The Last Policeman

by Ben H. Winters

  Littlejohn takes a deep breath, looks around the room, as if he’s afraid of the eavesdropping ghost of Peter Zell. “You know, to tell you the truth, after that, we weren’t crazy having him around Kyle. All of this, it’s hard enough—on the boy—” His voice breaks, he clears his throat. “Excuse me.”

  I nod, writing, my mind moving quickly.

  So what do we have, then? We have a man who, at work, appears to be basically disaffected, quiet, head down, registering no reaction to the coming calamity except for that one shocking outburst on Halloween. Then it turns out that he’s squirreled away a massive and comprehensive trove of information on the asteroid, that he’s privately obsessed with what he’s shrugging off in public.

  And now it seems that, at least according to his brother-in-law, outside the office he was not only affected but overwhelmed; distraught. The kind of man who would, after all, be inclined to take his own life.

  Oh, Peter, I think. What is your story, friend?

  “And this mood, this depression, it hadn’t improved lately?”

  “Oh, no. Heavens, no. To the contrary. It was much worse since, you know, since January. Since the final determination.”

  The final determination. Meaning the Tolkin interview. Tuesday, January 3. A CBS News Special Report. Garnered 1.6 billion viewers worldwide. I wait in silence for a moment, listening to Kyle’s energetic footsteps overhead. Then I decide, what the heck, and I take out the small white pad of paper from my breast pocket and hand it to Erik Littlejohn. “What can you tell me about this?”

  I watch while he reads it. Dear Sophia.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “Is that Peter Zell’s handwriting, as far as you know?”

  “Sure. I mean, I think so. As I said—”

  “You didn’t know him that well.”

  “Right.”

  “He was going to write something to your wife, before he died, and he changed his mind. Do you know what that might have been?”

  “Well, a suicide note, presumably. An unfinished suicide note.” He looks up, looks in my eyes. “What else would it be?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, standing up, tucking away my little book. “Thanks very much for your time. And if you would just let Sophia know I’ll be calling again to set up a time to talk.”

  Erik stands also, his brow furrowing. “You still need to speak to her?”

  “I do.”

  “All right, sure.” He nods, sighs. “This is a trial for her. All of it. But of course I’ll let her know.”

  I get in the Impala but don’t go anywhere, not yet. I sit outside the house for about a minute, until I see Littlejohn shepherding Kyle out and across the lawn, thick with unbroken snow like vanilla buttercream frosting. A goofy ten-year-old, tromping in oversized winter boots, pointy elbows jutting out from the pushed-up sleeves of his windbreaker.

  At Zell’s apartment, I saw the picture and I remember thinking he was an average-looking, even homely child. But now I’m revising that assessment, seeing him as his father sees him: a princeling, dancing in morning light as he marches across the snow.

  * * *

  I’m driving away and I’m thinking about the Tolkin interview, imagining Peter Zell on that night.

  It’s January 3, it’s a Tuesday, and he’s home from work, settled in his sterile gray living room, staring at the screen of his small TV.

  On January 2, the asteroid 2011GV1, known as Maia, had at last emerged from conjunction with the Sun, was again observable from Earth, was at last sufficiently close and bright for the scientists to see it clearly, to gather new sets of data, to know. Observations were pouring in, being compiled and processed at one collection center, the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, in Pasadena, California. What had been, since September, a fifty-fifty chance was about to be resolved—either one hundred percent, or zero.

  So there’s Peter Zell on his living room sofa with his latest accumulation of asteroid-related articles spread out in front of him, all the scientific discourse and anxious analysis finally boiling down to predictions and prayers, to yes or no.

  CBS had won the bidding war for broadcast rights. The world was ending, maybe, but if it wasn’t, they’d feast on the ratings coup for years. There was an elaborate preshow centered on the head engineer at JPL, Leonard Tolkin, the man overseeing that final burst of number crunching. “I’ll be the one,” he had promised David Letterman three weeks earlier, his smile twitching, “to give the good news.” Pale, bespectacled, in a white lab coat, a central-casting government astronomer.

