The Last Policeman

5.

“Excuse me? Good morning. Hi. I need you to run a sample for me.”

“Yeah. Well, that’s what we do. Gimme a second, all right.”

“I need you to run it right now.”

“Didn’t I just say, give me a second?”

This is the assistant to the assistant that Fenton warned me about, the individual now running the state lab on Hazen Drive. He’s young and disheveled and late for work, and he is looking at me like he’s never seen a policeman before in his life. He stumbles toward his desk, gestures vaguely at a row of hard plastic orange chairs, but I decline.

“I need these done right away.”

“Dude, dude. Give me a damn second.”

He’s clutching a bag of doughnuts, grease staining its bottom, and he looks bleary eyed and unshaven and hungover.

“Sir?”

“I just walked in the door. It’s like ten in the morning.”

“It’s ten forty-five. I’ve been waiting since nine.”

“Yeah, well, the world’s about to end.”

“Yes,” I say. “I heard.”

Tonight it will be one week since Peter Zell was killed, and at last I’ve got a bite on it. One piece. One idea. My hands tap on the toxicologist’s desk while he breathes open-mouthed and settles heavily into his rolling chair, and then I place my sample on his desk. A vial of dark red blood drawn from the heart of Peter Zell, which I removed this morning from the back of my freezer and zipped in the insulated box I use for my lunch.

“Dude, come on. This isn’t tagged.” The functionary lifts the vial to the pallid halogen light. “There’s no sticker on it, no date. This could be chocolate syrup, man.”

“It’s not.”

“Yeah, but, this isn’t procedure, Officer.”

“The world’s about to end,” I say, and he looks at me, sour.

“It has to have a sticker, and someone’s gotta order it. Who ordered it?”

“Fenton,” I say.

“Seriously?”

He lowers the vial, narrows his red-rimmed eyes at me. He scratches his head, and a drift of dandruff tumbles onto the desk.

“Yes, sir,” I say. “She told me that this place is a mess. That orders are getting lost all the time.”

I’m on thin ice. I am aware of that. I can’t help it. The guy is looking at me, a little fearfully, it seems like, and I realize that my fists are clenched, and my jaw is tight. I need to know if there was morphine in this blood. I need to know if Naomi Eddes is telling me the truth. I think she was, but I need to know.

“Please, friend,” I say quietly. “Please run my blood. Just run it.”

* * *

“Brother?” calls a bespectacled middle-aged man with a beard, as I walk from the parking garage across School Street toward headquarters, turning over possibilities in my head, laying out my timeline. “Have you heard the good news?”

“Yes,” I say, smile politely. “I sure have. Thanks.”

I need to get inside, tell my colleagues what I’ve worked out, determine a plan of action. But first I’ve got to stop in Wilentz’s office, get the results of the search I called him for at 8:45 this morning. But the bearded religious man holds his ground, and when I look up I see that they’re out in force this morning, a thick flock of the religious, long black coats, smiling in all directions, wielding their tattered pamphlets.

“Be not afraid,” says a plain woman who appears before me, her eyes mildly crossed, dots of red lipstick on her smiling teeth. The others are all dressed similarly, three women and two men, all beaming rapturously, all holding thin pamphlets in gloved fingers.

“Thanks,” I say, no longer smiling. “Thanks so much.”

It’s not the Jews, the Jews have the hats. It’s not Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Jehovah’s Witnesses stand there quietly holding aloft their literature. Whoever it is, I do what I always do, which is look at my feet and try to keep moving.

“Be not afraid,” says the first woman again, and the others form behind her in a ragged semicircle, blocking me like a hockey goal. I take a step back, nearly stumble into the street.

“I’m not afraid, actually. Thanks so much, though.”

“The truth is not yours to refuse,” murmurs the woman, pressing the pamphlet into my hand. I look down at it, just to avoid her God-glazed eyes, and I scan the bold red-outlined text: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY, the cover says on the top, and the same along the bottom: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY!

“Read it,” says another of the ladies, a small, stout African American woman with a lemon-colored scarf and a silver brooch. Everywhere I turn there’s a flap of broadcloth, a heavenly smile. I flip open the pamphlet, skim the bullet points.

* IF A MAN’S BLINDNESS CAN BE CURED BY THE PRAYERS OF A DOZEN, MANKIND’S CATASTROPHE CAN BE UNDONE BY THE PRAYERS OF A MILLION.

I don’t really accept the premise, but I go ahead and skim it. If enough of us renounce our wickedness and kneel in the loving light of the Lord, the pamphlet insists, then the ball of fire will bend in its path and sail harmlessly over the horizon. It’s a nice thought. I just want to get into the office. I fold the pamphlet and push it back toward the first woman, the one with the batty eyes and the lipstick teeth.

“No thanks.”

“Keep it,” she insists, gentle and firm, while the chorus calls, “Read it!”

“May I ask you, sir,” says the African American woman, with the scarf. “Are you a man of faith?

“No. My parents were.”

“God bless them. And where are your parents now?

