Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Holy moly,” I say aloud.

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

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

  * * *

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

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

  “I hit a tree. I’m fine.”

  “How’s the tree?”

  “Can you run a name for me?”

  “Do you like my hat?”

  “Wilentz, come on.”

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

  “Answer me, Palace.”

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

  “You’re just saying that.”

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

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

  “I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.”

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

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

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

  “Oh, right, you said that.”

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

  “Wilentz?”

  “Yes?”

  “Would you ever kill yourself?”

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

  “We’re not facing tyranny, though.”

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

  “Why?”

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

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

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

  “What?”

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

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

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

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

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

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I know, but look, Hank.”

  “I’ve seen it before.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Wait, wait.”

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

  “See what?”

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

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

  “No.”

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

  “Andreas.”

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

  “Detective Andreas, no one doctored the film.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Cases?”

  “Yeah. Cases.”

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

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

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

  “Yeah. I ran into a tree. What’s up?”

  “I found that kid.”

  “What kid?”

  “The kid you were looking for.”