gentle lap.

And now Victor France is cooing at me. “Open your eyes, sweetheart. Crack open those big moody peepers, Mustache McGee.”

I crack open my big moody peepers. Outside is darkness. France’s voice is whispery and grotesque and insistent. I blink awake and catch one final sidewise glimpse of Alison, radiant in the auburn front room of our wooden house on Casco Bay.

“I’m so sorry to wake you, Palace. Oh, wait, I’m not sorry at all.” France’s voice dissolves into a queer little giggle. He’s high on something, that’s for sure; maybe marijuana, maybe something else. High as a satellite, my father used to say. “No, definitely not sorry.”

I yawn again, crack my neck, and check the clock: 3:47 a.m.

“I don’t know how you’ve been sleeping, Detective, but I have not been sleeping too well, me, personally. Every time I’m about to crash out I think to myself, now, Vic, baby, that’s just dead hours. That’s just golden hours right down the tubes.” I’m sitting upright, feeling around on my night table for the light switch, grabbing my blue book and my pen, thinking, he’s got something for me. He wouldn’t be calling except that he’s got something for me. “I’m keeping track, at my house, can you believe that? I’ve got this big poster with every day that’s left, and every day I check one off.”

Behind France’s ragged monologue is the rapid-fire thump and robotic piano of electronic music, a large crowd hooting and chanting. Victor is partying in a warehouse somewhere, probably out on Sheep Davis Road, way east of the city proper.

“It’s like an Advent calendar, you know what I mean, my man?” He slips into a horror-movie narrator’s basso profondo. “An Advent calendar … of doom.”

He cackles, coughs, cackles again. It’s definitely not marijuana. Ecstasy is what I’m now thinking, though I shudder to think how France would have funded a purchase of Ecstasy, the prices for synthetics being as high as they are.

“Do you have information for me, Victor?”

“Ha! Palace!” Cackle, cough. “That’s one of the things I like about you. You do not mess around.”

“So do you have something for me?”

“Oh, my goodness gracious.” He laughs, pauses, and I can picture him, twitching, skinny arms tensing, the teasing grin. In the silence the bass-and-drum behind him pipes through, tinny and distant. “Yeah,” he says finally. “I do. I found it, about your pickup truck. I actually got it yesterday, but I waited. I waited until I was sure it would wake you up, and do you know why?”

“Because you hate me.”

“Yes!” he hollers and cackles. “I hate you! You got a pen, beautiful?”

The red pickup truck with the flag on the side was converted to a waste-oil engine, according to Victor France, by a Croatian mechanic named Djemic, who runs a small shop near the burned-out Nissan dealership on Manchester Street. I don’t know the place he’s talking about, but it will be easy to find.

“Thank you, sir.” I’m wide awake now, writing quickly, this is great, holy moly, and I’m feeling a surge of excitement and a wild rush of kindness toward Victor France. “Thanks, man,” I say. “This is great. Thank you so much. Go back to your party.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Now, you listen to me.”

“Yes?” My heart is shivering in my chest; I can see the outlines of the next phase of my investigation, each piece of information properly following forward from the last. “What?”

“I just wanna say … I wanna say something.” Victor’s voice has lost its ragged overlay of addled giddiness, he’s drawn down very quiet. I can see him, clear as though he’s standing before me, hunched forward over the warehouse pay phone, jabbing a finger in the air. “I just wanna say, this is it, man.”

“Okay,” I say. “This is it.” I mean it, too. He’s given me what I asked for, and more, and I’m ready to cut him loose. Let him dance in his warehouse till the world burns down.

“Do you—” His voice catches, thick with suppressed tears, and now the tough guy is gone, he’s a little boy pleading his way out of punishment. “Do you promise?”

“I do, Victor,” I say. “I promise.”

“Okay,” he says. “ ’Cause also, I know whose truck it is.”

* * *

I know what the dream is about, by the way. I’m not an idiot. There is little novelty in the detective who cannot solve himself.

The dream that I’ve been having, about my high-school sweetheart, is not really about my high-school sweetheart, when you get right down to it. It’s not a dream about Alison Koechner and our lost love and the precious little three-bedroom house in Maine we might have built together, had things gone a different way. I am not dreaming of white picket fences and Sunday crosswords and warm tea.

There’s no asteroid in the dream. In the dream, life continues. Simple life, happy and white-picket lined or otherwise. Mere life. Goes on.

When I’m dreaming of Alison Koechner, what I’m dreaming of is not dying.

Okay? See? I get it.

* * *

“I just wanted to go over a few things with you, Mr. Dotseth, just to let you know—this case, this hanger, it’s got legs. It really does.”

“Mom? Is that you?”

“What? No—it’s Detective Palace.”

A pause, a low chuckle. “I know who it is, son. I’m having a little fun.”

“Oh. Of course.”

I hear newspaper pages flipping, I can practically smell the bitter steam rising off of Denny Dotseth’s cup of coffee. “Hey, did you hear about what’s happening in Jerusalem?”

“No.”

“Boy, oh boy. Do you want to?”

“No, sir, not right now. Hey, so, this case, Mr. Dotseth.”

“I’m sorry, remind me what case we’re talking about?”

Sip of coffee, crinkle of newspaper page, he’s teasing me, me at my kitchen table drumming long fingers over a page of my blue book. On which page, as of four o’clock this morning, is written the name and home address of the last person to see my insurance man alive.

“The Zell case, sir. The hanger from yesterday morning.”

“Oh, right. The attempted murder. It’s a suicide, but you’re attempting—”

“Yes, sir. Listen, though: I’ve got a strong lead on the vehicle.”

“What vehicle is that, kiddo?”

My fingers, drumming faster, rat-a-tat-tat. C’mon, Dotseth.

“The vehicle I mentioned when we spoke yesterday, sir. The red pickup truck with the vegetable-oil engine. In which the victim was last seen.”

Another long pause, Dotseth trying to drive me insane.

“Hello? Denny?”

“So, okay, so you have a lead on the vehicle.”

“Yes. And you said to keep you apprised if there was any real chance it’s more than a hanger.”

“Did I?”

“Yeah. And I think there is, sir, I think there is a real chance. I’m going to swing over there this morning, talk to the guy, and if it looks like anything, I’ll come back to you and we can get a warrant, right?” I trail off. “Mr. Dotseth?”

He clears his throat. “Detective Palace? Who’s your detective-sergeant these days?”

“Sir?”

I wait, my hand still poised over my notebook, my fingers curling over the address: 77 Bow Bog Road. It’s just south of us, in Bow, the first suburb over the city line.

“Down in Adult Crimes. Who is supervising the division?”

“Uh, no one, I guess. Chief Ordler, technically. Sergeant Stassen went Bucket List at the end of November, I think, before I even moved upstairs. A replacement appointment is pending.”

“Right,” says Dotseth. “Okay. Pending. Respectfully, buddy: you want to follow the case, follow the damn case.”