“Dead,” I say. “They were murdered. Excuse me, please.”

“Leave him alone, you jackals,” says a booming voice, and I look up: my savior, Detective McGully, an open beer bottle in one hand, a cigar clamped in his teeth. “You want to pray to someone, pray to Bruce Willis in Armageddon.” McGully tosses me a salute, lifts his middle finger and waves it at the true believers.

“Sneer now, sinner, but wickedness shall be punished,” says the saint with the lipstick teeth to Officer McGully, backing away, a pamphlet fluttering from her open pocketbook onto the sidewalk. “You shall face the darkness, young man.”

“Guess what, sister,” says McGully, handing me his Sam Adams and forming his hands into a megaphone. “You, too.”

* * *

“It’s a percentage.”

“What is?”

“The number,” I say. “It’s 12.375 percent.”

I’m pacing, and I’ve got it under my arm like a football, Peter Zell’s shoebox, the one overflowing with asteroid information, all the numbers circled and double underlined. I’m laying it out for my colleagues, explaining what I’ve got, what I think I’ve got. McGully sits with furrowed brow, tipped back in his chair, rolling his empty morning beer bottle between his palms. Culverson is at his desk in a crisp silver suit, sipping coffee from a mug, considering. Andreas, over in his shadowy corner, head down, eyes closed, asleep. Adult Crimes.

“When Maia first showed up, when they first spotted it and began tracking it, Peter immediately began following the story.”

“Peter is your hanger?”

“The victim, yeah.”

I take that first AP article, from April 2, the one ending with the odds of impact at one in two million one hundred twenty-eight thousand, and hand it to Culverson.

“And here’s another one, a few days later.” I pull out another scrap of dog-eared computer paper and begin reading. “ ‘Though the object appears to be massively large, with an estimated diameter upwards of six and a quarter kilometers, Spaceguard astronomers calculate its current chances of colliding with Earth as barely higher than zero—what Dr. Kathy Goldstone, a professor of astrophysics at the University of Arizona, calls only just within the realm of non-negligible probability.’ And Mr. Zell, he’s got that number—six and a quarter—that’s underlined, too.”

I take out another piece of paper, and another. Zell wasn’t just keeping track of the numbers on Maia, on its trajectory and projected density and composition. His box also has articles on all the asteroid-related societal changes: new laws, shifting economic landscape, and he’s watching those numbers, too, writing on the backs of the papers, scrawling calculations—long columns of data, exclamation points—adding it all into the matrix.

“Son of a gun,” says Culverson suddenly.

“Son of a gun what?” says McGully. “What?”

“See—so—” I start, and Culverson finishes, says it smooth and right: “The strong possibility of death by global catastrophe can be seen as mitigating the risk of death from drug-related misadventure.”

“Yes,” I say. “Right. Yes.”

“Yes, what?” growls McGully.

“Palace’s hanger was doing a risk assessment.”

I beam. Culverson nods at me approvingly, and I place the lid back on the box. It’s 11:30 now, shift change, and from the break room a couple doors down we can hear the frat-house rumble of the patrol officers, the young Brush Cuts with their nightsticks. They’re rattling around, shouting abuse at one another, drinking their skinny little cans of energy drink, strapping on their bulletproofing. Ready to get out there and aim their sidearms at some looters, ready to fill up the drunk tank.

“My theory is, Zell makes a decision, very early on, that if the odds of impact rise above a certain mathematically determined level, he’s going to try something dangerous and illegal, an interest that had always been too risky to indulge. Until now.”

In early June the odds rise above his threshold, and Zell heads to the house of his old friend J. T. Toussaint, who figures out how to get ahold of something, and together they get high as satellites.

But then—late October—Zell has a bad reaction, or a change of heart, or maybe the drugs run out. He goes into withdrawal.

At this point, McGully raises a hand slowly, sarcastically, like a surly teenager giving his math teacher a hard time.

“Uh, yes, Detective? Excuse me? How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?”

“Well, I don’t know. But that’s what I’d like to find out.”

“Okay. Great!” He claps, hops off his desk. “So, let’s go to this Toussaint fella’s house and run the a*shole in.”

I turn from Culverson to McGully, my heartbeat accelerating a little. “You think so?”

“Hell, yeah, I think so.” In fact, he looks delighted at the prospect, and I’m reminded of McConnell, the philosophical question of our era: How many more times do I get to yell, “Stop, motherf*cker”?

“But I don’t have probable cause,” I protest, and I turn back toward Culverson, hoping that he’ll object to my objection, hoping to hear him say, “Sure you do, son,” but he’s still quiet in his corner, ruminating.

“Probable cause?” snorts McGully. “Christ, man, you’ve got it in spades. You’ve got the guy procuring a controlled substance, distributing it. Automatic go to jail, do not pass Go, IPSS Title IX—right, hotshot? You’ve got him lying to a police officer. Same deal—Title I-don’t-f*cking-know, Title Infinity.”

“Well, I think he’s done those things. I don’t know.” I appeal to Culverson, the adult in the room. “Maybe we can get a warrant? Search the house?”

