The Last Policeman

1.

The best thing I can do at present, in this cramped and narrow storeroom with the low tile ceiling and the three rows of long gray-steel filing cabinets, is concentrate on the facts. This, after all, is the appropriate role for the junior detective who has been called to the scene of the crime, as a courtesy, by his more senior colleague.

This is not my murder, it is Detective Culverson’s murder, and so all I’m doing is, I’m standing just inside the door of the dim room, staying out of his way, out of Officer McConnell’s way. It was my witness, but it’s not my corpse.

So—the victim is a Caucasian female in her mid-twenties wearing a brown wool houndstooth skirt, light brown pumps, black stockings, and a crisp white blouse with the sleeves rolled up. The victim bears a number of distinguishing physical characteristics. Around each wrist there is a wreath of tattoos of art-deco roses; there are multiple piercings along the rim of each ear, and a small gold stud in one nostril; her head is shaved, with a light blonde fuzz just beginning to grow in. The body is slumped in the northeast corner of the room. There are no signs of sexual assault, nor indeed of a physical altercation of any kind—except of course for the gunshot wound, which appears almost certainly to have been the cause of death.

A single gunshot wound to the center forehead, which has left a ragged hole just above and to the right of the victim’s left eye.

“Well, it’s not a suicide by hanging,” says Denny Dotseth, appearing at my elbow, chuckling. Mustache, broad grin, coffee in a paper cup. “Kind of refreshing, isn’t it?”

“Morning, Denny,” says Culverson, “come on in,” and Dotseth steps around me, the small room getting busier, more crowded, coffee smell coming off Dotseth, the smell of Culverson’s pipe tobacco, small twists of rug fiber drifting and floating in the dim light, my stomach rising and churning.

Focus, Detective Palace. Easy.

The room is a slim rectangle, six feet by ten, empty of decoration. No furniture except the three rows of squat steel filing cabinets. The lights are flickering a little, two long parallel fluorescent bulbs in a low-hung dusty fixture. The victim is slumped against one of those cabinets, which is slightly ajar, and she died on her knees, head tilted back, eyes open, suggesting that she died facing her killer, perhaps pleading for her life.

I did this. The details are unclear.

But this is my fault.

Easy, Palace. Focus.

Culverson murmuring to Dotseth, Dotseth nodding, chuckling, McConnell scribbling in her notebook.

There is a spray of blood, an upside-down crescent, fanned on the plaster wall behind the victim, unevenly mottled pinks and reds in a seashell pattern. Culverson, with Dotseth hovering over him, kneels and gently eases the victim’s head forward and finds the exit wound. The bullet smashed through the fragile porcelain of her skull, just there, between the eyes, ripped through her brain, and burst out again through the back. That’s how it looks, Fenton will tell us for sure. I turn away, look out into the hallway. Three Merrimack Life and Fire employees are huddled at the end of the hall, where it bends toward the front door of the suite. They see me looking, look back, hushed, and I turn back into the room.

“Okay,” says Culverson. “Killer enters here, the victim is down here.”

He rises, walks back to where I am at the door, and then back to the body, slow movements, considering.

“Maybe she’s looking for something in the file cabinet?” says McConnell, and Culverson says, “Maybe.” I’m thinking, yes, looking for something in the file cabinet. Dotseth sips his coffee, makes a satisfied “ah” noise, Culverson continues.

“Killer makes a noise, maybe announces himself. Victim turns.”

He’s acting it out, playing both parts. He tilts his head first this way, then that, imagining, reenacting, approximating the movements. McConnell is writing it all down, taking furious notes in her spiral flip-top notebook, a great detective someday.

“Killer crouches, the victim backs up, into the corner—the gun is fired—”

Culverson stands in the doorway and makes his hand into a gun and pulls the imaginary trigger, and then with his forefinger he traces the journey of the bullet, all the way across the room, stopping just shy of the entrance wound, where the real bullet continued, penetrated the skull. “Hm,” he says.

McConnell, meanwhile, is peering into the filing cabinet. “It’s empty,” she says. “This one drawer. Cleaned out.”

Culverson bends to check it out. I stay where I am.

“So what are we thinking?” says Dotseth mildly. “One of these ancient-grudge cases? Kill her before she dies, kind of thing? You hear about the guy who hung himself in his fourth-grade classroom?”

“I did,” says Culverson, looking around the room.

I keep my focus on the victim. The bullet hole looks like a crater torn in the sphere of her skull. I lean against the doorjamb, struggle for breath.

“So, Officer,” says Culverson, and McConnell says, “Yes, sir?”

“Talk to all these mopes.” He jerks a thumb out into the office. “Then go through the building, floor by floor, starting here and working your way down.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Interview that old guy at the front desk. Someone saw the killer come in.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Wowie wowie wow,” says Dotseth, talking through a small yawn. “A full investigation. At—what are we? Six months to go? Color me impressed.”

“It’s the kid,” says Culverson, and since he’s down on his knees now, hunting the rug for the spent casing, it takes me a second to realize he means me. “He’s keeping us honest.”

I’m watching a silent movie in my head, a woman looking for a file, slim fingers walking across the tabs, a sudden click of a door opening behind her. She turns—her eyes widen—bam!

“Skip the manager, Officer McConnell. The guy who called this in. I’ll talk to him.” Culverson flips searchingly through his book.

“Gompers,” I say.

“Gompers, right,” he says. “You’ll join me?”

“Yeah.” I stop, grit my teeth. “No.”

“Palace?”

I feel bad. A kind of pressure, a horror, is inflating itself in my lungs, like I swallowed a balloon full of something, some kind of gas, a poison. My heart is slamming repeatedly against my ribcage, like a desperate prisoner hurling himself rhythmically against the concrete door of his cell.

“No, thank you.”

“You all right there, son?” Dotseth takes a step back from me, like I may vomit on his shoes. McConnell has scooted behind Naomi’s body, she’s running her fingers along the wall.

“You gotta—” I drag a hand across my forehead, discover that it’s slick and clammy. My wounded eye socket is throbbing. “Ask Gompers about the files in this drawer.”

“Of course,” says Culverson.

“We need copies of everything that would have been in that drawer.”

“Sure.”

“We need to know what’s missing.”

“Hey, look,” says McConnell. She’s got the bullet. She pries it from the wall behind Naomi’s skull, and I turn and flee. I stumble down the hallway, find the stairwell, and then I take the stairs two at a time, then three, hurling downward, and I kick open the door, spilling into the lobby, out onto the sidewalk, heaving breaths.

Bam!

All of this, all of it, what did I think? You go into this hall of mirrors, you chase these clues—a belt, a note, a corpse, a bruise, a file—one thing and then the next, it’s this giddy game that you enter into, and you just stay down there, in the hall of mirrors, forever. I’m sitting up here at the counter because I couldn’t face my usual booth, where I sat with Naomi Eddes over lunch and she told me about Peter Zell’s secrets, his addiction, his grim fleeting joking fantasy about killing himself in the Main Street McDonald’s.

The music drifting from the kitchen of the Somerset is nothing I recognize, and it is not to my taste. Pounding and electronic, keyboard-driven, a lot of shrill beeps and whistles and hoots.

My notebooks are lined up in front of me, six pale-blue rectangles in a neat row like tarot cards. I’ve been staring at their covers for an hour, not interested, unable to open them and read the history of my failure. But I can’t help it, the thoughts keep coming, one fact after another shuffling across my brain, like grim refugees trudging along with their packs.

Peter Zell was not a suicide. He was murdered. Fenton confirmed it.

Naomi Eddes was murdered, too. Shot through the head while looking for insurance files, the files that we talked about together last night.

She sat at the foot of my bed before she left; she was going to tell me something and then she stopped herself and went home.

He told her about the McDonald’s: if he was going to kill himself, that’s where he would do it. But he’d told his sister the same thing. Who knows who else?

Sixty-milligram bottles of MS Contin, in a bag, in a doghouse.

I’m dimly aware of a cup of coffee growing cold in front of me on the counter, dimly aware of the television floating above me, bolted high on a metal arm. A newsman stands in front of some kind of palace, speaking in agitated tones about “a minor confrontation beginning to assume the dimensions of a crisis.”

Peter Zell and J. T. Toussaint, Detective Andreas, Naomi Eddes.

“All right, honey,” says Ruth-Ann, apron, order pad, one fist around the handle of a coffeepot.

“What’s this music?” I say. “Where’s Maurice?”

“He quit,” she says. “You look terrible.”

“I know. More coffee, please.”

And then, too, there is my baby sister. Missing, possibly dead, possibly in jail. Another catastrophe I failed to predict or prevent.

The television now shows jerky footage of a line of South Asian men behind a table, green military uniforms with gold epaulets, one of them speaking sternly into a microphone. A guy two stools down from me makes an agitated harumph. I take him in, a soft middle-aged man in a Harley jacket, a thick mustache and beard; he says, “You mind?” I shrug, and he climbs up onto the counter, balances awkwardly on his knees to change the channel.

My phone is shivering.

Culverson.

“Hey, Detective.”

“How you feeling, Henry?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m all right.”

The Pakistanis on the TV are gone, replaced by a pitchman, grinning obscenely before a pyramid of canned food.

