The Last Policeman

1.

I’m staring at the insurance man and he’s staring at me, two cold gray eyes behind old-fashioned tortoiseshell frames, and I’m having this awful and inspiring feeling, like holy moly this is real, and I don’t know if I’m ready, I really don’t.

I narrow my eyes and I steady myself and I take him in again, shift on my haunches to get a closer look. The eyes and the glasses, the weak chin and the receding hairline, the thin black belt tied and tightened beneath the chin.

This is real. Is it? I don’t know.

I take a deep breath, demanding of myself that I focus, block out everything but the corpse, block out the grimy floors and the tinny rock-and-roll Muzak from the cheap speakers in the ceiling.

The smell is killing me, a pervasive and deeply unpleasant odor, like a horse barn that’s been splashed with French-fry grease. There are any number of jobs in this world still being efficiently and diligently accomplished, but the late-night cleaning of twenty-four-hour fast-food-restaurant bathrooms is not among them. Case in point: the insurance man had been slumped over in here, lodged between the toilet and the dull green wall of the stall, for several hours before Officer Michelson happened to come in, needing to use the john, and discovered him.

Michelson called it in as a 10-54S, of course, which is what it looks like. One thing I’ve learned in the last few months, one thing we’ve all learned, is that suicides-by-hanging rarely end up dangling from a light fixture or a roof beam, like in the movies. If they’re serious, and nowadays everybody is serious, would-be suicides fasten themselves to a doorknob, or to a coat hook, or, as the insurance man appears to have done, to a horizontal rail, like the grab bar in a handicapped stall. And then they just lean forward, let their weight do the work, tighten the knot, seal the airway.

I angle farther forward, readjust my crouch, trying to find a way to share space comfortably with the insurance man without falling or getting my fingerprints all over the scene. I’ve had nine of these in the three and a half months since I became a detective, and still I can’t get used to it, to what death by asphyxiation does to a person’s face: the eyes staring forward as if in horror, laced with thin red spiderwebs of blood; the tongue, rolled out and over to one side; the lips, inflated and purplish at the edges.

I close my eyes, rub them with my knuckles, and look again, try to get a sense of what the insurance man’s appearance had been in life. He wasn’t handsome, that you can see right away. The face is doughy and the proportions are all just a little off: chin too small, nose too big, the eyes almost beady behind the thick lenses.

What it looks like is that the insurance man killed himself with a long black belt. He fastened one end to the grab bar and worked the other end into the hangman’s knot that now digs brutally upward into his Adam’s apple.

“Hey, kid. Who’s your friend?”

“Peter Anthony Zell,” I answer quietly, looking up over my shoulder at Dotseth, who has opened the door of the stall and stands grinning down at me in a jaunty plaid scarf, clutching a steaming cup of McDonald’s coffee.

“Caucasian male. Thirty-eight years old. He worked in insurance.”

“And let me guess,” says Dotseth. “He was eaten by a shark. Oh, wait, no: suicide. Is it suicide?”

“It appears that way.”

“Shocked, I am! Shocked!” Denny Dotseth is an assistant attorney general, a warhorse with silver hair and a broad, cheerful face. “Oh, geez, I’m sorry, Hank. Did you want a cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you, sir.”

I give Dotseth a report on what I’ve learned from the black faux-leather wallet in the victim’s back pocket. Zell was employed at a company called Merrimack Life and Fire, with offices in the Water West Building, off Eagle Square. A little collection of movie stubs, all dating from the last three months, speaks to a taste for adolescent adventure: the Lord of the Rings revival; two installments of the sci-fi serial Distant Pale Glimmers; the DC-versus-Marvel thing at the IMAX in Hooksett. No trace of a family, no photographs in the wallet at all. Eighty-five dollars in fives and tens. And a driver’s license, with an address here in town: 14 Matthew Street Extension, South Concord.

“Oh, sure. I know that area. Some nice little town houses down that way. Rolly Lewis has a place over there.”

“And he got beat up.”

“Rolly?”

“The victim. Look.” I turn back to the insurance man’s distorted face and point to a cluster of yellowing bruises, high on the right cheek. “Someone banged him one, hard.”

“Oh, yeah. He sure did.”

Dotseth yawns and sips his coffee. New Hampshire statute has long required that someone from the office of the attorney general be called whenever a dead body is discovered, so that if a murder case is to be built, the prosecuting authority has a hand in from Go. In mid-January this requirement was overturned by the state legislature as being unduly onerous, given the present unusual circumstances—Dotseth and his colleagues hauling themselves all over the state just to stand around like crows at murder scenes that aren’t murder scenes at all. Now, it’s up to the discretion of the investigating officer whether to call an AAG to a 10-54S. I usually go ahead and call mine in.

“So what else is new, young man?” says Dotseth. “You still playing a little racquetball?”

“I don’t play racquetball, sir,” I say, half listening, eyes locked on the dead man.

“You don’t? Who am I thinking of?”

I’m tapping a finger on my chin. Zell was short, five foot six maybe; stubby, thick around the middle. Holy moly, I’m still thinking, because something is off about this body, this corpse, this particular presumptive suicide, and I’m trying to figure out what it is.

“No phone,” I murmur.

“What?”

“His wallet is here, and his keys, but there’s no cell phone.”

Dotseth shrugs. “Betcha he junked it. Beth just junked hers. Service is starting to get so dicey, she figured she might as well get rid of the darn thing now.”

I nod, murmur “sure, sure,” still staring at Zell.

“Also, no note.”

“What?”

“There’s no suicide note.”

“Oh, yeah?” he says, shrugs again. “Probably a friend will find it. Boss, maybe.” He smiles, drains the coffee. “They all leave notes, these folks. Although, you have to say, explanation not really necessary at this point, right?”

“Yes, sir,” I say, running a hand over my mustache. “Yes, indeed.”

Last week in Kathmandu, a thousand pilgrims from all over southeast Asia walked into a massive pyre, monks chanting in a circle around them before marching into the blaze themselves. In central Europe, old folks are trading how-to DVDs: How to Weigh Your Pockets with Stones, How to Mix a Barbiturate Cocktail in the Sink. In the American Midwest—Kansas City, St. Louis, Des Moines—the trend is firearms, a solid majority employing a shotgun blast to the brain.

Here in Concord, New Hampshire, for whatever reason, it’s hanger town. Bodies slumped in closets, in sheds, in unfinished basements. A week ago Friday, a furniture-store owner in East Concord tried to do it the Hollywood way, hoisted himself from an overhanging length of gutter with the sash of his bathrobe, but the gutter pipe snapped, sent him tumbling down onto the patio, alive but with four broken limbs.

“Anyhow, it’s a tragedy,” Dotseth concludes blandly. “Every one of them a tragedy.”

He shoots a quick look at his watch; he’s ready to boogie. But I’m still down in a squat, still running my narrowed eyes over the body of the insurance man. For his last day on earth, Peter Zell chose a rumpled tan suit and a pale blue button-down dress shirt. His socks almost but don’t quite match, both of them brown, one dark and one merely darkish, both loose in their elastic, slipping down his calves. The belt around his neck, what Dr. Fenton will call the ligature, is a thing of beauty: shiny black leather, the letters B&R etched into the gold buckle.

“Detective? Hello?” Dotseth says, and I look up at him and I blink. “Anything else you’d like to share?”

“No, sir. Thank you.”

“No sweat. Pleasure as always, young man.”

“Except, wait.”

“Sorry?”

I stand up straight and turn and face him. “So. I’m going to murder somebody.”

A pause. Dotseth waiting, amused, exaggerated patience. “All righty.”

“And I live in a time and a town where people are killing themselves all over the place. Right and left. It’s hanger town.”

“Okay.”

“Wouldn’t my move be, kill my victim and then arrange it to appear as a suicide?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, right?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But that right there?” Dotseth jabs a cheerful thumb toward the slumped corpse. “That’s a suicide.”

He winks, pushes open the door of the men’s room, and leaves me alone with Peter Zell.

“So what’s the story, Stretch? Are we waiting for the meat wagon on this one, or cuttin’ down the piñata ourselves?”

I level Officer Michelson a stern and disapproving look. I hate that kind of casual fake tough-guy morbidity, “meat wagon” and “piñata” and all the rest of it, and Ritchie Michelson knows that I hate it, which is exactly why he’s goading me right now. He’s been waiting at the door of the men’s room, theoretically guarding the crime scene, eating an Egg McMuffin out of its yellow cellophane wrapper, pale grease dripping down the front of his uniform shirt.

“Come on, Michelson. A man is dead.”

“Sorry, Stretch.”

I’m not crazy about the nickname, either, and Ritchie knows that also.

“Someone from Dr. Fenton’s office should be here within the hour,” I say, and Michelson nods, burps into his fist.

“You’re going to turn this over to Fenton’s office, huh?” He balls up his breakfast-sandwich wrapper, chucks it into the trash. “I thought she wasn’t doing suicides anymore.”

“It’s at the discretion of the detective,” I say, “and in this case, I think an autopsy is warranted.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t really care. Trish McConnell, meanwhile, is doing her job. She’s on the far side of the restaurant, a short and vigorous woman with a black ponytail jutting out from under her patrolman’s cap. She’s got a knot of teenagers cornered by the soda fountain. Taking statements. Notebook out, pencil flying, anticipating and fulfilling her supervising investigator’s instructions. Officer McConnell, I like.

“You know, though,” Michelson is saying, talking just to talk, just getting my goat, “headquarters says we’re supposed to fold up the tent pretty quick on these.”

“I know that.”

“Community stability and continuity, that whole drill.”

“Yes.”

“Plus, the owner’s ready to flip, with his bathroom being closed.”

I follow Michelson’s gaze to the counter and the red-faced proprietor of the McDonald’s, who stares back at us, his unyielding gaze made mildly ridiculous by the bright yellow shirt and ketchup-colored vest. Every minute of police presence is a minute of lost profit, and you can just tell the guy would be over here with a finger in my face if he wanted to risk an arrest on Title XVI. Next to the manager is a gangly adolescent boy, his thick mullet fringing a counterman’s visor, smirking back and forth between his disgruntled boss and the pair of policemen, unsure who’s more deserving of his contempt.

“He’ll be fine,” I tell Michelson. “If this were last year, the whole scene of crime would be shut down for six to twelve hours, and not just the men’s john, either.”

Michelson shrugs. “New times.”

I scowl and turn my back on the owner. Let him stew. It’s not even a real McDonald’s. There are no more real McDonald’s. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we’re now standing in, on Concord’s Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee.