“A warrant?” McGully throws his hands up, imploring the room, the heavens, the hushed form of Detective Andreas, who has opened his eyes just enough to stare at something he’s got on his desk.

“Wait, wait, you know what? He’s driving an oil car, right? He’s admitted to that, right? To the WVO?

“Yeah. So?”

“So?” McGully is grinning ear to ear, his hands raised high in the touchdown sign. “Three new provisions just tacked onto Title XVIII, in re: natural resources management and scarcity.” He hops over to his desk, scoops up the new binder, fat and black with the American flag stickered on the front. “Hot off the press, mis amigos. Presuming your man is juicing his French-fry oil with diesel, that vehicle is in fragrant violation.”

I shake my head. “I can’t arrest him for retroactively violating a newly enacted statute.”

“Oh, well, Agent Ness, how high-minded of you.” He gives me both middle fingers and sticks out his tongue for good measure.

“You’ve got another problem, though,” says Culverson. I know what he’s going to say; I’m ready for it. I’m actually a little excited about it. “You told me yesterday that Toussaint’s got a squeaky-clean record. Hardworking guy. Working man. To the extent that Zell has kept up with him at all, to the extent that he’s even crossed the guy’s mind, why would he go to him for drugs?”

“Excellent question, Detective,” I say, beaming. “Look.”

I show him the printout I got from Wilentz, on the way up here, the search results on Toussaint’s father. Because that’s what I was remembering, that’s what I found in my notes from yesterday, something about the way J. T. said it, about his old man: “Was he an artist?” “Yes, among other things.” I watch Culverson skim the report. Roger Toussaint; a.k.a. Rooster Toussaint; a.k.a. Marcus Kilroy; a.k.a. Toots Keurig. Possession. Possession with intent to distribute. Possession with intent to distribute. Possession. Violation of a minor. Possession.

So when Peter Zell decided to get ahold of a controlled substance—when the odds of impact made the decision for him—he remembered his old friend, because his old friend’s dad was a drug dealer.

Culverson, at last, nodding, rising slowly from his chair. McGully, out of his chair in a flash. My heart, galloping.

“Okay then,” Culverson says. “Let’s go.”

I nod, there’s a pause, and then the three of us move to the door at the same time, three policemen swinging into action, patting their shoulder holsters and shrugging on their coats, and there’s a rush of anticipation and joy so strong in my gut that it comes all the way around, to a kind of dread. This is a moment I’ve imagined all my life, three police detectives up and ready for action, feeling the sturdiness of our legs beneath us, feeling the adrenaline begin to flow.

McGully stops for Andreas on the way out the door—“You coming, gorgeous?”—but the last of the Adult Crimes detectives isn’t going anywhere. He’s frozen in his chair, a half-empty coffee cup at his elbow, his hair a bird’s nest, staring at a tattered pamphlet on his desk: IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY.

“Come on, pally,” McGully urges, snatching away the wrinkled pamphlet. “New Guy has got a scumbag for us.”

“Come on,” says Culverson, and I say it, too. “Come on.”

He turns a quarter of an inch, mutters something.

“What?” I say.

“What if they’re right?” says Andreas. “The—the—” he gestures to the pamphlet, and I sort of can’t take it anymore.

“They’re not right.” I place a firm hand on his shoulder. “Why don’t we not think about this right now.”

“Not think about it?” says Andreas, wide-eyed, pathetic. “Not think about it?”

With a quick flat chop I knock over the cup of coffee on Andreas’s desk, and the cold brown liquid gushes out, rushing over the pamphlet, flooding his ashtray, his paperwork and computer keyboard.

“Hey,” he says dumbly, pushing back from the desk, turning all the way around. “Hey.”

“You know what I’m doing right now?” I say, watching the muddy liquid rush toward the edge of the table. “I’m thinking: Oh no! The coffee’s going to spill onto the floor! I’m so worried! Let’s keep talking about it!”

And then the coffee waterfalls over the side of the desk, splashing on Andreas’s shoes and pooling on the ground beneath the desk.

“Oh, look at that,” I say. “It happened anyway.”

* * *

All is the same as it was.

The doghouse, the thorn bushes and the oak tree, the ladder propped against the lip of the roof. There’s the small white dog, Houdini, weaving anxiously around the legs of the ladder, and there’s big J. T. Toussaint, up there fixing shingles, bent to his task in the same brown work pants and black boots. He looks up at the sound of the gravel crunch on the driveway, and I catch a flash of impression, a reclusive animal surprised in his lair by the arrival of the hunters.

I’m out of the car first, straightening up and tugging down the hem of my suit coat, one hand shading my eyes against the winter sun, the other hand raised, flat palmed in greeting.

“Good morning, Mr. Toussaint,” I call. “I have just a couple more questions for you.”

“What?” he says. He comes up from his crouch, finds his balance, and stands full height on the roof, the sun right behind him and all around him, casting him in a weird pale gray halo. The other doors slam behind me, McGully and Culverson stepping out of the vehicle, and Toussaint flinches, retreats a step upward on the roof, stumbles.

