The Last Policeman

1.

“Good Lord Almighty, Henry Palace, what happened to you?”

This seems like an awfully harsh assessment from a former sweetheart I haven’t seen for six years, until I remember what I look like: my face, my eye. I bring my hand up, adjust the thick stiff packet of gauze, smooth my mustache, feel the bristle of stubble along my jaw.

“I’ve had a rough couple of days,” I say.

“Sorry to hear that.”

It’s six-thirty in the morning, and Andreas is dead, and Zell is dead, and Toussaint is dead, and here I am standing in Cambridge, on a footbridge over the Charles River, making small talk with Alison Koechner. And it’s weirdly pleasant out here, it must be over fifty degrees, as if crossing the Massachusetts state line has tripped me over into a southern latitude. All of it, the gentle spring breeze, the morning sun glinting off the bridge, the soothing ripple of the river in spring, it would all be pleasurable in another world, another time. But I close my eyes and what I see is death: Andreas flattened against the grill of a bus; J. T. Toussaint thrown back against the wall, a hole blown open in his chest; Peter Zell in the bathroom.

“It’s great to see you, Alison.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I mean it.”

“Let’s not get into all that.”

The wild tangle of orchid-red hair that I remember has been cut to an adult length and corralled into a bun with a system of small efficient clips. She wears gray pants and a gray blazer and a small gold pin on her lapel: she really does, she looks terrific.

“So,” says Alison, and draws from an inside pocket of her blazer a slim letter-size white envelope. “This friend of yours? Mr. Skeve?”

“He’s not my friend,” I say immediately, raising one finger. “He’s Nico’s husband.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Nico, as in your sister Nico?”

“Asteroid,” I say, no need to expound. Impulse marriage. Shotgun wedding. Biggest imaginable shotgun. Alison nods, just says, “Wow.” She knew Nico when Nico was twelve years old, already not the kind of a person you imagined settling down. A sneak smoker, a snatcher of beers from the cooler in Grandfather’s garage, a succession of bad haircuts and disciplinary problems.

“Okay then. So, your brother-in-law, Skeve? He’s a terrorist.”

I laugh. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.”

“The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”

I sigh, lean one hip against the rusted green steel of the bridge’s guard rail. A shell slides by, cutting through the surface of the river, the crew grunting as they shoot past. I like these kids, getting up at six in the morning to row crew, keeping in shape, sticking with their program. These kids, I like.

“What would you say,” Alison asks, “if I told you that the United States government, long ago anticipating this kind of disaster, had prepared an escape plan? Had constructed, in secret, a habitable environment, beyond reach of the asteroid’s destructive effects, where humanity’s best and brightest could be relocated and made safe to repopulate the species?”

I bring my palm up to my face, rub it against my cheek, which is only now beginning to emerge, from its numbness, into active pain.

“I’d say that’s insane. It’s Hollywood nonsense.”

“And you would be right. But there are those who are not as perspicacious.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I’m remembering Derek Skeve lying on the thin mattress in his cell, his spoiled kid’s clowning grin. I wish I could tell you, Henry, but it’s a secret.

Alison opens the white envelope, unfolds three pieces of crisp white paper, and hands them to me, and my impulse is to say, you know what? Forget the whole thing. I have a murder to solve. But I don’t. Not today.

Three single-spaced typed pages, no watermark, no agency seal, pocked here and there with thick black lines of redaction. In 2008 there was a tabletop exercise convened by the Directorate of Strategic Planning of the United States Air Force, drawing on the resources and personnel of sixteen discrete agencies of the United States government, including the DHS, the DTRA, and NASA. The exercise imagined an event “above global-catastrophe threshold” in a “short-warning” scenario—in other words, exactly what has now come to pass—and considered every possible response: nuclear counterstrike, slow push-pull, kinetic options. The conclusion was that realistic response options would be limited to civil defense.

I’m yawning, flipping forward. I’m still on the first page. “Alison?”

She rolls her eyes slightly, the small gentle sarcasm so familiar that it squeezes my heart in my chest, and takes back the papers. “There was a dissent, Palace. An astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore named Dr. Mary Catchman insisted that the government act preemptively and build habitable environments on the moon. When Maia turned up, certain individuals convinced themselves that the DOD had embraced that dissent, and that these safe havens exist.”

“Bases?”

“Yes.”

“On the Moon?”

“Yes.”

I squint into the gray sun, seeing Andreas plastered against the bus, slowly sliding down. IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY. Secret government escape bases. People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.

“So, Derek was tooling around the Guard station on his ATV looking for, what, blueprints? Escape pods? A giant slingshot?”

“Or something.”

“Doesn’t make him a terrorist.”

“I know, but that’s the designation. The way the military-justice system works right now, once he’s got that tag, there’s nothing that can be done.”

“Well, I’m no fan of this guy, but Nico loves him. There’s nothing—?”

“There’s nothing. Nothing.” Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far. “I’m sorry. It’s not my department.”

“What is your department, anyway?”

She doesn’t answer; I knew she wouldn’t. We’ve always stayed in touch, the occasional e-mail, phone numbers exchanged every couple of years. I know that she is based in New England, and I know that she works for a federal agency, operating at a level of law enforcement that is orders of magnitude beyond mine. Before we dated, she had wanted to go to veterinary school.

“Any more questions, Palace?”

“No.” I glance at the river, then back at her. “Wait. Yes. A friend of mine asked why we won’t let the Pakistanis try and nuke the asteroid, if they want to.”

Alison laughs once, mirthlessly, and begins tearing the papers into strips. “Tell your friend,” she says, tearing the strips into smaller strips, then those into still smaller ones, “that if they hit it—which they won’t—but if they do instead of one asteroid, we’ll have thousands of smaller but still devastating asteroids. Thousands and thousands of irradiated asteroids.”

