The Last Policeman

1.

“Good Lord Almighty, Henry Palace, what happened to you?”

This seems like an awfully harsh assessment from a former sweetheart I haven’t seen for six years, until I remember what I look like: my face, my eye. I bring my hand up, adjust the thick stiff packet of gauze, smooth my mustache, feel the bristle of stubble along my jaw.

“I’ve had a rough couple of days,” I say.

“Sorry to hear that.”

It’s six-thirty in the morning, and Andreas is dead, and Zell is dead, and Toussaint is dead, and here I am standing in Cambridge, on a footbridge over the Charles River, making small talk with Alison Koechner. And it’s weirdly pleasant out here, it must be over fifty degrees, as if crossing the Massachusetts state line has tripped me over into a southern latitude. All of it, the gentle spring breeze, the morning sun glinting off the bridge, the soothing ripple of the river in spring, it would all be pleasurable in another world, another time. But I close my eyes and what I see is death: Andreas flattened against the grill of a bus; J. T. Toussaint thrown back against the wall, a hole blown open in his chest; Peter Zell in the bathroom.

“It’s great to see you, Alison.”

“Okay,” she says.

“I mean it.”

“Let’s not get into all that.”

The wild tangle of orchid-red hair that I remember has been cut to an adult length and corralled into a bun with a system of small efficient clips. She wears gray pants and a gray blazer and a small gold pin on her lapel: she really does, she looks terrific.

“So,” says Alison, and draws from an inside pocket of her blazer a slim letter-size white envelope. “This friend of yours? Mr. Skeve?”

“He’s not my friend,” I say immediately, raising one finger. “He’s Nico’s husband.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Nico, as in your sister Nico?”

“Asteroid,” I say, no need to expound. Impulse marriage. Shotgun wedding. Biggest imaginable shotgun. Alison nods, just says, “Wow.” She knew Nico when Nico was twelve years old, already not the kind of a person you imagined settling down. A sneak smoker, a snatcher of beers from the cooler in Grandfather’s garage, a succession of bad haircuts and disciplinary problems.

“Okay then. So, your brother-in-law, Skeve? He’s a terrorist.”

I laugh. “No. Skeve is not any kind of terrorist. He’s an idiot.”

“The overlapping Venn-diagram section of those two categories, you will find, can be quite large.”

I sigh, lean one hip against the rusted green steel of the bridge’s guard rail. A shell slides by, cutting through the surface of the river, the crew grunting as they shoot past. I like these kids, getting up at six in the morning to row crew, keeping in shape, sticking with their program. These kids, I like.

“What would you say,” Alison asks, “if I told you that the United States government, long ago anticipating this kind of disaster, had prepared an escape plan? Had constructed, in secret, a habitable environment, beyond reach of the asteroid’s destructive effects, where humanity’s best and brightest could be relocated and made safe to repopulate the species?”

I bring my palm up to my face, rub it against my cheek, which is only now beginning to emerge, from its numbness, into active pain.

“I’d say that’s insane. It’s Hollywood nonsense.”

“And you would be right. But there are those who are not as perspicacious.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” I’m remembering Derek Skeve lying on the thin mattress in his cell, his spoiled kid’s clowning grin. I wish I could tell you, Henry, but it’s a secret.

Alison opens the white envelope, unfolds three pieces of crisp white paper, and hands them to me, and my impulse is to say, you know what? Forget the whole thing. I have a murder to solve. But I don’t. Not today.

Three single-spaced typed pages, no watermark, no agency seal, pocked here and there with thick black lines of redaction. In 2008 there was a tabletop exercise convened by the Directorate of Strategic Planning of the United States Air Force, drawing on the resources and personnel of sixteen discrete agencies of the United States government, including the DHS, the DTRA, and NASA. The exercise imagined an event “above global-catastrophe threshold” in a “short-warning” scenario—in other words, exactly what has now come to pass—and considered every possible response: nuclear counterstrike, slow push-pull, kinetic options. The conclusion was that realistic response options would be limited to civil defense.

I’m yawning, flipping forward. I’m still on the first page. “Alison?”