He raises his hands to steady himself, and I hear McGully shout, “Gun!” and I turn my head back and say, “What—no,” because it’s not, “it’s just a caulking gun!”

But McGully and Culverson have their weapons raised, service-issue SIG Sauer P229s. “Freeze, a*shole,” McGully shouts, but Toussaint can’t freeze, his boots have lost their purchase on the shingled slope, he’s scrabbling, hands in motion, eyes wide, McGully still shouting—and I’m shouting, too, “No, no, don’t—no,” whipping my head back and forth, because I don’t want him dead. I want to know the story.

Toussaint turns on his heel, tries to escape toward the spine of the roof; McGully fires his gun, a sliver of brick spits off the side of the chimney, and Toussaint turns and falls off the house and down onto the lawn.

* * *

“Your house smells like dog shit.”

“Let’s focus on what’s material, Detective McGully.”

“Okay. It’s true, though, isn’t it? Stinks in here.”

“Detective, come on.”

J. T. Toussaint starts to say something, or maybe he’s just moaning, and McGully tells him to shut up, and he shuts up. He’s on the living-room floor, giant body prone on the dirty carpet, face buried in the rug, bleeding from his forehead where he caught it on the roof on the way down. McGully is sitting on his back, smoking a cigar. Detective Culverson is over by the mantel, I’m pacing, everyone’s waiting, it’s my show.

“Okay. Let’s—let’s just chat,” I say, and then my body is wracked by a long shiver, shaking off the last of the adrenaline high, the rush of the gunshots, of hurtling forward, charging through the muddy snow.

Calm, Palace. Easy.

“Mr. Toussaint, it seems as if the last time we spoke, you omitted a few details about your relationship with Peter Zell.”

“Yeah,” says McGully curtly, shifting so that his full weight digs into the small of Toussaint’s back. “A*shole.”

“Detective?” I murmur, trying to suggest take it easy without saying it in front of the suspect. He rolls his eyes at me.

“So we were getting high,” says Toussaint. “Okay? We were getting f*cked up. Me and Petey, we got high a few times.”

“A few times,” I say.

“Yeah. Okay?”

I nod, slowly. “And why did you lie to me, J. T.?”

“Why did he lie to you?” McGully asks, staring at me. “Because you’re a policeman, you dodo.”

Culverson makes an amused noise from his place over by the mantel. I wish I were alone with J. T., in a room, just he and I, and he could tell me the story. Just two people talking.

Toussaint looks up at me, his body immobile under McGully’s weight. “You come around here, you think the guy got killed.”

“I said he was a suicide.”

“Yeah, well, that was you lying,” he says. “No one is investigating suicides. Not now they’re not.”

Culverson makes his amused noise again, and I look at him, at his wry face: it’s a good point. McGully taps out a fat turd of cigar ash on the suspect’s rug.

Toussaint ignores them both, keeps his eyes on me, keeps talking. “You come here looking for a killer, and I tell you that Pete and me were taking f*cking pain pills, you’re going to conclude that I’m the guy who killed him. Right?”

“Not necessarily.”

I’m thinking, pills. Popping pills. Small colorful capsules, waxy coating coming off in a sweaty palm. Trying to imagine it, my insurance man, the squalid details of abuse and addiction.

“J. T.,” I start.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m dead now either way. I’m done.”

“Yup,” says McGully mirthfully, and I will him to shut up.

Because I believe Toussaint. I do. There’s a part of me that really does believe him. He lied to me for the same reason that Victor France spent his precious hours snooping around Manchester Road to get me the information I needed—because nowadays every charge is serious. Every sentence is a death sentence. If he had explained his real relationship with Peter Zell, he would have gone to prison and not come out. But there’s still no reason to assume that he killed him.

“McGully. Let him up.”

“What?” says McGully sharply. “Absolutely not.”

We both look to Culverson instinctively; we’re all the same rank, but he’s the grown-up in the room. Culverson nods minutely. McGully glowers, comes up out of his squat like a gorilla rising from the jungle floor, and steps pointedly on Toussaint’s fingers on his way to the ratty sofa. Toussaint struggles to his knees, and Culverson murmurs, “That’s far enough,” so I get down on my knees, too, so I can look into his eyes, and I give my voice a coaxing, sweet gentleness, somewhere in the vocal range of my mother.

“Tell me what else.”

Long silence. “He’s—” starts McGully, and I hold up one hand, eyes still on the suspect, and McGully shuts up.

“Please, sir,” I say softly. “I just want to know the truth, Mr. Toussaint.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“I know that,” and I mean it. In this instant, looking into his eyes, I don’t believe that he did kill him. “I just want to know the truth. You said pills. Where did you get the pills?”

“I didn’t get them.” Toussaint looks at me, bewildered. “Peter brought ’em over.”

“What?”

“God’s truth,” he says, for he can see my skepticism. We’re down there on the floor, kneeling across from each other like two religious fanatics, a pair of penitents.