  There’s a countdown clock on the lower-right corner of the screen accompanying cheesy B-roll, tracking shots of Tolkin walking the hallways of the institute, scrawling columns of math on a dry-erase board, huddling with his subordinates around computer screens.

  And there’s short, paunchy, lonely Peter Zell in his apartment, watching in silence, surrounded by his articles, glasses perched on his nose, hands flat on his knees.

  The program goes live, featuring the newsman Scott Pelley, square chinned and grave, gray hair and solemn made-for-television face. Pelley watches, on behalf of the world, as Tolkin emerges from the decisive meeting with a stack of manila folders clutched under one arm, peels off his horn-rimmed spectacles, and begins to sob.

  Now, driving slowly in the direction of the Somerset Diner, I’m trying to capture the memory of someone else’s feelings, trying to decide exactly what Peter Zell was experiencing in that moment. Pelley leans forward, all empathy, asks the magically stupid question that all the world needed to hear:

  “So, then, Doctor. What are our options?”

  Dr. Leo Tolkin trembling, almost laughing. “Options? There are no options.”

  And then Tolkin just keeps talking, babbling really, about how sorry he is, on behalf of the world astronomical community, how this event never could have been predicted, how they had studied every realistic scenario—small object, short lead time; large object, long lead time—but this, this never could have been imagined, an object with such a near perihelion, with such an epically long elliptical period, such a staggeringly large object—the odds of such an object’s existence so vanishingly low as to be statistically equivalent to impossible. And Scott Pelley is staring at him, and all over the world people are sinking into grief or hysteria.

  Because all at once there was no more ambiguity, no more doubt. All at once it was just a matter of time. Odds of impact one hundred percent. October 3. No options.

  Many people remained glued to their televisions after the program ended, watching pundits and professors of astronomy and political figures stammering and weeping and contradicting one another on the various cable stations; waiting for the president’s promised address to the nation, which ultimately did not materialize until noon the next day. Many people ran to the phones to try to reach loved ones, though all the circuits were jammed and would remain that way for the week that followed. Other people went out into the streets, bitter January weather notwithstanding, to commiserate with neighbors or strangers, or to engage in small acts of vandalism or petty mischief—a trend that would continue and culminate, in the Concord area at least, with a small wave of rioting on Presidents’ Day.

  I, personally, turned off the TV and went to work. I was in my fourth week as a detective, I had an arson case I was working on, and I had a strong suspicion, ultimately proved true, that the next day would be a busy and stressful one at police headquarters.

  The question, though, is what about Peter Zell? What did he do, when the show was over? Whom did he call?

  A summary review of the bare facts suggests that, behind his attempts to keep up a brave face, Zell had been despondent all along about the possibility of Earth’s immanent destruction. And with the confirmation of that fact, it’s not hard to imagine that on the night of January 3, seeing the bad news on television, he had been pitched past despondence and into a brutal depression. He had staggered around for eleven weeks in a haze of dread and then,
two nights ago, had hung himself with a belt.

  So why am I driving around Concord, trying to figure out who killed him?

  I’m in the parking lot of the Somerset Diner, nestled at the three-way intersection of Clinton, South, and Downing. I’m contemplating the snow in the parking lot, churned up by the morning influx of pedestrians and bicyclists. I’m comparing this rutted, brown-and-white mess to the unbroken blanket of snow on the front lawn of the Littlejohns’ house. If Sophia had really been called out for an emergency delivery this morning, she had left by catapult, or teleportation machine.

  * * *

  The walls of the Somerset, where you first come in, are lined with photographs of presidential candidates shaking hands with Bob Galicki, the former owner, now deceased. There’s a picture of sallow Dick Nixon, one of stiff and unconvincing John Kerry, hand stiffly protruding like a broken piece offence. Here’s John McCain with his skull-face grin. John F. Kennedy, impossibly young, impossibly handsome, doomed.