There are no more real 7-Elevens, either, and no more real Dunkin’ Donuts. There are still real Paneras, but the couple who owns the chain have undergone a meaningful spiritual experience and restaffed most of the restaurants with coreligionists, so it’s not worth going in there unless you want to hear the Good News.

I beckon McConnell over, let her and Michelson know we’re going to be investigating this as a suspicious death, try to ignore the sarcastic lift of Ritchie’s eyebrows. McConnell, for her part, nods gravely and flips her notebook to a fresh page. I give the crime-scene officers their marching orders: McConnell is to finish collecting statements, then go find and inform the victim’s family. Michelson is to stay here by the door, guarding the scene until someone from Fenton’s office arrives to collect the corpse.

“You got it,” says McConnell, flipping closed her notebook.

“Beats working,” says Michelson.

“Come on, Ritchie,” I say. “A man is dead.”

“Yeah, Stretch,” he says. “You said that already.”

I salute my fellow officers, nod goodbye, and then I stop short, one hand on the handle of the parking-lot-side door of the McDonald’s, because there’s a woman walking anxiously this way through the parking lot, wearing a red winter hat but no coat, no umbrella against the steady drifts of snow, like she just ran out of somewhere to get here, thin work shoes slipping on the slush of the parking lot. Then she sees me, sees me looking at her, and I catch the moment when she knows that I’m a policeman, and her brow creases with worry and she turns on her heel and hurries away.

I drive north on State Street away from the McDonald’s in my department-issued Chevrolet Impala, carefully maneuvering through the quarter inch of frozen precipitation on the roadway. The side streets are lined with parked cars, abandoned cars, drifts of snow collecting on their windshields. I pass the Capitol Center for the Arts, handsome red brick and wide windows, glance into the packed coffee shop that someone’s opened across the street. There’s a snaking line of customers outside Collier’s, the hardware store—they must have new merchandise. Lightbulbs. Shovels. Nails. There’s a high-school-age kid up on a ladder, crossing out prices and writing in new ones with a black marker on a cardboard sign.

Forty-eight hours, is what I’m thinking. Most murder cases that get solved are solved within forty-eight hours of the commission of the crime.

Mine is the only car on the road, and the pedestrians turn their heads to watch me pass. A bum leans against the boarded-up door of White Peak, a mortgage broker and commercial real-estate firm. A small pack of teenagers is loitering outside an ATM vestibule, passing around a marijuana cigarette, a kid with a scruffy goatee languorously exhaling into the cold air.

Scrawled across the glass window of what used to be a two-story office building, at the corner of State and Blake, is graffiti, six-foot-tall letters that say LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.

I regret giving Ritchie Michelson a hard time. Life for patrol officers had gotten pretty rough by the time I was promoted, and I’m sure that the fourteen subsequent weeks have not made things easier. Yes, cops are steadily employed and earning among the best salaries in the country right now. And, yes, Concord’s crime rate in most categories is not wildly elevated, month against month, from what it was this time last year, with notable exceptions; per the IPSS Act, it is now illegal to manufacture, sell, or purchase any kind of firearm in the United States of America, and this is a tough law to enforce, especially in the state of New Hampshire.

Still, on the street, in the wary eyes of the citizenry, one senses at all times the potential for violence, and for an active-duty patrol officer, as for a soldier in war, that potential for violence takes a slow and grinding toll. So, if I’m Ritchie Michelson, I’m bound to be a little tired, a little burned out, prone to the occasional snippy remark.

The traffic light at Warren Street is working, and even though I’m a policeman and even though there are no other cars at the intersection, I stop and I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and I wait for the green light, staring out the windshield and thinking about that woman, the one in a hurry and wearing no coat.

“Everybody hear the news?” asks Detective McGully, big and boisterous, hands cupped together into a megaphone. “We’ve got the date.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’ve got the date’?” says Detective Andreas, popping up from his chair looking at McGully with open-mouthed bafflement. “We already have the date. Everybody knows the goddamned date.”

The date that everybody knows is October 3, six months and eleven days from today, when a 6.5-kilometer-diameter ball of carbon and silicates will collide with Earth.

“Not the date the big meatball makes landfall,” says McGully, brandishing a copy of the Concord Monitor. “The date the geniuses tell us where it’s gonna hit.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” nods Detective Culverson, settled at his own desk with his own paper; he reads the New York Times. “April 9, I think.”

My own desk is in the far corner of the room, by the trash can and the little fridge. I have my notebook open in front of me, reviewing my observations on the crime scene. It’s actually a blue book, the kind college students use to take their exams. My father was a professor, and when he died we found about twenty-five boxes of these things up in the attic, slim paper books of robin’s-egg blue. I’m still using them.

“April 9? That seems so soon.” Andreas slumps back down in his chair, and then he echoes himself in a ghostly murmur. “Seems soon.”

Culverson shakes his head and sighs, while McGully chortles. This is what remains of the Concord Police Department’s division of Criminal Investigations, Adult-Crimes Unit: four guys in a room. Between August of last year and today, Adult Crimes has had three early retirements, one sudden and unexplained disappearance, plus Detective Gordon, who broke his hand in the course of a domestic-violence arrest, took medical leave and never came back. This wave of attrition has been insufficiently countered by the promotion, in early December, of one patrolman. Me. Detective Palace.

We’re pretty fortunate, personnel-wise. Juvenile Crime is down to two officers, Peterson and Guerrera. Tech Crime was disbanded entirely, effective November 1.

McGully opens today’s New York Times and begins to read aloud. I’m thinking about the Zell case, working through my notes. No signs of foul play or struggle // cell phone? // Ligature: belt, gold buckle.

A black belt of handsome Italian leather, emblazoned “B&R.”

“The crucial date is April 9, according to astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” reads McGully from the Monitor. “Experts there, along with legions of other astronomers, astrophysicists, and dedicated amateurs following the steady progress of Maia, the massive asteroid formally known as 2011GV₁—”

“Jesus,” moans Andreas, mournful and furious, jumping up again and hurrying over to McGully’s desk. He’s a small guy, twitchy, in his early forties, but with a thick head of tight black curls, like a cherub. “We know what it is. Is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know all of this already?”

“Take it easy, pally,” says McGully.

“I just hate how they give all the information over and over again, every time. It’s like they’re rubbing it in or something.”

“That’s just how newspaper stories are written,” Culverson says.

“Well, I hate it.”

“Nevertheless.” Culverson smiles. He’s the only African American officer in the Criminal Investigations Unit. He is in fact the only African American officer on the Concord force and is sometimes lovingly referred to as “The Only Black Man in Concord,” though this is not technically true.

“All right, all right, I’ll skip ahead,” says McGully, patting poor Andreas on the shoulder. “Scientists have been… I’ll skip, I’ll skip… some disagreement, now largely resolved, as to… skip skip skip. Here: ‘On the April date, with only five and a half months remaining until impact, sufficient points of declination and right ascension will have been mapped to pinpoint the precise location on the surface of Earth where Maia will land, to an accuracy of within fifteen miles.”

McGully gets a little hushed at the end there, his baritone bluster softening, and he gives out a whistle, low and long. “Fifteen miles.”

A silence follows, filled by the small clanging noises of the radiator. Andreas stands at McGully’s desk, staring down at the newspaper, his hands balled in fists at his side. Culverson, in his comfortable corner, picks up a pen and begins tracing long lines on a piece of paper. I close the blue book, tilt my head back, and fix my eyes on a point in the ceiling, near the scalloped light fixture in the center of the room.

“Well, that’s the gist of it, ladies and germs,” says McGully, bluster recovered, sweeping the paper closed with a flourish. “Then it gets into all the reaction and so on.”

“Reaction?” howls Andreas, flapping his hands angrily in the direction of the newspaper. “What kind of reaction?”

“Oh, you know, the prime minister of Canada says, hey, hope it lands in China,” says McGully, laughing. “President of China says, ‘Listen, Canada, no offense or anything, but we’ve got a different perspective.’ You know. Blah blah blah.”

Andreas growls in disgust. I’m watching all this, sort of, but really I’m thinking, eyes focused on the light fixture. Guy walks into a McDonald’s in the middle of the night and hangs himself in a handicapped stall. Guy walks into a McDonald’s, it’s the middle of the night…

Culverson solemnly lifts his paper, reveals it to be cross-hatched into a large simple chart, X axis and Y axis.

“Official Concord Police Department asteroid pool,” he announces, deadpan. “Step right up.”

I like Detective Culverson. I like that he still dresses like a real detective. Today he’s in a three-piece suit, a tie with a metallic sheen, and a matching pocket square. A lot of people, at this point, have wholly given themselves over to comfort. Andreas, for example, is presently wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans, McGully a Washington Redskins sweatsuit.

“If we must die,” Culverson concludes, “let us first collect a few bucks from our brothers and sisters in the patrol division.”

“Sure, but,” Andreas looks around uneasily, “how are we supposed to predict?”

“Predict?” McGully whacks Andreas with the folded-up Monitor. “How are we supposed to collect, goofus?”

“I’ll go first,” says Culverson. “I’m taking the Atlantic Ocean for an even hundred.”

“Forty bucks on France,” says McGully, rifling through his wallet. “Serve ’em right, the pricks.”

Culverson walks his chart to my corner of the room, slides it on the desk. “What about you, Ichabod Crane? What do you think?”

“Gee,” I say absently, thinking about those angry lesions beneath the dead man’s eye. Someone punched Peter Zell in the face, hard, in the recent-but-not-too-recent past. Two weeks ago, maybe? Three weeks? Dr. Fenton will tell me for sure.

Culverson is waiting, eyebrows raised expectantly. “Detective Palace?”

“Hard to say, you know? Hey, where do you guys buy your belts?”

“Our belts?” Andreas looks down at his waist, then up, as if it’s a trick question. “I wear suspenders.”

“Place called Humphrey’s,” says Culverson. “In Manchester.”

“Angela buys my belts,” says McGully, who’s moved on to the sports section, leaned way back, feet propped up. “The hell are you talking about, Palace?”

“I’m working on this case,” I explain, all of them looking back at me now. “This body we found this morning, at the McDonald’s.”

“That was a hanger, I thought,” says McGully.

“We’re calling it a suspicious death, for now.”

“We?” says Culverson, smiles at me appraisingly. Andreas is still at McGully’s desk, still staring at the front section of the paper, one hand clapped to his forehead.