I don’t say anything. With her small efficient fingers, Alison feeds the tiny bits of paper into the Charles, and then she turns to me and smiles.

“Anyway, Detective Palace,” she says. “Whatcha working on?”

“Nothing,” I say, turn my face away. “Nothing, really.”

But I tell her about the Zell case anyway, I can’t help it. We’re walking up John F. Kennedy from Memorial Drive to Harvard Square, and I give her the whole story, top to bottom, and then I ask her, from a professional standpoint, what she makes of the case. We’ve arrived at a kiosk in what used to be a newsstand, now strung with Christmas lights, a squat portable generator humming outside, grumbling and hissing like a miniature tank. The glass of the newsstand is blacked out, and someone has taped two big pieces of cardboard across the front doors, written THE COFFEE DOCTOR on them in big black letters with a Sharpie.

“Well,” she says slowly, as I hold open the door for her. “Not having examined the evidence firsthand, it certainly sounds like you reached the correct conclusion. Ninety-five percent chance, this guy was just another hanger.”

“Yep,” I say.

It’s dark inside the converted news kiosk, a couple of bare bulbs and another string of Christmas lights, an old-fashioned cash register and an espresso machine, squat and gleaming, parked like a tank on the black countertop.

“Greetings, humans,” says the proprietor, an Asian kid, maybe nineteen, with a porkpie hat and horn-rimmed glasses and a wispy beard. He gives Alison a cheerful salute. “Pleasure, as always.”

“Thanks, Coffee Doctor,” she says. “Who’s in the lead?”

“Let’s see.”

I look where he’s looking, seven paper coffee cups lined up on the far end of the counter, each cup with the name of a continent scrawled on it. He tilts a couple, rattles them, eyeballs the number of beans that have been tossed in each.

“Antarctica. No contest.”

“Wishful thinking,” says Alison.

“No shit, sister.”

“Couple of the usual.”

“Your wish, my command,” he says, and works fast, lining up two dainty ceramic demitasses, dunking a steamer wand in a stainless-steel jug of milk and flicking it on.

“Best coffee in the world,” notes Alison.

“What’s the five percent chance?” I ask, as the espresso machine rattles and hisses.

Alison smiles faintly. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“I’m just wondering.”

“Henry,” says Alison, as the kid presents us with our two short cups of coffee. “Can I tell you something? You can follow this case forever, and you can discover all its secrets, you can build this man’s timeline all the way back to his birth, and the birth of his father and his father’s father. The world is still going to end.”

“Yep. Yeah, I know.” We’ve settled in a corner of the ersatz coffee shop now, huddled at an old plastic card table the Coffee Doctor has set up. “But what’s the five percent chance, though, in your analysis?”

She sighs, gives it to me again, that small gentle sarcastic eye roll.

“The five percent is this: for this man Toussaint to attack you with the ashtray like that, to try and run for it? With three armed detectives in the room. That’s a Hail Mary. That’s a desperation play.”

“McGully threatened to have him executed.”

“In jest.”

“He’s scared. He doesn’t know that.”

“Sure, sure.” She tilts her head this way and that, considering. “But you’re threatening, at the same moment, to arrest him on a minor violation.”

“For two weeks. Engine fraud. A token bid.”

“Yes,” she says. “But even for a token bid, you’re going to search the house, right?”

Alison pauses to sip her espresso. I leave mine alone, for now, staring at her. Oh, Palace, I’m thinking. Oh, Palace. Holy moly. Someone else comes into the cafe, a college-age girl; the Coffee Doctor says, “Greetings, human,” fires up his machine, and the girl tosses a bean into the cup marked EUROPE.

“Still, five percent chance,” says Alison. “But you know what they say about odds.”

“Yep.” I sip my espresso, which is, in fact, delicious. “Yep, yep, yep.”

I’m buzzing. I’m feeling it. The coffee, the morning. Five percent chance.

Ninety-three north, fifty-five miles an hour, eight o’clock in the morning, no other cars on the road.

Somewhere between Lowell and Lawrence my phone picks up three bars, and I call Nico, I wake her up, I give her the bad news: Derek got involved with something foolish, and he’s not getting out. I go easy on the details. I don’t use the word terrorist. I don’t tell her about the secret organization, I don’t tell her about the Moon. I just tell her what Alison said about the military-justice system right now: he’s got a label that means he’s not going anywhere.

I’m sympathetic but clear: this is the way it is, and there’s nothing else to be done, and then I brace myself for her tearful or spiteful or furious rebuttal.

Instead she is silent, and I lift the phone, making sure my bars haven’t disappeared. “Nico?”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“So—do you understand?”

I’m rolling north, steadily north, over the state line. Welcome to New Hampshire. Live Free or Die.

“Yeah,” says Nico, a pause for the slow exhale of cigarette smoke. “I understand.”

“Derek will mostly likely spend the rest of the time in that facility.”

“Okay, Henry,” she says, like maybe now I’m rubbing it in. “I get it. How was it, seeing Alison?”

“What?”

“How does she look?”

“Uh, good,” I say. “She looks really good.”

And then somehow the conversation slips into a different key, and she’s telling me how much she always liked Alison, and we’re trading stories from old times: growing up, our first days at Grandfather’s, then later, sneaking around with dates in the basement. I’m rolling past the scenery, and for a while we’re talking like we used to talk, two kids, brother and sister, the real world.

By the time Nico and I get off the phone, I’m almost home, I’m rolling into the southern part of the Concord metro area, and my cellphone signal is still strong, so I go ahead and put through one more call.

“Mr. Dotseth?”

“Hey, kid. I heard about Detective Andreas. Christ.”

“I know. I know. Listen, I’m going to take another peek around.”

“Peek around where?”

