The Last Policeman

1.

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

“Hello?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Do you have information for me, Victor?”

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

“So do you have something for me?”

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

“Because you hate me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I do, Victor,” I say. “I promise.”

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

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

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

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

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

Okay? See? I get it.

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

“Mom? Is that you?”

“What? No—it’s Detective Palace.”

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

“Oh. Of course.”

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

“No.”

“Boy, oh boy. Do you want to?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What vehicle is that, kiddo?”

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

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

Another long pause, Dotseth trying to drive me insane.

“Hello? Denny?”

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

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

“Did I?”

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

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

“Sir?”

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

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

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

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

2.

“Petey’s not dead.”

“He is.”

“Just hung out with him. Couple days ago. Tuesday night, I think.”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“Think I did.”

“Actually, sir, it was Monday.”

I’m at the bottom of a metal extension ladder that’s leaned against the side of a house, a squat frame house with a sharp shingle roof. My hands are cupped together, my head is tilted back, and I’m calling up through a light drift of snow. J. T. Toussaint, an unemployed construction worker and quarryman, a giant of a man, is up on the ladder, heavy tan work boots planted on the topmost metal rung, a considerable stomach balanced against the overhanging gutters of his roof. I can’t yet clearly see his face, just the lower-right quadrant of it, turned down toward me, framed inside the hood of a blue sweatshirt.

“You picked him up from his place of employment on Monday evening.”

Toussaint makes a noise for “oh yeah?” but elided into one thick uncertain utterance: “Ohuh?”

“Yes, sir. In your red pickup truck, with the American flag on the side. That’s your truck right there?”

I point to the driveway, and Toussaint nods, shifts his weight against the rain spout. The base of the ladder trembles a little.

“On Tuesday morning he was found dead.”

“Oh,” he says, up on the roof. “Damn. A hanger?”

“That’s how it looks. Will you come down off the ladder, please?”

It’s an ugly block of a house, wooden and dilapidated and uneven, like the torso of a soapbox racer left forgotten in the dirt. In the front yard is a single ancient oak tree, crooked branches reaching for the sky as if under arrest; around the side there’s a doghouse and a row of thick, untended thorn bushes along the property line. As Toussaint descends, the ladder’s metal legs jerk back and forth alarmingly, and then he’s standing there in his hooded sweatshirt and his heavy workingman’s boots, a caulking gun dangling loosely from one thick fist, looking me up and down, both of us breathing cold puffs of condensation.

It’s true what everyone has been saying, he’s a big man, but he’s big and solid, the sturdily formed weight of someone who used to play football. There’s a steel in his bigness, and he looks like he could run and jump if he had to. Throw a tackle if he had to. Toussaint’s head is like a brick of granite: jutting oblong jaw, broad forehead, the flesh hard and mottled, as if irregularly eroded.

“My name is Detective Henry Palace,” I say. “I’m a policeman.”

“No kidding,” he says, and then he takes a big sudden lunging step toward me, yelps twice sharply and claps his hands, and I jerk backward, startled, fumble for my shoulder holster.

But it’s just a dog, he’s calling his dog. Toussaint squats and it scampers over, a scruffy thing with patchy curls of white fur, some kind of poodle or something.

“Hey, Houdini,” he says, opens his arm. “Hey, boy.”

Houdini rubs his small face along Toussaint’s meaty palm, and I’m trying to get it together, take a deep breath, and the big man looks up at me from his crouch, amused, and he can tell, I know he can—he can see right through me.

The house is ugly and dull inside, with dingy walls of yellowing plaster, every ornamentation strictly functional: a clock, a calendar, a bottle opener bolted to the doorframe of the kitchen. The small fireplace is filled with garbage, empty bottles of imported beer—expensive stuff when even the cheap brands are price controlled by ATF at $21.99 for a six-pack, ranging a lot higher on the black market. As we walk past, a bottle of Rolling Rock slips free from the pile and rattles across the hardwood of the living room.

“So,” I say, pulling out a blue book and a pen. “How do you know Peter Zell?”

Toussaint lights a cigarette and slowly inhales before answering. “From grammar school.”

“Grammar school?”

“Broken Ground. Right up the street, here. Curtisville Road.” He tosses his caulking gun into a toolbox, kicks the toolbox under the beat-up sofa. “Sit if you want, man.”

“No, thanks.”

Toussaint doesn’t sit either. He lumbers past me into the kitchen, cigarette exhaust swirling up around his head like dragon-smoke.

There’s a scale model of the New Hampshire state house on the mantel above the fireplace, six inches high and fastidiously detailed: the white stone facade, the gilded dome, the tiny imperious eagle jutting from the top.

“Like that?” says Toussaint when he comes back in, holding a Heineken by the neck, and I set the model down abruptly. “My old man made that.”

“He’s an artist?”

“He’s dead,” he says, and flips open the dome, revealing the inside to be an ashtray. “But yeah, an artist. Among other things.”

He taps his ash into the inverted dome of the state house and looks at me and waits.

“So,” I say. “Grammar school.”

“Yeah.”

According to Toussaint, he and Peter Zell had been best friends from the second grade through the sixth. Both were unpopular, Toussaint a poor kid, a free-breakfast kid, wearing the same dime-store clothes every day; Zell well-off but painfully awkward, sensitive, a born victim. So they formed a bond, two little weirdos, played ping-pong in the Zells’ finished basement, rode their bikes up and down the hills around the hospital, played Dungeons & Dragons in this very house, right where we’re sitting now. Summertime, they’d ride the couple miles to the quarry on State Street, past the jail, strip down to their underpants and dive in, splash around, dunk each other’s heads under the cold fresh water.

“You know,” Toussaint concludes, smiling, enjoying his beer. “Kid stuff.”

I nod, writing, intrigued by the mental picture of my insurance man as a child: the pasty adolescent body and the thick glasses, clothes carefully folded at the lip of the swimming hole, the young version of the obsessive, timid actuary he was destined to become.

J. T. and Peter, as was perhaps inevitable, drifted apart. Puberty hit and Toussaint got tough, got cool, started shoplifting Metallica CDs from Pitchfork Records and sneaking beers and smoking Marlboro Reds, while Zell remained locked in the stiff and permanent contours of his character, rigid and anxious and geeky. By middle school they would nod to each other in the hallway, and then Toussaint dropped out and Peter graduated and went to college and then twenty years passed without a word between them.

I write it all down. Toussaint finishes his beer and tosses the empty into the pile in the fireplace. There are small gaps in the joinings of the house’s wooden sides, or there must be, because in the pauses in our conversation there’s a howling whistle, the wind whipping around out there, intensified as it tries to slide in through the cracks.

“Then he calls me up, man. Jack-blue sky. Says, let’s have lunch.”

I click my pen open and closed three times.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. July? No. It was right after I got shit-canned. June. Says he’s been thinking about me, since all this bullcrap got started.”

He extends one forefinger and aims it out the window, up at the sky. All this bullcrap. My phone rings, and I glance down at it. Nico. I thumb it off.

“And so, what exactly did you and Mr. Zell do together, the two of you?”

“Same stuff, man.”

“You played Dungeons & Dragons?”

He looks at me, snorts, shifts in his chair. “Okay, man. Different stuff. We drank beers. We drove around. Did some shooting.”

I pause, the wind whipping. Toussaint lights another butt, guesses what I’m going to say next. “Three Winchester rifles, officer. In a cabinet. Unloaded. They’re mine and I can prove they’re mine.”

“Locked up tight, I hope.”

Gun theft is a problem. People are stealing them and hoarding them, and other people are stealing them to sell, for astronomical sums, to the first kind of people.

“Nobody’s going to take my fucking guns,” he says quickly, harshly, and levels a hard look at me, like I was considering it.

I move on. I ask Toussaint about Monday night, the last night of Peter Zell’s life, and he shrugs.

“Picked him up after work.”

“What time?

“I don’t know,” he says, and I can feel it, he’s liking me less and less, he’s ready for me to go, and maybe this man killed Peter and maybe he didn’t, but there is no avoiding the impression that he could pound me to death if he wanted to, just like that, three or four blows, like a caveman destroying a deer. “After-work time.”

Toussaint says they cruised around for a bit, then went to see the new episode of Distant Pale Glimmers, the science-fiction serial, at the Red River. They had some beers, they watched the movie, and then they split up, Peter saying he wanted to walk home.

“Did you see anyone at the theater?”

“Just the people who work there and stuff.”

He sucks the last life out of his second cigarette, crushes out the butt in the state house. Houdini pads over unevenly, darting pink tongue finding the last bites of biscuit at the corners of his mouth, and rubs his thin head against the broad expanse of his master’s leg.

“I’m gonna have to shoot this dog,” Toussaint says, suddenly, absently, matter-of-fact, and stands up. “At the end, I mean.”

“What?”