  The music from the stereo in the kitchen is Bob Dylan, something from Street Legal, which means Maurice is cooking, which augurs well for the quality of my lunch.

  “Sit anywhere, honey,” says Ruth-Ann, rushing past with a carafe of coffee. Her hands are withered but strong, steady around the thick black handle of the carafe. When I used to come here in high school, we would joke about Ruth-Ann’s ancientness, whether she’d been hired for this gig or if they’d built the place around her. That was ten years ago.

  I drink my coffee and ignore the menu, surreptitiously inspecting the faces of my fellow diners, weighing the relative melancholy in each of their eyes, the shell-shocked expressions. An old couple murmuring to each other, bent over their soup bowls. A girl, nineteen maybe, with an enervated stare, joggling a pallid baby on her knee. A fat businessman glaring angrily at the menu, a cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth.

  Everybody is smoking, actually, dull gray tendrils curling up under every light fixture. It’s like how it used to be in here, before they outlawed smoking in places of public accommodation, a law I strongly supported, as the only nonsmoker among my group of misfit high-school sophomores. The regulation is still on the books, but it’s widely flouted, and CPD policy at this point is to look the other way.

  I fiddle with my cutlery and sip my coffee and think.

  Yes, Mr. Dotseth, it is true a lot of people are depressed, and a lot of those people have chosen to take their own lives. But I cannot, as a responsible police detective, accept this piece of context as evidence that Peter Zell was a 10-54S. If the coming destruction of the planet was enough to make people kill themselves, this restaurant would be empty. Concord would be a ghost town. There’d be no one left for Maia to kill, because we’d all be dead already.

  “Three-egg omelet?”

  “Whole wheat toast,” I say, and then add, “Ruth-Ann, I got a question for you.”

  “I have an answer.” She has not written down my order, but I’ve been ordering the same thing since I was eleven. “You go first.”

  “What do you make of all this hanger-town business? The suicides, I mean. Would you ever—”

  Ruth-Ann growls, disgusted.

  “You kidding? I’m Catholic, honey. No. Absolutely not.”

  See, I don’t think I would either. My omelet arrives and I eat it slowly, staring into space, wishing it weren’t so smoky in here.

  5.

  The expansion of Concord Hospital was announced with much fanfare eighteen months ago: a public–private partnership to add a new long-term-care wing and make wide-ranging improvements to pediatrics, to obstetrics/gynecology, and to the ICU. They broke ground last February, made steady progress through the spring, and then financing dried up and construction slowed and then stopped entirely by the end of July, leaving a maze of half-built hallways, towers of skeletal scaffolding, lots of awkward temporary arrangements made permanent, everybody walking in circles and giving one another wrong directions.

  “The morgue?” says a white-haired volunteer in a cheerful red beret, consulting a handheld map. “Let’s see … the morgue, the morgue, the morgue. Oh. Here.” A pair of doctors rushes past, clutching clipboards, while the volunteer gestures at her map, which I can see is covered with scrawled emendations and exclamation points. “What you need is Elevator B, and Elevator B is … oh, dear.”

  My hands are twitching at my sides. One thing you don’t want to do, when you’re meeting Dr. Alice Fenton, is be late.

  “Oh. That way.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Elevator B, according to the sign written in black permanent marker and taped above the buttons, goes either up—to oncology, to special surgery, to the pharmacy—or down, to the chapel, the custodial department, and the morgue. I step off, checking my watch, and hustle down the hallway past an office suite, past a supply closet, past a small black door with a white Christian cross on it, thinking, oncology—thinking, you know what would really be awful right about now? Having cancer.

  But then I push open the thick metal doors of the morgue, and there’s Peter Zell, his body laid out on the table in the center of the room, spot-lit dramatically by the arching bank of hundred-watt autopsy lights. And standing beside him, waiting for me, is the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire. I stick out a hand in greeting. “Good morning, Dr. Fenton. Afternoon, sorry. Hello.”