“The house on Bow Bog Road? Where we tried to arrest a suspect yesterday in the hanger case?”

“Yeah, good collar. Except where you shot the guy to death.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, did you hear about these goofballs in Henniker? Couple of kids riding one of those two-person bikes, trailing a rolling suitcase on a bungee cord. State police pull ’em over, the suitcase is full of escopetas—those little Mexican shotguns. We’re talking fifty thousand dollars’ worth of firearms these kids are biking around with.”

“Huh.”

“Today’s prices, anyway.”

“Huh. So, Denny, I’m going to head back to that house now, give it another look.”

“Which house is that?”

The crime-scene taping job that’s been done at J. T. Toussaint’s ugly little house is clumsy and haphazard. One thin strip of yellow cellophane, run in a series of slack fluttering U’s, from porch post to porch post, then to one of the sagging branches of the oak tree, then across the lawn to the flag of the mailbox. Tied loosely at each station, half slipping, wind teased, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s birthday party decoration.

Supposedly, subsequent to yesterday’s gunplay, this house was secured and searched by a team of patrol officers, per procedure, but I have my doubts, based firstly on the lackluster nature of the crime-scene taping, secondly on the fact that, inside, nothing appears to have been moved. All of Toussaint’s battered and stained living-room furniture rests exactly where it did yesterday. It’s easy to imagine, say, Officer Michelson, enjoying an egg-and-sausage sandwich, strolling through the house’s four small rooms, lifting and dropping sofa cushions, peering in the refrigerator, yawning, calling it a day.

Six thick patches of blood form a black and rust red archipelago across the carpeted floor of the living room and the hardwood of the front hallway. My blood, from my eye; Toussaint’s, from the cut on his forehead, from the multiple gunshot wounds that killed him.

I step carefully over and around the blood, and then I stand at the center of the living room, turning in a slow circle, mentally dividing the house into quadrants, as Farley and Leonard recommend, and then I launch into a real search. I go through the house inch by inch, crawling on my belly when necessary, awkwardly shoehorning my body all the way under Toussaint’s bed. I dig a stepladder out of the cluttered closet and climb up to punch through the flimsy tiles of the ceiling, find nothing in the crawlspace but insulation fiber and ancient secret stockpiles of dust. I go through Toussaint’s bedroom closet carefully—looking for what, exactly? A rack of fancy leather belts, with one missing? A blueprint of the men’s room of the Main Street McDonald’s? I don’t know.

Anyway—pants, shirts, overalls. Two pairs of boots. Nothing.

A five percent chance is what Alison reckoned. Five percent.

A small door beside the pantry opens onto a short flight of concrete stairs, no railing, a grim basement, a single lightbulb with a length of twine as a pull-cord. Opposite a massive dead boiler is the lair of the dog: a pillow bed, a collection of chewed-up rubber toys, a food bowl licked clean, another bowl with a quarter-inch puddle of dirty water.

“Poor thing,” I say aloud, and then he appears, Houdini, as if conjured, standing at the top of the steps, a tiny scruffy mop-head of a dog, yellow teeth bared, eyes wide, white fur mottled gray.

What am I supposed to do? I find some bacon and I cook it up, and then, while Houdini is eating, I sit at the kitchen table and I imagine Peter Zell sitting across from me, glasses off and set down beside him, eyes intent on his small delicate task, carefully sniffing up the crushed white interiors of a pain pill.

And then there’s the loud bang of the front door slamming closed, and when I leap up my chair tips backward and hits the floor, a second bang, and Houdini looks up and barks and I’m running as fast as I can, through the house, flinging open the door and shouting, “Police!”

Nothing, silence, white lawn, gray clouds.

I sprint down to the road, lose and then gain my balance, sliding the last three feet as if on skis. “Police!” again, one way down the road, and then the other, breathing hard. Whoever it was is gone. They were here, in here with me this whole time, or they’ve slipped in and out again, looking for whatever it was I’m looking for, and now they’re gone.

“Shoot,” I say quietly. I turn around and stare at the ground, trying to tell the intruder’s footprints in the snow and slush from my own. Big snowflakes are tumbling down, one at a time, as if they’ve agreed in advance to take turns. My heart slowly decelerates.

Houdini is on the doorstep, licking his chops. Wants more food.

Wait, now. I tilt my head, study the house and the tree and the lawn.

“Wait.”

If Houdini lives down there with the boiler, what’s in the doghouse?

The answer is simple: it’s pills. Pills and a whole lot of other stuff.

Manila mailing envelopes crammed full with pill bottles, each bottle containing several dozen thirty- or sixty-milligram tablets, each tablet stamped with the name of the medication or the manufacturer. Most of the pills are MS Contin, but there are others: Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Lidocaine. Six of the thick mailing envelopes in total, hundreds of pills in each. There’s a small carton filled with small white wax papers; a pill crusher, the kind you get at the drug store; in another box, wrapped in a baggie, inside a paper bag from Market Basket, a snub-nose automatic pistol, which in today’s environment must be worth several thousand dollars. There are vials of dark-colored liquid and several dozen syringes wrapped individually in crinkly plastic packaging. In another Market Basket bag is cash, fat bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

Two thousand. Three thousand.

I stop counting after five thousand. My hands are trembling, so I can’t count it all, but it’s a lot.

Then I limp back to the car again for a roll of crime-scene tape, and I wind it all the way around, secure it properly, tight and taut. Houdini trots along with me around the perimeter, and then stands next to me, panting, and I don’t invite him into the Impala, but I don’t stop him from getting in, either.

“Stretch. My brother. You’re never going to believe this.” McGully is at the window, it’s slightly cracked, there’s a sweet and heavy smell in the room. “So these jokers up in Henniker are on ten-speeds, they’re towing a rolling suitcase—”

“I heard.”