“He’s a little scaredy cat, this one.” Toussaint is looking down at the dog, his head tilted, as if evaluating, trying to imagine how it’s going to feel. “Can’t think of him dying like that, fire or cold or drowning. Probably I’m gonna go ahead and shoot him.”

I’m ready to get out of here. I’m ready to go.

“Last thing, Mr. Toussaint. Did you happen to notice the bruising? Under Mr. Zell’s right eye?”

“He said he fell down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

He chuckles, scratches the dog’s thin head. “If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t. I’d figure he whistled at the wrong dude’s girlfriend. But Pete, who knows? I bet he fell down some stairs.”

“Right,” I say, thinking, I bet he didn’t.

Toussaint cradles Houdini’s head in his hands, and they’re gazing at each other, and I can see into the future to the terrible and agonized moment, the raised .270, the trusting animal, the blast, the end.

He looks away from his dog, back up at me, and the spell is broken.

“Anything else? Mr. Policeman?”

One of my father’s favorite jokes was when people asked him what he did for a living, he would say he was a philosopher king. He would make this claim with perfect seriousness, and the thing about Temple Palace was that he wouldn’t let go of it. Inevitably, he would get that blank look from whoever had asked—the barber, say, or someone at a cocktail party, or one of my friends’ parents, and there I am looking at the ground in rank embarrassment—and he’d just say, “What?” opening his palms, imploring, “What? I’m serious.”

What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.

The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.

I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against the green linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.

And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”

“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”

I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.

“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”

“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”

“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he become a bully?”

My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.

Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.

In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.

And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.

Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information, all this unbearable immanence?

Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.

No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.

Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to Distant Pale Glimmers, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.

The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.

But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.

Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine clearly. In recent months the world has seen episodes of cannibalism, of ecstatic orgies; outpourings of charity and good works; attempted socialist revolutions and attempted religious revolutions; mass psychoses including the second coming of Jesus; of the return of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, the Commander of the Faithful; of the constellation Orion with sword and belt, climbing down from the sky.

People are building rocket ships, people are building tree houses, people are taking multiple wives, people are shooting indiscriminately in public places, people are setting fire to themselves, people are studying to be doctors while doctors quit work and build huts in the desert and sit in them and pray.

None of these things, so far as I know, has happened in Concord. Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

I’m at Albin Road just past Blevens when the car catches a patch of bad ice and heaves itself violently to the right, and I try to jerk it back to the left and nothing happens. The steering wheel spins uselessly under my hands, I’m rolling it this way and that, and I can hear the snow chains ricocheting against the rims with a series of vicious clangs.

“Come on, come on,” I say, but it’s like the wheel has lost communication with the steering column, spinning and spinning, and meanwhile the whole car is hurtling to the right, a giant hockey puck that someone whaled at, sliding furiously toward the ditch at the side of the road.

“Come on,” I say again, “come on,” my stomach lurching. I’m pumping the brake, nothing is happening, and now the back of the car is rolling up and pulling even with the front, the nose of the Impala nearly perpendicular to the roadway, and I feel the back wheels lift up while the front goes sailing forward, bounces over the ditch and into the wide sturdy trunk of an evergreen, and my head slams back against the headrest.

And then all is still. The silence sudden and complete. My breath. A winter bird sounding, way off somewhere. A small defeated hiss from the engine.

Slowly, I become aware of a clicking noise and it takes me a second to discover that the sound is my teeth, chattering. My hands are trembling, too, and my knees are clacking like marionette legs.

My collision with the tree shook loose a lot of snow, and some of it is still drifting down, a gentle powdery false storm, a dusting of accumulation on the cracked windshield.

I shift, breathe, pat myself down like I’m frisking a suspect, but I’m fine. I’m fine.

The front of the car is bent in, just one big dent, dead center, like a giant reeled back and kicked it once, hard.

My snow chains have come off. All four of them. They lay splayed out in crazy directions like fishermen’s nets, in jumbled heaps around the tires.

“Holy moly,” I say aloud.

I don’t think he killed him. Toussaint. I gather up the snow chains and lay them in the trunk in a loose pile.

I don’t think he’s the killer. I don’t think it’s right.

There are a total of five staircases at police headquarters but only two that go down to the basement. One is a set of rough concrete steps that descends from the garage, so when the units pull in with cuffed suspects in the backseat, they can be led right down to processing, to the part of the basement with the mug-shot camera and the fingerprint ink and the regular holding cell and the drunk tank. The drunk tank is always full these days. To access the other part of the basement you use the front northwest stairwell: you wave your ID badge at the keypad, wait for the door to click open, and go down to the cramped domain of Officer Frank Wilentz.

“Why, Detective Sky-high,” says Wilentz, and he throws me a friendly mock-salute. “You look a little pale.”

“I hit a tree. I’m fine.”

“How’s the tree?”

“Can you run a name for me?”

“Do you like my hat?”

“Wilentz, come on.”

The administrative technician of the CPD records unit works in a four-foot-square caged-off pen, a former evidence enclosure, at a desk littered with comic books and bags of candy. A row of hooks along the chain mesh of his cage is hung with major-league ball caps, one of which, a bright red souvenir Phillies cap, sits on Wilentz’s head at a rakish angle.

“Answer me, Palace.”

“I like your hat very much, Officer Wilentz.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“So, I need you to run a name for me.”

“I got one hat for every team in the league. D’ja know that?”

“I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.”

The problem is that at this point Wilentz has the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the building; for all I know, it’s the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the county. Something to do with the CPD being allowed one machine that connects with some kind of gold-plated Department of Justice law-enforcement router. It just means that if I want to connect to the FBI’s servers to perform a nationwide criminal-background check, I first need to admire Frank’s hat collection.

“I used to be collecting these bastards to give ’em to my children one day, but since now it seems clear that I shall not be having any children, I’m just enjoying ’em myself.” His deadpan gives way to a big, gap-toothed grin. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, myself. Did you need something?”

“Yep. I need you to run a name for me.”

“Oh, right, you said that.”

Wilentz types in the name and the address on Bow Bog, checks off boxes on a DOJ login screen, and I’m standing at his desk, watching while he types, tapping my own fingers thoughtfully on the side of his cage.

“Wilentz?”

“Yes?”

“Would you ever kill yourself?”

“No,” he says immediately, still typing, clicking on a link. “But I will confess that I have considered it. The Romans, you know, they thought it was, like, the bravest thing you could do. In the face of tyranny. Cicero. Seneca. All those guys.” He slowly draws a finger across his neck, slash.

“We’re not facing tyranny, though.”

“Ah, but we are. Fascist in the sky, baby.” He turns away from the computer and selects a miniature Kit Kat from his pile. “But I won’t do it. And you know why not?”

“Why?”

“Because… I…” He turns back, hits a final key. “…am a coward.”

It’s hard to tell, with Wilentz, if he’s kidding, but I think he’s not, and anyway I turn my attention to what’s happening on the monitor, long columns of data marching up the screen.

“Well, my friend,” says Officer Wilentz, unwrapping his candy. “What you got here is a gosh-darn Boy Scout.”

“What?”

Mr. J. T. Toussaint, as it turns out, has never committed a crime, or at least has never been caught for one.

Never has he been arrested by the Concord force, pre- or post-Maia, nor by the state of New Hampshire, nor by any other state, county, or local official. He’s never done federal time, he’s got no FBI or Justice Department file. Nothing international, nothing military. Once, it looks like, he parked a motorcycle illegally in a small town called Waterville Valley, up in the White Mountains, and earned himself a parking ticket, which he promptly paid.

“So, nothing?” I say, and Wilentz nods.

“Nothing. Oh, unless he popped someone in Louisiana. New Orleans is cut off from the grid.” Wilentz stands, stretches, adds the crumpled candy wrapper to the pile on the desk. “Kind of thinking of going down there, myself. Wild times down there. All kinda sex stuff going on, I hear.”

I head back up the stairs with a one-page printout of J. T. Toussaint’s criminal history, or lack thereof. If he’s the kind of guy who goes around killing people and stringing them up in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, he only recently elected to become so.

Upstairs, at my desk, I get back on the landline and try Sophia Littlejohn again, and I am again treated to the bland peppy tones of the Concord Midwifery receptionist. No, Ms. Littlejohn is out; no, she doesn’t know where; no, she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.

“Could you tell her to call Detective Palace, at the Concord PD?” I say, and then I add, impulsively, “Tell her I’m her friend. Tell her I want to help.”

The receptionist pauses for a moment and then says, “Oooo-kay” drawing out that first syllable like she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about. I can’t blame her, because I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about, either. I take the tissue I’ve been holding up to my head and throw it in the garbage. I’m feeling restless and dissatisfied, staring at J. T. Toussaint’s clean record, thinking about the whole house, the dog, the roof, the lawn. The other thing is, I have a fairly clear memory of carefully latching my snow chains yesterday morning, checking their slack, as is my habit, once a week.