“Dead serious,” says Toussaint. “Guy shows up on my doorstep with two pill bottles, MS Contins, sixty milligrams a pill, a hundred pills in each bottle. He says he’d like to ingest the drugs in a safe and effective manner.”

“That’s what he said?” snorts McGully, settled in the easy chair, his sidearm trained on Toussaint.

“Yes.”

“Look at me,” I say. “Tell me what happened then.”

“I said, sure, but let me split ’em with you.” He looks up, looks around, his narrowed eyes flashing with nervousness, defiance, pride. “Well, what the hell was I supposed to do? I worked my whole life—every day, since I got out of high school I worked. For the specific reason that my old man was a piece of shit, and I didn’t want to be my old man.”

J. T. Toussaint’s massive frame is shaking with the force of expressing all this.

“And then, out of the clear blue sky, this bullshit? An asteroid is coming, no one’s building anything, the quarry shuts down, and just like that I got no job, no prospects, nothing to do but wait to die. Two days later Peter Zell comes to my house with a handful of opiates? What would you do?”

I look at him, his kneeling trembling frame, his giant head cast down at the rug. I look to Culverson, at the mantel, who shakes his head sadly. I become aware of a light high-pitching hum and look over at McGully on the sofa, his gun in his lap, pretending to play a little violin.

“Okay, J. T.,” I say. “Then what happened?”

It wasn’t hard for J. T. Toussaint to help Peter ingest morphine sulfate in a safe and effective manner, to circumvent the time-release mechanism and measure out the dosage to ration the share and minimize the risk of accidental overdose. He’d watched his father do it a million times with a million different kinds of pills: scrub off the wax, crush the tablet, measure it out, and place it under the tongue. When they were done, Peter got more.

“He never told you where it came from?”

“Nope.” A pause—a half-second hesitation—I stare into his eyes. “Really, man. This went on till, like, October. Wherever he was getting the shit, he ran out of it.” After October, says Toussaint, they’d still hang out, started going to see Distant Pale Glimmers together when that started up, grab a beer now and then after work. I’m thinking about all this, considering the raft of new details, trying to see what might be true.

“And last Monday night?”

“What?”

“What happened on Monday night?”

“Just like I told you, man. We went to the movie, we had a bunch of beer, and I left him there.”

“And you’re sure?” I say gently, almost tenderly. “Sure that’s the whole story?”

Silence. He looks at me, and he’s about to say something, I can see his mind working behind the rock-wall hardness of his face, he wants to tell me one thing more.

“McGully,” I say. “What’s the mandatory on the waste-vehicle violation?”

“Death,” says McGully, and Toussaint’s eyes go wide, and I shake my head.

“Come on, Detective,” I say. “Seriously.”

Culverson says, “Discretion.”

“Okay,” I say, eyes back on Toussaint. “Okay. So, look, we’re going to bring you in. We have to. But I’ll make it so you do two weeks on the car.” I stand up, hands out to him, to pull him up. “A month maybe. Easy time.”

And then McGully says, “Or we could shoot him right now.”

“McGully—” I turn away from J. T. Toussaint for one second, to Culverson, trying to get him to get McGully to knock it off, and by the time I turn back to J. T. he’s in motion, launching himself up like a rocket and ramming his head into my chest, the massive weight of him like a sledge. I’m down, backward, and McGully is up and Culverson is in motion, guns drawn. Toussaint’s big hand has got that model of the New Hampshire state house, and now Culverson has his gun out, too, but he’s not firing, and McGully isn’t either, because Toussaint is on top of me, and he comes right at my eye with that thing, its wicked golden steeple pointed down, and everything goes black.

“Son of a bitch,” says McGully. Toussaint lets me go and I hear him thunder toward the door, and I shout, “Don’t,” blood gushing from my face, my hands up over my eyes. I shout, “Don’t shoot!” but it’s too late, everybody’s shooting, the bullets a series of hot rushes in the corner of my blindness, and I hear Toussaint scream and fall down.

Houdini barking like crazy from the door by the kitchen, howling and woofing in grief and astonishment.

* * *

“Uh, yes, Detective? Excuse me? How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?”

These are the words ringing bitterly in the hollowed-out corners of my brain, as I’m lying here in the hospital, in pain. McGully’s sarcastic question back at headquarters, before we went over there.

J. T. Toussaint is dead. McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and he was dead by the time he arrived at Concord Hospital.

My face hurts. I’m in a lot of pain. Maybe Toussaint went after me with the ashtray and tried to bolt because he murdered his friend Peter, but I don’t think so.

I think he attacked me simply because he was afraid. There were too many cops in the room, and McGully was cracking wise and I tried to tell him otherwise, but he was afraid that if we took him in for the stupid engine violation, he would rot in prison until October 3. He took a calculated risk, just like Peter did, and he lost.

McGully shot him three times, and Culverson shot him once, and now he’s dead.

“A quarter of an inch higher and your eyeball would have exploded,” says the doctor, a young woman with a high blonde ponytail and sneakers and the cuffs of her white doctor’s coat rolled up.