“Oh,” he says. “Ruin it.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“A little bit, yeah, I am. It’s been a hard week. I shot a guy, remember? You want?”

“No, thanks.”

I tell him about my haul from Toussaint’s house, tell him how I’ve discovered that there’s more to the story, much more. He listens with glazed eyes, and occasionally he takes a deep pull from the tiny rolled-up twist of paper, blowing smoke out the crack in the window. Culverson is nowhere to be seen, Andreas’s desk is empty, computer monitor turned to face the wall, phone unplugged. It feels like it’s been empty for years.

“So the scumbag was lying,” is McGully’s conclusion. “I could have told you that. He’s a drug dealer, he got his buddy hooked, and then his buddy killed himself.”

“Well, except it’s true that Zell was the one who brought Toussaint drugs in the first place. He stole his sister’s prescription pad.”

“Oh. Huh.” He grins, scratches his chin. “Oh, wait—you know what? Who gives a shit.”

“Yep,” I say. “Good point.”

“Whoa. Is that the fucking dog from the crime scene?”

“Maybe…” I say, and McGully says, “Maybe what?” and now I’m pacing vigorously, the dog is pacing, too, in my footsteps. “Maybe what happens is, Peter brings Toussaint pills in June. They hang out, they get high, and then after Peter gets caught and quits, J. T. keeps it going. Maybe at some point he started selling the overflow, and now he’s gotten used to the cash, he’s put a customer base together. So he finds himself a new source.”

“Yes!” says McGully exuberantly, and pounds his fist on the table. “Probably the same person who tried to murder you with your snow chains.”

I look at him and he’s clearly making fun of me. I sit back down in my chair.

No use telling McGully about the slamming front door back at the house on Bow Bog Road, because he will say I’m imagining things, or that it was a ghost, and I know that I am not, and it was not. Someone tried to stop me from finding those drugs, and it wasn’t J. T. Toussaint, because Toussaint is lying dead in the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital.

Houdini sniffs around under Andreas’s desk, settles in for a nap. My cell phone rings.

“Hello? Detective Palace?”

It’s Naomi Eddes, and she sounds nervous, and at the sound of her voice I feel nervous, too, like a kid.

“Yep. This is me. Hi.”

I can feel McGully looking at me, so I stand up from my desk, step over to the window.

“What’s up?”

“I just—” The phone crackles for a second, and my heart leaps in terror against the possibility that I’ve lost the connection.

“Ms. Eddes?”

“I’m here. I just—I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case.”

2.

“Good evening,” she says, and I say, “Good evening,” and then we spend a second or two looking at each other. Naomi Eddes is in a bright red dress with black buttons running down the center of it. I look terrible, I’m sure. I’m wishing now I had stopped to change from my day-at-the-office, my gray jacket and blue tie, to something more appropriate for dinner with a lady. Truth is, all my jackets are gray, all my ties are blue.

Eddes lives in a neighborhood in Concord Heights, south of Airport Road, a new development where all the streets are named for fruits, and where the asteroid recession took hold halfway through construction. She’s on Pineapple, and everything from Kiwi moving westward is half finished: bare wooden frames like dug-up dinosaur bones, half-tiled roofs, vandalized interiors, never-used kitchens stripped for copper and brass.

“You can’t come in,” she says, and steps out onto the front stoop, her peacoat draped over her arm, tugging a hat down over her bald head. It’s a kind of hat I’ve never seen before, a kind of girl-style trilby hat. “Place is a mess. Where are we going?”

“You said—” she’s walking to my car, I follow her, slipping a little on a patch of black ice on the driveway, “—you said you might have information relevant to my case. To Peter’s death.”

“I do,” she says. “I mean, I think I do. Not information. Just, like, an idea. What happened to your face?”

“Long story.”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“That’s good.”

It’s true, my wounded eye has been fine all day, but as I’m saying the word no an intense pulse of pain seizes the right side of my face, radiating outward from the eyehole, as if the injury is punishing me for lying. I blink the good eye, endure a wave of nausea, and find Naomi standing at the shotgun door in an old-fashioned way, waiting for me to open it for her, and I do, and by the time I come around to my side and slide in, she’s reaching for the dashboard computer with fascination, almost but not quite touching the screen.

“So, what is your idea?”

“How does this work?”

“It’s just a computer. You can keep track of where every other member of the force is, at any given time.”

“What does WC stand for?”

“Watch Commander. What’s the idea you had, about the case?”

“It’s probably nothing.”

“Okay.”

She’s looking out the window, or at her own ghostly reflection in the window glass. “Why don’t we talk about it at dinner?”

Eddes vetoes the Somerset Diner out of hand, and basically what’s left are the bars and the pirated fast-food joints and the Panera. I’ve heard of a fine-dining place still open in Boston where the owners have bribed their way out of price controls, where you can get the whole white-tablecloth experience, but from what people say, it would cost all the money I’ve got left.

Naomi and I end up at Mr. Chow’s, looking at each other over a pot of steaming jasmine tea across a grease-stained linoleum table.

“So how’s it going?”

“What?”

“Sorry, how would you say it, in cop language?” A small teasing smile. “What is the status of the case?”

“Well, we did, actually, apprehend a suspect.”

“You did? And how did that go?”

“Fine.”

I could tell her more, but I don’t. The suspect attacked me with a scale model of the New Hampshire state house. The suspect was a drug dealer, and either was supplying or was supplied by the victim. The suspect is dead. Ms. Eddes seems satisfied not to know, and anyway our food comes quickly, a massive lazy Susan laden with dumplings, soups, and cashew chicken. The words Chow! Chow! flash in pink neon on the window just past our table.

“What was your idea about the case?”

“You know what?

“What?”

I knew she was going to do this. Put it off, delay, elide. I feel oddly as if I know her so well.