“Hey, Palace, come over here and look at this.”

It’s Andreas, at his computer. “Are you watching this on dial-up?”

“No,” he says. “This is on my hard drive. I downloaded it the last time we were online.”

“Oh,” I say, “All right, well…” But it’s too late, I’ve walked across the room to his desk and now I’m standing beside him, and he’s got one hand clutched at my elbow, the other hand pointed at the screen.

“Look,” says Detective Andreas, breathing rapidly. “Look at this with me.”

“Andreas, come on. I’m working on a case.”

“I know, but look, Hank.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Everyone has seen it. A few days after Tolkin, after the CBS special, the final determination, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA released a short video to promote public understanding of what’s going on. It’s a simple Java animation, in which crude pixelated avatars of the relevant celestial bodies wing their way around the Sun: Earth, Venus, Mars, and, of course, the star of the show, good old 2011GV₁. The planets and the infamous minor planetoid, all cruising around the Sun at their varying speeds in their varying ellipses, clicking forward, frame by frame, each instant on screen representing two weeks of real time.

“Just wait a second,” says Andreas, loosening his grip but not letting go, leaning forward even farther on his desk. His cheeks are flushed. He’s staring at the screen with an awestruck expression, wide-eyed, like a kid gazing into the aquarium glass.

I stand there behind him, watching in spite of myself, watching Maia make her wicked way around the Sun. The video is eerily entrancing, like an art film, an installation in a gallery: bright colors, repetitive motion, simple action, irresistible. In the outer reaches of its orbit, 2011GV₁ moves slowly, methodically, just sort of chugging along in the sky, much slower on its track than Earth on hers. But then, in the last few seconds, Maia speeds up, like the second hand of a clock suddenly swooping from four to six. In proper obedience to Kepler’s Second Law, the asteroid gobbles up the last few million miles of space in the last two months, catches up with the unsuspecting Earth, and then… bam!

The video freezes on the last frame, dated October 3, the day of impact. Bam! In spite of myself, my stomach lurches at the sight of it, and I turn away.

“Great,” I mutter. “Thanks for sharing.” Like I told the guy, I’ve seen it before.

“Wait, wait.”

Andreas drags the scroll bar back, to a few seconds before impact, moment number 2:39.14, then lets it play again; the planets jerk forward two frames, and then he pauses it again. “There? You see it?”

“See what?”

He rewinds it again, plays it again. I’m thinking about Peter Zell, thinking about him watching this—surely he saw the video, probably dozens of times, and maybe he took it apart, frame by frame, as Andreas is doing. The detective lets go of my arm, pushes his face all the way forward, until his nose is almost brushing against the cold plastic of the monitor.

“Right there: the asteroid joggles only slightly to the left. If you read Borstner—have you read Borstner?”

“No.”

“Oh, Hank.” He looks around at me, like I’m the crazy one, then he turns back to the screen. “He’s a blogger, or he was, now he’s got this newsletter. A friend of mine out in Phoenix, he called me last night, gave me the whole rundown, told me to watch the video again, to stop it right…” He clicks Pause, 2:39.14. “Right there. Look. Okay? See?” He plays it again, pauses it again, plays it again. “What Borstner points out, here, if you compare this video, I mean.”

“Andreas.”

“If you compare it with other asteroid-path projections, there are anomalies.”

“Detective Andreas, no one doctored the film.”

“No, no, not the film. Of course no one doctored the film.” He cranes his head around again, squints at me, and I catch a quick whiff of something on his breath, vodka, maybe, and I step back. “Not the film, Palace, the ephemeris.”

“Andreas.” I’m fighting a powerful urge, at this point, simply to yank his computer free from the wall and throw it across the room.

I have a murder to solve for God’s sake. A man is dead.

“See—there—see,” he’s saying. “See where she almost strays, but then sort of veers back? If you compare it to Apophis or to 1979 XB. If you—see—Borstner’s theory is that an error was made, a fundamental early error in the, the, calculus, you know, the math of the thing. And just starting with the discovery itself, which, you must know, was totally unprecedented. A seventy-five-year orbit, that’s off the charts, right?” He’s talking quicker and quicker, his words spilling out, slipping over one another. “And Borstner has tried to contact JPL, he’s tried to contact the DOD, explain to them what, what’s, you know—and he’s just been rebuffed. He’s been ignored, Palace. Totally ignored!”

“Detective Andreas,” I say firmly, and instead of smashing his computer I just lean forward next to him, wrinkling my nose at his stink of stale liquor and sweaty desperation, and turn off the monitor.

He lifts his head to me, eyes wide. “Palace?”

“Andreas, are you working on any interesting cases?”

He blinks, baffled. The word cases is from a foreign language he used to know, a long time ago.

“Cases?”

“Yeah. Cases.”

We stare at each other, the radiator making its indistinct gurglings from the corner, and then Culverson comes in.

“Why, Detective Palace.” He’s standing in the doorway, three-piece suit, Windsor knot, a warm grin. “Just the man I was looking for.”

I’m glad to turn away from Andreas, and he from me; he fumbles for the button to turn his monitor on again. Culverson is waving me over with a small slip of yellow paper. “You doing okay, son?”

“Yeah. I ran into a tree. What’s up?”

“I found that kid.”

“What kid?”

“The kid you were looking for.”

As it turns out, Culverson was paying attention from his side of the room when I was on the phone yesterday, spinning my wheels in search of my sister’s village idiot of a husband. So, Culverson, he goes ahead and makes some calls of his own, God bless him, and because he’s a much better investigator than I will ever be, he cracked it.

“Detective,” I say. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Forget about it,” he says, still grinning. “You know me, I like a challenge. And also, before you thank me too much, take a look at what I found out.”

He slides the little piece of paper into my palm, and I read it and groan. We stand there for a second, Culverson grinning wickedly, Andreas in his corner watching his movie and wringing his sweaty hands together.

“Good luck, Detective Palace,” says Culverson, patting me on the shoulder. “Have fun.”

He’s wrong.

Andreas, I mean.

Along with this Borstner, the blogger or pamphleteer or whatever he is: the jackass in Arizona getting people’s hopes up.

There are many such characters, and they’re all wrong, and it’s irritating to me because Andreas has responsibilities, he has a job to do; the public is relying on him, just as they are on me.

Still, at some point, a few hours later, before I call it a day, I stop at his desk to watch the Jet Propulsion Lab video again. I lean forward, hunch forward really, and squint. There’s no swerve, no stop-start flicker in the animation that might credibly suggest an error in the underlying data. Maia does not jog or bobble on its course, it’s clear forward motion all the way. It just comes, on and on, unerring, as it’s been coming since long before I was born.

I can’t purport to understand the science, but I know that there are a lot of people who do. There are many observatories, Arecibo and Golds tone and the rest of them, there are a million or more amateur astronomers tracking the thing across the sky.

Peter Zell, he did understand the science, he studied it, he sat in his small apartment silently absorbing the technical details of what is happening, making his notes, underlining details.

I restart the video, watch the asteroid swing around one more time, speed up furiously in the homestretch, and then… bam!

3.

“Roll through, please.”

The soldier’s chin is perfectly square, his eyes are sharp and cheerless, his face is cold and impassive beneath a wide black helmet, the minuteman logo of the National Guard emblazoned across the brim. He motions me forward with the tip of his firearm, which appears to be an M-16 semiautomatic. I roll through. This morning I reattached the snow chains, triple-checking the cable connects, drawing tight the slack. Thom Halburton, the department mechanic, said the car’ll drive just fine even with the dent, and so far it seems like he’s right.

I’m not even a half mile from downtown Concord, I can still see the spire of the state house in one direction and the Outback Steakhouse billboard in the other, but it’s a different world. Barbed-wire fences, one-story windowless brick buildings, a blacktop service road marked with white arrows and yellow arrows and stone pylons. Guard towers, green directional signs riddled with cryptic acronyms. More soldiers. More machine guns.

The IPSS Act is known to contain a raft of so-called black titles, classified sections generally assumed to relate to the various branches of the armed services. The exact content of those black titles is unknown—except, presumably, to its drafters, a joint House and Senate armed forces committee; to the military commanders and high-level officers of the affected branches; and to various relevant members of the executive branch.

But everyone knows, or at least everyone in law enforcement is fairly certain, that the organization of the United States military has been extensively revamped, its powers and resources expanded—all of which makes this the last place I would choose to be, on a gray and windy Friday morning when I’m hip-deep in a murder investigation: navigating my Chevrolet Impala through the headquarters of the New Hampshire National Guard.

Thanks, Nico. I owe you one.

I climb out of the Impala at the brig, a squat and windowless concrete building with a small forest of antennae bristling along the flat lines of its roof, at 10:43. Thanks to Culverson, and Culverson’s contacts, I’ve got five minutes, beginning at exactly 10:45 a.m.

