Ben H. Winters

by The Last Policeman

  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 sta
rt 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.

  I’m rolling on a ten-speed bicycle down the sun-washed sidewalks of New Castle, New Hampshire, in search of Salamander Street. The sun is up there slipping in and out of patchy cloud cover, the breeze is warm and kind and salt-smelling, and I decide, what the heck, and I take a right and coast down a side street toward the water.

  New Castle is a small and charming summer town out of season, with the chained-up souvenir shops, the ice-cream-and-fudge place, the post office, the historical society. There’s even a boardwalk, running for a quarter mile or so along the beach, a handful of happy beachgoers out on the dunes. An elderly couple hand in hand, a mom tossing a Nerf football with her son, a teenager sprinting, trying to get a bulky box kite up and off the ground.

  A path from the far end of the beach leads back to the town square, where a green lawn surrounds a handsome dark-wood gazebo festooned with bunting and American flags. It looks like there was a small-town celebration last night, and it looks like there’s going to be another one tonight. A couple of locals are wandering into the square, even now, unpacking brass instruments and making small talk, shaking hands. I chain up my ten-speed bike by an overflowing garbage can surrounded by paper plates, uneaten bites of funnel cake drawing happy lines of ants.

  There was a parade in Concord last night, also, and there were even fireworks launched from a barge in the Merrimack, bursting majestically and sparkling around the golden dome of the state house. Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They can’t or won’t name an impact spot with a hundred percent certainty, but the vicinity is the Indonesian archipelago, just east of the Gulf of Boni. Pakistan, with its eastern border just four thousand kilometers from the impact site, has renewed its promise to blast the rock from the sky, and the United States has renewed its objections.

  In America, meanwhile, across the country, parades and fireworks and celebrations. And, at a suburban shopping mall outside Dallas, looting, followed by gunfire, ending in a riot; six people dead. A similar incident in Jacksonville, Florida, and one in Richmond, Indiana. Nineteen people dead at a Home Depot in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

  * * *

  Four Salamander Lane does not look like the headquarters of any kind of institute. It’s a little Cape Cod–style single-family residence, old wood painted in blue pastel, close enough to the water that I can smell the salt breeze, here on the front steps.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” I say to the tremendously old woman who answers my knock. “My name is Detective Henry Palace.” It’s not, though. “Sorry, my name is Henry Palace. Is this the Open Vista Institute?”

  The old woman turns silently and goes into the house, and I follow her, and tell her what I want, and at last she speaks.

  “He was an odd duck, wasn’t he?” she says, of Peter Zell. Her voice is strong and clear, surprisingly so.

  “I actually never met him.”

  “Well, he was.”

  “Okay.”

  I just figured it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more about this file, this last claims investigation that my insurance man was up to, before he was killed. I’ve had to return my department-issued Impala, so I just biked out here, broke out my mother’s old Schwinn. It took me a little over five hours, including a stop to eat my lunch at an abandoned Dunkin’ Donuts at a highway rest stop.

  “An odd duck. And he didn’t need to come here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” She gestures to the file I brought, which rests on the coffee table between her and me, three pieces of paper in a manila folder: a claim, a policy, a summary of supporting documents. “There was nothing he asked that he couldn’t have asked me on the phone.”

  Her name is Veronica Talley, it’s her signature on the files, hers and that of her husband, Bernard, now deceased. Mrs. Talley’s eyes are small and black and beady, like doll’s eyes. The living room is small and tidy, the walls lined with seashells and delicate seaweed still lifes. I am still seeing zero evidence that this is the headquarters of any kind of institute.

  “Ma’am, I understand that your husband committed suicide.”

  “Yes. He hung himself. In the bathroom. From the thing—” She looks irritated. “The thing? That the water comes out of?”

  “The showerhead, ma’am?”

  “That’s right. Excuse me. I’m old.”

  “I am sorry for your loss.”

  “Shouldn’t be. He told me he was going to do it. Told me to go for a walk along the water, talk to the hermit crabs, and when I got back he’d be dead in the bathroom. And that’s how it happened.”

  She sniffs, appraises me with her tiny hard eyes. Bernard Talley’s death, I know from having read the papers on the table between us, netted her one million dollars, personally, and an additional three million for the Open Vista Institute, if there is such a thing. Zell had authorized the claim, released the money, after his visit to this place three weeks ago—though he had left the file open, as if he might have been intending to come back, follow up.

  “You’re a bit like him, aren’t you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re like your friend, the one that came out here. Sat right there where you’re sitting.”

  “As I said, ma’am, I never knew Mr. Zell.”

  “Still, you’re like him though.”

  There are wind chimes hung right out the back window, behind the kitchen, and I just keep still for as second, listen to their gentle crystal tolling.

  “Ma’am? WIll you tell me about the Institute? I would like to know what all that money will go toward.”

  “That’s just what your friend wanted to know.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s not illegal. We’re a registered nonprofit. 501(c)3, whatever it’s called.”

  “I’m sure.”

  She doesn’t say anything else. The wind chimes go again, and then a drift of parade music, tubas and trumpets from the gazebo, warming up.

  “Mrs. Talley, I can find out in other ways if I must, but it would be easier if you could just tell me.”

  She sighs, stands up and shuffles
out of the room, and I’m following her, hoping we’re going somewhere so she can show me, because that was pure bluff—I have no real way of finding out anything. Not anymore.

  * * *

  The money, as it turns out, has gone in large part for titanium.

  “I’m not the engineer,” says Mrs. Talley. “Bernard was the engineer. He designed the thing. But the contents we chose together, and we solicited the materials together. We started in May, as soon as it became clear that the worst was a real possibility.”

  On a worktable in the garage is an unadorned metal sphere, a few feet in diameter. Mrs. Talley tells me the outer layer is titanium, but that is only the outer layer: there are several layers of aluminum, levels of a thermal coating of Mr. Talley’s own design. He had been an aerospace engineer for many years, and he felt certain that the sphere would be resistant to cosmic radiation and to damage from space detritus, and it could survive in orbit around Earth.

  “Survive for how long?”

  She smiles, the first time she has done so in my presence.

  “Until humanity recovers sufficiently to retrieve it.”

  Packed carefully inside the sphere are a brick of DVDs, drawings, rolled-up newspapers in glass cases, and samples of various materials. “Salt water, a clump of clay, human blood,” says Mrs. Talley. “He was a smart cookie, my husband. A smart cookie.”

  I go through the inventory in the little satellite for a few minutes, turning over the odd assemblage of objects, holding each thing in my hand, nodding appreciatively. The human race, human history, in a nutshell. While putting the collection together, they had contracted with a small private aerospace company to do the launch, scheduled it for June, and then they’d run out of money. That’s what the insurance claim was for; that’s what the suicide was for. Now the launch, says Mrs. Talley, is back on schedule.

  “Well?” she says. “What do you want to add to the capsule?”

  “Nothing,” I say. “Why do you ask that?”

  “That’s what the other man wanted.”

  “Mr. Zell? He wanted to put something in here?”

  “He did put something in there.” She reaches into the accumulated materials, shifts through and removes an innocuous manila envelope, thin and small and folded over. I hadn’t noticed it before. “I actually think this is why he came up here, to tell you the truth. He pretended that he needed to investigate our claim in person, but I had told him everything, and then he showed up here anyway. Came up here with that little tape, and then he asked, kind of mumbling, if could he put it in here.”