“Let’s have an hour.”

“An hour?”

“Henry, please, I really…”

She looks at me with clear-eyed sincerity, her face washed of all her teasing swagger. I like it intensely, that clear-eyed face, her pale cheeks, the symmetry of her shaved head. “I know I called because I said I had something to tell you. But to tell you the truth, I was also thinking how much I would love to just, you know, just eat dinner with a human being.”

“Sure.”

“You know? Have a normal conversation. Eat dinner without talking about death.”

“Sure,” I say again.

“To the extent that this activity is still possible, I would like to try it.”

“Sure.”

She lifts her wrist, slim and pale, undoes the little silver buckle of her watch, and places it on the table between us. “One hour of normalcy. Deal?”

I reach out and let my hand rest for one moment, over hers.

“Deal.”

And so we do, we sit there and we eat what is really pretty mediocre Chinese food and we speak about normal things.

We talk about the world we grew up in, the strange old world from before, about music and movies and television shows from ten and fifteen years ago, ’N Sync and Beverly Hills, 90210 and The Real World and Titanic.

Naomi Eddes, at it turns out, was born and raised in a suburb called Gaithersburg, in Maryland, what she calls America’s Least Remarkable State. Then she went to community college for a couple of semesters, dropped out to be the lead singer in a “terrible but well-meaning” punk-rock band, and then, when she figured out what she really wanted to do, she moved to New York City to finish her bachelor’s and get a master’s degree. I like hearing her talk when she gets going, there’s music in it.

“What was it? What you really wanted to do?

“Poetry.” She sips her tea. “I wanted to write poems, and not just in my little journal in my room. I wanted to write good poems, and publish them. Still do, in fact.”

“No kidding.”

“Yes, sir. So, I got into school, went to New York, I waited tables, I saved my pennies. Ate ramen noodles. All the things you do. And I know what you’re thinking.

“What’s that?”

“All this, and now she works in insurance.”

“Nope. Not what I’m thinking at all.”

What I’m actually thinking, as I organize a tangle of thick noodles onto my chopsticks, is that this is the sort of person I’ve always admired: the person with a difficult goal who takes the necessary steps to achieve it. I mean, sure, it’s easy to do what you’ve always wanted to do, now.

The little hand on Naomi’s watch makes its way around to the hour, and slips past it, and the lazy Susan gets empty, stray noodles and empty soy-sauce packets littering our plates like shed snakeskins, and now I’m telling her my whole story: my father the professor, my mother who worked at the police station, the whole bit, how they were killed when I was twelve years old.

“They were both killed?” asks Naomi.

“Yeah. Yep. Yeah.”

She puts down her chopsticks, and I think, oh hell.

I don’t know why I told the story. I lift the teapot, dribble out the dregs, Naomi is silent, and I cast about the room for our waitress, motioning with my hands at the empty pot.

You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they’re doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there. So I haven’t mentioned it to a new person in years—don’t mention it as a rule—I am not a fan of people having opinions about the whole thing—not a fan, generally, of people having opinions about me at all.

Naomi Eddes, however, to her credit, when she speaks she just says, “Whoa.” There is no glimmer of scandalized fascination in her eyes, no attempt at “understanding.” Just that breathy and honest little syllable, whoa.

“So, your parents are murdered, and you dedicate your life to fighting crime. Like Batman.”

“Yep,” I say, and I smile at her, dip my last dumpling into a row-boat of ginger-scallion sauce. “Like Batman.”

They come and clear away the lazy Susan and we go on talking, the neon flashing and flashing and finally flickering off, the ancient married couple who run Mr. Chow’s coming around with the long push brooms, just like in the movies, and then, at last, they lift the chairs around us onto the tables, and we go.

“Okay, Detective Palace. Do you know what a contestability clause is?”

“No, I do not.”

“Well, it’s kind of interesting. Maybe not. You tell me.”

Naomi adjusts herself in her folding beach chair, trying to get comfortable. I would apologize again for the fact that my living room has no proper furniture, just a set of beach chairs in a semicircle around a milk carton, except that I’ve already apologized repeatedly, and Naomi told me to stop.

“The contestability clause in a life-insurance policy means that if a policy is taken out and the subject dies within two years, for any reason, the company gets to investigate the circumstances of death before paying out.”

“Okay,” I say. “Do a lot of life-insurance policies have these clauses?”

“Oh, yeah,” says Naomi. “They all do.”

I refill her wine.

“And are they being enforced?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Huh,” I say, scratching my mustache.

“Tell you the truth, people with Merrimack policies are lucky,” says Naomi, “because a lot of the bigger companies are totally frozen shut; they’re not paying out at all. What Merrimack is saying is, yes, you can get your money, because we issued the policy and that was the deal, asteroid or no asteroid, basically. The big boss, in Omaha, has a Jesus thing, I believe.”

“Right,” I say. “Right, right.” Houdini comes in, sniffs the floor, stares suspiciously at Naomi, and darts out again. I’ve made a bed for him in the bathroom, just an old sleeping bag I cut open, a bowl for water.

“But the company line is, we’re going to make absolutely sure that we’re not being bilked, because a lot of people are cheating. I mean, what an easy way to get squared away until the end, right? Fake Mom’s death, big payday, off to the Bahamas. So that’s the policy, right now.”

“What is?”

“Investigate every claim. Every contestable claim, we’re contesting.”

I stop, the wine bottle frozen in my hand, and suddenly I’m thinking, Palace, you dunce. You total dunce. Because I’m picturing the boss, pale jowly Gompers, settled in his big chair, telling me that Palace wasn’t doing actuarial work anymore at the time that he died. No one’s buying life insurance, so there’s no data to analyze, no tables of data to draw up. So Zell, like everyone else in that office, was working on clearing suspicious insurance claims.