A severe and charmless female reserve officer in green camouflage pants stares at my badge in silence for thirty seconds before nodding once and ushering me down a short hallway to a massive metal door with a small square Plexiglas window in its dead center.

“Thanks,” I say, and she grunts and heads back down the hallway.

I peer in the window, and there he is: Derek Skeve, sitting in the middle of the floor of his cell, cross-legged, breathing slowly and elaborately.

He’s meditating. For the love of God.

I make a fist and knock on the little window.

“Skeve. Hey.” Knock, knock. “Derek.”

I wait a second. I tap again.

“Hey.” Louder, sharper: “Derek.”

Skeve, eyes still closed, raises one finger of one hand, like a doctor’s receptionist busy on the phone. Rage boils in my cheeks, this is it, I’m ready to go home. Surely it’s better to let this self-involved doofus sit in military prison aligning his chakras until Maia gets here. I’ll turn around, say “thanks anyway” to the charmer at the door, call Nico and give her the bad news, and get back to work finding Peter Zell’s killer.

But I know Nico, and I know myself. I can tell her whatever I feel like, I’ll just end up driving back out here tomorrow.

So I bang on the window again, and at last the prisoner unfolds himself and stands. Skeve is in a tan jumpsuit with NHNG stenciled across the front, an incongruous complement to his long, matted ropes of hair, those ridiculous Caucasian dreadlocks that make him look like a bike messenger—which in fact he has been, among many other short-lived quasi-professions. Several days’ growth of fuzz coat his cheeks and chin.

“Henry,” he says, smiling beatifically. “How are you, brother?”

“What’s going on, Derek?”

Skeve shrugs absently, as if the question doesn’t really concern him.

“I am as you find me. A guest of the military-industrial complex.”

He looks around at the cell: smooth concrete walls, a thin and utilitarian bunk bed bolted to one corner, a small metal toilet to the other.

I lean forward, filling the small window with my face. “Can you expand on that, please?”

“Sure. I mean, what can I tell you? I’ve been arrested by the military police.”

“Yes, Derek. I see that. For what?”

“I think the charge is operating an all-terrain vehicle on federal land.”

“That’s the charge? Or you think that’s the charge?”

“I believe that I think that is the charge.” He smirks, and I would smack him if it were physically possible, I really would.

I step away from the window, take a deep calming breath, and look at my watch. 10:48.

“Well, Derek. Were you, in fact, operating an ATV on the base for some reason?”

“I don’t remember.”

He doesn’t remember. I stare at him, standing there, still smirking. It’s such a fine line with some people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.

“I’m not a policeman right now, Derek. I’m your friend.” I stop myself, start again. “I’m Nico’s friend. I’m her brother, and I love her. And she loves you, and so I’m here to help you. So start at the beginning, and tell me exactly what happened.”

“Oh, Hank,” he says, like he pities me. Like my entreaties are something childish, something he thinks is cute. “I seriously wish that I could.”

“You wish?”

This is madness. It’s madness.

“When are you being arraigned?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I check my watch. Thirty seconds left, and I can hear the heavy footfalls of the reservist from the desk, making her way back to collect me. One thing about the military, they like their schedules.

“Derek, I came all the way down here to help you.”

“I know, and that’s really decent of you. But, you know, I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Yes, but Nico did ask me. Because she cares about you.”

“I know. Isn’t she an amazing person?”

“All right sir.”

It’s the guard. I talk quickly into the hole in the door. “Derek, there is nothing I can do for you unless you can tell me what’s going on.”

Derek’s smug grin widens for a moment, the eyes misting with kindness, and then he walks slowly over to the bed and sprawls out, his hands folded behind his head.

“I totally hear what you’re saying, Henry. But it’s a secret.”

That’s it. Time’s up.

I was twelve years old and Nico was only six when we moved from the house on Rockland to the farmhouse on Little Pond Road, halfway to Penacook. Nathanael Palace, my grandfather, only recently retired from forty years in banking, had a wide range of interests: model trains, shooting, building stone walls. Already by prepubescence a bookish and private person, I was uninterested to varying degrees in all these activities but was forced by Grandfather to take part. Nico, a lonesome and anxious child, was avidly interested in all of them and rigorously ignored. He once got a set of World War II–era model airplanes, and we sat in the basement, the three of us, and Grandfather harangued me for an hour, refusing to let me quit until I’d successfully attached both wings to the body, while mechanically minded Nico sat in the corner, clutching a handful of tiny gunmetal gray airplane parts, waiting for her turn: at first excited, then restlessly, and finally in tears.

That was springtime, I think, not that long after we moved in with him. The years have been like that, for her and me, a lot of ups and downs.

“So, you’ll go back.”

“No.”

“Why not? Can’t Culverson get you another appointment? Maybe Monday.”

“Nico.”

“Henry.”

“Nico.” I’m leaning forward, sort of hollering into the phone, which is on speaker on the passenger seat. We’ve got a terrible line, cell to cell, all kinds of stops and starts, which isn’t helping. “Listen to me.”

But she’s not going to listen.

“I’m sure you just misunderstood him or something. He can be weird.”

“That is true.”

I’m parked in the abandoned lot next to what remains of the Capitol Shopping Center, a several-block stretch just east of Main Street along the banks of the Merrimack. The Presidents’ Day riots burned away the last remaining shops here, and now there are just a few scattered tents full of drunks and homeless people. This is where Mr. Shepherd, my scout leader, was living when the Brush Cuts ran him in on vagrancy.

“Nico, are you okay? Are you eating?”

“I’m fine. You know what I bet?” She’s not fine. Her voice is raspy, haggard, like she’s been doing nothing but smoking since Derek’s disappearance. “I bet he just didn’t want to say anything in front of the guards.”

“Nope,” I say. “No, Nico.” Exasperating. I tell her how easy it was for me to get in there, how few guards are watching over Derek Skeve.

“Really?”

“There’s one woman. A reservist. They don’t care about some kid who went joyriding on a military base.”

“So why can’t you get him out?”

“Because I don’t have a magic wand.”

Nico’s denial of reality, as maddening as her husband’s dull obstinacy, is a long-standing aspect of her character. My sister was a mystic from an early age, a firm believer in fairies and miracles, and her starry little spirit demanded magic. In the immediate aftermath of our becoming orphans, she could not and would not accept that it was all real, and I’d gotten so mad, I’d stormed away, and then I’d reeled back around, shouting. “They’re both dead! Period. End of story. Dead, dead, d-dead-d-dead! Okay? No ambiguity!”

This was at Father’s wake, the house full of friends and well-meaning strangers. Nico had stared back at me, tiny rose lips pursed, the word ambiguity vastly above her six-year-old pay grade, the severity of my tone nevertheless unmistakable. The assembled mourners staring at the sad little pair of us.

And now, the present, new times, Nico’s powers of disbelief unwavering. I try to change the subject.

“Nico, you’re good at math. Does the number 12.375 mean anything?”

“What do you mean, does it mean anything?”

“I don’t know, is it, like, pi or something, where—”

“No, Henry, it’s not,” she says quickly, coughs. “So what are we going to do next?”

“Nico, come on. Are you not listening to me? It’s military, which is on a totally different set of rules. I wouldn’t even know how to try to get him out of there.”

One of the homeless guys stumbles out of his tent, and I give him a small two-fingered wave; his name is Charles Taylor, and we went to high school together.

“This thing is going to fall out of the sky,” says Nico, “it’s going to fall on our heads. I don’t want to be sitting here by myself when it happens.”

“It is not falling on our heads.”

“What?”

“Everybody says that, and it’s just—it’s just arrogant, is what it is.” I’m so tired of this, all of it, and I should stop talking, but I can’t. “Two objects are moving through space on separate but overlapping orbits, and this one time, we’ll both be at the same place at the same time. It’s not ‘falling on our heads,’ okay? It’s not ‘coming for us.’ It just is. Do you understand?”

It suddenly seems incredibly, weirdly, quiet, and I realize I must have been yelling. “Nico? I’m sorry. Nico?”

But then she’s back, her voice small and flat. “I just miss him, is all.”

“I know that.”

“Forget it.”

“Wait.”

“Don’t worry about me. Go solve your case.”

She hangs up, and I sit there in the car, my chest trembling as if struck.

Bam!

It’s a science-fiction serial, is what it is, Distant Pale Glimmers, one new half-hour episode coming out every week, running like gangbusters since Christmastime. Here in Concord it’s showing at the Red River, the indie house. Apparently it’s about an intergalactic battleship called the John Adams, piloted by a General Amelie Chenoweth, who is portrayed by a bombshell named Kristin Dallas, who also writes and directs. The John Adams charts the distant reaches of the universe circa 2145. Of course the subtext, as subtle as a blow to the head, is that somehow, someone makes it, survives, prospers, the human race resurgent among the stars.

I went with Nico and Derek once, a few weeks ago, the first Monday in March. I didn’t care for it much, personally.