“Okay,” I say.

She secures a thick pad of gauze over my right eyeball with surgical tape.

“It’s called an orbital floor fracture,” she says, “and it’s going to cause some numbing of the cheek.”

“Okay,” I say.

“As well as mild to severe diplopia.”

“Okay.”

“Diplopia means double vision.”

“Oh.”

Through all of this, the question is still rolling around in my head: How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim?

Unfortunately, I think I know the answer. I wish I didn’t, but I do.

My doctor keeps apologizing, for her lack of experience, for the lightbulbs that have burned out and not been replaced in this emergency room, for the overall shortage of palliative resources. She looks about nine years old, and she has not technically finished her residency. I tell her it’s okay, I understand. Her name is Susan Wilton.

“Dr. Wilton,” I say while she’s drawing the silken thread in and out of my cheek, wincing with each pull, as if she’s stitching her own face, not mine. “Dr. Wilton, would you ever kill yourself?”

“No,” she says. “Well—maybe. If I knew I was going to be miserable the whole rest of the time. But I’m not. I like my life, you know? If I was someone who was really miserable already—you know?—then it would be like, why sit around and wait for it?”

“Right,” I say. “Right.” I keep my face steady while Dr. Wilton sews me up.

There’s only one mystery left. If Toussaint was telling the truth, and I think he was, and Peter was the one who supplied the pills, where did he get them?

That’s the last part of the mystery, and I think I know the solution to that, too.

* * *

Sophia Littlejohn looks uncannily like her brother, even peering through the crack between the door and the doorjamb, staring at me under the chain. She’s got the same small chin and large nose and wide forehead, even the same unfashionable style of eyeglasses. Her hair is cut short, too, boyish, sticking out here and there, just like his.

“Yes?” she says. She’s staring at me just like I’m staring at her, and I remember that we’ve never met, and what I must look like: the fat wad of gauze that Dr. Wilton has taped over my eye, the bruise radiating out around it, brown and pink and puffy.

“It’s Detective Henry Palace, ma’am, from the Concord Police Department,” I say. “I’m afraid that we—” but the door is already closing, and then there’s the quiet tinkle of the chain unlatching, and then the door opens again.

“All right,” she says, nodding stoically, as though this day has been coming, she knew it was coming. “Okay.”

She takes my coat and gestures me into the same overstuffed blue easy chair I sat in during my last visit, and I’m getting out my notebook and she’s explaining that her husband isn’t home, he’s working late, one of them is always working late these days. Erik Littlejohn’s semioccasional nondenominational worship service is now happening every night, and so many hospital staff are attending that he closed the little chapel in the basement and took over an auditorium upstairs. Sophia is talking just to talk, that’s clear, one last goal-line effort to avoid this conversation, and what I’m thinking is that these are what Peter’s eyes must have looked like, when he was alive: careful, analytical, calculating, a little sad.

I smile, I shift in the chair, I let her trail off, and then I can ask my question, which is really more of a declarative statement than a question. “You gave him your prescription pad.”

She looks down at the rug, an endless row of small delicate paisleys, then up at me again. “He stole it.”

“Ah,” I say. “Okay.”

I was in the hospital with my injured face, thinking about this question for an hour before the possibility had occurred to me, and I still wasn’t sure. I had to ask my friend Dr. Wilton, who had to look it up: can midwives prescribe?

Turns out, they can.

“I should have told you sooner, and I’m sorry,” she says quietly.

Outside the French door connecting the living room to the outdoors, I can see Kyle with another kid, both of them in snow suits and boots, goofing around with a telescope in the otherworldly brightness of the backyard floodlights. Last spring, with odds of impact in the single digits, there was a vogue for astronomy, everyone suddenly interested in the names of the planets, their orbits, their distances from one another. Like how, after September 11, everybody learned the provinces of Afghanistan, the difference between Shiite and Sunni. Kyle and his buddy have repurposed the telescope as a sword, are taking turns knighting each other, kneeling, giggling in the early-evening moonlight.

“It was June. Early June,” begins Sophia, and I turn back to her. “Peter called me out of the blue, said he’d like to have lunch. I said that sounded nice.”

“You ate in your office.”

“Yes,” she says. “That’s right.”

They ate and caught up and had a wonderful conversation, brother and sister. Talked about movies they’d seen as kids, about their parents, about growing up.

“Just, you know, stuff. Family stuff.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“It all felt really nice. That’s probably what hurt me the most, Detective, when I figured it out, what he had really been up to. We were never very close, Peter and I. Him calling me that way, just out of nowhere? I remember thinking, when this craziness is over, maybe we’ll be friends. Like brothers and sisters are supposed to be.”

She reaches up and dabs a tear from her eye.

“The odds were still really low then. You could still think like that, when this is all over.”

I wait patiently. My blue book is open, balanced on my lap.

“Anyway,” she says. “I write prescriptions only rarely. Our practice is largely holistic, and any drugs that do come into play, it’s during labor and delivery, not by prescription during the course of pregnancy.”