“The ligature in this case was a black belt. Fancy. Buckle said ‘B&R.’”

“Belknap and Rose,” says Culverson. “Wait now, you’re working this as a murder? Awfully public place for a murder.”

“Belknap and Rose, exactly,” I say. “See, because everything else the victim was wearing was nothing to write home about: plain tan suit, off the rack, an old dress shirt with stains at the pits, mismatched socks. And he was wearing a belt, too, a cheap brown belt. But the ligature: real leather, hand stitching.”

“Okay,” says Culverson. “So he went to B&R and bought himself a fancy belt for the purposes of killing himself.”

“There you go,” puts in McGully, turns the page.

“Really?” I stand up. “It just seems like, I’m going to hang myself, and I’m a regular guy, I wear suits to work, I probably own a number of belts. Why do I drive the twenty minutes to Manch, to an upscale men’s clothing store, to buy a special suicide belt?”

I’m pacing a little bit now, hunched forward, back and forth in front of the desk, stroking my mustache. “Why not, you know, just use one of my many existing belts?”

“Who knows?” says Culverson.

“And more important,” adds McGully, yawning, “who cares?”

“Right,” I say, and settle back into my seat, pick up the blue book again. “Of course.”

“You’re like an alien, Palace. You know that?” says McGully. In one swift motion, he balls up his sports section and bounces it off my head. “You’re like from another planet or something.”

2.

There is a very old man behind the security desk at the Water West Building, and he blinks at me slowly, like he just woke up from a nap, or the grave.

“You got an appointment with someone here in the building?”

“No, sir. I’m a policeman.”

The guard is in a severely rumpled dress shirt, and his security-guard cap is misshapen, dented at the peak. It’s late morning, but the gray lobby has a gloaming quality, motes drifting listlessly in the half light.

“My name is Detective Henry Palace.” I display my badge—he doesn’t look, doesn’t care—I tuck it carefully away again. “I’m with the Criminal Investigations Division of the Concord Police Department, and I’m looking into a suspicious death. I need to visit the offices of Merrimack Life and Fire.”

He coughs. “What are you, anyway, son? Like, six foot four?”

“Something like that.”

Waiting for the elevator I absorb the dark lobby: a giant potted plant, squat and heavy, guarding one corner; a lifeless White Mountains landscape above a row of brass mailboxes; the centenarian security man examining me from his perch. This, then, was my insurance man’s morning vista, where he started his professional existence, day in and day out. As the elevator door creaks open, I take a sniff of the musty air. Nothing arguing against the case for suicide, down here in the lobby.

Peter Zell’s boss is named Theodore Gompers, a jowly, pallid character in a blue wool suit, who evinces no surprise whatsoever when I tell him the news.

“Zell, huh? Well, that’s too bad. Can I pour you a drink?”

“No, thank you.”

“How about this weather, huh?”

“Yep.”

We’re in his office, and he’s drinking gin from a short square tumbler, absently rubbing his palm along his chin, staring out a big window at the snow tumbling down onto Eagle Square. “A lot of people are blaming it on the asteroid, all the snow. You’ve heard that, right?” Gompers talks quietly, ruminatively, his eyes fixed on the street outside. “It’s not true, though. The thing is still 280 million miles from here at this point. Not close enough to affect our weather patterns, and it won’t be.”

“Yep.”

“Not until afterward, obviously.” He sighs, turns his head to me slowly, like a cow. “People don’t really understand, you know?”

“I’m sure that’s true,” I say, waiting patiently with my blue book and a pen. “Can you tell me about Peter Zell?”

Gompers takes a sip of his gin. “Not that much to tell, really. Guy was a born actuary, that’s for sure.”

“A born actuary?”

“Yeah. Me, I started out on the actuarial side, degree in statistics and everything. But I switched to sales, and at some point I sort of drifted up to management, and here I have remained.” He opens his hands to take in the office and smiles wanly. “But Peter wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily, but he wasn’t going anywhere.”

I nod, scratching notes in my book, while Gompers continues in his glassy murmur. Zell, it seems, was a kind of wizard at actuarial math, had a nearly supernatural ability to sort through long columns of demographic data and draw precise conclusions about risk and reward. He was also almost pathologically shy, is what it sounds like: walked around with his eyes on the floor, muttered “hello” and “I’m fine” when pressed, sat in the back of the room at staff meetings, looking at his hands.

“And, boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door,” Gompers says. “You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans.”

I’m scratching away, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I’m thinking how much I’m starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.

“The thing about him, though, about Zell, is that this craziness never seemed to affect him too much. Even at the beginning, even when it all first started up.”

Gompers inclines his head backward, toward the window, toward the sky, and I’m guessing that when he says “when it all first started up,” he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way. It had been spotted by scientists as early as April, but for those first couple months, it only appeared in News-of-the-Weird kinds of reports, funny headlines on the Yahoo! homepage. “Death from Above?!” and “The Sky is Falling!”—that sort of stuff. But for most people, early June was when the threat became real; when the odds of impact rose to five percent; when Maia’s circumference was estimated at between 4.5 and 7 kilometers.

“So, you remember: people are going nuts, people are weeping at their desks. But Zell, like I said, he just keeps his head down, does his thing. Like he thought the asteroid was coming for everyone except him.”

“And what about more recently? Any change in that pattern? Depression?”

“Well,” he says. “You know, wait.” He stops abruptly, puts one hand over his mouth, narrows his eyes, as if trying to see something murky and far away.

“Mr. Gompers?”

“Yeah, I just… Sorry, I’m trying to remember something.” His eyes drift shut for a second, then snap open, and I have a moment of concern for the reliability of my witness here, wondering how many glasses of gin he’s already enjoyed this morning. “The thing is, there was this one incident.”

“Incident?”

“Yeah. We had this girl Theresa, an accountant, and she came to work on Halloween dressed as the asteroid.”

“Oh?”

“I know. Sick, right?” But Gompers grins at the memory. “It was just a big black garbage bag with the number, you know, two-zero-one-one-G-V-one, on a name tag. Most of us laughed, some people more than others. But Zell, out of nowhere, he just flipped. He starts yelling and screaming at this girl, his whole body is shaking. It was really scary, especially because, like I said, he’s normally such a quiet guy. Anyway, he apologized, but the next day he doesn’t show up for work.”

“How long was he gone?”

“A week? Two weeks? I thought he was out for good, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.”

“The same?”

“Yeah. Quiet. Calm. Focused. Hard work, doing what he’s told. Even when the actuarial side dried up.”

“The—I’m sorry?” I say. “What?”

“The actuarial end. Late fall, early winter, you know, we stopped issuing policies entirely.” He sees my questioning expression and smiles grimly. “I mean, Detective: would you like to buy life insurance right now?”

“I guess not.”

“Right,” he says, sniffs, drains his glass. “I guess not.”

The lights flicker and Gompers looks up, mutters “come on,” and a moment later they glow brightly again.

“Anyway, so then I’ve got Peter doing what everyone else is doing, which is inspecting claims, looking for false filings, dubious claims. It seems loony, but that’s what our parent company, Variegated, is obsessed with these days: fraud prevention. It’s all about protecting the bottom line. A lot of CEOs have cashed in their chips, you know, they’re in Bermuda or Antigua or they’re building bunkers. But not our guy. Between you and me, our guy thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven when the end comes. That’s the impression I get.”

I don’t laugh. I tap the end of the pen on my book, trying to make sense of all the information, trying to build a timeline in my head.

“Do you think I might speak to her?

“To who?”

“The woman you mentioned.” I glance down at my notes. “Theresa.”

“Oh, she’s long gone, Officer. She’s in New Orleans now, I believe.” Gompers inclines his head, and his voice peters down to a murmur. “A lot of the kids are going down there. My daughter, too, actually.” He looks out the window again. “Anything else I can tell you?”

I stare down at the blue book, spiderwebbed with my crabbed handwriting. Well? What else can he tell me?

“What about friends? Did Mr. Zell have any friends?”

“Uh…” Gompers tilts his head, sticks out his lower lip. “One. Or, I don’t know what he was, I guess he was a friend. A guy, kind of a big fat guy, big arms. Once or twice last summer I saw Zell having lunch with him, around the corner at the Works.”

“A large man, you said?”

“I said a big fat guy, but sure. I remember because, first of all, you’d never see Peter out to lunch, so that was unusual in itself. And second, Peter was such a small person, the two of them were kind of a sight, you know?”

“Did you get his name?”

“The big man? No. I didn’t even talk to him.”

I uncross and recross my legs, trying to think of the right questions, think of the things I’m supposed to ask, what else I need to know. “Sir, do you have any idea where Peter got the bruises?”

“What?”

“Under his eye?”

“Oh, yeah. Yeah, he said he fell down some stairs. A couple weeks ago, I think?”

“Fell down some stairs?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Okay.”

I’m writing this down, and I’m starting to see the dim outlines of the course of my investigation, and I’m feeling these jolts of adrenaline shooting up my right leg, making it bounce a little bit where it’s crossed over the left one.

“Last question, Mr. Gompers. Do you know if Mr. Zell had any enemies?”

Gompers rubs his jaw with the heel of his hand, his eyes swimming into focus. “Enemies, did you say? You’re not thinking that someone killed the guy, are you?”

“Well. Maybe. Probably not.” I flip closed my blue book and stand up. “May I see his workspace, please?”

That sharp jolt of adrenaline that shot up my leg during the Gompers interview has now spread throughout my body, and it lingers, spreading up my veins, filling me with a strange kind of electric hunger.

I’m a policeman, the thing I’ve always wanted to be. For sixteen months I was a patrol officer, working almost exclusively on the overnight shift, almost exclusively in Sector 1, cruising Loudon Road from the Walmart at one end to the overpass on the other. Sixteen months patrolling my four-and-a-half-mile stretch, back and forth, 8 p.m. to 4 a.m., breaking up fights, scattering drunks, rolling up panhandlers and schizophrenics in the Market Basket parking lot.

I loved it. Even last summer I loved it, when things got weird, new times, and then the fall, the work got steadily harder and steadily stranger and I loved it still.

But since making detective I’ve been befogged by a frustrating unnamable sensation, some dissatisfaction, a sense of bad luck, bad timing, where I got the job I’ve wanted and waited for my whole life and it’s a disappointment to me, or I to it.

And now, today, here at last this electric feeling, tingling and fading at my pulse points, and I’m thinking holy moly, this might just be it. It really might be.