“It’s kind of harsh policy, when you think about it,” Naomi is saying, “for all the people who weren’t committing insurance fraud, whose husband or whoever really did kill himself, and now they’re going to wait an extra month, two months, for the cash? Brutal.”

“Right, right,” I say, mind rolling, thinking about Peter, Peter in the McDonald’s, his eyes bugging out. All along the answer was right there. The first day of my investigation, the first witness I interviewed, it was laid at my feet.

“What I’m wondering is,” Naomi says, and I’m right there with her, “I’m wondering if maybe Peter found out something, or he was close to finding out something.… I don’t know. It sounds silly. He stumbled into something, and it got him killed?”

“Doesn’t sound silly at all.”

Not at all. Motive. It sounds like motive. Palace, you total absolute dunce.

“Okay,” I say to Naomi, sit down in the chair across from her. “Tell me more.”

She does; she tells me more about the kinds of cases that Peter was working on, most likely, insurable-interest cases, where a policy isn’t taken out by a person on another person, but by an organization on a person. A company takes out a policy on its executive director, or its CEO, hedging the risk of financial calamity should that key individual die. I sit down to listen, but then it turns out it’s hard to pay attention while sitting down—given the wine, given the late hour, given the redness of Naomi’s lips and the pale luminescence of her scalp in the moonlight—so I get up, I’m pacing around the room, from the small television to the door of the kitchen, Naomi with her head craned back, watching me pace with an arch, amused expression.

“Is this how you stay so thin?”

“It helps,” I say. “I need to see what he was working on.”

“Okay.”

“His office—” I close my eyes, think back. “There was no inbox, no pile of active files.”

“No,” says Naomi. “No, since we stopped using the computers, and everything was on paper. Gompers came up with this whole annoying system. Or maybe the regional office did, I don’t know. But every day, at the end of the day, what you’re working on goes back in the filing cabinets. You pick it up in the morning.”

“Is it filed by worker?”

“What do you mean?”

“Would all of Peter’s files be together?”

“Huh. You know—I don’t know.”

“Okay,” I say, and I grin, my cheeks flushed, my eyes flashing. “I like this. This is good.”

“What a funny person you are,” she says, and I sort of can’t believe that she’s real, she’s sitting in my house, on my crappy old beach chair in her red dress with the black buttons.

“I do, I like this. Maybe I’ll make a midlife career change,” I say. “Try my luck in the insurance biz. I’ve got the rest of my life ahead of me, right?”

Naomi doesn’t laugh. She stands up. “No. No. Not you. You’re a policeman through and through, Hank,” she says. She looks at me, right up at my face, and I stoop a little and look right back, I’m suddenly thinking to myself, fiercely, painfully, that this is it. I will never fall in love again. This will be the last time.

“You’ll be standing there when the asteroid comes down, with one hand out, yelling, Stop! Police!”

I don’t know what to say to that, I really don’t.

I stoop a little, and she cranes her neck upward, and we kiss very slowly, as if we have all the time in the world. Halfway through the kiss the dog pads in, nuzzles against my leg, and I sort of gently kick him away. Naomi reaches up and puts a hand around my neck, her fingers drifting down beneath the collar of my shirt.

When we’re done with the kiss, we kiss again, harder, an onrush of urgency, and when we pull apart again Naomi suggests that we go into the bedroom, and I apologize because I don’t have a real bed, just a mattress on the floor. I haven’t gotten around to buying one yet, and she asks how long I’ve been living here and I say five years.

“You’re probably not ever going to get around to it, then,” she murmurs, pulling me to her, and I whisper, “You’re probably right,” pulling her down.

Much later, in the darkness, sleep starting to seep into our eyelids, I whisper to Naomi, “What kind of poetry?”

“Villanelles,” she whispers in return, and I say I don’t know what that means.

“A villanelle is a poem of nineteen lines,” she says, still hushed, murmuring into my neck. “Five tercets, each composed of three rhymed lines. And the first and last lines of the first tercet return over and over again, over the course of the poem, as the last line of each of the subsequent tercets.”

“Okay,” I say, not really registering all of that, more focused on the soft electric presence of her lips on my neck.

“It ends with a quatrain, which is four rhymed lines, with the second two lines of the quatrain again repeating the first and last lines of the first tercet.”

“Oh,” I say, and then, “I’m going to need an example.”

“There are a lot of really good ones.”

“Tell me one of the ones you’re writing.”

Her laugh is a small warm gust into my collarbone. “I’m only writing one, and it’s not done.”

“You’re only writing one?”

“One great one. Before October. That’s my plan.”

“Oh.”

We’re still and quiet then, for a moment.

“Here,” she says. “I’ll tell you a famous one.”

“I don’t want the famous one. I want yours.”

“It’s by Dylan Thomas. You’ve probably heard of it. It’s been in the newspaper a lot lately.”

I’m shaking my head. “I try not to read the papers too much.”

“You’re a strange man, Detective Palace.”

“People tell me that.”

At some point late, late at night, I drift awake and there’s Naomi standing in the doorframe, in only her underwear, slipping the red dress on over her head. She sees me watching and pauses, smiles, unembarrassed, and finishes dressing. I can see, even in the pale light from the hallway, that the lipstick is scrubbed from her lips. She looks shorn and lovely, like something newborn.

“Naomi?”

“Hey, Henry.” She closes her eyes. “Something.” Opens her eyes. “One more thing.”

I make my hand a visor against the moonlight, trying to see her clearly. The bedsheets are scrunched up against my chest, my legs are spilling slightly over the edge of the mattress.

She sits on the bed, down by my feet with her back to me.

“Naomi?”

“Forget it.”