Culverson runs through what he’s got so far. Theodore Gompers, in his office with his bottle, heard a shot fired at around 2:15, but by his own admission he was pretty drunk, and it took him several minutes to set out in search of the noise, and then several minutes more to locate the narrow storeroom, where he found Naomi’s body and called the police at 2:26.

“What about the rest of the staff?”

“It was just Gompers in there when it happened. He’s got three other employees at present, and they were all out, enjoying a long lunch at the Barley House.”

“Bad luck.”

“Yeah.”

I stack the blue books, spread them out, shift them into a square, like a fortification around my coffee cup. Culverson is going to do a ballistics workup on the bullet—on the off chance, the way-off chance, he says, that this gun was bought legally, pre-IPSS, and we can trace it. In the corner of my eye the bearded guy in the Harley jacket mops up egg yolk with a crust of toast. The TV pitchman scornfully tosses the canned food into the garbage, and now he’s demonstrating some kind of countertop vacuum sealer, dumping a bowl of strawberries in its stainless-steel funnel. McConnell, says Culverson, canvassed the rest of the Water West Building, four stories of office suites, half of them empty, no one saw anything or heard anything strange. No one cares. The old security guard says no one came in or out that he didn’t recognize—but there are two back entrances, and one of them leads directly to the rear stairwell, and the security cameras are long gone.

More clues. More puzzles. More facts.

I stare at the TV screen, where the pitchman dumps out his cardboard carton of blueberries into the funnel and switches on the machine. My counter-mate whistles appreciatively, chuckles.

“And the uh—” I say.

And then I’m just frozen, I’m sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Casco Bay and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.

“Palace?” says Culverson.

“The files,” I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. “What about the files?”

“Ah, yes, the files,” says Culverson. “The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we’re up the metaphorical creek, on that front.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can’t tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files.”

“Bad luck,” I say, I get out a pen, I’m writing, I’m getting it all down.

“Tomorrow I’m going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give ’em the bad news, see if they know anything.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Sure.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.

He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes his head, as if to say, boy oh boy, huh? and I can tell he’s about to try to talk to me, have some sort of human moment, and I don’t have time, I can’t do it. I have work to do.

At home I peel out of the clothes I’ve been wearing all day—to the morgue, to the National Guard, to the scene of crime—and I stand in the bedroom and look around.

Last night past midnight I woke in this room, in this same darkness, and Naomi was framed in the doorway, slipping her red dress over her head in the moonlight.

I’m pacing, thinking.

She put on the dress and she sat on the mattress and she started to talk—to tell me something—but then she stopped herself, “Forget it.”

I walk slowly in a circle in my bedroom. Houdini stands in the doorway, unsure, unsettled.

Naomi started to say something, and then she stopped, and then instead she said that, no matter what happened, it was real and good and right. And she won’t forget it, no matter how it ends.

I pace in a circle, snapping my fingers, biting at the ends of my mustache. Real and good and right, no matter how it ends is what she said, but she was going to say something else, instead.

In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi’s skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth’s fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.

I wake up with the dead yellow light of the sun filling my bedroom, with the next phase of the investigation having announced itself in my head.

A tiny little thing, a little lie to follow up on.

2.

It’s not my murder, it’s Culverson’s murder, but here I go again back toward downtown, back to the Water West Building, like an animal who’s witnessed some scene of violence and keeps on restlessly returning to the place of horrid fascination. There’s some goon marching in circles around Eagle Square, big parka and a fur hat and an old-fashioned sandwich board—DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID in big cartoon bubble-letters—and he’s ringing a bell like a Salvation Army Santa Claus. “Hey,” he hollers, “do you know what time it is?” I duck my head, ignore him, push open the door.

The old guard isn’t here. I take the stairs up to the third floor, and I don’t politely call out hello from reception, I just go ahead on in and find Mr. Gompers behind his walnut desk.

“Oh,” he says, startled, and half rises, unsteadily, to take me in. “I, uh, I went over everything with the other gentleman last night. About poor Naomi.”

“Yeah,” I say. He’s graduated from a tumbler to a pint glass of gin. “Not everything, though.”

“What?”

My insides feel cold, like my organs have been removed, separated from one another, packed back inside me in mud. I slam my hands down on Gompers’s desk and lean in; he rears back, fleshy face retreating from my glare. I know what I look like. Unshaven, gaunt, the one dead eye with an uneven halo of brown puffy bruising around the clean white of the gauze.

“When I talked to you last week, you told me that the parent company in Omaha is obsessed with fraud prevention.”

“What? I don’t know,” he mumbles.

“Okay, well, here,” I say, tossing the thin blue book on the desk in front of him, and he flinches. “Read it.”

Gompers doesn’t move, so I tell him what it says. “You claimed that all your company cares about is protecting the bottom line. You said the board chairman thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven. But yesterday you told Detective Culverson that there are no duplicates of those files.”

“Yeah, see, we went to an all-paper system,” he mumbles. “The servers…” He’s not looking at me, he’s looking at a picture on his desk: the daughter, the one who went off to New Orleans.

“You’ve got the whole office checking and double-checking those claims, there’s no computer backup, and you’re telling me there’s no hard copies being made? No duplicate set squirreled away somewhere?”

“Well. I mean…” Gompers looks out his window, and then back at me, steeling himself to make one more run at it. “No, I’m sorry, there’s—”

I grab the glass from his hand and I hurl it against the window pane and it explodes and rains ice and gin and chips of glass onto the rug. Gompers stares at me, gaping like a fish. I picture Naomi—all she wanted was to write one perfect villanelle—see her fetching this man fresh bottles of alcohol from the corner store, and then I’m grabbing him by his lapels and lifting him out of his chair and up onto the desk, his blubbery neck trembling at the pressure of my thumbs.

“Are you out of your mind?”

“Where are the copies?”

“Boston. The regional office. State Street.” I slacken my grip, just ever so slightly. “Every night we run off everything and overnight them. The overnights, they keep ’em in Boston.” He says the words again, pleading, pathetic. “The overnights… okay…”

I let go of him, and he drops down onto the desk, slides miserably back into his chair.

“Look, Officer—” he says, and I interrupt him.

“I’m a detective.”

“Detective. Variegated, they’re shutting the franchises one by one. They’re looking for reasons. Stamford. Montpelier. If that happens here, I don’t know what I’ll do. We have no savings. My wife and I, I mean.” His voice is trembling. “We won’t make it.”

I stare at him.

“If I call Boston and I tell them I need to see the overnights, and they say why, and I—” He breathes, trying to keep it together, I’m just staring at him. “I say, gee, I’ve got missing files, I’ve got—I’ve got dead employees.” He looks up at me, his eyes wet and wide, pleading like a child. “Just let me sit here. Just let me sit here until it ends. Please just let me sit here.”

He’s weeping, his face dissolving in his hands. It’s exhausting. People hiding behind the asteroid, like it’s an excuse for poor conduct, for miserable and desperate and selfish behavior, everybody ducking in its comet-tail like children in mommy’s skirts.

“Mr. Gompers, I am sorry.” I rise. “But you’re going to get those files. I want to know everything that’s missing, and I want you to tell me, specifically, if any of the missing files were Peter Zell’s. Do you understand?”

“I will—” He gets himself together, sits up a little and honks into a handkerchief. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t try,” I say, standing, turning. “You have till tomorrow morning. Do it.”

I take the steps slowly back down to the first floor, trembling, shot, my energy expended, and while I was upstairs hassling Gompers the sky has decided to send down a miserable frozen drizzle, which slants into my face while I cross Eagle Square on the way back to my car.

The man with the sandwich board is still stalking the plaza, parka and fur hat, and again he hollers, “Do you know what time it is?” and I ignore him, but then he’s planted himself in my path. He’s holding up his sandwich board, DO THEY THINK WE’RE STUPID, raising it between us like a centurion’s shield, and I mutter, “Excuse me, sir,” but he doesn’t move, and then I realize it’s the guy from last night, from the Somerset, out of his Harley jacket now but still the heavy untrimmed mustache, red cheeks, doleful eyes.

And he goes, “You are Palace, right?”

“Yeah,” and I realize what’s happening too late, I reach for my shoulder holster but he’s already dropped the sign and he’s got something jammed up into my ribs. I glance down—a pistol, short and black and ugly.

“Do not move.”

“Okay,” I say.

The rain splatters steadily down over both of us, frozen in the center of Eagle Square. People are walking down the sidewalk, a couple dozen feet away, but it’s cold and it’s raining hard and everybody’s looking at their feet. Nobody notices. Who cares?

“Do not say a word.”

“I won’t.”

“Okay.”

He breathes heavily. His mustache and beard are stained in patches, dirty cigarette-yellow. His breath is stale with old smoke.

“Where is she?” he hisses. The gun is pressed painfully into my ribs, angled upward, and I know the path that the bullet will take, gouging through the soft flesh, severing muscles, slamming to a stop in my heart.

“Who?” I ask.

I’m thinking about Toussaint’s desperation move, with the ashtray. To make a move like that, Alison said, he would have had to be desperate. And now here is this man with his sandwich board: assaulting a police officer, use of a sidearm in the commission of a felony. Desperate. The gun twists into my side.