She rolls her eyes slightly, the small gentle sarcasm so familiar that it squeezes my heart in my chest, and takes back the papers. “There was a dissent, Palace. An astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore named Dr. Mary Catchman insisted that the government act preemptively and build habitable environments on the moon. When Maia turned up, certain individuals convinced themselves that the DOD had embraced that dissent, and that these safe havens exist.”

“Bases?”

“Yes.”

“On the Moon?”

“Yes.”

I squint into the gray sun, seeing Andreas plastered against the bus, slowly sliding down. IT IS SIMPLY TO PRAY. Secret government escape bases. People’s inability to face up to this thing is worse than the thing, it really is.

“So, Derek was tooling around the Guard station on his ATV looking for, what, blueprints? Escape pods? A giant slingshot?”

“Or something.”

“Doesn’t make him a terrorist.”

“I know, but that’s the designation. The way the military-justice system works right now, once he’s got that tag, there’s nothing that can be done.”

“Well, I’m no fan of this guy, but Nico loves him. There’s nothing—?”

“There’s nothing. Nothing.” Alison sends a long look out across the river, at the rowers, the ducks, the clouds easing along in parallel with the water line. She is not the first girl I ever kissed, but she remains the one I’ve kissed the most, in all my life thus far. “I’m sorry. It’s not my department.”

“What is your department, anyway?”

She doesn’t answer; I knew she wouldn’t. We’ve always stayed in touch, the occasional e-mail, phone numbers exchanged every couple of years. I know that she is based in New England, and I know that she works for a federal agency, operating at a level of law enforcement that is orders of magnitude beyond mine. Before we dated, she had wanted to go to veterinary school.

“Any more questions, Palace?”

“No.” I glance at the river, then back at her. “Wait. Yes. A friend of mine asked why we won’t let the Pakistanis try and nuke the asteroid, if they want to.”

Alison laughs once, mirthlessly, and begins tearing the papers into strips. “Tell your friend,” she says, tearing the strips into smaller strips, then those into still smaller ones, “that if they hit it—which they won’t—but if they do instead of one asteroid, we’ll have thousands of smaller but still devastating asteroids. Thousands and thousands of irradiated asteroids.”

I don’t say anything. With her small efficient fingers, Alison feeds the tiny bits of paper into the Charles, and then she turns to me and smiles.

“Anyway, Detective Palace,” she says. “Whatcha working on?”

“Nothing,” I say, turn my face away. “Nothing, really.”

* * *

But I tell her about the Zell case anyway, I can’t help it. We’re walking up John F. Kennedy from Memorial Drive to Harvard Square, and I give her the whole story, top to bottom, and then I ask her, from a professional standpoint, what she makes of the case. We’ve arrived at a kiosk in what used to be a newsstand, now strung with Christmas lights, a squat portable generator humming outside, grumbling and hissing like a miniature tank. The glass of the newsstand is blacked out, and someone has taped two big pieces of cardboard across the front doors, written THE COFFEE DOCTOR on them in big black letters with a Sharpie.

“Well,” she says slowly, as I hold open the door for her. “Not having examined the evidence firsthand, it certainly sounds like you reached the correct conclusion. Ninety-five percent chance, this guy was just another hanger.”

“Yep,” I say.

It’s dark inside the converted news kiosk, a couple of bare bulbs and another string of Christmas lights, an old-fashioned cash register and an espresso machine, squat and gleaming, parked like a tank on the black countertop.

“Greetings, humans,” says the proprietor, an Asian kid, maybe nineteen, with a porkpie hat and horn-rimmed glasses and a wispy beard. He gives Alison a cheerful salute. “Pleasure, as always.”

“Thanks, Coffee Doctor,” she says. “Who’s in the lead?”

“Let’s see.”

I look where he’s looking, seven paper coffee cups lined up on the far end of the counter, each cup with the name of a continent scrawled on it. He tilts a couple, rattles them, eyeballs the number of beans that have been tossed in each.

“Antarctica. No contest.”

“Wishful thinking,” says Alison.

“No shit, sister.”

“Couple of the usual.”