“So what are you looking for, anyway?”

It’s an accusation more than a question. I turn from what I’m doing, which is sorting methodically through Peter Zell’s desk drawers, and I see a bald woman in a black pencil skirt and white blouse. It’s the woman I saw at the McDonald’s, the one who approached the door of the restaurant and then turned away, melting back into the parking lot and out of sight. I recognize her pale complexion and deep black eyes, even though this morning she was wearing a bright red wool cap, and now she is hatless, her smooth white scalp reflecting the harsh overhead lights of Merrimack Life and Fire.

“I am looking for evidence, ma’am. A routine investigation. My name is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department.”

“Evidence of what, exactly?” she asks. The woman’s nose is pierced, one nostril, a single understated golden stud. “Gompers said that Peter killed himself.”

I don’t answer, and she steps the rest of the way into the small airless office and watches me work. She’s good-looking, this woman, small and strong-featured and poised, maybe twenty-four, twenty-five years old. I wonder what Peter Zell must have made of her.

“Well,” she says, after thirty seconds or so. “Gompers said to find out if you need anything. Do you need anything?”

“No, thank you.”

She’s looking over and around me, at my fingers pawing through the dead man’s drawers. “I’m sorry, what did you say you were looking for?”

“I don’t know yet. An investigation’s proper course cannot be mapped in advance. It follows each piece of information forward to the next one.”

“Oh, yeah?” When the young woman raises her eyebrows, it creates delicate furrows on her forehead. “It sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something.”

“Huh.” I keep my expression neutral. It is in fact a direct quote, from Farley and Leonard, Criminal Investigation, the introduction to chapter six.

“I actually do need something,” I say, pointing to Zell’s monitor, which is turned backward, facing the wall. “What’s the deal with the computers here?”

“We’ve been all-paper since November,” she says, shrugging. “There’s this whole network system where our files here were shared with corporate and the different regional offices, but the network got incredibly slow and annoying, so the whole company is operating offline.”

“Ah,” I say, “okay.” Internet service, as a whole, has been increasingly unreliable in the Merrimack Valley since late January; a switching point in southern Vermont was attacked by some kind of anarchist collective, motive unclear, and the resources haven’t been found to repair it.

The woman is just standing there, looking at me. “So, I’m sorry—you’re Mr. Gompers’s executive assistant?”

“Please,” she says, rolling her eyes. “Secretary.”

“And what’s your name?”

She pauses, just long enough to let me know she feels that she could, if she chose, keep the information to herself, and then says, “Eddes. Naomi Eddes.”

Naomi Eddes. She is not, I am noticing, completely bald, not quite. Her scalp is gently feathered with a translucent blonde fuzz, which looks soft and smooth and lovely, like elegant carpeting for a doll’s house.

“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, Ms. Eddes?”

She doesn’t answer, but neither does she leave the room; she just stands there regarding me steadily as I launch in. She’s worked here for four years. Yes, Mr. Zell was already employed when she started. No, she did not know him well. She confirms Gompers’s general portrait of Peter Zell’s personality: quiet, hardworking, socially uncomfortable, although she uses the word maladroit, which I like. She recalls the incident on Halloween, when Peter lashed out at Theresa from Accounting, though she doesn’t recall any subsequent weeklong absence from the office.

“But to be totally honest,” she says, “I’m not sure I would have noticed him not being here. Like I said, we weren’t that close.” Her expression softens, and for a split second I would swear she’s blinking back tears, but it’s just a split second, and then her steady, impassive expression recomposes itself. “He was very nice, though. A really nice guy.”

“Would you have characterized him as being depressed?”

“Depressed?” she says, smiling faintly, ironically. “Aren’t we all depressed, Detective? Under the weight of all this unbearable immanence? Aren’t you depressed?”

I don’t answer, but I’m liking her phrase, all this unbearable immanence. Better than Gompers’s “this craziness,” better than McGully’s “big meatball.”

“And did you happen to notice, Ms. Eddes, what time Mr. Zell left the office yesterday, or with whom?”

“No,” she says, her voice dipping down a half register, her chin pressing against her chest. “I did not notice what time he left the office yesterday, nor with whom.”

I am thrown for a moment, and then by the time I realize that her sudden pseudoserious intonation is meant to tease me, she’s continuing in her regular voice. “I left early myself, actually, at about three. We’ve got kind of a relaxed schedule these days. But Peter was definitely still here when I took off. I remember waving good-bye.”

I have a sudden and vivid mental image of Peter Zell, three o’clock yesterday afternoon, watching his boss’s beautiful and self-possessed secretary leave for the day. She gives him a friendly indifferent wave, and my man Zell nods nervously, hunched over his desk, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

“And now, if you’ll excuse me,” says Naomi Eddes abruptly, “I have to go back to work.”

“Sure,” I say, nodding politely, thinking, I didn’t ask you to come in. I didn’t ask you to stay. “Oh, Ms. Eddes? One more thing. What were you doing at the McDonald’s this morning, when the body was discovered?”

In my inexperienced estimation, this question flusters Ms. Eddes—she looks away, and a trace of a blush dances across her cheeks—but then she gathers herself and smiles and says, “What was I doing? I go there all the time.”

“To the McDonald’s on Main Street?”

“Almost every morning. Sure. For coffee.”

“There’s a lot of places closer to here, for coffee.”

“They have good coffee.”

“Then why didn’t you come in?”

“Because—because I realized at the last minute that I had forgotten my wallet.”

I fold my arms and draw myself up to full height. “Is that true, Ms. Eddes?”

She folds her own arms, mirrors my stance, looks up to meet my eyes. “Is it true that this is a routine investigation?”

And then I’m watching her walk away.

“It’s the short fella you’re asking about, is that correct?”

“Pardon me?”

The old security officer is exactly where I left him, his chair still swiveled to face the elevator bank, as if he’s been frozen in this position, waiting, the whole time I was working upstairs.

“The fella who died. You said you were on a murder, up at Merrimack Life.”

“I said I was investigating a suspicious death.”

“That’s fine. But it’s the short fella? Little squirrelly? Spectacles?”

“Yes. His name was Peter Zell. Did you know him?”

“Nope. Except I knew everybody who worked in the building, to say hello to. You’re a cop, you said?”

“A detective.”

The old man’s leathery face contorts itself for a split second into the distant sad cousin of a smile. “I was in the Air Force. Vietnam. For a while, when I got home, I used to want to be a cop.”

“Hey,” I say, offering up by rote the meaningless thing my father always used to say, when confronted with any kind of pessimism or resignation. “It’s never too late.”

“Well.” The security officer coughs hoarsely, adjusts his battered cap. “It is, though.”

A moment passes in the dreary lobby, and then the guard says, “So last night, the skinny guy, he got picked up after work by someone in a big red pickup truck.”

“A pickup truck? Running gas?”

No one has gas, no one but cops and army. OPEC stopped exporting oil in early November, the Canadians followed suit a couple of weeks later, and that was it. The Department of Energy opened the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on January 15, along with strictly enforced price controls, and everybody had gas for about nine days, and then they didn’t anymore.

“Not gas,” says the guard. “Cooking oil, by the smell of it.”

I nod, excited, take a step forward, smooth my mustache with the heel of one hand. “Did Mr. Zell get in the truck willingly or unwillingly?”

“Well, no one pushed him in there, if that’s what you mean. And I didn’t see any gun or anything.”

I take out my notebook, click open a pen. “What did it look like?”

“It was a performance Ford, an old model. Eighteen-inch Goodyears, no chains. Smoke billowing out the back, you know, that nasty vegetable-oil smoke.”

“Right. You get a license plate?

“I did not.”

“And did you get a look at the driver?”

“Nope. Didn’t know I’d have a reason to.” The old man blinks, bemused, I think, by my enthusiasm. “He was a big fella, though. Pretty sure of that. Heavyset, like.”

I’m nodding, writing quickly. “And you’re sure it was a red pickup?”

“It was. A red, medium-body pickup truck with a standard bed. And there was a big flag airbrushed on the driver’s side wall.”

“What flag?”

“What flag? United States,” he says diffidently, as if unwilling to acknowledge the existence of any other kind.

I write quietly for a minute, faster and faster, the pen scratching in the silence of the lobby, the old man looking abstractedly at me, head tilted, eyes distant, like I’m something in a museum case. Then I thank him and put away my blue book and my pen and step out onto the sidewalk, the snow falling on the red brick and sandstone of downtown, and I’m standing there for a second watching it all in my head, like a movie: the shy, awkward man in the rumpled brown suit, climbing up into the shotgun seat of a shiny red pickup running a converted engine, driving off into the last hours of his life.

3.

There’s a dream I used to have, pretty consistently once or twice a week, going back to when I was right around twelve years old.

The dream featured the imposing figure of Ryan J. Ordler, the long-serving chief of the Concord Police Department, long-serving even back then, whom in real life I would see every summer at the Family and Friends Picnic Potluck, where he would awkwardly tousle my hair and flip me a buffalo-head nickel, like he did for all the children present. In the dream, Ordler stands at attention in full uniform, holding a Bible, on which I place my right hand, palm down, and I’m repeating after him, pledging to enforce and uphold the law, and then he’s solemnly presenting me with my gun, my badge, and I salute him and he salutes me back and the music swells—there is music in the dream—and I am made detective.

In real life, one brutally cold morning late last year, I returned to the station at 9:30 a.m., after a long night spent patrolling Sector 1, to find a handwritten note in my locker instructing me to report to the office of the DCA. I stopped in the break room, splashed water on my face, and took the stairs two at a time. The Deputy Chief of Administration at that time was Lieutenant Irina Paul, who had held the post a little more than six weeks, after the abrupt departure of Lieutenant Irvin Moss.

“Good morning, ma’am,” I say. “Did you need something?”

“Yeah,” Lieutenant Paul says, looks up and then back down at what’s in front of her, a thick black binder with the words U.S. DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE stenciled on the side. “Gimme one sec, Officer.”

“Sure,” I say, looking around, and then there’s another voice, deep and rumbling, from the far end of the office: “Son.”

It’s Chief Ordler, in uniform but no tie, collar open, shrouded in semidarkness at the small office’s only window, arms crossed, a sturdy oak tree of a human being. A wave of trepidation washes over me, my spine straightens, and I say, “Morning, sir.”

“Okay, young man,” says Lieutenant Paul, and the chief nods minutely, gently, titling his head toward the DCA, letting me know to pay attention. “Now. You were involved in an incident two nights ago, in the basement.”