“Where is she?” he asks again.

“Where is who?”

“Nico.”

Oh, God. Nico. It’s raining harder and harder while we’re standing here. I’m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my assailant licks his lips.

“I don’t know where Nico is,” I tell him.

“Yes, you do, you do know.”

He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It’s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.

“Please listen to me, sir,” I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. “I do not know where she is. I’ve been trying to find her myself.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

“Bullshit.”

“Who are you?”

“Don’t worry about who I am.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a friend of hers, okay?” he says anyway. “I’m a friend of Derek’s.”

“Okay,” I say, and I’m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I’ll be dead.

“Where’s Derek?” I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, “You asshole,” and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.

He comes in close, hisses into my ear. “Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he’s dead because you killed him.”

“I didn’t—” my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. “No.”

“Oh, okay, so you had him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality.”

“I promise you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It’s funny, though, I’m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of did know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you’d asked. But I haven’t really had time to think about it. God, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.

“Listen, friend,” I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. “I promise you—no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?” He jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we’re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.

“I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know.”

He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, “You’re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan—”

“What?”

“To get Derek out of there—”

“What?”

“Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car—”

“Slow down—wait—”

The rain is pounding.

“And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she’s nowhere.”

“I don’t know about any of this.”

“Yes, you do.”

A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, “Hey—” and then there’s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and lands on his rear end. “Shit,” he says from the ground, and I draw my sidearm and aim, right down at his thick torso, but the sudden motion has thrown off my balance, and it’s dark and my face is soaked, I’m seeing double again, and I must be pointing the gun at the wrong man, because the kick comes out of nowhere—he swipes out with his feet and catches me in the heel, and I topple like a statue being pulled down with ropes. I roll over, look wildly around the plaza. Nothing. Silence. Rain.

“Shoot,” I say, sitting up and drawing out my handkerchief and holding it up to my lip. Houdini comes over and stands in front of me, bouncing back and forth, growling tenderly, and I hold out my hand, let him sniff it.

“He’s lying,” I tell the dog. Why would Nico have told some story about me having a prison-break plan? Where would Nico get a vehicle?

The problem is, a person like this guy doesn’t have the brains to lie. A person who really thinks that the United States government somehow, over the last half decade, secretly constructed a warren of habitable bases on the dark side of the Moon, that we would have dedicated that level of resources toward mitigating the risk of a 1-in-250-million event.

It’s weird, I think, struggling to my feet. My sister is too smart for this nonsense.

I wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve and start to lope back to the car.

The thing is, she really is. She really is too smart for this nonsense.

“Huh,” I say. “Huh.”

An hour later I’m down in Cambridge, in the sunken plaza across from Harvard Yard, where there’s a group of ragged college-age homeless kids in a drum circle, and a couple of hippies dancing, and a man selling paperback books from a shopping cart, and a woman in a halter top on a uni cycle, jugging bowling pins, singing “Que Sera Sera.” A very old woman in a silver pantsuit is smoking a marijuana cigarette, trading it back and forth with a black man in thrift-store fatigues. A drunk snores loudly, sprawled across the steps, his lower half soaked with urine. A Massachusetts state trooper keeps a wary eye on the scene, his big mirrored sunglasses propped atop his ranger-style hat. I nod at him, a fellow policeman’s nod, but he doesn’t nod back.

I cross Mt. Auburn Street and find the little green kiosk with the boarded-up windows. I still have no idea where Alison Koechner works, and there is no one answering the phone at the old number, so this is all I’ve got: one place I know she goes a lot.

“Well, well,” says the Coffee Doctor in his hat and beard. “If it isn’t my old nemesis.”

“I’m sorry?” I say, narrowing my eyes, looking around at the dark room, empty but for me and the kid. He puts his hands up, grins. “Just kidding, man. Just something I say.” He points at me with both hands, a big boisterous two-finger point. “You look like you could use a latte, friend.”

“No, thank you. I need information.”

“I don’t sell that. I sell coffee.”

He bustles around behind his counter, swiftly and efficiently, inserting the conical base of the portable filter into the espresso machine and pulling it out again, a light ka-chunk. He levels off the ground beans, tamps them down.

“I was in here a couple days ago.”

“Okay,” he says, eyes on his machine. “If you say so.”

The paper cups are still lined up along the counter, one for each continent, step right up and place your bets. North America has only one or two beans in there—Asia a handful—Africa a handful. Antarctica remains in the lead, overspilling with beans. Wishful thinking. As if the thing would just plow into the snow, snuff out like a candle.

“I was here with a woman. About this tall, short red hair. Pretty.”

He nods, pours milk from a carton into a metal jug. “Sure.” He sticks a wand into the jug, flicks a switch, it begins to foam. “Coffee Doctor remembers all.”

“Do you know her?”

“I don’t know her, but I see her a lot.”

“Okay.”

For a moment I lose my train of thought, entranced by the frothing of the milk, staring along with the Coffee Doctor into his jug, and then he flicks the thing off with a sharp, birdlike movement, exactly at the moment before it would have foamed over.

“Ta-da.”

“I need to leave her a message.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The Coffee Doctor cocks an eyebrow. I massage my side, where the assailant’s gun barrel has left me with a patch of tenderness, just below the ribs.

“Tell her that Henry was here.”

“I can do that.”

“And let her know that I need to see her.”

“I can do that, too.” He lifts a white ceramic demitasse off a hook and fills it with espresso, layers in the foamed milk with a long-handled spoon. There’s a kind of genius at work here, a delicate sensibility being applied.

“You didn’t always do this,” I say. “Coffee, I mean.”

“No.” He keeps his eyes on his work, he’s got the demitasse cradled in his palm and he’s delicately jostling it, conjuring a pattern of dark coffee and cloudy foam. “I was a student of applied mathematics,” he says, and very lightly inclines his head to indicate Harvard, across the street. He looks up, beaming. “But you know what they say,” he concludes and presents me my latte, which bears a perfect and symmetrical oak leaf in milk foam. “There’s no future in it.”

He’s smiling, and I’m supposed to laugh, but I don’t. My eye hurts. My lip is throbbing where I got punched.

“So, you’ll let her know? That Henry was here?”

“Yes, dude. I’ll tell her.”

“And please tell her—” You know what? At this point, why not? “Tell her Palace needs to know what all this Jules Verne moon-shot hokum is covering up. Tell her I know there’s more to this, and I want to know who these people are, and what it is they want.”

“Wow. See, now, that’s a message.”

I’m pulling my wallet out of my pocket, and the Coffee Doctor reaches up and stills my hand.

“No, no,” he says. “On the house. I gotta be honest, friend. You don’t look so good.”

3.

Detectives must consider all possibilities, consider and weigh each conceivable set of events that might have led to a crime, to determine which are most likely, which might prove to be true.

When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for Peter’s insurable-interest files because she knew I was intrigued by them, and she was helping me in my investigation.

When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for the files to hide them before I could find them.

Someone shot her. A stranger? An accomplice? A friend?

For one hour I’m driving back from Cambridge to Concord, an hour of dead highway and vandalized exit signs and deer standing tremulously along the lip of 93 North. I’m thinking about Naomi in the doorway of my bedroom, Monday night. The more I think of that moment, the more certain I become that whatever she had to tell me—whatever she started to say and then stopped—it was not merely sentimental or interpersonal. It was relevant to the mechanics of my ongoing investigation.

But do you stand in the moonlight half-dressed and tell somebody one more thing about contestability clauses and insurable interest?

It was something else, and I’ll never know what it was. But I want to.

Normally, when I arrive at CPD headquarters on School Street, I park in the lot and enter through the back door that leads to the garage. This afternoon for some reason I go around to the front and use the main door, the public entrance, which I first walked through when I was four, maybe five years old. I say hey to Miriam, who works at the desk where my mother used to work, and I go upstairs to call Naomi Eddes’s family.

Only thing is, now I’m up here, and the landline’s not working.

No dial tone, no nothing. Dead plastic. I lift the cord, trace it back to the jack and then back to the desk, click the switch hook a few times. I look around the room, bite my lip. Everything is the same: the desks are in place, the piles of papers, filing cabinets, sandwich wrappers, soda cans, the wan winter light tilting in through the window. I travel around the room to Culverson’s desk, lift up his receiver. It’s the same: no dial tone, no life. I place the receiver back gently in the cradle.

“Something’s fucked,” says Detective McGully, appearing in the doorway with his arms crossed, sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, cigar jabbing out of the side of his face. “Right?”

“Well,” I say. “I can’t get a line.”

“Tip of the fucking iceberg,” he growls, digging in the pockets of his sweatpants for a matchbox. “Something’s up, New Guy.”

“Huh,” I say, but he is serious, dead serious—in all the time I’ve known him I’ve never seen an expression like this one on McGully’s face. I go over and take Andreas’s chair down off his desk, give his phone a try. Nothing. I can hear the Brush Cuts in the little coffee room two doors down, loud voices, someone guffawing, someone going, “So I say—I say—listen, wait.” Somewhere a door slams; footsteps are rushing this way and that way outside.