She shakes her head rapidly, stands again, speaks, a rush of words in the near darkness. “Henry, just know that no matter what else—no matter how this ends—this was all real and good and right.”

“Well, sure,” I say. “Yeah. Yes.”

“Real and good and right, and I won’t forget it,” she says. “Okay? No matter how it ends.”

“Okay,” I say.

She leans over me and kisses me hard on the lips, and she goes.

3.

“Palace.”

“What?” I say, sitting up, looking around. “Hello?”

I’m so used to being woken from a dream by the telephone that it takes me a moment to realize that I was dreaming not of Alison Koechner but of Naomi Eddes, and then it’s the next moment that I figure out that it was not a dream, not this time—Naomi was real, is real, and then I look around for her, and she’s gone. My shades are open, the winter sun is sending wavering yellow rectangles across the crumpled sheets on my old mattress, and there is a woman on my phone yelling at me.

“Are you familiar with the current statutory penalties for impersonating a state official?”

Oh, God. Oh, no. Fenton.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

The blood, the vial of blood. Hazen Road.

“Well, I’ll quote them for you.”

“Dr. Fenton.”

“Impersonating a state official carries a sentence of ten to twenty-five years and is prosecuted under Title VI, meaning automatic imprisonment pending trial, which will never occur.”

“I know that.”

“The same penalty pertains for impeding a criminal investigation.”

“Can I explain?”

“No, thanks. But if you’re not at the morgue in twenty minutes, you’re going to jail.”

I take two minutes to get dressed and two minutes to remove and replace the wad of paper towels over my eye. Before I close my front door, I take a look around: the beach chairs, the empty bottle of wine. No sign of Naomi’s clothes, of her pocketbook, her coat, no traces of her boot heels on the rug. No trace of her scent.

It happened, though. Close my eyes and I can feel it, the trace of her finger tickling the back of my neck, drawing me in. No dream.

Twenty minutes, Fenton said, and she was not kidding. I push the speed limit all the way to Concord Hospital.

Fenton is precisely as she was when I saw her last, alone with her rolling cart of medical equipment in the stark cold brightness of the morgue. The steel drawers with their gray handles, the strange sad locker room of the damned.

I walk in and she looks at her watch. “Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds.”

“Dr. Fenton, I hope that you—I hope—listen—” There are tears in my voice, somehow, for some reason. I clear my throat. I am trying to formulate an explanation that will satisfy, trying to explain how I could have stolen blood and had it tested under false pretenses—how sure I was that this was a drugs case, how imperative it was to prove or disprove that Peter Zell was an addict—and of course now it doesn’t matter, turns out never to have mattered, it was about insurance claims, about insurance all along—and I am meanwhile melting under the combined effect of her glare and the brightness of the lights—and there, too, is Peter, she’s taken his body out of its drawer and laid it on the cold slab of the mortuary table, stone dead and staring straight up into the lights.

“I’m sorry,” is all I can muster, at last. “I’m really sorry, Dr. Fenton.”

“Yes.” Her face is neutral, impassive, behind the perfect O’s of her glasses. “Me, too.”

“What?”

“I said that I am also sorry, and if you think I’m going to say it a third time, you are deeply mistaken.”

“I don’t understand.”

Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. “These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”

“In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.

“This man was murdered.”

My mouth drops open, and I can’t help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. “I knew it. Oh, my God, I knew it all along.”

Fenton pushes up her glasses slightly where they have slipped down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. “First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”

“I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see Distant Pale Glimmers. They had a bunch of beers.

“Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, “were significant traces of a controlled substance.”

“Right,” I say, nodding, mind buzzing, one step ahead of her. “Morphine.”

“No,” says Fenton, and looks up at me, curious, surprised, a little irritated. “Morphine? No. No traces of opiates of any kind. What he had in his system was a chemical compound called gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.”

I squint over her shoulder at the lab report, a thin sheet of paper, decorated with calculations, checked-off boxes, someone’s precise backward-slanting handwriting. “I’m sorry. What kind of acid?”

“GHB.”

“You mean—the date-rape drug?”

“Stop talking, Detective,” says Fenton, pulling on a pair of clear latex gloves. “Come here and help me turn over the body.”

We slip our fingers under his back and carefully lift Peter Zell and flip him over onto his stomach, and then we’re looking at the broad paleness of his back, the flesh spreading away from the spine. Fenton fits into her eye a small lens, like a jeweler’s glass, reaches up to adjust the hallucinogenically bright lamp overhanging the autopsy table, aiming it at a blotchy brown bruise on the back of Zell’s left calf, just above the ankle.

“Look familiar?” she says, and I peer forward.

I’m still thinking about GHB. I need a notebook, I need to write all this down. I need to think. Naomi stopped in the doorway of my bedroom, she almost said something, and then she changed her mind and slipped away. I experience a pang of longing so strong that it momentarily buckles my knees, and I lean against the table, grasp it with both hands.

Easy, Palace.

“This is what I really have to apologize for,” she says flatly. “In my rush to conclude an obvious suicide case I failed to make thorough survey of the things that could cause a ring of bruises above a person’s ankle.”

“Okay. And so…” I stop talking. I don’t know what she means at all.

“At some point in the hours before he ended up where you found him, this man was knocked unconscious and dragged by the leg.”

I look at her, unable to speak.

“Probably to the trunk of a car,” she continues, placing the paper back on the cart. “Probably to be taken to the scene, and hanged. Like I said, I have significantly revised my understanding of this case.”

I catch an inward glimpse of Peter Zell’s dead eyes, the glasses, disappearing into the darkness of the trunk of a car.

“Do you have any questions?” Fenton asks.

I have nothing but questions.

“What about his eye?”

“What?”

“The other cluster of old bruises. On his cheek, below his right eye. He apparently reported that he fell down some stairs. Is that possible?”