“What—oh.”

My face flushes, and I begin to explain: “One of the new people—newer, I should say—” I’ve only been on the force for sixteen months myself, “—one of the newer people brought in a suspect for preventive detention under Title XVI. A vagrant. A homeless individual, that is.”

“Right,” says Paul, and I see that she’s got an incident report in front of her, and I’m not liking this at all. I’m sweating now, literally sweating in the cold office.

“And he was, the officer I mean, he was being verbally abusive to the suspect, in a way I felt was inappropriate and contrary to department guidelines.”

“And you took it open yourself to intervene. To, let’s see,” and she looks down at her desk again, flips over the onion-skin pink paper of the report, “to recite the relevant statute in an aggressive and threatening manner.”

“I’m not sure that I would characterize it that way.” I glance at the chief, but he’s looking at Lieutenant Paul, her show.

“It’s just, I happened to know the gentleman—sorry, the, I should say, the suspect. Duane Shepherd, Caucasian male, age fifty-five.” Paul’s gaze, unwavering but distant, disinterested, is flustering me, as is the quiet presence of the chief. “Mr. Shepherd was my scout leader when I was a kid. And he used to work as an electric-crew foreman, in Penacook, but I gather he’s had a hard time. With the recession.”

“Officially,” says Paul quietly, “I believe it is a depression.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Lieutenant Paul looks down at the incident report again. She looks exhausted.

This conversation is taking place in early December, deep in the cold months of uncertainty. On September 17 the asteroid went into conjunction, got too close to the Sun to be observed, too close for new readings to be taken. So the odds, which had been inching steadily upward since April—three percent chance of impact, ten percent chance, fifteen—were stalled, late fall and early winter, at fifty-three percent. The world economy went from bad to worse, much worse. On October 12 the president saw fit to sign the first round of IPSS legislation, authorizing an influx of federal money to state and local law-enforcement agencies. In Concord, this meant all these young kids, younger than me, some recent high-school dropouts, all of them rushed through a sort of quasi-police-academy boot camp. Privately, McConnell and I call them the Brush Cuts, because they all seemed to have that same haircut, the same baby faces and cold eyes and swagger.

The thing with Mr. Shepherd was not, in truth, my first run-in with my new colleagues.

The chief clears his throat, and Paul leans back, happy to let him take over. “Son, listen. There is not a person in this building who does not want you here. We were proud to welcome you to the patrol division, and were it not for the present unusual circumstances—”

“Sir, I was first in my class at the academy,” I say, aware that I am talking loudly and that I have interrupted Chief Ordler, but I can’t stop, I keep going. “I have a perfect attendance record, zero violations, zero citizen complaints pre- and post-Maia.”

“Henry,” says the chief gently.

“I am trusted implicitly, I believe, by Watch Command.”

“Young man,” says Lieutenant Paul sharply, and holds up her hand. “I think you misunderstand the situation.”

“Ma’am?”

“You’re not being fired, Palace. You’re being promoted.”

Chief Ordler steps forward into a slant of sunlight from the small window. “We think that, given the circumstances and your particular talents, you’d be better off in a seat upstairs.”

I gape at him. I scramble for and then recover the power of speech. “But department regulation says that an officer must put in two years and six months on patrol before becoming eligible for service in the detective unit.”

“We’re going to waive that requirement,” Paul explains, folding up the incident report and dropping it in the trash. “I think we’ll also not bother with reclassifying your 401(k), just for the time being.”

This is a joke, but I don’t laugh; it’s all I can do to stay upright. I’m trying to get oriented, trying to form words, thinking new times and thinking a seat upstairs and thinking this is not how it happens, in the dream.

“Okay, Henry,” says Chief Ordler mildly. “That’s the end of the meeting.”

I learn later on that it’s Detective Harvey Telson whose spot I’m filling, Telson having taken an early retirement, gone “Bucket List” like many others were doing by this point, by December, heading off to do the things they’ve always wanted to do: speed around in race cars, experiment with long-suppressed romantic or sexual inclinations, track down the old bully and punch him in the face. Detective Telson, as it turns out, always wanted to race yachts. America’s Cup kind of stuff. A lucky break for me.

Twenty-six days after the meeting in her office, two days after the asteroid emerged from conjunction with the Sun, Lieutenant Paul quit the force and moved to Las Vegas to be with her grown children.

I don’t have the dream anymore, the one where Ordler lays my hand on the Bible and makes me a detective. There’s another dream that I’ve been having a lot instead.

Like Dotseth says, the cellular phones are getting dicey. You dial, you wait, sometimes you get through and sometimes not. A lot of people are convinced that Maia is bending Earth’s gravitational field, our magnets or ions, or something, but of course the asteroid, still 450 million kilometers away, is having no more effect on cellphone service than on the weather. Officer Wilentz, our tech guy, he explained it to me once: cellular service is chopped up into sectors—cells—and basically the sectors are dropping out, the cells are dying, one by one. The telecom companies are losing service people because they can’t pay them, because no one is paying their bill; they’re losing their executives to the Bucket List; they’re losing telephone poles to unrepaired storm damage, and they’re losing long stretches of wire to vandals and thieves. So the cells are dying. As for all the other stuff, the smartphone stuff, the apps and the gizmos, forget it.

One of the five major carriers announced last week that it’s begun winding down its business, describing this fact in a newspaper advertisement as an act of generosity, a “gift of time” to the company’s 355,000 employees and their families, and warning customers to expect total suspension of service within the next two months. Three days ago, Culverson’s New York Times had the Department of Commerce predicting total collapse of telephony by late spring, with the administration supposedly crafting a plan to nationalize the industry.

“Meaning,” McGully noted, chortling, “total collapse by early spring.”

Sometimes, when I notice that I have a strong signal, I’ll make a call real quick, so as not to waste it.

“Oh, man. Man oh man, what in hell do you want?”

“Good afternoon, Mr. France. This is Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department.”

“I know who it is, okay? I know who it is.”

Victor France sounds riled, agitated; he always sounds like that. I’m sitting in the Impala outside Rollins Park now, a couple blocks from where Peter Zell used to live.

“Come on, Mr. France. Take it easy, now.”

“I don’t want to take it easy, okay? I hate your guts. I hate it when you call me, okay?” I hold the phone an inch or two away from my ear as France’s scattershot snarl pours from the earpiece. “I’m trying to live my life here, man. Is that such an awful and terrible thing, just to live my life?”

I can picture him, the thug resplendent: loops of chain drooping from black jeans, skull-and-crossbones pinky ring, scrawny wrists and forearms crawling with several species of tattoo snakes. The rat-eyed face twisted with melodramatic outrage, having to answer the phone, take orders from a stuck-up egghead policeman like myself. But look, I mean, that’s what you get for being a drug dealer, and moreover for getting caught, at this juncture in American history. Victor may not know by heart the full text of the Impact Preparation Security and Stabilization Act, but he’s got the gist.

“I don’t need much help today, Mr. France. A little research project, is all.”

France blows out one last exasperated “oh man oh man,” and then he comes around, just like I knew he would. “All right, okay. All right, what is it?”

“You know a little bit about cars, don’t you?”

“Yeah. Sure. I mean, what, Detective, what, you calling me to fill your tires?”

“No, thank you. The last few weeks, people have started converting their cars to vegetable-oil engines.”

“No shit. You seen gas prices lately?” He clears his throat noisily, spits.

“I’m trying to find out who did one such conversion. It’s a midsize red pickup, a Ford. American flag painted on the side. You think you can handle that?”

“Maybe. And what if I can’t?”

I don’t answer. I don’t have to. France knows the answer.

One of the most striking effects of the asteroid, from a law-enforcement perspective, has been the resulting spike in drug use and drug-related crime, with skyrocketing demand for every category of narcotic, for opiates, for Ecstasy, for methamphetamine, for cocaine in all its varieties. In small towns, in docile suburbs, farming communities, everywhere—even midsize cities like Concord, which had never experienced serious narcotics crime in the past. The federal government, after some tacking back and forth in the summer and fall, late last year resolved on a firm and uncompromising law-and-order stance. The IPSS Act incorporated provisions stripping the right of habeas corpus and other due-process protections from anyone accused of importing, processing, growing, or distributing controlled substances of all kinds.

These measures were deemed necessary “in the interest of controlling violence, promoting stability, and encouraging productive economic activity in the time remaining before impact.”

Personally, I do know the full text of the legislation.

The car is off and the wipers are still, and I’m watching as gray blobs of snow build up in uneven slopes on the windshield.

“All right, man, all right,” he says. “I’ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week.”

“I wish I could, Victor. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” He heaves an extravagant sigh. “Asshole.”

The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally destabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France’s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Saturday afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circumstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France’s case not to exercise that discretion—conditionally.

I could lock Victor France up for six months on Title VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.

Six months is hard time, when it’s all the time you’ve got left.

“You know, a lot of cops are quitting,” says France. “Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?”

“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.

No one is really sure—even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendments and codicils—not a hundred percent sure what the “Preparation” parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they’ll start handing out umbrellas.

“Yeah?”

“Oh—I’m sorry. Is this—is this Belknap and Rose?”

“Yeah.”

“I have a request for you.”

“Don’t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what’s left, I’m here most days.”

“No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?”

“What?”

“If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I’m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL.”

“Is this a joke?

“No, sir.”

“I mean, are you joking?”

“No, sir.”

“All right, buddy.”

“I’m investigating a suspicious death, and the information might be material.”

“Alllll right, buddy.”

“Hello?”

Peter Zell’s townhouse, 14 Matthew Street Extension, is a new building, cheap construction, with just four small rooms: living room and kitchen on the first floor, bedroom and bathroom upstairs. I linger on the threshold, recalling the relevant text from Criminal Investigation advising me to work slowly, divide the house into a grid, take each quadrant in its turn. Then the thought of the Farley and Leonard—my reflexive reliance on it—reminds me of Naomi Eddes: it sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something. I shake that off, run a hand over my mustache, and step inside.

“Okay, Mr. Zell,” I say to the empty house. “Let’s have a look.”

The first quadrant gives me precious little to work with. A thin beige carpet, an old coffee table with ring-shaped stains. A small but serviceable flat-screen TV, wires snaking up from a DVD player, a vase of chrysanthemums that turn out, on close inspection, to be made of fabric and wire.