“Your wish, my command,” he says, and works fast, lining up two dainty ceramic demitasses, dunking a steamer wand in a stainless-steel jug of milk and flicking it on.

“Best coffee in the world,” notes Alison.

“What’s the five percent chance?” I ask, as the espresso machine rattles and hisses.

Alison smiles faintly. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“I’m just wondering.”

“Henry,” says Alison, as the kid presents us with our two short cups of coffee. “Can I tell you something? You can follow this case forever, and you can discover all its secrets, you can build this man’s timeline all the way back to his birth, and the birth of his father and his father’s father. The world is still going to end.”

“Yep. Yeah, I know.” We’ve settled in a corner of the ersatz coffee shop now, huddled at an old plastic card table the Coffee Doctor has set up. “But what’s the five percent chance, though, in your analysis?”

She sighs, gives it to me again, that small gentle sarcastic eye roll.

“The five percent is this: for this man Toussaint to attack you with the ashtray like that, to try and run for it? With three armed detectives in the room. That’s a Hail Mary. That’s a desperation play.”

“McGully threatened to have him executed.”

“In jest.”

“He’s scared. He doesn’t know that.”

“Sure, sure.” She tilts her head this way and that, considering. “But you’re threatening, at the same moment, to arrest him on a minor violation.”

“For two weeks. Engine fraud. A token bid.”

“Yes,” she says. “But even for a token bid, you’re going to search the house, right?”

Alison pauses to sip her espresso. I leave mine alone, for now, staring at her. Oh, Palace, I’m thinking. Oh, Palace. Holy moly. Someone else comes into the cafe, a college-age girl; the Coffee Doctor says, “Greetings, human,” fires up his machine, and the girl tosses a bean into the cup marked EUROPE.

“Still, five percent chance,” says Alison. “But you know what they say about odds.”

“Yep.” I sip my espresso, which is, in fact, delicious. “Yep, yep, yep.”

* * *

I’m buzzing. I’m feeling it. The coffee, the morning. Five percent chance.

Ninety-three north, fifty-five miles an hour, eight o’clock in the morning, no other cars on the road.

Somewhere between Lowell and Lawrence my phone picks up three bars, and I call Nico, I wake her up, I give her the bad news: Derek got involved with something foolish, and he’s not getting out. I go easy on the details. I don’t use the word terrorist. I don’t tell her about the secret organization, I don’t tell her about the Moon. I just tell her what Alison said about the military-justice system right now: he’s got a label that means he’s not going anywhere.

I’m sympathetic but clear: this is the way it is, and there’s nothing else to be done, and then I brace myself for her tearful or spiteful or furious rebuttal.

Instead she is silent, and I lift the phone, making sure my bars haven’t disappeared. “Nico?”

“Yeah. I’m here.”

“So—do you understand?”

I’m rolling north, steadily north, over the state line. Welcome to New Hampshire. Live Free or Die.

“Yeah,” says Nico, a pause for the slow exhale of cigarette smoke. “I understand.”

“Derek will mostly likely spend the rest of the time in that facility.”

“Okay, Henry,” she says, like maybe now I’m rubbing it in. “I get it. How was it, seeing Alison?”

“What?”

“How does she look?”

“Uh, good,” I say. “She looks really good.”

And then somehow the conversation slips into a different key, and she’s telling me how much she always liked Alison, and we’re trading stories from old times: growing up, our first days at Grandfather’s, then later, sneaking around with dates in the basement. I’m rolling past the scenery, and for a while we’re talking like we used to talk, two kids, brother and sister, the real world.

By the time Nico and I get off the phone, I’m almost home, I’m rolling into the southern part of the Concord metro area, and my cellphone signal is still strong, so I go ahead and put through one more call.

“Mr. Dotseth?”

“Hey, kid. I heard about Detective Andreas. Christ.”

“I know. I know. Listen, I’m going to take another peek around.”

“Peek around where?”

“The house on Bow Bog Road? Where we tried to arrest a suspect yesterday in the hanger case?”