I wonder if Peter was there, that same night? Maybe alone, maybe with J. T. Toussaint.

I bet he was.

“Detective Culverson?”

“Yeah?”

“How reliable are the snow chains on the Impalas?”

“How reliable are they? What do you mean?”

“The chains. On the cars. They’re good, right? They stay on, for the most part?”

Culverson shrugs, engrossed in the newspaper. “I guess.”

I’m in my chair, at my desk, blue books arranged in a neat rectangle in front of me, trying to forget about my sister, move on with my life. A case to investigate. A man is dead.

“They’re fucking tremendous,” calls McGully from his desk, and his pronouncement is punctuated by the slam of his front chair legs hitting the floor as he leans forward. He’s got a pastrami sandwich from the Works, he’s got a napkin for a bib, spread out like a picnic blanket over his stomach. “They won’t come off for shit, not unless you latch ’em wrong. What happened? You spin out?”

“I did. Yesterday afternoon. Hit a tree.”

McGully bites his sandwich. Culverson mutters “Jesus,” but not about the accident, about something in the newspaper. Andreas’s desk is empty. Our window unit is clanking, burping out drifts of heat. Outside, on the sill, a slowly deepening shelf of new snow.

“It’s a tricky little latch on those bastards, and you really gotta keep the slack out.” McGully grins, mustard on his chin. “Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Yep. But, you know, I’ve been doing them a while. I did a winter on patrol.”

“Yeah, but were you servicing your own vehicle last winter?”

“No.”

Culverson, meanwhile, sets down his newspaper and looks out the window. I get up and start pacing. “Someone could have uncoupled them pretty easily, right? If they wanted to.”

McGully snorts, swallows a big bite of sandwich. “In the garage, here?”

“No, out in the field. While I was parked somewhere.”

“You mean—” he stares at me, lowers his voice, mock-serious, “somebody who’s trying to murder you?”

“Well—I mean—sure.”

“By unlatching your snow chains?” McGully brays laughter, hunks of pastrami erupting from his maw and bouncing off the napkin, onto the desk. “I’m sorry, kid, are you in a spy movie?”

“No.”

“Are you the president?”

“No.”

People have been trying to assassinate the president, that’s one of the deranged features of the national scene, the last three months—that’s the joke there.

I look at Culverson, but he’s still up in his head somewhere, eyes fixed on the drifting snow.

“Well, then, no offense, kid,” says McGully, “but I don’t think anybody’s trying to murder you. Nobody cares about you.”

“Right.”

“Nothing against you. Nobody cares about anything.”

Culverson stands abruptly, drops his newspaper in the garbage.

“What’s up your ass?” says McGully, craning his head around.

“The Pakistanis. They want to nuke it.”

“Nuke what?”

“Maia. They made some kind of a proclamation. They cannot leave the survival of their proud and sovereign people in the hands of the Western imperialist et cetera et cetera et cetera.”

“The Pakistanis, huh?” says McGully. “No kidding? I thought Iran were the pricks to worry about on this thing.”

“No, see, the Iranians have uranium, but no missile. They can’t fire it.”

“Pakistanis can fire it?”

“They have missiles.”

I’m thinking about my snow chains, feeling the lurch of the road spinning out from under me, remembering the shudder and the thud of impact.

Culverson’s shaking his head. “So the State Department is saying, basically, you try to nuke it, we’ll nuke you first.”

“Good times,” says McGully.

“I have a pretty clear memory of checking the chain latches,” I say, and they both look over at me. “Monday morning, first thing.”

“Jesus, Palace.”

“But, so, wait. Let’s just imagine I am a murderer. Let’s imagine there’s a detective who’s working the case, and he’s, he’s”—I pause, conscious of coloring a little—“he’s closing in on me. So I want this detective dead.”

“Yes,” says McGully, and I think for a second he’s being serious, but then he sets down his sandwich, rises slowly with a solemn expression. “Or maybe it was a ghost.”

“Okay, McGully.”

“No, I’m serious.” He comes over. His breath smells like pickles. “It’s the ghost of this hanger, and he’s so annoyed that you’re trying to pretend he got murdered, he’s trying to scare you into dropping the investigation.”

“Okay, McGully, okay. I don’t think it was a ghost.”

Culverson has pulled the Times out of the trash, he’s reading the story again.

“Yeah, you’re right,” says McGully, going back to his desk and the remainder of his lunch. “You probably forgot to latch the chains.”

Another of my father’s favorite jokes was the one he rolled out whenever people asked why we lived up in Concord, considering that he worked at St. Anselm’s, half an hour away, outside Manchester. He would reel back, astonished, and just say, “Because it’s Concord!” as if it that were explanation enough, like it’s London or Paris.

This was to become a favorite joke between Nico and me, in our years of surly teenage discontent, which for Nico have never really ended. Why couldn’t we find a place to eat a decent steak after nine p.m.? Why did every other city in New England get a Starbucks before we did?

Because it’s Concord!

But the real reason my parents stayed was for my mother’s work. She was the department secretary for the Concord police, planted behind the bullet-proof glass in the front lobby, handling visitors, calmly accepting complaints from drunks and vagrants and sex offenders, ordering a cake shaped like a semiautomatic pistol for every retiring detective.

Her salary was maybe half of my father’s income, but she’d held that job before she even met Temple Palace, and she married him only on the express condition that they would remain in Concord.

He was trying to be funny when he said “because it’s Concord!” but really, he didn’t care where he lived. He loved my mother a whole heck of a lot, was the explanation, and he just wanted to be where she was.

It’s Friday, late, coming up on midnight. The stars are gleaming dully through a gray wreath of clouds. I’m sitting on my back porch, looking out on the undeveloped acreage, former farmland, that abuts my row of townhouses.

I’m sitting here telling myself I was honest with Nico, and there’s nothing else I can do.

But she’s right, unfortunately. I love her, and I don’t want her to die alone.

Technically, I don’t want her to die at all, but there’s not much I can do about that.

It’s way past business hours, but I go inside and pick up the landline and dial the number anyway. Someone will answer. It’s never been the sort of office that shuts down for nights and weekends, and I’m sure that in the asteroid era the schedule has only gotten busier.

“Hello?” says a voice, quiet and male.

“Yeah, good evening.” Tilting my head back, taking a deep breath. “I need to speak to Alison Koechner.”

On Saturday morning I go for a jog, five miles along an eccentric route of my own invention: up to White Park, over to Main Street, and then home along Rockingham, sweat trickling down my forehead, mingling with the dusting of snow. My leg drags a little from the car accident, and there’s a tightness in my chest, but it feels good to be running, to be outdoors.

Okay. I could have forgotten to latch one of the chains on the tires, sure, I could see that. I’m hurrying, I’m anxious. Maybe I neglected to latch one. But all four?

I get home and turn on my cell phone and find that I have two service bars, and that I’ve missed a call from Sophia Littlejohn.

“Oh, no,” I mutter, pressing the button to play the voicemail. Forty-five minutes I’d been out, an hour maybe, and it was the first time I had turned off my phone in a week, the first time since I laid eyes on Peter Zell’s body in the bathroom of the pirate McDonald’s.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you,” says Ms. Littlejohn on the message, her voice neutral and steady. I’m cradling the phone under my neck, flipping open a blue book, clicking open a pen. “But the thing is, I really don’t know what to tell you.”

And then she just starts talking, a four-minute message that does nothing but recapitulate what her husband told me at their house on Wednesday morning. She and her brother had never been close. He had reacted terribly to the asteroid, become withdrawn, detached, more so than ever. She is obviously disappointed that he chose to kill himself, but not surprised.

“And so, Detective,” she says, “I thank you for your diligence, for your concern.” She stops, and there’s a few seconds of silence, I think the message is over, but then there’s a murmuring, supportive whisper behind her—handsome husband Erik—and she says, “He was not a happy man, Officer. I wanted you to know that I cared for him. He was a sad man, and then he killed himself. Please don’t call me again.”

Beep. End of message.

I sit drumming my fingers on the warped tile of my kitchen counter, the warm sweat of my exertion drying and turning cold on my forehead. In her message, Sophia Littlejohn hadn’t mentioned the aborted suicide note, if that’s what it was—Dear Sophia. But I had told her husband about it, and it’s a safe bet that he told her.

I call her back on the landline. At home, and then on her cell, and then at work, and then at home again.

Maybe she’s not answering because she doesn’t recognize the number, so I try all the numbers again on my cell phone, except halfway through the second call I lose all my bars, no signal, dead plastic, and I throw the stupid thing across the room.

You can’t see it in people’s eyes, not in this weather: winter hats pulled down low, faces turned down to the sleet-covered sidewalk. But you read it in their gaits, in that low weary shuffle. You can see the ones who aren’t going to make it. There’s a suicide. There’s one. This guy’s not going to make it. That woman, the one with face front, chin up high. She’ll hold up, do her best, pray to someone or something, right up until the end.