Most of Zell’s bookshelf space is given over to his professional interests: math, advanced math, ratios and probabilities, a thick history of actuarial accounting, binders from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institutes of Health. Then he’s got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined, all the nerdy sci-fi and fantasy stuff, Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series, vintage D&D rule-books, a book on the mythological and philosophical underpinnings of Star Wars. A small armada of spaceship miniatures is suspended from wires in the doorway to the kitchen, and I duck to avoid them.

In the pantry are nine boxes of cereal, carefully alphabetized: Alpha-Bits, Cap’n Crunch, Cheerios, and so on. There is one empty slot in the neat row, like a missing tooth between the Frosted Flakes and the Golden Grahams, and my mind automatically fills in the missing box: Fruity Pebbles. A stray candy-pink grain confirms my hypothesis.

“I like you, Peter Zell,” I say, carefully closing the pantry door. “You, I like.”

Also in the kitchen, in an otherwise empty drawer beside the sink, is a pad of plain white paper, with writing on the top sheet that says, Dear Sophia.

My heart catches on a beat, and I breathe and I pick up the pad, flip it over, rifle through the pages, but that’s all there is, one sheet of paper with the two words, Dear Sophia. The handwriting is precise, careful, and you can tell, you can feel that this was not a casual note Zell was writing, but an important document, or was meant to be.

I tell myself to remain calm, because it could after all be nothing, though my mind is blazing with it, thinking that whether it’s the start of an aborted suicide note or not, it is definitely something.

I tuck the pad into the pocket of my blazer, walk up the stairs, thinking, who is Sophia?

The bedroom is like the living room, sterile and unornamented, the bed haphazardly made. A single framed print hangs over the bed, a signed still from the original Planet of the Apes film. In the closet hang three suits, all in dull shades of brown, and two threadbare brown belts. In a small, chipped-wood night table beside the bed, in the second drawer down, is a shoebox, wrapped tightly in duct tape, with the number 12.375 written on the outside in the same precise handwriting.

“Twelve point three seven five,” I murmur. And then, “What is this?”

I tuck the shoebox box under my arm and stand up, take a look at the one photograph in the room: it’s a small print in a cheap frame, a school picture of a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, thin yellow flyaway hair, gawky grin. I tug it from the frame and flip it over, find careful handwriting on the back. Kyle, February 10. Last year. Before.

I use the CB to raise Trish McConnell.

“Hey,” I say, “it’s me. Were you able to locate the victim’s family?”

“Yes, indeed.”

Zell’s mother is dead, as it turns out, buried here in Concord, up at Blossom Hill. The father is living at Pleasant View Retirement, suffering the opening phases of dementia. The person to whom McConnell delivered the bad news is Peter’s older sister, who works as a midwife at a private clinic near Concord Hospital. Married, one child, a son. Her name is Sophia.

On my way out, I stop again on the threshold of Peter Zell’s house, awkwardly carrying the shoebox and the photograph and the white notepad, feeling the weight of the case and balancing it against an ancient memory: a policeman standing in the doorway of my childhood home on Rockland Road, hatless and somber, calling, “Anybody home?” into the morning darkness.

Me standing at the top of the stairs, in a Red Sox jersey, or it might have been a pajama top, thinking my sister is probably still asleep, hoping so anyway. I’ve already got a pretty good idea what the policeman’s there to say.

“Let me guess, Detective,” says Denny Dotseth, “We’ve got another 10-54S.”

“Not a new one, actually. I wanted to touch base with you about Peter Zell.”

I’m easing the Impala down Broadway, hands at ten and two. There’s a New Hampshire state trooper parked at Broadway and Stone, engine on, the blue lights slowly rotating on the roof, a machine gun clutched in his hand. I nod slightly, raise two fingers off the wheel, and he nods back.

“Who’s Peter Zell?” says Dotseth.

“The man from this morning, sir.”

“Oh, right. Hey, you hear they named the big day? When we’ll know where she comes down, I mean. April 9.”

“Yep. I heard.”

Dotseth, like McGully, likes to keep up-to-date on every unfolding detail of our global catastrophe. At the last suicide scene, not Zell’s but the one before that, he talked excitedly for ten minutes about the war on the Horn of Africa, the Ethiopian army swarming into Eritrea to avenge ancient grievances in the time remaining.

“I thought it made sense to present you with what I’ve learned so far,” I say. “I know your impression from this morning, but I think this might be a homicide, I really do.”

Dotseth murmurs, “Is that a fact?” and I take that as a go-ahead, give him my sense of the case thus far: The incident at Merrimack Life and Fire, on Halloween. The red pickup truck, burning vegetable oil, that took the victim away the night he died. My hunch on the belt from Belknap and Rose.

All of this the assistant AG receives with a toneless “interesting,” and then he sighs and says, “What about a note?”

“Uh, no. No note, sir.”

I decide not to tell him about Dear Sophia, because I feel fairly certain that whatever that is, it is not an aborted suicide note—but Dotseth will think it was, he’ll say, “There you go, young man, you’re barking up the wrong tree.” Which he pretty clearly thinks I’m doing anyway.

“You got some straws to grasp at there,” is what he says. “You’re not going to refer this case to Fenton, are you?”

“I am, actually. I already did. Why?”

There’s a pause, and then a low chuckle. “Oh, no reason.”

“What?”

“Hey, listen, kid. If you really think you can build a case, of course I’ll take a look. But don’t forget the context. People are killing themselves right and left, you know? For someone like the fella you’re describing, someone without a lot of friends, with no real support system, there’s a powerful social incentive to join the herd.”

I keep my mouth shut, keep driving, but this line of reasoning I do not like. He did it because everyone else is doing it? It’s like Dotseth is accusing the victim of something: cowardice, perhaps, or mere faddishness, some color of weakness. Which, if in fact Peter Zell was murdered, murdered and dragged into a McDonald’s and left in that bathroom like meat, only adds insult to injury.

“I’ll tell you what,” says Dotseth genially. “We’ll call it an attempted murder.”

“Sorry, sir?”

“It’s a suicide, but you’re attempting to make it a murder. Have a great day, Detective.”

Driving down School Street there’s an old-time-style ice-cream parlor on the south side of the road, right where you pass the YMCA, and today it looks like they’re doing a pretty brisk business, snow or no snow, dairy prices or no dairy prices. There’s a nice-looking young couple, early thirties maybe, they’ve just stepped outside with their colorful cones. The woman gives me a small tentative friendly-policeman wave, and I wave back, but the man looks at me dead-eyed and unsmiling.

People in the main are simply muddling along. Go to work, sit at your desk, hope the company is still around come Monday. Go to the store, push the cart, hope there’s some food on the shelves today. Meet your sweetheart at lunch hour for ice cream. Okay, sure, some people have chosen to kill themselves, and some people have chosen to go Bucket List, some people are scrambling around for drugs or “wandering around with their dicks out,” as McGully likes to say.

But a lot of the Bucket Listers have returned, disappointed, and a lot of newly minted criminals and wild pleasure-seekers have found themselves in jail, waiting in terrified solitude for October.

So, yeah, there are differences in behavior, but they are on the margins. The main difference, from a law-enforcement perspective, is more atmospheric, harder to define. I would characterize the mood, here in town, as that of the child who isn’t in trouble yet, but knows he’s going to be. He’s up in his room, waiting, “Just wait till your father gets home.” He’s sullen and snappish, he’s on edge. Confused, sad, trembling against the knowledge of what’s coming next, and right on the edge of violence, not angry but anxious in a way that can easily shade into anger.

That’s Concord. I can’t speak to the mood in the rest of the world, but that’s pretty much it around here.

I’m back at my desk on School Street, back in Adult Crimes, and I’m carefully cutting away the duct tape that holds the lid of the shoebox, and for the second time since I met her I hear the voice of Naomi Eddes—standing there with her arms crossed, staring at me, so what are you looking for, anyway?

“This,” I say, when I have the lid off the box and I’m staring inside. “This is what I’m looking for.”

Peter Zell’s shoebox contains hundreds of newspaper articles, magazine pages, and items printed from the Internet, all relating to Maia and its impending impact with Earth. I lift the first of the articles off the top of the stack. It’s from April 2 of last year, an Associated Press squib about the Palomar Observatory at Caltech and the unusual but almost certainly harmless object the scientists there had spotted, which had been added to the Potentially Hazardous Asteroid list at the Minor Planet Center. The author concludes the article by dryly noting that “whatever its size or composition, this mysterious new object’s odds of impacting Earth are estimated at 0.000047 percent, meaning there is a one in 2,128,000 chance.” Zell, I note, has carefully circled both numbers.

The next item in the shoebox is a Thomson Reuters piece from two days later, headlined “Newly Discovered Space Object Largest in Decades,” but the article itself is rather mundane, a single paragraph, no quotes. It estimates the size of the object—in those early days still being referred to by its astronomical designation of 2011GV₁,—as “among the largest spotted by astronomers in some decades, possibly as large as three kilometers in diameter.” Zell has circled that estimate, too, faintly, in pencil.

I keep reading, fascinated by this grim time capsule, reliving the recent past from Peter Zell’s perspective. In each article, he has circled or underlined numbers: the steadily increasing estimates of Maia’s size, its angle in the sky, its right ascension and declination, its odds of impact as they inch higher, week by week, month by month. He’s put neat boxes around each dollar amount and percentage of stock-value loss in an early-July Financial Times survey of the desperate emergency actions of the Fed, the European Central Bank, and the International Monetary Fund. He has, too, articles on the political side: legislative wrangling, emergency laws, bureaucratic shuffles at the Justice Department, the refunding of the FDIC.

I am picturing Zell, late at night, every night, at his cheap kitchen table, eating cereal, his glasses resting at his elbow, marking up these clippings and printouts with his mechanical pencil, considering every unfolding detail of the calamity.

I pluck out a Scientific American piece dated September 3, asking in big bold letters, “How Could We Not Have Known?” The short answer, which I already know, which everyone knows by now, is that 2011GV₁’s highly unusual elliptical orbit brings it close enough to be visible from Earth only once every seventy-five years, and seventy-five years ago we weren’t looking, we had no program in place to spot and track Near-Earth Asteroids. Zell has circled “75” each time it appears; he’s circled 1 in 265 million, the now-moot odds of such an object existing; he’s circled 6.5 kilometers, which by then had been determined to be Maia’s true diameter.

The rest of the Scientific American article gets complicated: astrophysics, perihelions and aphelions, orbital averaging and values of elongation. My head is spinning reading all of this, my eyes hurt, but Zell has clearly read every word, thickly annotated every page of it, made dizzying calculations in the margins, with arrows leading to and from the circled statistics and amounts and astronomical values.