“I ran into the chief when I came in this morning,” McGully says, wandering into the room, leaning against the wall by the radiator, “and I said, ‘hey, asshole,’ like I always do, and he just walked right past me. Like I was a ghost.”

“Huh.”

“Now there’s some kind of meeting going on in there. Ordler’s office. The chief, the DCO, the DCA. Plus a bunch of jerks I don’t recognize.” He puffs on the cigar. “In wraparound sunglasses.”

“Sunglasses?”

“Yeah,” he says, “sunglasses,” like it signifies something, but whatever the drift is I’m not catching it, and I’m only half listening, anyway. There’s a small tender swelling on the back of my head, where it slammed against the brick wall in Eagle Square this morning.

“You mark my words, kid.” He points at me with his unlit cigar, gestures with it all around the room, like the Ghost of Christmas Future. “Something is going the fuck on.”

In the lobby of the main branch of the Concord Public Library is a neat display of classics, the greatest hits of the Western canon arranged in a tidy pyramid: The Odyssey, The Iliad, Aeschylus and Virgil providing the foundation, Shakespeare and Chaucer the second row, upward and forward in time all the way through The Sun also Rises at the capstone. No one has felt it necessary to provide a title for the display, although the theme is clearly things to read before you die. Somebody, maybe the same joker who put the R.E.M. song on heavy rotation on the Penuche’s jukebox, has slipped a paperback copy of On the Beach into this display, shoehorned between Middlemarch and Oliver Twist. I take it out and carry it over to Fiction and refile it before going down to the basement to find the reference section.

This is what it must have meant to be a policeman in a predigital age, I’m thinking, enjoying the experience in a visceral way, digging out the fat phonebook for suburban Maryland, thumping it open along the spine, running my forefinger along the tiny columns of type, flipping through the tissue-thin pages for a name. Will there be policemen afterward, I do not know. No—there won’t—eventually, maybe—but not for a while.

There are three listings for Eddes in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I carefully copy the numbers into my blue book and go back up to the lobby, past the Shakespeare and John Milton, to where they have an old-fashioned phone booth by the front entrance. There’s a line, and I wait for about ten minutes, gazing out the tall deco windows, my eyes resting on the skinny branches of a little gray musclewood tree outside the library entrance. I get in there, take a breath, and start dialing.

Ron and Emily Eddes, on Maryland Avenue. No answer, no machine.

Maria Eddes, Autumn Hill Place. She answers, but first of all she sounds very young and second she speaks only Spanish. I manage to ask her if she knows a Naomi Eddes, and she manages to reply no, she does not. I apologize and hang up.

It’s drizzling out there again. I dial the last number and while it rings I watch a single lonesome ovular leaf, alone on the farthest reach of a twisting branch, get pelted by the raindrops.

“Hello?”

“William Eddes?”

“Bill. Who’s this?”

My teeth clench. I clutch my forehead with my palm. My stomach is a tight black knot.

“Sir, are you related to a woman named Naomi Eddes?”

The pause that follows is long and painful. This is her father.

“Sir?” I say at last.

“Who is this?” he says, his voice tight and cold and formal.

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

He hangs up.

The musclewood leaf, the one I was watching, is gone. I look and I think I can see where it landed, a black smear in the slush of the lawn. I call Bill Eddes back and I do not get an answer.

There’s someone outside the phone booth, an agitated-looking old lady, bent over a small wire-frame shopping cart, the kind you get from the hardware store. I hold up one finger, smile apologetically, and I call Bill Eddes a third time, and I’m not surprised at all when there’s no answer, and that the phone abruptly stops ringing entirely. Naomi’s father, in his living room or kitchen, has yanked the phone from the wall. He’s slowly winding the slim gray cord around the phone, placing the phone on the shelf of a closet, like you put away something not to be thought of again.

“Sorry, ma’am,” I say, holding open the door for the old lady with the cart, and she asks, “What happened to your face?” but I don’t answer. I’m leaving the library, I’m chewing on an end of my mustache, holding one hand over my heart, palming it, feeling it beat—holy moly—this is it—holy moly—hurrying, running now, through the sodden lawn and back to the car.

It’s such a small town, Concord, sixty square miles taking in all the outskirts, and to drive just from downtown to the hospital with no other cars on the road? Ten minutes, which is not time enough to figure it all out, but is time enough to be sure that I will figure it out, that I’ve got it, that I will solve this murder—these murders—two murders, one murderer.

Here I am already, at the intersection of Langley Parkway and Route 9, looking up at Concord Hospital, where it sits like a child’s model of a castle on a hill, surrounded by its outbuildings and sprawling parking lots and office suites and clinics. The new wing, unfinished and never-to-be finished, piles of timber, panes of glass, frames of scaffolding hidden under tarps.

I pull in, sit in the parking lot, drum my fingers on the wheel.

Bill Eddes reacted how he did for a reason, and I know what the reason is.

That fact implies a second fact, which leads me on to a third.

It’s like you walk into a dark room, and there’s a sliver of pale light under a doorway on the opposite side. You open that door and it leads on to a second room, slightly brighter than the last, and there’s another door on the other side, with light under that one. And you keep going forward, one room after the other, more and more rooms, more and more light.

There’s a bank of spherical lights over the main doors, and all were lit the last time I was here, and now two are out, and that’s just it. The world is decaying bit by bit, every piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.

There’s no volunteer behind the horseshoe desk in the lobby today, just a family sitting on the couches in a small anxious knot, a mom and a dad and a kid, and they look up as I walk past, as if I might have the bad news they’re waiting for. I nod apologetically and then I stand there, turning in all directions, trying to orient myself, looking for Elevator B.

A nurse in scrubs rushes past me, stops at a doorway, mutters, “Oh, shoot,” and turns back the other way.

I think I’ve figured out which way I’m going, and I take two steps and experience a pulse of intense pain from my bandaged eye. I gasp, raise my hand to it, shake it off, no time just now.

The pain, because—what was it that Dr. Wilton told me while winding gauze around my head? The hospital is experiencing a shortage of palliative resources.

Facts are connecting themselves, glowing to life in my memory and then connecting themselves, one to the other, forming pictures like constellations. But there is no joy, I feel no pleasure at all, because my face hurts, and my side where the gun barrel dug into it, the back of my head where it banged against the wall, and I’m thinking, Palace, you dunce. Because if I could just go back in time and see things clearer, see them correctly quicker, I would have solved the Zell case—and there would be no Eddes case. Naomi would not be dead at all.

The elevator door slides open and I step inside.

No one else gets on; it’s just me, the tall quiet policeman with one eye, running his fingers up and down the sign, like a blind man reading Braille, trying to read the answers off the sign.

I ride it for a while, a few times up, a few times down. “Where,” I mutter to myself, “where could you be keeping it?” Because somewhere in this building is a place analogous to the doghouse at J. T. Toussaint’s, where presale product and ill-gotten gains are being hoarded. But a hospital is a place full of places—storerooms and surgeries, office suites and hallways—especially a hospital like this one, chaotic, chopped up, frozen midrenovation, it’s a place full of places.

At last I call it quits and get off in the basement and find Dr. Fenton in her office, down a short hallway from the morgue, a small and immaculate office decorated with fresh flowers and family pictures and a print of Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Bolshoi Ballet, 1973.

Fenton looks surprised and not pleased to see me, like I’m a garden pest, a raccoon maybe, she thought she was rid of.

“What?”

I tell her what I need done and ask her how long that takes, typically. She scowls, and says, “Typically?” like the word no longer has meaning, but I say, “Yes, typically.”

“Typically, between ten days and three weeks,” she says. “Although, the Hazen Drive staff being what it is, at present, I imagine it would be more like four to six weeks.”

“Okay—well—can you do it by the morning?” I ask, and I’m waiting for the scornful bray of laughter, bracing myself, thinking how I’m going to beg for it.

But she takes off her glasses, gets up from her chair, and looks at me carefully. “Why are you trying so hard to solve this murder?”

“I mean—” I hold up my hands. “Because it’s unsolved.”

“Okay,” she says, and tells me she’ll do it, as long as I promise never to call her or seek her out again, for any reason, forever.

And then, on my way back to the elevator, I find it, the place I was looking for, and I gasp, my jaw drops open and I literally gasp, and I say, “Oh, my God,” my voice echoing down the concrete basement hallway, and then I turn and run back to ask Fenton for one more thing.

My cell phone isn’t working. No bars. No service. It’s getting worse.

I can picture them in my mind: untended cell towers tilting over slowly and then falling, connecting cables drooping, dead.

I drive back to the library, put quarters in the meter. I wait in line for the phone booth, and when it’s my turn I reach Officer McConnell at home.

“Oh, hey, Palace,” she says. “You work upstairs. You want to tell me what on earth is going on over there? With the chiefs?”

“I don’t know.” Mysterious men in sunglasses. McGully, something’s fucked. “I need your help with something, Officer. Do you have any clothes that aren’t pants?”

“What?”

McConnell writes down where she’s supposed to go and when, where Dr. Fenton will meet her in the morning. There’s a line forming outside the phone booth. The old lady with the wire cart from the hardware store is back, waving her arms at me, like, hello, and behind her is a businessman type in a brown suit, with a briefcase, and a mom with twin girls. I flash my badge through the glass of the phone booth and duck down, trying to arrange myself comfortably in this tiny wooden room.