“Yeah, good collar. Except where you shot the guy to death.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hey, did you hear about these goofballs in Henniker? Couple of kids riding one of those two-person bikes, trailing a rolling suitcase on a bungee cord. State police pull ’em over, the suitcase is full of escopetas—those little Mexican shotguns. We’re talking fifty thousand dollars’ worth of firearms these kids are biking around with.”

“Huh.”

“Today’s prices, anyway.”

“Huh. So, Denny, I’m going to head back to that house now, give it another look.”

“Which house is that?”

* * *

The crime-scene taping job that’s been done at J. T. Toussaint’s ugly little house is clumsy and haphazard. One thin strip of yellow cellophane, run in a series of slack fluttering U’s, from porch post to porch post, then to one of the sagging branches of the oak tree, then across the lawn to the flag of the mailbox. Tied loosely at each station, half slipping, wind teased, like it doesn’t matter, like it’s birthday party decoration.

Supposedly, subsequent to yesterday’s gunplay, this house was secured and searched by a team of patrol officers, per procedure, but I have my doubts, based firstly on the lackluster nature of the crime-scene taping, secondly on the fact that, inside, nothing appears to have been moved. All of Toussaint’s battered and stained living-room furniture rests exactly where it did yesterday. It’s easy to imagine, say, Officer Michelson, enjoying an egg-and-sausage sandwich, strolling through the house’s four small rooms, lifting and dropping sofa cushions, peering in the refrigerator, yawning, calling it a day.

Six thick patches of blood form a black and rust red archipelago across the carpeted floor of the living room and the hardwood of the front hallway. My blood, from my eye; Toussaint’s, from the cut on his forehead, from the multiple gunshot wounds that killed him.

I step carefully over and around the blood, and then I stand at the center of the living room, turning in a slow circle, mentally dividing the house into quadrants, as Farley and Leonard recommend, and then I launch into a real search. I go through the house inch by inch, crawling on my belly when necessary, awkwardly shoehorning my body all the way under Toussaint’s bed. I dig a stepladder out of the cluttered closet and climb up to punch through the flimsy tiles of the ceiling, find nothing in the crawlspace but insulation fiber and ancient secret stockpiles of dust. I go through Toussaint’s bedroom closet carefully—looking for what, exactly? A rack of fancy leather belts, with one missing? A blueprint of the men’s room of the Main Street McDonald’s? I don’t know.

Anyway—pants, shirts, overalls. Two pairs of boots. Nothing.

A five percent chance is what Alison reckoned. Five percent.

A small door beside the pantry opens onto a short flight of concrete stairs, no railing, a grim basement, a single lightbulb with a length of twine as a pull-cord. Opposite a massive dead boiler is the lair of the dog: a pillow bed, a collection of chewed-up rubber toys, a food bowl licked clean, another bowl with a quarter-inch puddle of dirty water.

“Poor thing,” I say aloud, and then he appears, Houdini, as if conjured, standing at the top of the steps, a tiny scruffy mop-head of a dog, yellow teeth bared, eyes wide, white fur mottled gray.

What am I supposed to do? I find some bacon and I cook it up, and then, while Houdini is eating, I sit at the kitchen table and I imagine Peter Zell sitting across from me, glasses off and set down beside him, eyes intent on his small delicate task, carefully sniffing up the crushed white interiors of a pain pill.

And then there’s the loud bang of the front door slamming closed, and when I leap up my chair tips backward and hits the floor, a second bang, and Houdini looks up and barks and I’m running as fast as I can, through the house, flinging open the door and shouting, “Police!”

Nothing, silence, white lawn, gray clouds.

I sprint down to the road, lose and then gain my balance, sliding the last three feet as if on skis. “Police!” again, one way down the road, and then the other, breathing hard. Whoever it was is gone. They were here, in here with me this whole time, or they’ve slipped in and out again, looking for whatever it was I’m looking for, and now they’re gone.

“Shoot,” I say quietly. I turn around and stare at the ground, trying to tell the intruder’s footprints in the snow and slush from my own. Big snowflakes are tumbling down, one at a time, as if they’ve agreed in advance to take turns. My heart slowly decelerates.

Houdini is on the doorstep, licking his chops. Wants more food.

Wait, now. I tilt my head, study the house and the tree and the lawn.