Carefully I place the cover back on the box, look out the window.

I place my long flat palms on the top of the box, stare again at the number on the side of the box, written firmly, in black marker: 12.375.

I’m feeling it again—something—I don’t know what. But something.

“May I speak to Sophia Littlejohn? This is Detective Henry Palace of the Concord Police Department.”

There’s a pause, and then a woman’s voice, polite but unsettled. “This is she. But I think you folks have got your wires crossed. I already spoke to someone. This is—you’re calling about my brother, right? They called earlier today. My husband and I both spoke to the officer.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know.”

I’m on the landline, at headquarters. I’m judging Sophia Littlejohn, picturing her, painting myself a picture from what I know, and from the tone of her voice: alert, professional, compassionate. “Officer McConnell gave you the unfortunate news. And I’m really sorry to be bothering you again. As I said, I’m a detective, and I just have a few questions.”

As I’m talking I’m becoming aware of an unpleasant gagging noise; over there on the other side of the room is McGully, his black Boston Bruins scarf twisted up over his head into a comedy noose, going “erk-erk.” I turn away, hunch over my chair, holding the receiver close to my ear.

“I appreciate your sympathy, Detective,” Zell’s sister is saying. “But I honestly don’t know what else I can tell you. Peter killed himself. It’s awful. We weren’t that close.”

First Gompers. Then Naomi Eddes. And now the guy’s own sister. Peter Zell certainly had a lot of people in his life with whom he wasn’t that close.

“Ma’am, I need to ask if there’s any reason your brother would have been writing you a letter. A note of some kind, addressed to you?”

On the other end of the phone, a long silence. “No,” says Sophia Littlejohn finally. “No. I have no idea.”

I let that hang there for a moment, listen to her breathe, and then I say, “Are you sure you don’t know?”

“Yes. I am. I’m sure. Officer, I’m sorry, I don’t really have time to talk right now.”

I’m leaning all the way forward in my chair. The radiator makes a metallic chugging noise from its corner. “What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’m sorry, but it really is very important that we speak.”

“Okay,” she says, after another pause. “Sure. Can you come to my home in the morning?”

“I can.”

“Very early? Seven forty-five?”

“Anytime is fine. Seven forty-five is fine. Thank you.”

There’s a pause, and I look at the phone, wondering if she’s hung up, or if the landlines are now having trouble, too. McGully tousles my hair on his way out, bowling bag swinging from his other hand.

“I loved him,” says Sophia Littlejohn suddenly, hushed but forceful. “He was my little brother. I loved him so much.”

“I’m sure you did, ma’am.”

I get the address, and I hang up, and I sit for a second staring out the window, where the slush and sleet just keep on coming down.

“Hey. Hey, Palace?”

Detective Andreas is slumped in his chair on the far side of the room, tucked away in darkness. I hadn’t even known he was in the room.

“How you doing, Henry?” His voice is toneless, empty.

“Fine. How about you?” I’m thinking about that glistening pause, that lingering moment, wishing I could have been inside Sophia Littlejohn’s head as she cycled through all the reasons her brother might have had for writing Dear Sophia on a piece of paper.

“I’m fine,” Andreas says. “I’m fine.”

He looks at me, smiles tightly, and I think the conversation is over, but it’s not. “I gotta say, man,” Andreas murmurs, shaking his head, looking over at me. “I don’t know how you do it.”

“How I do what?”

But he’s just looking at me, not saying anything else, and from where I’m sitting across the room it looks like there are tears in his eyes, big pools of standing water. I look away, back out the window, just no idea what to say to the guy. No idea whatsoever.

4.

A loud and terrible noise is filling my room, a shrieking and violent eruption of sound rushing into the darkness, and I’m sitting up and I’m screaming. It’s here, I’m not ready, my heart is exploding in my chest because it’s here, it’s early, it’s happening now.

But it’s just my phone. The shrieking, the horrendous noise, it’s just the landline. I’m sweating, my hand clutched to my chest, shivering on my thin mattress on the floor that I call a bed.

It’s just my stupid phone.

“Yeah. Hello?”

“Hank? What are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” I look at the clock. It’s 4:45 a.m. “I’m sleeping. I was dreaming.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I need your help, I really do, Henny.”

I breathe deeply, sweat cooling on my forehead, my shock and confusion rapidly fading into irritation. Of course. My sister is the only person who would be calling me at five o’clock in the morning, and she’s also the only person who still calls me Henny, a miserable childhood nickname. It sounds like a vaudeville comedian or a small addled bird.

“Where are you, Nico?” I ask, my voice gruff with sleep. “Are you okay?”

“I’m at home. I’m flipping out.” Home means the house where we grew up, where Nico still lives, our grandfather’s renovated redbrick farmhouse, on one and a half rolling acres on Little Pond Road. I’m cycling through the litany of reasons my sister would be calling with such urgency at this ungodly hour. Rent money. A ride. Plane ticket, groceries. Last time, her bicycle had been “stolen,” loaned to a friend of a friend at a party and never returned.

“So, what’s going on?”

“It’s Derek. He didn’t come home last night.”

I hang up, throw the phone on the ground, and try to fall back asleep.

What I’d been dreaming about was my high-school sweetheart, Alison Koechner.

In the dream, Alison and I are strolling with linked arms through the lovely downtown area of Portland, Maine, gazing through the window of a used-book store. And Alison’s leaning gently on my arm, her wild bouquet of orchid-red curls tickling into my neck. We’re eating ice cream, laughing at a private joke, deciding what movie to see.

It’s the kind of dream that’s hard to get back into, even if you can fall back asleep, and I can’t.

At seven-forty it is bright and clear and cold and I am winding my way through Pill Hill, the upscale West Concord neighborhood that wraps around the hospital, where its surgeons and administrators and attending physicians live in tasteful colonials. These days a lot of these homes are patrolled by private-duty security guards, gun bulges under their winter coats, as if all of a sudden this is a Third World capital. There’s no guard, though, at 14 Thayer Pond Road, just a wide lawn blanketed with snow so perfect and vivid in its new-fallen whiteness I almost feel bad tromping across it in my Timberlands to get to the front door.

But Sophia Littlejohn is not at home. She had to rush out early to perform an emergency delivery at Concord Hospital, a turn of events for which her husband is profusely apologetic. He meets me on the stoop wearing khaki slacks and a turtleneck, a gentle man with a trim golden beard carrying a mug of fragrant tea, explaining how Sophia often has irregular hours, especially now that most of the other midwives in her practice have quit.

“Not her, though. She’s determined to do right by her patients, right up to the end. And believe it or not, there are plenty of new patients. My name is Erik, by the way. Would you care to come inside anyway?”

He looks slightly surprised when I say yes, says, “Oh, okay… great,” steps back into the living room, and gestures me inside. The thing is, I’ve been up and dressed for two hours, waiting to learn more about Peter Zell, and his brother-in-law is bound to know something. Littlejohn leads me inside, takes my coat and hangs it on a hook.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks. I won’t take but a few minutes of your time.”

“Well, good, because that’s about what I have available,” he says, and tips me a friendly little wink, makes sure I know his diffidence is playful. “I need to walk our son to school and myself to the hospital for nine o’clock.”

He gestures me into an armchair and sits down himself, crossing his legs, relaxing. He has a broad gracious face, a wide and friendly mouth. There’s something powerful but unthreatening about the man, like he’s a friendly cartoon lion, the genial overseer of his pride.

“These must be difficult times to be a policeman.”

“Yes, sir. You work at the hospital?”

“Yes. I’ve been there about nine years. I’m the director of Spiritual Services.”

“Oh. And what is that, exactly?”

“Ah.” Littlejohn leans forward, laces his fingers, clearly pleased with the question. “Anyone who walks through the doors of a hospital has needs beyond the strictly physical. I’m referring to the patients, of course, but also family members, friends, and, yes, even the doctors and nurses themselves.” All this he presents in a smooth, confident disquisition, rapid and unfaltering. “It is my job to minister to such needs, however they might manifest themselves. I am, as you can imagine, rather busy these days.”

His warm smile is unwavering, but I can hear the echoes in the single word, busy, see it in the big expressive eyes: the exhaustion, the long nights and wearying hours, trying to offer comfort to the perplexed and the terrified and the ill.

From the corner of my eye I’m catching flashes of my interrupted dream, pretty Alison Koechner as if she were sitting next to me, gazing out the window at the snow-frosted dogwoods and black tupelo.

“But—” Littlejohn clears his throat abruptly, looking significantly at my blue book and pen, which I have out and balanced on my lap. “You’re here to ask about Peter.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before I can pose a specific question, Littlejohn sets in, speaking in the same tone, rapid and composed. He tells me how his wife and her brother had grown up here, in West Concord, not far from where we’re sitting. Their mother is dead of cancer, twelve years ago, and the father is at Pleasant View Retirement with a host of physical problems, plus the early stages of dementia—very sad, very sad, but God’s plans are for God alone to divine.

Peter and Sophia, he explains, have never been terribly close, not even as children. She was tomboyish, outgoing; he was nervous, inward, shy. Now that they both had careers, and Sophia her family, they socialized only rarely.

“We reached out to him once or twice, of course, when all this began, but without much success. He was in rather a bad place.”

I look up, raise one finger to pause Littlejohn’s onrushing tide of narrative.

“What do you mean, ‘a bad place’?”

He takes a deep breath, as if weighing whether it’s fair to say what he’s about to, and I lean forward, pen poised above my book.

“Well, look. I have to tell you that he was extremely disturbed.”

I tilt my head. “He was depressed, or disturbed?”

“What did I say?”

“You said disturbed.”

“I meant depressed,” says Littlejohn. “Would you excuse me a quick second?”

He rises before I can answer and walks to the far side of the room, allowing me a view into a bright and well-loved kitchen: a row of hanging pots, a gleaming refrigerator adorned with alphabet magnets, report cards, and school pictures.

Littlejohn is at the foot of the stairs, gathering together a navy blue backpack and a pair of child-size hockey skates from where they’re slung over the banister. “Are we brushing teeth up there, Kyle?” he shouts. “We’re at T-minus nine minutes, here.”

A hollered “okay, dad” echoes down the steps, followed by the rattle of footsteps, a faucet going on, a door slamming open. The framed picture on Zell’s dresser, the clumsily smiling lad. The Concord School District, I know, has remained open. A feature had run in the Monitor: the dedicated staff, learning for the sake of learning. Even in the newspaper pictures, you could see that the classrooms were half full. A quarter, even.