On the wall of the former office building, the graffiti: LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.

I’m walking over to the Somerset for a bachelor’s solitary Saturday night dinner, and I go out of my way to pass the McDonald’s on Main Street. I eye the empty parking lot, the stream of pedestrians going in, coming out with their paper bags, steaming from the tops. There’s an overflowing black Dumpster along the side of the building, partially concealing the side entrance. I stand for a second, and I imagine that I’m a killer. I’ve got my car—it’s a WVO engine, or I’ve put together a half tank somehow.

I’ve got a body in the trunk.

I wait patiently for midnight to roll around, midnight or one. Well past the dinner rush but before the tide of late-night postbar customers starts to wash in. The restaurant is mostly empty.

Casually, looking around the dimly lit lot, I pop the trunk and pull out my friend; lean him against my body and walk with him, three-legged, like a couple of drunks supporting ourselves, past the barrier of the Dumpster and in that side entrance, right down the little hall to the men’s john. Slide closed the lock. Take off my belt…

When I get to the Somerset, Ruth-Ann nods hello and fills up my coffee. Dylan is playing from the kitchen, Maurice loudly singing along to “Hazel.” I push the menu aside, surround myself with blue books. Listing and relisting the facts I’ve got thus far.

Peter Zell died five days ago.

He worked in insurance.

He loved math.

He was obsessed with the oncoming asteroid, collected information and tracked it in the sky, learning everything he could. He kept this information in a box marked “12.375,” for reasons I have yet to understand.

His face. He died with bruises on his face, below his right eye.

He was not close with his family.

He appeared to have had only one friend, a man named J. T. Toussaint, whom he’d loved as a child and then decided, for reasons of his own, to make contact with again.

I sit in front of my dinner for an hour, reading and rereading my notes, muttering to myself, waving away the slow-moving cigarette clouds that drift over from neighboring tables. At some point Maurice wanders out of the kitchen, white apron, hands on his hips, and looks down at my plate with stern disapproval.

“What’s the problem, Henry?” he says. “There a ladybug in your eggs or something?”

“Just not hungry, I guess. No offense.”

“Well, you know, hate to waste the food,” says Maurice, a high-pitched giggle sneaking into his voice, and I look up, sensing a punch line coming. “But it’s not the end of the world!”

Maurice dies laughing, stumbles back into the kitchen.

I pull out my wallet, slowly count out three tens for the check and an even thousand for a tip. The Somerset has to abide by the price controls or get shut down, so I always try to make it right on the table.

Then I gather up my blue books and shove them in the inside pocket of my blazer.

Basically, I know nothing.

4.

“Hey, Palace?”

“Yeah?” I blink, clear my throat, sniff. “Who’s this?”

My eyes find the clock. 5:42. Sunday morning. It’s like the world has decided I’m better off on Victor France’s plan, up and at ’em no time to waste. The Advent calendar… of doom.

“It’s Trish McConnell, Detective Palace. I’m sorry to wake you.”

“That’s all right.” I yawn, stretch my limbs. I haven’t spoken to Officer McConnell in days. “What’s up?”

“It’s just—like I said, I’m really sorry to bother you. But I’ve got your victim’s phone.”

In ten minutes she’s at my house—small town, no traffic—and we’re sitting at my ramshackle kitchen table, which wobbles every time one of us picks up or puts down our mug of coffee.

“I couldn’t shake the scene of the crime,” says McConnell, in uniform from cap to shoes, the thin gray stripe running down the leg of her blue pants. Her expression is intent, fixed, a woman with a story to tell. “Couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

“Yeah,” I say quietly. “Me, neither.”

“Everything about it seemed off somehow, you know what I mean?”

“I do.”

“Especially the absence of a phone. Everyone’s got a phone. All the time. Even now. Right?”

“Right.” Except Denny Dotseth’s wife.

“So.” McConnell pauses, holds up one finger for dramatic effect, a sly smile starting to tug at the corners of her mouth. “I’m halfway through my shift two nights ago, overnight on Sector 7, and it comes to me. Somebody boosted the guy’s phone.”

I nod sagely, trying to give the impression that I’ve considered this possibility and discarded it for some higher-level, detective-grade reason, all the while kicking myself, because I’d pretty much forgotten about the phone angle entirely. “You think the killer took the phone?”

“No, Hank. Detective.” McConnell’s tight pony tail flicks back and forth as she shakes her head. “His wallet was still on him, you said. Wallet and keys. If someone killed him for gain, they’d take everything, right?”

“So maybe he got killed for the phone itself,” I say. “Something on there? A number. A photograph? Some piece of information.”

“I don’t think so.”

I rise to take our mugs over to the counter, the table teetering in my wake.

“So I’m thinking, it’s not the murderer, it’s someone at the scene,” says McConnell. “Someone at that McDonald’s snatched the phone from the dead man’s pocket.”

“Serious crime. Stealing from a corpse.”

“Yes.” she says. “But you gotta do a risk analysis.”

I glance up from the counter, where I’m emptying the Mr. Coffee carafe into our mugs. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s say I’m a regular citizen. I’m not homeless or broke, because here I am at a restaurant on a weekday morning.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got a job, but it’s a scrub job. If I can pawn a cell phone to a metal bug, someone collecting cadmium, that’s a serious payday. Enough to keep me going for a month or two, maybe even get me out of work for the end of it. So that’s a reward, a significant-percent chance of a significant reward.”

“Sure, sure.” I like the way she’s doing this.

“So I’m standing there at the McDonald’s, cops are on the way,” says McConnell. “I figure I’ve got a ten percent chance of getting caught.”

“With cops descending on the scene? Twenty-five percent chance.”

“One of them is Michelson. Eighteen percent.”

“Fourteen.”

She’s laughing, I’m laughing too, but I’m thinking about my father, and Shakespeare, and J. T. Toussaint: motive reconsidered in the matrix of new times. “But if you get caught, that’s no arraignment, no habeas, that equals one hundred percent chance of dying in jail.”

“Well, I’m young,” she says, still in character. “I’m cocky. I decide I like my odds.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” I say, stirring milk into my coffee. “Who took the phone?”

“It was that kid. The kid at the counter.”

I remember him immediately, the kid she’s talking about: greasy mullet, flipped-up visor, the acne scars, looking back and forth between hated boss and hated cops. The smirk just screaming, I got one over on all you bastards, didn’t I?

“Son of a gun,” I say. “Son of a gun.”

McConnell is beaming. She joined the force in February of last year, so she’d gotten—what?—four months active duty before someone took an axe handle and bashed in the face of the world.

“I radio in to Watch Command I’m leaving my sector—you know, nobody cares all that much—and I head right over to that McDonald’s. I walk in the door, and as soon as that kid sees my face he takes off running. Hurdles the counter, he’s out the door, across the lot, out in the snow, and I’m like, not today, friend. Not today.”

I laugh. “Not today.”

“So I draw my sidearm and I give chase.”

“You do not.”

“I do.”

This is terrific. Officer McConnell is maybe five foot one, 105 pounds, twenty-eight years old, a single mother of two. Now she’s on her feet, gesturing, pacing around my kitchen.

“He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, ‘Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!’”

“You do not yell, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’”

“I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’”

McConnell has the kid in cuffs and she leans on him hard, right there in the churned-up snow of the West Street playground, and he spills. He’d pawned the phone to a blue-haired lady named Beverly Markel, who runs a junk shop out of a boarded-up bail bondsman’s next to the county courthouse. Markel is a goldbug, stockpiling coins and bullion, but she has a sideline in pawnbroking. McConnell works the lead: Beverly had sold the phone already, to a fat loon named Konrad, who was collecting lithium-ion cell phone batteries to communicate with the aliens who he thinks are on the way from the Andromeda galaxy to load the human race onto a flotilla of rescue ships. McConnell paid Konrad a visit, and after he was made to understand that she was a visitor not from outer space but from the police department, he grudgingly handed over the phone—still, miraculously, intact.

I reward this dramatic conclusion with a long, low appreciative whistle and a round of applause, while McConnell produces her prize and slides it on the table between us: a slim black smartphone, slick and gleaming. It’s the same make and model as my own, and for a brief, disorienting instant I think it is mine, that somehow Peter Zell died in possession of Detective Henry Palace’s cellular telephone.

“Well, Officer McConnell.” I scoop up the phone and feel its cool flat weight in my palm. It’s like holding one of Zell’s organs, a kidney, a lobe of the brain. “That is one solid piece of police work.”

She looks down at her hands, then back up at me, and that’s it, our business is concluded. We sit there in easy morning silence, two human beings framed by the single window of a small white kitchen, the sun struggling to make itself known outside through the dampening gray of the low-hanging clouds. I’ve got a pretty decent view out here, especially first thing in the morning: a nice little copse of winter pine, the farmland beyond, deer tracks dancing across the snow.