I raise Detective Culverson on the CB and I tell him that I solved the case.

“You mean, your hanger?”

“Yeah. And your case, too. Eddes.”

“What?”

“Your case, too,” I say. “Same killer.”

I run over the whole thing for him, and then there’s a long pause, radio crackling in the silence, and he says that’s quite a lot of police work I’ve been doing.

“Yeah.”

He says the same thing I said to McConnell last week: “You’re going to be a great detective one day.”

“Yep,” I say. “Right.”

“Are you coming back to headquarters?”

“No,” I say. “Not today.”

“Good,” he says. “Don’t.”

4.

Even in the most quiescent policing environments, there is that occasional violent and random incident, where someone is murdered for no good reason in broad daylight on a busy street or in a parking lot.

The entire Concord Police Department was on hand for my mother’s funeral, and they all rose and stood at attention as the coffin was carried in—fourteen staff members and eighty-six officers in their uniform blues, stiff as statues, saluting. Rebecca Forman, the force’s certified public accountant, a sturdy middle-aged lady with salt-and-pepper hair, seventy-four years old, dissolved into sobs and had to be escorted out. The only person who remained seated was Professor Temple Palace, my father; he sat slackly in his pew throughout the short service, dull-eyed, eyes staring straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus, his twelve-year-old son and six-year-old daughter standing wide-eyed on either side of him. He sat there, just sort of slumped against my hip, looking more perplexed than grief-stricken, and you could tell right there—I could tell—he wasn’t going to make it.

I am sure that in retrospect what was hard for my father the English professor was not just the simple fact of her death, but the irony: that his wife, who sat from nine to five Monday through Friday behind bulletproof glass in a police station, should be shot through the heart by a thief in the T.J. Maxx parking lot on a Saturday afternoon.

Just to give you a sense of how low the crime rate was in Concord at that time: in the year in question, 1997, according to FBI records, my mother was the only person killed. Which means that, retrospectively, my mother’s odds of falling victim to a murderer in Concord, in that year, came in at one in forty thousand.

But that’s how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn’t be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

After the wake, my father looked at the kitchen, his glasses sitting on his nose, his eyes large and confused, and said to his children, “Well, now, what are we going to do for dinner?” and he meant not just tonight but forever. I smiled uneasily at Nico. The clock was ticking. He wasn’t going to make it.

Professor Palace slept on the sofa, unable to go up there and deal with the fact of my mother’s absence from the bed, with going through her closet full of things. I did all that. I packed up her dresses.

The other thing I did was hang around the police station a lot, asked the young detective leading the investigation to please let me know how it was going, and Culverson did: he called me when they had analyzed the footprints lifted from the gravel of the T.J. Maxx parking lot; he called when they located the vehicle identified by witnesses, a silver Toyota Tercel subsequently abandoned in Montpelier. When the suspect was in custody, Detective Culverson stopped by the house, laid out the files for me on the kitchen table and walked me through the case, the chain of evidence. He let me see everything except the photographs of the corpse.

“Thank you, sir,” I said to Culverson, my father leaning in the doorway of the kitchen, pale, tired, mumbling “thank you” also. In my memory Culverson says, “Just doing my job,” but I have my doubts whether he really would have said something so cliché. My memory is cloudy—it was a difficult time.

On June 10 of that same year they found my father’s body in his office at St. Anselm’s, where he had hung himself with the window cord.

I should have told Naomi the whole story, about my parents, the truth of it, but I didn’t, and now she’s dead and I never will.

5.

It’s a beautiful morning, and there’s something galling about it, how suddenly, just like that, the winter ends and springtime begins—rivulets of snowmelt and twists of green grass pushing up from under the rapidly thinning layer of snow in the farmland outside my kitchen window. This is going to be trouble, just in terms of law enforcement. It will work like black magic on the public spirit, this new season, the dawn of the last springtime we’re going to get. We can expect a ratcheting up of desperation, fresh waves of anxiety and terror and anticipatory grief.

Fenton said that if she could pull it off, she would call me at nine o’clock with her report. It’s 8:54.

I don’t really need Fenton’s report. Don’t need the confirmation, I mean. I’m right, and I know I’m right. I know that I’ve got it. It’ll help though. It’ll be necessary in court.

I watch one perfect white cloud drift across the blue of the morning, and then, thank God, the phone rings, and I snatch it up and say hello.

No answer. “Fenton?”

There’s a long silence, a rumbling of deep breathing, and I hold my breath. It’s him. It’s the killer. He knows. He’s toying with me. Holy moly.

“Hello?” I say.

“I hope you’re happy, Officer—excuse me, Detective.” There’s a noisy cough, a tinkling noise, ice in a glass of gin, and I look up at the ceiling and exhale.

“Mr. Gompers. This is not a good time.”

“I found the claims,” he says, as if he hadn’t heard me. “The mysterious missing claims you wanted me to find. I found them.”

“Sir.” But he’s not going to stop, and anyway I did tell him he had twenty-four hours, and here he is, reporting in, the poor bastard. I can’t just hang up. “Right,” I say.

“I went to the overnight cabinet, and I pulled that stretch of case numbers. There’s only one in the bunch with Zell’s name on it. That’s what you wanted to know, right?”

“That’s right.”

His voice sloshes with drunken sarcasm. “Hope so. Because it’s all going to happen, just like I said it was. Just like I said.”

I’m looking at the clock. 8:59. What Gompers is telling me doesn’t matter anymore. It never mattered in the first place. This case was never about insurance fraud.

“I’m in the conference room in Boston, digging through the overnights, and who sidles in but Marvin Kessel. Do you know who that is?”

“No, sir. I appreciate your help, Mr. Gompers.”

It was never about insurance fraud. Not even for one second.

“Marvin Kessel, for your information, is the assistant regional manager for the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, and he was awfully interested in what the heck is going on up in Concord. And so now he knows, and now Omaha knows, we’ve got missing files, we’ve got suicides. We’ve got it all!” He sounds like my dad: Because it’s Concord!

“And so now I am going to lose my job, and everybody in this branch, they’re going to lose their jobs, too. And we’ll all be out on the street. So, I hope you have a pen handy, Detective, because I’ve got the information.”

I do have a pen, and Gompers gives me the information. The claim that Peter was working on when he died was filed in mid-November by a Ms. V. R. Jones, a director of the Open Vista Institute, a nonprofit corporation registered in the state of New Hampshire. Its headquarters are in New Castle, which is on the coast, near Portsmouth. It was a comprehensive life-insurance policy on the executive director, Mr. Bernard Talley, and Mr. Talley committed suicide in March, and Merrimack Life and Fire was exercising its right to investigate.

I write it all down, old habit, but it doesn’t matter and it never mattered, not even for a second.

Gompers is done and I say, “Thanks,” looking at the clock, it’s 9:02—any minute Fenton will call, she’ll give me the confirmation I need, and I’ll get in the car and go get the killer.

“Mr. Gompers, I recognize that you have made a sacrifice. But this is a murder investigation. It’s important.”

“You have no idea, young man,” he says morosely, “You have no idea what’s important.”

He hangs up, and I almost call him back. I swear to God, with all that’s going on, I almost get up and go over there. Because he’s not—he’s not going to make it.

But then the landline rings again, and I snatch it up again, and now it is Fenton, and she says, “Well, detective, how did you know?”

I take a breath, close my eyes, and listen to my heart pounding for a second, two seconds.

“Palace? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I say, slowly. “Please tell me exactly what you’ve found.”

“Why certainly. I’d be happy to. And then at some point you are going to buy me a steak dinner.”

“Yep.” I say, opening my eyes now, peering at the crisp blue sky just beyond the kitchen window. “Just tell me what you’ve found.”

“You’re a lunatic,” she says. “MassSpec on the blood of Naomi Eddes confirms presence of morphine sulfate.”

“Right,” I say.

“This does not come as a surprise to you.”

“No, ma’am,” I say. No, it does not.

“Cause of death is unchanged. Massive craniocerebral trauma from gunshot wound in mid-forehead. But the victim of this gunshot had ingested a morphine derivative within the six- to eight-hour period prior to her death.”

It does not surprise me at all.

I close my eyes again, and I can picture Naomi leaving my house in her red dress in the middle of the night and going home to get high as a satellite. She must have been getting toward the end of her stash, too, must have been getting anxious about that, because now her dealer was dead. McGully had shot him. My fault.

Oh, Naomi. You could have told me.

I pull out my SIG Sauer from its holster and lay it on the kitchen table, open the magazine, empty out and count the dozen .357 bullets.

In the Somerset Diner, a week before, Naomi eating French fries, telling me that she had to help Peter Zell when she saw that he was suffering, that he was in withdrawal. She had to help him, she said, looked down, looked away.

I could have known it right then, had I wanted to know.

“I wish I could tell you more,” Fenton says. “If the girl had some hair on her head, I could tell you if she’s been using morphine for a long time.”

“Oh, yeah?”