Littlejohn settles back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair. He’s got the skates cradled in his lap. “Kid can play. He’s ten years old, skates like Messier, no kidding. He’ll play in the NHL one day, make me a millionaire.” He smiles softly. “Alternate universe. Where were we?”

“You were describing your brother-in-law’s mental state.”

“Right, right. I’m thinking of our little summer party. We had a barbecue, you know, hot dogs, beer. The whole drill. And Peter, he was never the most social person, the most outgoing, but it seemed clear that he was sinking into a depression. There but not there, if you can see what I mean.”

Littlejohn takes a deep breath, looks around the room, as if he’s afraid of the eavesdropping ghost of Peter Zell. “You know, to tell you the truth, after that, we weren’t crazy having him around Kyle. All of this, it’s hard enough—on the boy—” His voice breaks, he clears his throat. “Excuse me.”

I nod, writing, my mind moving quickly.

So what do we have, then? We have a man who, at work, appears to be basically disaffected, quiet, head down, registering no reaction to the coming calamity except for that one shocking outburst on Halloween. Then it turns out that he’s squirreled away a massive and comprehensive trove of information on the asteroid, that he’s privately obsessed with what he’s shrugging off in public.

And now it seems that, at least according to his brother-in-law, outside the office he was not only affected but overwhelmed; distraught. The kind of man who would, after all, be inclined to take his own life.

Oh, Peter, I think. What is your story, friend?

“And this mood, this depression, it hadn’t improved lately?”

“Oh, no. Heavens, no. To the contrary. It was much worse since, you know, since January. Since the final determination.”

The final determination. Meaning the Tolkin interview. Tuesday, January 3. A CBS News Special Report. Garnered 1.6 billion viewers worldwide. I wait in silence for a moment, listening to Kyle’s energetic footsteps overhead. Then I decide, what the heck, and I take out the small white pad of paper from my breast pocket and hand it to Erik Littlejohn. “What can you tell me about this?”

I watch while he reads it. Dear Sophia.

“Where did this come from?”

“Is that Peter Zell’s handwriting, as far as you know?”

“Sure. I mean, I think so. As I said—”

“You didn’t know him that well.”

“Right.”

“He was going to write something to your wife, before he died, and he changed his mind. Do you know what that might have been?”

“Well, a suicide note, presumably. An unfinished suicide note.” He looks up, looks in my eyes. “What else would it be?”

“I don’t know,” I say, standing up, tucking away my little book. “Thanks very much for your time. And if you would just let Sophia know I’ll be calling again to set up a time to talk.”

Erik stands also, his brow furrowing. “You still need to speak to her?”

“I do.”

“All right, sure.” He nods, sighs. “This is a trial for her. All of it. But of course I’ll let her know.”

I get in the Impala but don’t go anywhere, not yet. I sit outside the house for about a minute, until I see Littlejohn shepherding Kyle out and across the lawn, thick with unbroken snow like vanilla buttercream frosting. A goofy ten-year-old, tromping in oversized winter boots, pointy elbows jutting out from the pushed-up sleeves of his windbreaker.

At Zell’s apartment, I saw the picture and I remember thinking he was an average-looking, even homely child. But now I’m revising that assessment, seeing him as his father sees him: a princeling, dancing in morning light as he marches across the snow.

I’m driving away and I’m thinking about the Tolkin interview, imagining Peter Zell on that night.

It’s January 3, it’s a Tuesday, and he’s home from work, settled in his sterile gray living room, staring at the screen of his small TV.

On January 2, the asteroid 2011GV₁, known as Maia, had at last emerged from conjunction with the Sun, was again observable from Earth, was at last sufficiently close and bright for the scientists to see it clearly, to gather new sets of data, to know. Observations were pouring in, being compiled and processed at one collection center, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, California. What had been, since September, a fifty-fifty chance was about to be resolved—either one hundred percent, or zero.

So there’s Peter Zell on his living room sofa with his latest accumulation of asteroid-related articles spread out in front of him, all the scientific discourse and anxious analysis finally boiling down to predictions and prayers, to yes or no.

CBS had won the bidding war for broadcast rights. The world was ending, maybe, but if it wasn’t, they’d feast on the ratings coup for years. There was an elaborate preshow centered on the head engineer at JPL, Leonard Tolkin, the man overseeing that final burst of number crunching. “I’ll be the one,” he had promised David Letterman three weeks earlier, his smile twitching, “to give the good news.” Pale, bespectacled, in a white lab coat, a central-casting government astronomer.

There’s a countdown clock on the lower-right corner of the screen accompanying cheesy B-roll, tracking shots of Tolkin walking the hallways of the institute, scrawling columns of math on a dry-erase board, huddling with his subordinates around computer screens.

And there’s short, paunchy, lonely Peter Zell in his apartment, watching in silence, surrounded by his articles, glasses perched on his nose, hands flat on his knees.

The program goes live, featuring the newsman Scott Pelley, square chinned and grave, gray hair and solemn made-for-television face. Pelley watches, on behalf of the world, as Tolkin emerges from the decisive meeting with a stack of manila folders clutched under one arm, peels off his horn-rimmed spectacles, and begins to sob.

Now, driving slowly in the direction of the Somerset Diner, I’m trying to capture the memory of someone else’s feelings, trying to decide exactly what Peter Zell was experiencing in that moment. Pelley leans forward, all empathy, asks the magically stupid question that all the world needed to hear:

“So, then, Doctor. What are our options?”

Dr. Leo Tolkin trembling, almost laughing. “Options? There are no options.”

And then Tolkin just keeps talking, babbling really, about how sorry he is, on behalf of the world astronomical community, how this event never could have been predicted, how they had studied every realistic scenario—small object, short lead time; large object, long lead time—but this, this never could have been imagined, an object with such a near perihelion, with such an epically long elliptical period, such a staggeringly large object—the odds of such an object’s existence so vanishingly low as to be statistically equivalent to impossible. And Scott Pelley is staring at him, and all over the world people are sinking into grief or hysteria.

Because all at once there was no more ambiguity, no more doubt. All at once it was just a matter of time. Odds of impact one hundred percent. October 3. No options.

Many people remained glued to their televisions after the program ended, watching pundits and professors of astronomy and political figures stammering and weeping and contradicting one another on the various cable stations; waiting for the president’s promised address to the nation, which ultimately did not materialize until noon the next day. Many people ran to the phones to try to reach loved ones, though all the circuits were jammed and would remain that way for the week that followed. Other people went out into the streets, bitter January weather notwithstanding, to commiserate with neighbors or strangers, or to engage in small acts of vandalism or petty mischief—a trend that would continue and culminate, in the Concord area at least, with a small wave of rioting on Presidents’ Day.

I, personally, turned off the TV and went to work. I was in my fourth week as a detective, I had an arson case I was working on, and I had a strong suspicion, ultimately proved true, that the next day would be a busy and stressful one at police headquarters.

The question, though, is what about Peter Zell? What did he do, when the show was over? Whom did he call?

A summary review of the bare facts suggests that, behind his attempts to keep up a brave face, Zell had been despondent all along about the possibility of Earth’s immanent destruction. And with the confirmation of that fact, it’s not hard to imagine that on the night of January 3, seeing the bad news on television, he had been pitched past despondence and into a brutal depression. He had staggered around for eleven weeks in a haze of dread and then, two nights ago, had hung himself with a belt.

So why am I driving around Concord, trying to figure out who killed him?

I’m in the parking lot of the Somerset Diner, nestled at the three-way intersection of Clinton, South, and Downing. I’m contemplating the snow in the parking lot, churned up by the morning influx of pedestrians and bicyclists. I’m comparing this rutted, brown-and-white mess to the unbroken blanket of snow on the front lawn of the Littlejohns’ house. If Sophia had really been called out for an emergency delivery this morning, she had left by catapult, or teleportation machine.

The walls of the Somerset, where you first come in, are lined with photographs of presidential candidates shaking hands with Bob Galicki, the former owner, now deceased. There’s a picture of sallow Dick Nixon, one of stiff and unconvincing John Kerry, hand stiffly protruding like a broken piece offence. Here’s John McCain with his skull-face grin. John F. Kennedy, impossibly young, impossibly handsome, doomed.

The music from the stereo in the kitchen is Bob Dylan, something from Street Legal, which means Maurice is cooking, which augurs well for the quality of my lunch.

“Sit anywhere, honey,” says Ruth-Ann, rushing past with a carafe of coffee. Her hands are withered but strong, steady around the thick black handle of the carafe. When I used to come here in high school, we would joke about Ruth-Ann’s ancientness, whether she’d been hired for this gig or if they’d built the place around her. That was ten years ago.

I drink my coffee and ignore the menu, surreptitiously inspecting the faces of my fellow diners, weighing the relative melancholy in each of their eyes, the shell-shocked expressions. An old couple murmuring to each other, bent over their soup bowls. A girl, nineteen maybe, with an enervated stare, joggling a pallid baby on her knee. A fat businessman glaring angrily at the menu, a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth.

Everybody is smoking, actually, dull gray tendrils curling up under every light fixture. It’s like how it used to be in here, before they outlawed smoking in places of public accommodation, a law I strongly supported, as the only nonsmoker among my group of misfit high-school sophomores. The regulation is still on the books, but it’s widely flouted, and CPD policy at this point is to look the other way.

I fiddle with my cutlery and sip my coffee and think.

Yes, Mr. Dotseth, it is true a lot of people are depressed, and a lot of those people have chosen to take their own lives. But I cannot, as a responsible police detective, accept this piece of context as evidence that Peter Zell was a 10-54S. If the coming destruction of the planet was enough to make people kill themselves, this restaurant would be empty. Concord would be a ghost town. There’d be no one left for Maia to kill, because we’d all be dead already.

“Three-egg omelet?”

“Whole wheat toast,” I say, and then add, “Ruth-Ann, I got a question for you.”

“I have an answer.” She has not written down my order, but I’ve been ordering the same thing since I was eleven. “You go first.”

“What do you make of all this hanger-town business? The suicides, I mean. Would you ever—”

Ruth-Ann growls, disgusted.

“You kidding? I’m Catholic, honey. No. Absolutely not.”

See, I don’t think I would either. My omelet arrives and I eat it slowly, staring into space, wishing it weren’t so smoky in here.

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 fuck yourself.”