“You’ll make a great detective one day, Officer McConnell.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, flash of a smile, drains her coffee. “I know I will.”

Turning on the phone I am greeted by a home-screen picture of Kyle Littlejohn, Peter Zell’s nephew, in action on the ice, giant hockey mask covering his face, elbows jutted out to either side.

Kid must be terrified, I think, and I close my eyes to the thought, blink it away. Stay on target. Stay focused.

My first observation is that, within the three-month period covered by the list of “recent calls,” there have been two calls placed to the number listed as Sophia Littlejohn’s. One was last Sunday at 9:45 a.m., and it was twelve seconds long: just long enough for him to have gotten her voicemail or, say, for her to have answered, recognized his voice, and hung up. The second call, thirteen seconds, was on Monday, the day of his death, at 11:30 a.m.

I’ve got my blue book out and I’m writing down these observations and reflections, the pencil scritching rapidly, in the background the burbling of my second pot of coffee.

My second observation is that there have been seven conversations within that same three-month period, with the contact listed as “JTT.” Most were on Mondays, in the afternoon, perhaps making arrangements to go see that night’s Distant Pale Glimmers. The final call, incoming, lasting a minute and forty seconds, this past Monday at 1:15.

Interesting—interesting—very interesting. Thank you again, Officer McConnell.

It’s my third observation that really gets my heart pumping, that’s got me sitting here at the table with the phone in my hand, ignoring the eager beeping of the coffeemaker, staring at the screen, my mind rolling and gunning. Because there’s a number with no name assigned to it, to which Peter Zell had placed a twenty-two-second telephone call at ten o’clock on the night of his death.

And a forty-two-second call at exactly ten o’clock the night before that.

I scroll through the list again, my fingers dancing across the screen, faster and faster. Every night, the same number. Ten o’clock. Outgoing call. Call less than a minute long. Every single night.

Peter Zell’s phone is getting service in my house, two bars, the same as me. I call the mystery number and it is picked up after two rings.

“Hello?”

The voice answers as if from within a haze, whispering, confused—which is totally understandable. You don’t get calls every day from a dead man’s cell phone.

But I recognize her right away.

“Ms. Eddes? It’s Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department. I’m afraid we’re going to need to chat again.”

She’s early, but I’m even earlier, and Ms. Eddes sees me waiting and comes right over. I half rise, the ghost of my father in the small ritual gesture of politeness, and she slides into her side of the booth. And then, before I am fully back in my seat, I tell her I appreciate her coming, and she’s got to tell me everything she knows about Peter Zell and the circumstances surrounding his death.

“My goodness, Detective,” she says mildly, lifting up the thick glossy menu. “You don’t mess around.”

“No, ma’am.”

And I give it to her again, my whole tough-guy deadpan speech about how she’s got to tell me everything she knows. She lied to me before, left things out, and I’m trying to make it clear that such omissions will not be tolerated. Naomi Eddes looks back at me with raised eyebrows. She’s wearing dark red lipstick, her eyes are dark and wide. The white curve of her scalp.

“And what if I don’t?” she says, looking down at her menu, untroubled. “If I don’t tell you everything, I mean.”

“The thing is, you’re a material witness, Ms. Eddes.” I practiced this speech several times this morning, hoping I wouldn’t have to deliver it. “Given the information I now have, I mean the fact that your number is all over the victim’s phone…”

I should have practiced more; this sort of tough-as-nails posturing is a lot easier with Victor France. “And given that you chose, last time we spoke, to keep that information to yourself. The fact is, I have cause to take you in.”

“Take me in?”

“Have you held. Under state statutes. Federal, also. Revised New Hampshire criminal code, section—” I pluck a sugar packet from the caddy in the center of the table. “I’d have to look up the section.”

“Okay.” She nods solemnly. “Understood.” She smiles, and I exhale, but she’s not done. “Held for how long?”

“For the…” I look down, look away. I give the bad news to the sugar packet. “Held for the rest of it.”

“So, in other words, if I don’t start spilling everything right this second,” she says, “then you’ll throw me in a deep, dark dungeon and leave me there until Maia makes landfall and all the world is consumed in darkness. Is that it, Detective Palace?”

I nod without speaking, look up and find her smiling still.

“Well, Detective, I do not think you would do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I think you have a little bit of a crush on me.”

I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t, but my hands are really doing a number on the crimped paper border of this sugar packet. Ruth-Ann comes over, fills my coffee, and takes Ms. Eddes’s order for an unsweetened iced tea. Ruth-Ann scowls at the little mound of sugar I’ve left on her table and heads back to the kitchen.

“Ms. Eddes, on Monday morning you told me you weren’t that close to Peter Zell. It turns out this is not true.”

She purses her lips, exhales.

“Can we start with something else, please?” she says. “Aren’t you wondering why I’m bald?”

“No.” I turn a page in my blue book and begin to recite. “‘Detective Palace: You’re Mr. Gompers’s executive assistant?’ ‘Ms. Eddes: Please. Secretary.’”

“You wrote all that down?” She’s unwrapping her cutlery bundle, idly playing with her fork.

“‘Detective Palace: Did you know the victim well?’ ‘Ms. Eddes: To be totally honest, I’m not sure I would have noticed him not being here. Like I said, we weren’t that close.’”

I set down my book and lean forward across the table, lift the cutlery from her hands like a gentle parent. “If you weren’t that close, why did he call you every night, Ms. Eddes?”

She takes her fork back. “Why don’t you need to ask me why I’m bald? Do you think I have cancer?”

“No, ma’am.” I scratch my mustache. “I think, based on the length and curve of your eyelashes, that you have very long, thick hair. I think you decided that, with the world ending, it was no longer worth the time and trouble to deal with it. Style it and comb it and all that woman-type stuff.”

She looks at me, rubs a palm across her scalp. “That’s very clever, Detective Palace.”

“Thanks.” I nod. “Tell me about Peter Zell.”

“Let’s order first.”

“Ms. Eddes.”

She raises her hands, palms up, imploring. “Please?”

“All right. We’ll order first.”

Because I know, now, that she’s going to talk. Whatever she’s holding back, she’s going to give it to me, I can feel it, it’s only a matter of time, and I’m starting to get this kind of powerful nervousness, a sweet humming anticipation against my ribs, like when you’re on a date and you know that there will be a goodnight kiss—maybe more than a kiss—and it’s just a matter of time.

Eddes orders the BLT, and Ruth-Ann says, “Good choice, dear.” I get the three-egg omelet with whole wheat toast, and Ruth-Ann notes dryly that there are other kinds of food besides eggs.

“So,” I say. “We’ve ordered.”

“One more minute. Let’s talk about you. Who’s your favorite singer?”

“Bob Dylan.”

“Favorite book?”

I take a sip of coffee. “Right now I’m reading Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”

“Yeah,” says Eddes. “But what’s your favorite?”

“The Watchmen. It’s a graphic novel, from the eighties.”

“I know what it is.”

“Why did Peter Zell call you every night at exactly ten p.m.?”

“To make sure his watch was working.”

“Ms. Eddes.”

“He was a morphine addict.”

“What?”

I’m staring at the side of her face, she’s turned to look out the window, and I’m flabbergasted. It’s like she just said that Peter Zell was an Indian chief or a general in the Soviet army.

“A morphine addict?”

“Yeah. I think morphine. Some kind of opiate, for sure. But not now—not anymore—I mean, obviously, he’s dead now—but I mean—” She pauses, her fluency has deserted her, and she shakes her head, slows down. “For a period, last year, he was addicted to something, and then he quit.”

She keeps talking, and I keep listening, writing down every word she says, even as some hungry part of my mind flies off into a corner, huddles with this new information—a morphine addict, some kind of opiate, for a period—and begins to chew on it, taste its marrow, decide how it might be digested. Decide if it’s true.

“Zell was not inclined to outsize living, as you may have discovered,” says Eddes. “No booze. No dope. No cigarettes, even. Nothing.”

“Right.”

Peter played Dungeons & Dragons. Peter alphabetized his breakfast cereal. He arranged actuarial data into tables, analyzed it.

“And then, last summer, with everything, I guess he felt like making a change.” She smiles grimly. “A new lifestyle choice. He’s telling me all this later, by the way. I wasn’t privy to his decision-making process when he started.”

I write down last summer and lifestyle choice. Questions are bubbling up on my lips, but I force myself to stay silent, sit still, let her keep talking, now that at last she’s begun.

“So, you know, apparently this dalliance in illicit substances, it didn’t go that well for him. Or, it went really well at first, and then really poorly. As it happens, you know?”

I nod like I do know, but everything I know is from law-enforcement training materials and cop movies. Personally, I’m like Peter: a beer now and again, maybe. No pot, no smokes, no booze. My whole life. The skinny policeman-to-be at sixteen waiting in the restaurant with a paperback copy of Ender’s Game, his friends in the parking lot pulling hits off a purple ceramic head-shop bong and then sliding, giggling, back into the booth—this very booth. Not sure why. Just never been all that interested.