I’m not really listening. Here’s a girl who felt compelled to help this random coworker, this man she barely knew, when she saw that he was suffering. Here’s a girl with her own long experience of drug addiction, who’s put her parents through hell, so much so that her father hangs up the phone as soon as he hears her name, hears the word policeman.

“If you’ve got a long enough piece of hair, you can cut it into quarter-inch sections, break them down and test them one by one,” Fenton says, “figure out what substances were metabolized, month by month. Pretty fascinating stuff, actually.”

“I’ll see you over there,” I say. “And I will. I’ll buy you that dinner.”

“Sure you will, Palace,” she says. “Around Christmas, right?”

I know what the hair test would have revealed. Naomi had been using, this time, for three months. I don’t know about her past usage, her periods of addiction and recovery and relapse, but this time she was using for almost three months exactly. Since Tuesday, January 3, when Professor Leonard Tolkin of the Jet Propulsion Lab went on television and gave her the same bad news he gave everybody else. My guess is, if she didn’t renew her active use of controlled substances that night, it was the day after, or the day after that.

I reload the magazine, snap it into place, depress the safety, and return my sidearm to the holster. I’ve already done this exercise in its entirety—open the magazine, check the bullets, close it up—several times since waking this morning at seven thirty.

Peter Zell had made his risk assessment and taken his plunge months before, gone through his whole cycle of attraction, experimentation, addiction, and withdrawal as the odds climbed steadily through the months. But Naomi, along with a lot of other people, took her own plunge only when it was official, when the odds of impact jumped all the way to one hundred percent. Millions of people all around the world deciding to get high as satellites and stay that way, scrambling for whatever they could—dope or junk or NyQuil or whippets or stolen bottles of hospital painkillers—and slip into pure pleasure mode, tune out the terror and the dread, in a world where the idea of long-term consequences had magically disappeared.

I will myself back in time, back to the Somerset Diner, reach across the table and take Naomi’s hands in my own, and I tell her to go ahead and tell me the truth, tell me about her weakness, and I’d tell her I don’t care and I’m going to fall for her anyway. I would have understood.

Would I have understood?

My father taught me about irony, and the irony here is that in October, when it was still fifty-fifty, when there was still hope, it was Naomi Eddes who had helped Peter Zell kick his stupid habit—helped him so well that when the end of the world was officially announced he fought through it, stayed clean. But Naomi, whose own addiction was deeper bred, whose habit was lifelong, not the result of a cold calculation of the odds… Naomi wasn’t that strong.

Another irony: it wasn’t so easy, in early January, to get ahold of drugs, especially the kind Naomi needed. New laws, new cops, demand spiking wildly, new choke points on supply, all the way up and down the line. But Naomi had known just where to go. She knew from her nightly conversations with Peter about his ongoing temptation: his old pal J. T. was still dealing, still getting morphine, in some form, from somewhere.

So that’s where she went, to the squat dirty house on Bow Bog Road, started buying, started using, never told Peter, never told anyone, and the only people who knew were Toussaint and the person who was his new supplier.

And that person—that person is the killer.

In the dark, at my house, frozen in the doorway, she almost told me the whole truth. Not only the truth about her addiction, but the truth about insurable interest, fraud claims, I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case. If I’d gotten out of bed, taken her wrists, kissed her and pulled her back into bed, she’d still be alive.

If she’d never met me, she’d still be alive.

I feel the weight of the gun in the holster, but I don’t take it out, not again. It’s ready, it’s loaded. I’m ready.

My Impala rolls through the gigantic parking lot, the asphalt painted black and wet with runoff. It’s 9:23.

There is only one thing left that I don’t understand, and that’s why. Why would someone do something like this—why would this person do these things?

I get out of the car and walk into the hospital.

I have to apprehend the suspect. And even more so, I have to know the answer.

In the crowded lobby I loiter behind a column, hunched over to minimize my height, my bandaged face hidden behind the Monitor like a spy. After a few minutes I see the murderer coming, striding purposefully down the hall, right on time. It’s urgent, important, work to be done in the basement.

I’m hunched in the hospital hallway, twitching with nervousness, ready for action.

The motive, on the one hand, is obvious: money. The same reason anybody steals and then sells controlled substances and commits murders to cover up those activities. Money. Especially now, high demand, low supply, the cost-benefit analysis on drug sales is skewed, someone is going to take the risk, someone is going to put together a small fortune.

But—somehow—it’s wrong. For this killer, for these crimes. These risks. Murder and then double murder, and worse than murder, and for what, for money? The risk of jail, of execution, of throwing away what little time is left? Just money?

Soon I’ll know all the answers. I’m going to go down there, it’s going to work, and then this will be over. The thought of it, the whole thing being over, rolls over me, inevitable, joyless, cold, and I clutch my newspaper. Peter’s killer—Naomi’s killer—gets on the elevator, and a few seconds later, I go down the stairs.

The morgue is cold. The autopsy lights are off, and it’s dim and hushed. The walls are gray. It’s like being inside a refrigerator, inside a coffin. I step into the chilling silence just in time to see Erik Littlejohn shake hands with Dr. Fenton, who gives him a curt, businesslike nod.

“Sir.”

“Good morning, Doctor. As I believe I mentioned on the phone, I do have a visitor coming at ten, but in the meantime I am happy to be of service.”

“Of course,” says Fenton. “Thanks.”

Littlejohn’s voice is hushed and sensitive and appropriate. The director of Spiritual Services. The gold beard, the big eyes, the aura of respect. A handsome new-looking jacket of creamy mahogany leather, a gold watch.

But money’s not enough—a gold watch—a new jacket—to do all that he’s done, the horrors that he has committed. It’s not enough. I can’t accept it. I don’t care what’s coming toward us in the sky.

I tuck myself against a wall, in a far corner, close by the door, the door leading back down the hallway, to the elevator.

Littlejohn turns now and nods his head deeply, respectfully, to Officer McConnell, who is supposed to be looking bereaved, in character, but who instead looks irritated, probably because she is following my instructions, wearing a skirt and blouse and carrying a black pocketbook, wearing her hair down, no ponytail.

“Good morning, ma’am,” says Peter Zell’s murderer. “My name is Erik. Dr. Fenton has asked me to be present this morning, and I understand that that is your wish.”

McConnell nods gravely and launches into the little speech we wrote for her.

“My husband, Dale, he went and he shot himself with his old hunting rifle,” says McConnell. “I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I do know, but I thought—” and then she plays at being unable to continue, her voice trembles and catches, me thinking, there you go, very impressive, Officer McConnell. “I thought we’d have the rest of it together, the rest of our time together.”

“The wound is rather severe,” says Dr. Fenton, “and so Ms. Taylor and I agreed that she might benefit from your presence in viewing her husband’s body for the first time.”

“Of course,” he murmurs, “absolutely.” My eyes flicker over his body, top to bottom, looking for the bulge of a firearm. If he’s got one, it’s well hidden. I don’t think he does.

Littlejohn smiles at McConnell with radiant kindness, places a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and turns to Fenton.

“And where,” he asks in a delicate undertone, “is Ms. Taylor’s husband now?”

My stomach tightens. I place a hand over my mouth to control the sound of my breathing, to control myself.

“This way,” Fenton answers—and here we are, this is the pivot point of the whole affair, because now she’s leading the two of them—Littlejohn with his gentle hand guiding McConnell, the fake widow—leading the two of them across the room, toward where I am, toward the hallway.

“We’ve laid the body out,” explains Dr. Fenton, “in the old chapel.”

“What?”

Littlejohn hesitates, a small stutter step, his eyes flashing with fear and confusion, and my heart catches in my throat, because I’m right—I knew I was right, and yet I cannot believe it. I’m staring at him, imagining those soft hands winding a long black belt around Peter Zell’s neck, slowly tightening. Imagining a pistol trembling in his hand, Naomi’s big black eyes.

A moment more, Palace. A moment more.

“I believe you are mistaken, Doctor,” he says quietly to Fenton.

“No mistake,” she replies briskly, smiling tightly, reassuringly at McConnell. She’s enjoying this, Fenton. Littlejohn keeps pushing, what choice does he have? “No, you are incorrect, that room is out of service. It is locked.”

“Yes,” I say, and Littlejohn jumps, in this instant he knows exactly what’s going on, he looks around the room and I step out of the darkness with my sidearm raised. “And you have the key. Where is the key, please?”

He looks at me, dumbstruck.

“Where is the key, sir?”

“It’s—” he closes his eyes, opens them again, the blood draining from his face, hope dying in his eyes. “It’s in my office.”

“We’ll go there.”

McConnell has drawn her weapon from her black pocketbook. Fenton stays put, her eyes glinting behind her round glasses, enjoying every second.

“Detective.” Littlejohn steps forward, he’s making an effort, his voice trembling, but he’s trying. “Detective, I can’t imagine—”

“Quiet,” I say. “Quiet, please.”

“Yes, but Detective Palace, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you… if you think…”

Feigned confusion distrorts his handsome features. It’s there, the truth is there, even in the fact that my name comes so easily to mind: he’s known exactly who I am since the day I caught this case, since I called his wife to arrange an interview, he’s been on to me, tailing me, interposing himself between me and my ongoing investigation. Encouraging Sophia, for example, to evade my questions, selling her on the attenuated notion that it would upset her father. Selling me on how depressed his brother-in-law was. Watching outside the house, waiting, while I interviewed J. T. Toussaint. And then, a Hail Mary, unhooking the chains on my snow tires.

