Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  “Yes, ma’am. I know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Tomorrow?”

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

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

  “I can.”

  “Very early? Seven forty-five?”

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

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

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

  “I’m sure you did, ma’am.”

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

  “Hey. Hey, Palace?”

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

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

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

  “I’m fine,” Andreas says. “I’m fine.”

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

  “How I do what?”

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

  4.

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

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

  It’s just my stupid phone.

  “Yeah. Hello?”

  “Hank? What are you doing?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “So, what’s going on?”

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  “Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, sir. You work at the hospital?”

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

  “Oh. And what is that, exactly?”

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

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

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

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

  “Yes, sir.”

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

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

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

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

  “What do you mean, ‘a bad place’?”

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

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

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

  “What did I say?”

  “You said disturbed.”

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

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

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

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

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

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