Our food comes, and Eddes pauses to deconstruct her sandwich, making three small piles on her plate: vegetables over here, bread over there, bacon at the farthest edge of the plate. Inside I’m quivering, thinking about these new pieces of the puzzle that are falling from the sky, trying to grasp them and slide each falling brick into the place where it fits, like in that old video game.

The asteroid. The shoebox.

Morphine.

J. T. Toussaint.

12.375. Twelve point three seven five what?

Pay attention, Henry, I tell myself. Listen. Follow where it goes. “Sometime in October, Peter stopped using.” Eddes is talking with her big eyes shut, her head tilted back.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

“But he was suffering.”

“Withdrawing.”

“Yeah. And trying to cover it up. And failing.”

I’m writing, trying to piece together the timeline on all this. Old Gompers, his voice soaked in gin and stentorian malaise, explaining how Peter had flipped out at work, screamed at the girl. The asteroid costume. Halloween night.

Eddes keeps talking. “Kicking morphine is not easy, is nearly impossible, in fact. So I volunteered to help the guy out. Told him he had to go home for a little bit, and I would help him.”

“Okay…”

A week? Gompers had said. Two weeks? I thought he was gone, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.

“All I did was, I checked in with him on my way to work each day. Lunch, sometimes. Make sure he had everything he needed, bring him a fresh blanket, soup, whatever. He didn’t have any family. No friends.”

By the week before Thanksgiving, she says, Peter was up and around, shaky on his feet but ready to go back to work, to insurance data.

“And the phone calls every night?”

“Well, nighttime’s the hard part, and he was alone. Each night he would call me to check in. So I knew he was okay, and so he knew there was someone waiting to hear his voice.”

“Every night?”

“I used to have a dog,” she says. “That was a lot more burdensome.”

I’m thinking this over, wishing it rang entirely true.

“Why did you say you weren’t that close?”

“We weren’t. Before last fall, before all of this, we’d never actually spoken.”

“So, why go to all this trouble for the guy?

“I had to.” She looks down, looks away. “He was suffering.”

“Yeah, but that’s an awful lot of time and effort. Especially now.”

“Well, exactly.” Now she stops looking away; she stares at me, her eyes flashing, as if daring me to reject the possibility of such a far-fetched motive as simple human kindness. “Especially now.”

“What about the bruises?”

“Below his eye? I don’t know. Showed up two weeks ago, said he had fallen down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

She shrugs. “Like I said…”

“You weren’t that close.”

“Yeah.”

And here I’m feeling this strange and strong impulse to reach across the table, to take her hands in my own, to tell her it’s okay, that it’s all going to be okay. But I can’t do that, can I? It’s not okay. I can’t tell her it’s okay, because it’s not okay, and because I have one more question.

“Naomi,” I say, and her eyes flicker in quick teasing recognition that I’ve never used her first name before. “What were you doing there that morning?”

The spark dies in her eyes; her face tightens, pales. I wish I hadn’t asked. I wish we could just be sitting here, two people, order some dessert.

“He used to talk about it. On the phone, at night, especially around December. He was done with the drugs, I really think he was, but he was still—he was not entirely happy. On the other hand, no one is. Entirely happy. How can we be?”

“Yeah. So, but, he would talk about the McDonald’s?”

She nods. “Yeah. He’d say, you know that place? If I was going to kill myself, that would be the place to do it. Just look at that place.” I don’t say anything. From elsewhere in the restaurant, spoons clinking of coffee cups. Other people’s melancholy conversation. “Anyway. As soon as he didn’t show up for work, I came over to that McDonald’s. I knew it. I knew he would be over there.”

From Maurice’s radio in the kitchen come the opening chords of “Mr. Tambourine Man.”

“Hey,” says Naomi. “This is Dylan, isn’t it? You like this one?”

“No. I only like the seventies Dylan and the post-1990s Dylan.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

I shrug. We listen for a minute. The song plays. She takes a bite of tomato.

“My eyelashes, huh?”

“Yeah.”

It’s probably not true.

Almost certainly, this woman is gulling me, misdirecting me for reasons still to be discovered.

From all that I have learned, the idea of Peter Zell having experimented with hard drugs—not to mention having sought out and purchased drugs, given their current scarcity and extreme expense, and the severity of the penalties for such purchases under the post-Maia criminal codes—it all seems like a one-in-a-million chance. On the other hand, isn’t it so that even the one-in-a-million chance must be true one time, or there would be no chance at all? Everybody’s been saying that. Statisticians on television talk shows, scientists testifying before Congress, everyone trying to explain, everyone desperate for all of this to make some kind of sense. Yes, the odds were extremely unlikely. A statistical unlikelihood approaching zero. But the strong unlikelihood of a given event is moot once that event has nevertheless transpired.

Anyway, I just don’t think she was lying. I don’t know why. I close my eyes and I can picture her telling me, her big dark eyes are steady and sad, she’s casting them down at her hands, her mouth is still and set, and I think for some insane reason that she was telling it straight.

The question of Peter Zell and morphine rotates in a slow ellipse in my mind, drifting past the other new fact spinning around up there: Zell’s preoccupation with the McDonald’s as a site of suicide. So what, Detective? So he got murdered, and the murderer left him to be found, by coincidence, in the very same spot? What are the odds of that?

It’s a different kind of snow right now, big fat drops falling slowly, almost one at a time, each adding its weight to the drifts in the parking lot.

“You all right, Hank?” says Ruth-Ann, slipping the hundreds I’ve left on the table into her apron pocket without looking at them.

“I don’t know.” I shake my head slowly, look out the window at the parking lot, lift my cup of coffee for one final sip. “I feel like I wasn’t made for these times.”

“I don’t know, kid,” she says. “I think maybe you’re the only person who was.”

I wake up at four o’clock in the morning, wake from some abstract dream of clocks and hourglasses and gambling wheels, and I can’t fall back asleep, because suddenly I’ve got it, I’ve got one piece of it, I’ve got something.

I get dressed, blazer and slacks, I put on coffee, I slide my department-issued semiautomatic pistol in its holster.

The words are turning around in my head, in a long slow circle: what are the odds?

There’s a lot to do when the day begins.

I’ve got to call Wilentz. I’ve got to get over to Hazen Drive.

I look at the moon, fat and bright and cold, and wait for daybreak.

5.

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

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

“I need you to run it right now.”

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

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

“I need these done right away.”

“Dude, dude. Give me a damn second.”

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

“Sir?”

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

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

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

“Yes,” I say. “I heard.”

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

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

“It’s not.”

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

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

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

“Fenton,” I say.

“Seriously?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No thanks.”

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

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

“No. My parents were.”

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s a percentage.”

“What is?”

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

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

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

“Peter is your hanger?”

“The victim, yeah.”

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

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

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

“Son of a gun,” says Culverson suddenly.

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

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

“Yes,” I say. “Right. Yes.”

“Yes, what?” growls McGully.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah. So?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He turns a quarter of an inch, mutters something.

“What?” I say.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All is the same as it was.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Your house smells like dog shit.”

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

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

“Detective, come on.”

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

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

Calm, Palace. Easy.

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

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

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

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

“A few times,” I say.

“Yeah. Okay?”

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

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

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

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

“I said he was a suicide.”

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

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

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

“Not necessarily.”

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

“J. T.,” I start.

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

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

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

“McGully. Let him up.”

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

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

“Tell me what else.”

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

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

“I didn’t kill him.”

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

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

“What?”

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He never told you where it came from?”

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

“And last Monday night?”

“What?”

“What happened on Monday night?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culverson says, “Discretion.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I say.

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

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

“Okay,” I say.

“As well as mild to severe diplopia.”

“Okay.”

“Diplopia means double vision.”

“Oh.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah,” I say. “Okay.”

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

Turns out, they can.

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

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

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

“You ate in your office.”

“Yes,” she says. “That’s right.”

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

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

“Yes, ma’am.”

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

She reaches up and dabs a tear from her eye.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s okay.”

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

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

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

“We made the decision together.”

“I talked you into it.”

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

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

“Why?” I say.

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

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

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

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

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”

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

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

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

“What? When?”

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

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

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

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

“No, ma’am. Guess not.”

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

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

Bam!

“Detective?”

“Yep.”

“You’re not writing.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Listen,” I say to Andreas.

“Yeah?”

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

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

“What?”

“About before. Spilling your coffee.”

He chuckles woodenly, draws on his smoke.

“Forget it,” he says.

“I—”

“Seriously, Henry. Who cares?”

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

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

“Yeah, I heard that.”

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

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

“Oh, yeah?”

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

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

“It just seems crazy.”

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

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

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

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

“Oh, well,” says Andreas.

“Oh, well, what?”

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

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

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

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

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