“Wait.”

If Houdini lives down there with the boiler, what’s in the doghouse?

* * *

The answer is simple: it’s pills. Pills and a whole lot of other stuff.

Manila mailing envelopes crammed full with pill bottles, each bottle containing several dozen thirty- or sixty-milligram tablets, each tablet stamped with the name of the medication or the manufacturer. Most of the pills are MS Contin, but there are others: Oxycontin, Dilaudid, Lidocaine. Six of the thick mailing envelopes in total, hundreds of pills in each. There’s a small carton filled with small white wax papers; a pill crusher, the kind you get at the drug store; in another box, wrapped in a baggie, inside a paper bag from Market Basket, a snub-nose automatic pistol, which in today’s environment must be worth several thousand dollars. There are vials of dark-colored liquid and several dozen syringes wrapped individually in crinkly plastic packaging. In another Market Basket bag is cash, fat bricks of hundred-dollar bills.

Two thousand. Three thousand.

I stop counting after five thousand. My hands are trembling, so I can’t count it all, but it’s a lot.

Then I limp back to the car again for a roll of crime-scene tape, and I wind it all the way around, secure it properly, tight and taut. Houdini trots along with me around the perimeter, and then stands next to me, panting, and I don’t invite him into the Impala, but I don’t stop him from getting in, either.

* * *

“Stretch. My brother. You’re never going to believe this.” McGully is at the window, it’s slightly cracked, there’s a sweet and heavy smell in the room. “So these jokers up in Henniker are on ten-speeds, they’re towing a rolling suitcase—”

“I heard.”

“Oh,” he says. “Ruin it.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“A little bit, yeah, I am. It’s been a hard week. I shot a guy, remember? You want?”

“No, thanks.”

I tell him about my haul from Toussaint’s house, tell him how I’ve discovered that there’s more to the story, much more. He listens with glazed eyes, and occasionally he takes a deep pull from the tiny rolled-up twist of paper, blowing smoke out the crack in the window. Culverson is nowhere to be seen, Andreas’s desk is empty, computer monitor turned to face the wall, phone unplugged. It feels like it’s been empty for years.

“So the scumbag was lying,” is McGully’s conclusion. “I could have told you that. He’s a drug dealer, he got his buddy hooked, and then his buddy killed himself.”

“Well, except it’s true that Zell was the one who brought Toussaint drugs in the first place. He stole his sister’s prescription pad.”

“Oh. Huh.” He grins, scratches his chin. “Oh, wait—you know what? Who gives a shit.”

“Yep,” I say. “Good point.”

“Whoa. Is that the f*cking dog from the crime scene?”

“Maybe …” I say, and McGully says, “Maybe what?” and now I’m pacing vigorously, the dog is pacing, too, in my footsteps. “Maybe what happens is, Peter brings Toussaint pills in June. They hang out, they get high, and then after Peter gets caught and quits, J. T. keeps it going. Maybe at some point he started selling the overflow, and now he’s gotten used to the cash, he’s put a customer base together. So he finds himself a new source.”

“Yes!” says McGully exuberantly, and pounds his fist on the table. “Probably the same person who tried to murder you with your snow chains.”

I look at him and he’s clearly making fun of me. I sit back down in my chair.

No use telling McGully about the slamming front door back at the house on Bow Bog Road, because he will say I’m imagining things, or that it was a ghost, and I know that I am not, and it was not. Someone tried to stop me from finding those drugs, and it wasn’t J. T. Toussaint, because Toussaint is lying dead in the morgue in the basement of Concord Hospital.

Houdini sniffs around under Andreas’s desk, settles in for a nap. My cell phone rings.

“Hello? Detective Palace?”

It’s Naomi Eddes, and she sounds nervous, and at the sound of her voice I feel nervous, too, like a kid.

“Yep. This is me. Hi.”

I can feel McGully looking at me, so I stand up from my desk, step over to the window.

“What’s up?”

“I just—” The phone crackles for a second, and my heart leaps in terror against the possibility that I’ve lost the connection.

“Ms. Eddes?”

“I’m here. I just—I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case.”