  “Tell me about your corpse.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say, letting my proffered hand float dumbly back to my side, and then I just stand there like an idiot, speechless, because Fenton is here, in front of me, standing in the stark white light of the morgue, one hand resting on the front end of her sleek silver cart like a captain at the tiller. She stares out from behind her famous perfect-circle glasses, waiting with an expression I’ve heard repeatedly described by other detectives, owlish and expectant and intense.

  “Detective?”

  “Yes,” I say, again. “Okay.” I get my act together and give Fenton what I’ve got.

  I tell her about the crime scene, about the expensive belt, the absence of the victim’s cell phone, the absence of a suicide note. As I speak, my eyes are flicking back and forth from Fenton to the items on her cart, the tools of the pathologist’s trade: the bone saw, the chisel and the scissors, rows of vials for the collection of various precious fluids. Scalpels of a dozen different widths and keennesses, arrayed on clean white fabric.

  Dr. Fenton remains silent and still through my recitation, and when at last I shut up she continues to stare, her lips pursed and her brow minutely furrowed.

  “Okay, then,” she says at last. “So, what the hell are we doing here?”

  “Ma’am?”

  Fenton’s hair is steely gray and cut short, bangs running in a precise line across her forehead.

  “I thought this was a suspicious death,” she says, her eyes narrowing to two flashing points. “What I’m hearing from you does not comprise evidence of a suspicious death.”

  “Well, yes, no,” I stammer. “Not evidence, per se.”

  “Not evidence, per se?” she echoes, in a tone that somehow makes me keenly aware of the basement’s unusually low ceiling, the fact that I’m standing slightly stooped so as not to bang my forehead on the bank of overhead lights, whereas Dr. Fenton, at five foot three, stands fully upright, her spine military-straight, glaring at me from behind the glasses.

  “Per Title LXII statute 630 of the criminal code of New Hampshire, as revised in January by the general court sitting in combined session,” Fenton says, and I’m nodding, vigorously nodding to show her that I know all this, I’ve studied the binders, federal, state, and local, but she keeps going, “the OCME will not perform autopsies when it can be reasonably ascertained at the scene that the death was the result of suicide.”

  “Right,” I say, muttering “yes” and “of course,” until I can respond. “And it was my determination, ma’am, that there may have been some question of foul play.”

  �
��There were signs of struggle at the scene?”

  “No.”

  “Signs of forced entry?

  “No.”

  “Missing valuables?”

  “Well, the, uh, he didn’t have a phone. I think I mentioned that.”

  “Who are you again?”

  “We haven’t met, officially. My name is Detective Henry Palace. I’m new.”

  “Detective Palace,” says Fenton, pulling on her gloves with a series of fierce movements, “my daughter has twelve piano recitals this season, and I am, at this very moment, missing one of them. Do you know how many piano recitals she will have next season?”

  I don’t know what to say to that. I really don’t. So I just stand there for a minute, the tall and stupid man in the brightly lit room full of corpses.

  “Okey-dokey then,” says Alice Fenton with menacing cheer, turning to her cart of equipment. “This better be a goddamn murder.”

  She takes up her blade and I stare at the floor, feeling distinctly that what I’m supposed to do, here, is stand very quietly until she is through—but it’s hard to do that, it really is, and as she begins the meticulous stepwise progression of her work, I look up and inch forward and watch her do it. And it is a glorious thing to watch, the cold and beautiful precision of the autopsy, Fenton in motion, a master moving meticulously through the steps of her craft.

  The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.

  Carefully Dr. Fenton cuts free the black leather belt and slips it off Zell’s neck, measures the width of the band and the length from end to end. With brass calipers she takes the dimensions of the bruising beneath the eye, and the bruise from the belt buckle, digging up beneath the chin, yellowish and dry like a patch of sere terrain running up on either side toward his ears, an angry ragged V. And she’s pausing, moment to moment, to take pictures of everything: the belt while it’s still on the neck, the belt alone, the neck alone.