And he was at Toussaint’s again, the house on Bow Bog Road, scrabbling around looking for the leftover merchandise, the phone numbers, client lists. Looking for the same things I was, except he knew what we were looking for and I didn’t, and then I chased him off before he could think to search the doghouse.

But he had one more trick to play, one more way to shove me in the wrong direction. One more brutal trick to play, and it almost worked.

Officer McConnell steps forward, drawing handcuffs from the small pocketbook, and I say, “Wait.”

“What?” she asks.

“I just—” my gun still leveled on Littlejohn. “I’d like to hear the story first.”

“I am sorry, Detective,” he says, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

I release the safety. I think that if he keeps lying, I might kill him. I might just do it.

But he does, he talks. Slowly, softly, his voice dead and toneless, staring not at me but into the barrel of my firearm, he tells the story. The story that I already know, that I already figured out.

After October, when Sophia discovered that her brother had stolen her prescription pad and was using it to score pain pills—after she confronted him and cut him off—after Peter slipped into the brief painful period of withdrawal, and Sophia thought the whole thing was at an end—after all of that, Erik Littlejohn went to J. T. Toussaint and made him a proposition.

At that time, with Maia in conjunction and the odds of impact hovering at an agonizing fifty percent, the hospital was working at half staff: pharmacists and pharmacists’ assistants were quitting in droves, and new people were being hired, glad for a salary backed by government money. Security was, and remains, all over the map. Some days, armed guards with machine guns; other days, the doors to locked wards propped open with folded-over magazines. Pyxis, the state-of-the-art mechanized pill dispensary, stopped working in September, and the technician assigned by the manufacturer to Concord Hospital could not be located.

The director of Spiritual Services, in this time of desperation and wildness, has remained at his post, a trusted and constant figure, a rock. And he was, as of November, stealing vast quantities of medicine from the hospital pharmacy, from the nurses’ stations, from patients’ bedsides. MS Contin, Oxycontin, oxytocin, Dilaudid, half-empty bags of liquid morphine.

Through all of this, my gun does not waver, pointed at his face: his golden eyes half closed, the mouth set, expressionless.

“I promised Toussaint that I would keep him supplied,” he says. “I told him I would take the risk of procuring the pills, if he would take the risk of selling them. We split the risk, and we split the profit.”

Money, I’m thinking, just stupid money. So small, so squalid, so dull. Two murders, two bodies in the ground, all those people suffering, doing with half doses of their pills, with the world about to end? I gape at the murderer, looking him up and down. Is this a man who does all that for gain? For a gold watch and a new leather jacket?

“But Peter found out,” I say.

“Yes,” Littlejohn whispers, “he did,” and he lowers his head and shakes it slowly, sadly, back and forth, as if remembering some regrettable act of God. Someone had a stroke, someone fell down the stairs. “He—it was last Saturday night—he showed up at J. T.’s house. It was late. I only went there very late.”

I exhale, grit my teeth. No escaping the fact that if Peter was at J. T.’s very late on a Saturday night—a meeting J. T. had not mentioned to me—then he was there for a fix. He had his nightly call with Naomi, his support system who was herself secretly using morphine; he told her he was doing fine, holding up, and then he went to J. T.’s to get high as a satellite; and then his brother-in-law of all people shows up, his brother-in-law who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a fresh supply.

Everybody with secrets, squirreled away.

“He sees me, I’m holding a duffel bag for God’s sake, and I just said, ‘please, please, please don’t tell your sister.’ But I knew—I knew he—” He stops himself, brings a hand to his mouth.

“You knew you had to kill him.”

He moves his head very slightly up and down.

He was right: Peter would have told Sophia. In fact, he had called her for that purpose the next day, Sunday, March 18, and again on Monday, but she didn’t answer. He sat down to write her a letter, but couldn’t find the words.

So, on Monday night, Erik Littlejohn went to see Distant Pale Glimmers at the Red River, where he knew he would find his brother-in-law, the quiet insurance man. And there he is with their mutual friend J. T. Toussaint, and after the movie Peter tells J. T. to take off, he wants to walk home—Littlejohn caught a break on that one—because now Peter is alone. And what do you know, here’s Erik, and Erik says, let’s have a beer, let’s catch up—let’s make amends before everything happens.

And they’re drinking their beers, and from his pocket he takes a small vial, and when Peter has passed out he drags him from the theater, nobody notices, nobody cares, he takes him to the McDonald’s to hang him in the bathroom.

McConnell puts the suspect in the handcuffs and I guide him by the bicep to the elevator, Fenton trailing behind us, and we ascend in silence: coroner, murderer, cop, cop.

“Holy crap,” says Fenton, and McConnell says, “I know.”

I don’t say anything. Littlejohn doesn’t say anything.

The elevator stops and the doors open onto the lobby and it’s crowded and among the crowd is a preadolescent boy, waiting there on one of the sofas, and Littlejohn’s whole body goes tense, and mine does, too.

He had told Fenton that he could come down to the morgue to help with a body at 9:30, but he had a visitor coming at 10.

Kyle looks up, stands up, stares, wide-eyed and baffled, his father in handcuffs, and Littlejohn can’t take it, he hurls his body out of the elevator, and I’m holding fast to his arm, and the force of his body in motion pulls me forward, too, both of us together. We land on the floor and go into a roll.

McConnell and Fenton spill out of the elevator, the lobby is full of people, doctors and volunteers, dodging out of the way and hollering as Littlejohn and I go end over end. Littlejohn bangs his forehead up and slams it into mine just as I’m drawing for my sidearm, and the force of the impact sends an explosion of pain into my wounded eye, throws a sky full of stars up in front of the other one. I slump down on top of him, he’s wriggling underneath me, McConnell is shouting, “Freeze!” and then someone is yelling, too, a small scared voice saying, “Stop, stop.” I look up, my vision is wavering back into place, and I say, “Okay.” He’s got my sidearm, the kid has got it, the service-issue SIG 229, pointed right at my face.

“Son,” says McConnell, and she’s got her gun out, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She aims it, uncertainly, at Kyle, then at Littlejohn and me, slumped together on the floor, and then back at the boy.

“Let him—” Kyle sniffs, whimpers, and I’m seeing myself, I can’t help it, of course, I was eleven once. “Let him go.”

God.

God, Palace.

You dunce.

The motive was staring me in the face the whole time, not just money but what you can get for it. What you can get for money, even now. Especially now. And here’s this funny-looking kid, the wide smile, a princeling, the boy I first saw the second day of my investigation, tromping across a lawn of unbroken snow.

I saw it in Littlejohn’s eyes when he was hollering affectionately up the stairs, telling his boy to go ahead and get ready, boasting quietly about what a whiz he is out there on the ice.

Let’s say, in our present unfortunate circumstances, I was the father of a child; what would I not do to shield that child, to whatever degree I could, from the coming calamity? Depending on where that thing comes down, the world is either ending or descending into darkness, and here is a man who would do anything—who has done awful things—to prolong and protect the life of his child should the latter eventuality arise. To mitigate the hazards of October and after.

And no, Sophia wouldn’t have called the police if she had found out, but she would have taken him, taken the boy and gone away, or at least that’s what Erik Littlejohn was afraid of—that the mother would not have understood what the father was doing, how important it was, how it had to be done, and she would have snatched him away. And then what would have become of him—and her—in the aftermath?

And tears are welling up and falling from the boy’s eyes, and tears are falling from Littlejohn’s eyes, and I wish I could say, being a professional detective in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult arrest, that I maintain my composure and focus, but they are, they are, tears are rolling down my face like the flood.

“Give me the gun, young man,” I say. “You should give the gun to me. I’m a policeman.”

He does. He walks over, and he puts it in my hand.

The little chapel in the basement is stacked with boxes.

They are labeled as containing medical supplies, and, in fact, some of them do: three boxes of syringes, six score to a box, two boxes of protective face masks, a small box of iodine pills and saline solution. IV bags, drip chambers. Tourniquets. Thermometers.

There are pills, too, the same variety I found at the doghouse. Stored here till he had enough to be worth smuggling them out of the hospital and to Toussaint’s.

There is food. Five boxes of canned goods: chipped beef and baked beans and chunky soup. Cans like this disappeared many months ago from the supermarket, and you can find them on the black market if you’ve got the money, but no one has the money. Not even cops. I lift a can of Del Monte pineapple chunks and feel its familiar weight in my hand, comforting and nostalgic.

Most of the boxes, however, are full of guns.

Three Mossberg 817 Bolt Action hunting rifles with twenty-one-inch barrels.

A single Thompson M1 submachine gun, with ten boxes of .45 caliber bullets, fifty bullets in a box.

A Marlin .30-06 with a scope on the top.

Eleven Ruger LCP .380s, little ten-ounce conceal-carry automatic handguns, plenty of ammunition for these, too.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of guns.

