Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

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

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

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

  “GHB.”

  “You mean—the date-rape drug?”

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

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

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

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

  Easy, Palace.

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

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

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

  I look at her, unable to speak.

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

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

  “Do you have any questions?” Fenton asks.

  I have nothing but questions.

  “What about his eye?”

  “What?”

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

  “Possible, but unlikely.”

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

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

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

  * * *

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

  “Jesus, Hank, where have you been?”

  “Nico?”

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

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

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

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

  “Henry, listen.”

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

  “Nico, where are you?”

  “I am not leaving you behind.”

  “What on Earth are you talking about?

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

  “Nico!”

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

  The line goes dead. Silence.

  * * *

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

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

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

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

  “God damn it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What? Yes—oh, hey. Hi. Hello?”

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

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

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

  “What prisoner?”

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

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

  “I said, what prisoner?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “There was no young man here.”

  * * *

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

  “Nico? Hello?”

  “Whoa. Easy. It’s Culverson.”

  “Oh.” I breathe. “Detective.”

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

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

  “Yeah?”

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

  “What do you mean, McConnell found her?”

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

  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 priso
ner 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.