So it was many weeks before Sophia Littlejohn realized that one of her prescription pads had gone missing from the stack in the top-right drawer of her office desk. And more weeks before she pieced it together that her timid brother had stolen it during their pleasant reunion lunch. She pauses during this portion of the story, looks up at the ceiling, shakes her head with self-recrimination; and I am picturing Peter the mild-mannered insurance man in his moment of bravado—he’s made his fateful decision—Maia having crossed the 12.375 threshold—summoning the nerve, his sister gone momentarily from her office, to the bathroom or on some small errand—nervous, a bead of sweat slipping down from his forehead under his glasses—lifting himself from his chair, sliding open the top drawer of the desk—

Kyle and the friend scream with laughter outside. I keep my eyes on Sophia.

“So then, in October, you figured it out.”

“Right,” she says, glances up briefly but doesn’t bother to wonder how I know. “And I was furious. I mean, Jesus Christ, we’re still human beings, aren’t we? We can’t just behave like human beings until it’s over?” There’s real anger in her voice. She shakes her head bitterly. “It sounds ridiculous, I know.”

“No, ma’am,” I say. “Not ridiculous at all.”

“I confronted Peter, and he admitted to taking them, and that was that. I haven’t—I’m sorry to say, I haven’t spoken to him since.”

I’m nodding. I was right. Bully for me. Time to go. But I have to know it all. I have to.

“Why didn’t you tell me all this before, why didn’t you return my calls—”

“Well, it was a … I made a practical decision. I just—decided—” she begins, and then Erik Littlejohn says, “Sweetheart,” from the doorway.

He’s standing on the threshold, has been standing there who knows how long, snow falling gently all around him. “No.”

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not. Hello, again, Detective.” He steps in, snowflakes melting to water on the leather shoulders of his coat. “I told her to lie. And if there are consequences, they should fall on me.”

“I don’t think there have to be any consequences. I just want to know the truth.”

“Okay. Well, the truth is, I saw no reason to tell you about Peter’s theft and drug abuse, and I told Sophia that.”

“We made the decision together.”

“I talked you into it.”

Erik Littlejohn shakes his head, looks at me squarely, almost sternly. “I told her there was no sense in telling you.”

I rise to look at him, and he looks back, unflinching.

“Why?” I say.

“What’s done is done. The incident with Sophia’s prescription pad was unrelated to Peter’s death, and there was no sense in telling the police about it.” He says “the police” like it’s this abstract concept, somewhere out there in the world, “the police,” as opposed to me, a person, now standing in their living room with an open blue book. “Telling the police would mean telling the press, telling the public.”

“My father,” murmurs Sophia, then looks up. “He means telling my father.”

Her father? I think back, scratch my mustache, and I recall Officer McConnell’s report: father, Martin Zell, in Pleasant View Retirement, the beginnings of dementia. “It was bad enough for him to know that Peter had killed himself. To find out also that his son had become a drug addict?”

“Why put him through that?” says Erik. “At a time like this? I told her not to tell you. It was my decision, and I take full responsibility.”

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

I sigh. I’m tired. My eye hurts. Time to go.

“I have one more question. Ms. Littlejohn, you seem so certain that Peter killed himself. Can I ask what it is that makes you so sure?”

“Because,” she says softly, “he told me.”

“What? When?”

“That same day. When we had lunch in my office. It already started, you know. There was one on the news. In Durham. The elementary school?”

“Yeah.” A man who had grown up in Durham, the Seacoast area, he traveled back there to hang himself in the coat closet of his fourth-grade classroom, just so that the teacher, whom he had loathed, would find him.

Sophia presses her fingertips into her eyes. Erik moves behind her, places his hands comfortingly on her shoulders.

“Anyway, Pete—Peter said that if he were ever going to do it, it would be at that McDonald’s. On Main Street. You know, it seemed like a joke. But I guess—I guess it wasn’t, huh?”

“No, ma’am. Guess not.”

There you go, Detective McGully. How does this tragic tale make the guy into a murder victim? The answer is, it doesn’t.

The fancy belt, the pickup truck, none of it matters. When his experiment with controlled substances had turned out to be a disaster—when he was discovered in his one audacious act of theft and betrayal—left with that shame and the lingering painful symptoms of withdrawal—faced with all that, and with the impending end of time—the actuary Peter Zell did another careful calculation, another analysis of risk versus reward, and went ahead and killed himself.

Bam!

“Detective?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not writing.”

Erik Littlejohn looks at me, almost suspiciously, like I’m hiding something.

My head hurts. The room swims; two Sophias, two Eriks. What did Dr. Wilton call it? Diplopia.

“You’ve stopped writing down what we’re saying.”

“No. I’m just—” I swallow, stand up. “This case is closed. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

* * *

Five hours, six hours later, I don’t know. It’s the middle of the night.