He was just getting ready. Getting ready for afterward. Although, when you look at it from inside this cramped room with the cross on the door, full of boxes of guns and canned foods and pills and syringes, you start to think: well, afterward has started already.

In one long box, of the kind that might have been used to package and ship a vanity mirror or a large picture frame, lies an oversized cross-bow, with ten aluminum bolts tied in a neat bundle at the bottom of the box.

We’re in the unit, the suspect is in the backseat, we’re on the way back to headquarters. It’s a ten-minute drive, but that’s time enough. Time enough to know whether I’ve got the rest of the story straight, or don’t I.

Instead of waiting for him to tell me, I tell him, my gaze flicking back and forth to the rear-view mirror, watching Erik Littlejohn’s eyes to see if I’m right.

But I am—I know I’m right.

May I please speak to Ms. Naomi Eddes?

That’s what he said, that gentle and mellifluous voice, a voice she didn’t recognize. It must have been strange, much like the time I called her from Peter Zell’s phone. Now here was a strange voice calling from J. T. Toussaint’s phone. A number she knew by heart, the number she’d been calling for a few months now, every time she needed to get high, to get lost.

And now the strange voice on the other end began to give her instructions.

Call that cop, said the voice—call your new friend, the detective. Gently remind him of what he’s overlooked. Suggest to him that this sordid drug-murder case is about something else entirely.

And boy, did it work. Holy moly. My face burns at the thought of it. My lips curl back in self-disgust.

Insurable interest. False claims. It sounded like just the sort of thing that someone gets killed for, and I dove right in. I was a kid playing a game, overheated, ready to jump for the brightly colored ring dangled in front of me. The dumb detective pacing in excited circles around his house, a fool, a puppy. Insurance fraud! A-ha! That must be it. I need to see what he’s working on!

Littlejohn isn’t saying anything. He’s done. He’s living in the future. Surrounded by death. But I know that I’m right.

Kyle has remained at the hospital, sitting in the lobby with Dr. Fenton, of all people, awaiting Sophia Littlejohn, who is now hearing the news, who is about to begin the hardest months of her life. Like everybody else, but worse.

I don’t need to ask anymore, I’ve really got the whole picture, but I can’t help it, it can’t be helped. “The next day, you came to Merrimack Life and Fire, and you waited, right?”

I linger at a red light at Warren Street. I could blow the light, of course, I have a dangerous suspect in custody, a murderer, but I wait, my hands at ten and two.

“Answer me, please, sir. The next day, you came to her office, and you waited?”

“Yes.” A whisper.

“Louder, please.”

“Yes.”

“You waited in the hallway, outside her cubicle.”

“In a closet.”

My hands tighten on the wheel, my knuckles white, practically glowing white. McConnell looking at me from the shotgun seat, looking uneasy.

“In a closet. And then when she was alone, Gompers drunk in his office, the rest of them at the Barley House, you showed her the gun, you marched her into the storeroom. Made it look like she was digging for files, too, just to—to what? Turn the screw one more time, for me, make sure I thought what you wanted me to think?”

“Yes, and…”

“Yes?”

McConnell, I notice, has placed one of her hands over mine, on the wheel, to make sure I don’t run off the road.

“She would have told you. Eventually.”

Palace, she said, sat on the bed. Something.

“I had to,” moans Littlejohn, fresh tears in his eye. “I had to kill her.”

“No one has to kill anyone.”

“Well, soon,” he says, looking out the window, staring out. “Soon, they will.”

“I told you something was fucked.”

McGully, in Adult Crimes, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Culverson sits on the opposite side of the room, somehow radiating dignity and poise though he is cross-legged, pant legs hitched up slightly.

“Where is everything?” I say.

The desks are gone. The computers are gone, the phones, the trash cans. Our tall bank of filing cabinets is gone from its space beside the window and has left behind an irregular pattern of rectangular indentations in the floor. Cigarette butts litter the ancient pale blue carpeting like dead bugs.

“I told you,” says McGully again, his voice a chilling echo in the hollowed-out room.

Littlejohn is outside, still cuffed in the backseat of the Impala, being babysat by Officer McConnell with a reluctant assist from Ritchie Michelson, until we do the official booking. I came into the station alone, ran upstairs to get Culverson. I want us to process the perp together—his murder, my murder. Teammates.

McGully finishes the cigarette he’s working on, twists it out between his fingers, and flicks the dead butt into the center of the room to join the others.

“They know,” says Culverson quietly. “Somebody knows something.”

“What?” asks McGully.

But Culverson doesn’t answer, and then Chief Ordler comes in.

“Hey, guys,” he says. The chief is in street clothes, and he looks tired. McGully and Culverson look up at him warily from their respective squats; I straighten up, bring my heels together and stand there expectantly, I am conscious of the fact that I have a suspected double-murderer downstairs in a parked unit, but strangely, after all this, it feels like it doesn’t matter anymore.

“Guys, as of this morning, the Concord Police Department has been federalized.”

Nobody says anything. Ordler’s got a binder under his right arm, the seal of the Justice Department stamped on the side.

“Federalized? What does that mean?” I ask.

Culverson shakes his head, slowly gets up, lays a steadying hand on my shoulder. McGully stays where he is, tugs out a fresh cigarette and lights it.

“What does that mean?” I ask again. Ordler looks at the floor, keeps talking.

“They’re overhauling everything, putting even more kids on the street, and they say I can keep most of my patrol officers, if I want and they want, but all under Justice Department jurisdiction.”

“But what does it mean?” I ask a third time, meaning, for us? What does it mean for us? The answer is obvious. I’m standing in an empty room.

“They’re shutting down the investigative units. Basically—”

I shake Culverson’s hand off my shoulder, drop my face down into my hands, look up again at Chief Ordler, shaking my head.

“—basically the feeling is that an investigative force is relatively unnecessary, given the current environment.”

He goes on for a while—it all gets lost for me, after that, but he goes on—and then at some point he stops talking and asks if there are any questions. We just look at him, and he mumbles something else, and then he turns and leaves.

I notice for the first time that our radiator has been shut off, and the room is cold.

“They know,” Culverson says again, and we both pivot our heads toward him, like marionettes.

“They’re not supposed to know for more than a week yet,” I say. “April 9, I thought.”

He shakes his head. “Somebody knows early.”

“What?” says McGully, and Culverson says, “Somebody knows where the damn thing is going to come down.”

I open the front shotgun-seat door of the Impala, and McConnell says, “Hey. What’s the story?” and I don’t say anything for a long time, I just stand there with one hand on the roof of the car, looking in at her, craning my neck to look at the prisoner in the backseat, slouched down, staring up. Michelson is sitting on the hood, smoking a butt, like my sister did that day in the parking lot.

“Henry? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing. Let’s go ahead and take him in.”

McConnell and Michelson and I remove the suspect from the backseat and stand him up in the garage. There’s a little crowd watching us, Brush Cuts and a few of the vets, Halburton, the old mechanic who’s still kicking around the garage. We pull Littlejohn from the car in his handcuffs, in his sharp leather jacket. A concrete stairwell leads from this area directly down to the basement, to Booking, to be used in exactly this circumstance: the perp is brought in, in a squad car, and handed directly to the duty officers to be taken down for processing.

“Stretch?” says Michelson. “What’s up?”

I’m just standing there, one hand on the suspect’s arm. Someone wolf-whistles at McConnell, she’s still in the skirt and blouse, and she says, “Up yours.”

I’ve used the staircase for pickpockets, once for a suspected arsonist, for countless drunks. Never before for a murderer.

A double-murderer.

I feel nothing, though, I feel numb. My mother would have been proud of me, I think dumbly; Naomi might have been proud of me. Neither is here. In six months none of this will be here, this’ll be ash and a hole.

I start moving again, leading the little group in step toward the staircase. The detective brings in his man. My head hurts.

What happens next, under normal circumstances, is this: The on-duty processing officers take custody of the suspect and walk him down the steps to the basement, where the suspect is fingerprinted and reminded of his rights. Then he would be searched, photographed, the contents of his pockets collected and labeled. His options for legal counsel would be presented to him; someone like Erik Littlejohn, a man of means, would presumably have private counsel he could retain, and he would be afforded an opportunity to make those arrangements.

This top step of this concrete staircase, in other words, is in fact just the next step in a long and complicated journey that begins with the discovery of a corpse on a dirty bathroom floor and ends ultimately at justice. That’s under normal circumstances.

We’re lingering a few steps from the stairhead, Michelson says it again, “Stretch?” and McConnell says, “Palace?”

I don’t know what happens to Littlejohn once I give him over to the two kids, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, who are waiting with their dull eyes and their hands outstretched to guide my suspect down the stairs.

The due-process rules have been adjusted several times under IPSS and the corresponding state laws, and the truth is I don’t know what’s in the new statutes. What’s in the binder Chief Ordler was holding just now—what other provisions are included along with the suspension of detective-level criminal investigation?

I haven’t confronted the question, in my heart, of what happens next to the alleged murderer once he’s been brought in. Tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t think I ever believed I’d be standing here.

But now—I mean—what’re the options? That is the question.

I’m looking at Erik Littlejohn, and he’s looking at me, and then I say, “I’m sorry,” and I hand him over.