“Possible, but unlikely.”

“And are you sure there was no morphine in his system? Are you sure he wasn’t using it the night he died?”

“Yes. Nor for at least three months beforehand.”

I have to rethink this whole thing, go over it again from top to bottom. Rethink the timeline, rethink Toussaint, rethink Peter Zell. Having been right all along, having guessed correctly that he was murdered, provides no joy, no powerful self-righteous rush. To the contrary, I feel confused—sad—uncertain. I feel like I’ve been thrown in a trunk, like I’m surrounded by darkness, peering up toward a crack of daylight. On my way out of the morgue I stop at the small black door with the cross on it, and I reach out and run my fingers along the symbol, remembering that so many people are feeling so awful these days that they had to close down this little room, move the nightly worship service to a bigger space, elsewhere in the building. That’s just how things are.

As soon as I step outside into the Concord Hospital parking lot, my phone rings.

“Jesus, Hank, where have you been?”

“Nico?”

It’s hard to hear her, there’s a loud noise in the background, a kind of roar.

“I need you to listen to me closely, please.”

The noise is intense behind her, like wind whipping through an open window. “Nico, are you on a highway?”

It’s too loud in the parking lot. I turn around and go back into the lobby.

“Henry, listen.”

The wind behind her is growing louder, and I’m starting to hear the distinct menacing whine of sirens, a distant shrieking mixed in with the whoosh and howl of the wind. I’m trying to place the sound of the sirens, those aren’t CPD sirens. Are they state cars? I don’t know—what are federal marshals driving right now?

“Nico, where are you?”

“I am not leaving you behind.”

“What on Earth are you talking about?

Her voice is stiff as steel; it’s her voice but not her voice, like my sister is reading lines from a script. The roar behind her stops abruptly, and I hear a door slam, I hear feet running.

“Nico!”

“I’ll be back. I’m not leaving you behind.”

The line goes dead. Silence.

I drive 125 miles an hour at full code all the way to the New Hampshire National Guard station, running the dashboard emitter to turn the red lights green as I go, burning precious gasoline like a forest fire.

The steering wheel shudders in my hands, and I’m shouting at myself full volume, stupid stupid stupid, should have told her, why didn’t I tell her? I should have just told her every single thing that Alison had told me: Derek had lied to her all along about what he was mixed up in, where he was going; he had gotten himself mixed up in this secret-society nonsense; the government considered him a terrorist, a violent criminal, and if she persisted in trying to be with him, she would end up with the same fate.

I make a fist, pound it into the steering wheel. I should have just told her, how little it was worth it, to sacrifice herself for him.

I call Alison Koechner’s office, and of course there’s no answer. I try to call back, and the phone fails, and I hurl it angrily into the backseat.

“God damn it.”

Now she’s going to do something stupid, get herself shot up by military police, get herself thrown in the brig for the duration, right alongside that moron.

I squeal to a halt at the entrance of NGNH, and I’m gibbering like an idiot to the guard at the gate.

“Hey! Hey, excuse me. My name is Henry Palace, I’m a detective, and I think my sister is in here.”

The guard says nothing. It’s a different guard than was at the front the last time.

“My sister’s husband was in jail here, and I think my sister is here and I need to find her.”

The gate guard’s expression doesn’t change. “We are holding no prisoners at present.”

“What? Yes—oh, hey. Hi. Hello?”

I’m waving my hands, both hands over my head, here comes someone I recognize. It’s the tough reservist who was guarding the brig when I came to interview Derek, the woman in camouflage who waited impassively in the hallway while I tried to get some sense out of him.

“Hey,” I say. “I need to see the prisoner.”

She marches right over to us, to where I’m standing, halfway out of the car, the car in park, stopped at a crazy angle, engine running, by the entrance gatehouse. “Excuse me? Hi. I need to see that prisoner again. I’m sorry, I don’t have an appointment. It’s urgent. I’m a policeman.”

“What prisoner?”

“I’m a detective.” I stop, take a breath. “What did you say?”

She must to have known I was here, must have seen the car pull up in a monitor or something, and come out to the gate. The thought is strangely chilling.

“I said, what prisoner?”

I stop talking, look from the reservist to the gatehouse guard. They’re both standing there staring at me, both with their hands on the butts of the machine guns slung around their necks. What is going on here? is what I’m thinking. Nico’s not here. There are no sirens, no frantic alarms sounding. Just a distant rotor hum; somewhere close by, somewhere on this sprawling campus, a helicopter is taking off or landing.

“The kid. The prisoner. The kid who was here, the one with the silly dreadlocks, who was in the…” I gesture vaguely in the direction of the brig facility. “In the cell there.”

“I don’t know what individual to whom you are referring,” answers the guard.

“Yeah, but you do,” I say, staring back at her dumbly. “You were there.”

The soldier never takes her eyes off mine as she slowly raises the machine gun to waist level. The second soldier, the gatehouse man, lifts his AK-47, too, and now it’s two soldiers with guns angled upward, the butts of the guns nestled into their waists and the barrels aimed directly at the center of my chest. And it doesn’t matter that I’m a cop, and these are United States soldiers, that we’re all peacekeepers, there is nothing in the world to stop these two from shooting me dead.

“There was no young man here.”

As soon as I am back in the car, the phone rings, and I scrabble around on the backseat, frantic, until I find it.

“Nico? Hello?”

“Whoa. Easy. It’s Culverson.”

“Oh.” I breathe. “Detective.”

“Listen, I think you mentioned a young woman named Naomi Eddes. From your hanger investigation?”

My heart jerks and leaps in my chest, bouncing like a fish on a line.

“Yeah?”

“McConnell just found her, up in the Water West Building. In this insurance office.”

“What do you mean, McConnell found her?”

“I mean, she’s dead. You want to come and see?”