Andreas and I are outside, we’ve both escaped from Penuche’s, the basement bar on Phenix Street, from the din and the smoke and the grim dive-bar haze of it, and we’re standing on the grimy spit of sidewalk, neither of us having wanted to come out for a beer in the first place. Andreas was literally dragged from his desk by McGully, to celebrate me solving my case; a case I didn’t solve, and which was never really a case in the first place. Anyway, it’s awful down there, the fresh cigarette smell mingling with the stale, the TVs blaring, people crammed against the graffiti-marked load-bearing poles that keep the whole place from collapsing in on itself. Plus some wiseacre has larded the jukebox with irony: Elvis Costello, “Waiting for the End of the World,” Tom Waits, “The Earth Died Screaming,” and of course that R.E.M. song, playing over and over and over.

It’s snowing out here, fat dirty chunks slanting down and ricocheting off the brick walls. I shove my hands into my pockets and stand with my head tilted back, staring up at the sky with my one working eye.

“Listen,” I say to Andreas.

“Yeah?”

I hesitate. I hate this. Andreas draws a Camel from a pack, I watch balls of snow lose themselves in his wet mop of hair.

“I’m sorry,” I say, when he’s got it lit.

“What?”

“About before. Spilling your coffee.”

He chuckles woodenly, draws on his smoke.

“Forget it,” he says.

“I—”

“Seriously, Henry. Who cares?”

A small crowd of kids comes out of the stairwell that leads up from the bar, laughing like crazy, dolled up in weird pre-apocalyptic fashion: a teenage girl in an emerald ball gown and tiara, her boyfriend in full-goth black. Another kid, gender indeterminate, baggy shorts over plaid tights, broad red clown suspenders. Music drifts out from the open door, it sounds like U2, and then fades again as the door closes.

“Newspaper says the Pakistanis want to blow the thing up,” says Andreas.

“Yeah, I heard that.”

I’m trying to remember what U2’s end-of-the-world song is. I turn away from the kids, stare at the road.

“Yeah. They say they’ve figured it out, they can make it happen. But we’re saying we won’t let them.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“There was a press conference. The secretary of state, secretary of defense. Someone else. They said, if they try, we’ll nuke them before they can nuke it. Why would we say that?”

“I don’t know.” I feel hollow. I’m cold. Andreas is exhausting.

“It just seems crazy.”

My eye hurts; my cheek. After the Littlejohns, I gave Dotseth a call, and he graciously accepted my apology for wasting his time, made his jokes about not knowing who I was, what case I was talking about.

Andreas starts to say something else, but there’s honking to our right, at the top of Phenix, where the road crests and starts to bend down toward Main Street. Loud, boisterous honking from a city bus, picking up steam as it barrels down the street. The kids cheer and holler, wave at the bus, and Detective Andreas and I look at each other. City bus service has been suspended, and there was never a night-owl route on Phenix Street in the first place.

The bus is getting closer, rattling fast, two wheels up on the sidewalk, and I go ahead and draw my service pistol and aim it in the general direction of the broad windshield. It’s like a dream, in the dark, a giant city bus, display lights spelling OUT OF SERVICE, sailing down the hill toward us like a ghost ship. Closer now, and we can see the driver, early twenties, Caucasian male, baseball cap backward, scruffy little mustache, eyes wide with adventure and delight. His buddy, black, also early twenties, also in a baseball cap, has the shotgun-side pneumatic door open and he’s leaning out and hollering, “Ya-hoo!” Everybody always wanted to do something, and here come the guys who always wanted to joyride in a city bus.

The teenagers on the curb with us are dying laughing, cheering. Andreas is staring at the headlights, and I’m standing there with my gun out wondering how to play it. Probably do nothing, let them sail by.

“Oh, well,” says Andreas.

“Oh, well, what?”

But it’s too late. He twists his body, flicks the half-smoked cigarette back toward the bar, and throws himself in front of the bus.

“No,” is all I’ve got time for, one cold sorrowful syllable. He’s timed it, calculated the vectors, bus and man intersecting as they move through space at their varying speeds. Bam!

The bus screeches to a halt and time stops, freeze-frame: the girl in the ball gown with her face hidden in the crook of the goth kid’s arm—me with my mouth open, gun out, pointed uselessly at the side of the bus—the bus at a deranged angle, back end on the sidewalk, front end jutting into the road. Then Detective Andreas slowly peels off and slips down onto the street, and the bar crowd is streaming out and surrounding me and chattering and hollering. The joyrider and his friend climb down the steps of the bus and stand a few paces back from Andreas’s broken body, staring openmouthed.

And then Detective Culverson is at my side, a firm hand on my wrist, gently lowering my gun hand to my side. McGully works his way through the crowd, pushing and shouting, “Cop!” waving his badge around, a Coors in the other hand, cigar in his mouth. He takes a knee in the middle of Phenix Street and lays a finger on Andreas’s throat. Culverson and I stand there in the center of the awestruck crowd, cold puffs of air drifting from our mouths, but Andreas’s head is all the way around, his neck is snapped. He’s dead.

“Well, Palace, what do you think?” says McGully, heaving up to his feet, looking over. “Suicide, or murder?”