The Last Policeman

3.

“Palace.”

“What?” I say, sitting up, looking around. “Hello?”

I’m so used to being woken from a dream by the telephone that it takes me a moment to realize that I was dreaming not of Alison Koechner but of Naomi Eddes, and then it’s the next moment that I figure out that it was not a dream, not this time—Naomi was real, is real, and then I look around for her, and she’s gone. My shades are open, the winter sun is sending wavering yellow rectangles across the crumpled sheets on my old mattress, and there is a woman on my phone yelling at me.

“Are you familiar with the current statutory penalties for impersonating a state official?”

Oh, God. Oh, no. Fenton.

“Yes, ma’am, I am.”

The blood, the vial of blood. Hazen Road.

“Well, I’ll quote them for you.”

“Dr. Fenton.”

“Impersonating a state official carries a sentence of ten to twenty-five years and is prosecuted under Title VI, meaning automatic imprisonment pending trial, which will never occur.”

“I know that.”

“The same penalty pertains for impeding a criminal investigation.”

“Can I explain?”

“No, thanks. But if you’re not at the morgue in twenty minutes, you’re going to jail.”

I take two minutes to get dressed and two minutes to remove and replace the wad of paper towels over my eye. Before I close my front door, I take a look around: the beach chairs, the empty bottle of wine. No sign of Naomi’s clothes, of her pocketbook, her coat, no traces of her boot heels on the rug. No trace of her scent.

It happened, though. Close my eyes and I can feel it, the trace of her finger tickling the back of my neck, drawing me in. No dream.

Twenty minutes, Fenton said, and she was not kidding. I push the speed limit all the way to Concord Hospital.

* * *

Fenton is precisely as she was when I saw her last, alone with her rolling cart of medical equipment in the stark cold brightness of the morgue. The steel drawers with their gray handles, the strange sad locker room of the damned.

I walk in and she looks at her watch. “Eighteen minutes and forty-five seconds.”

“Dr. Fenton, I hope that you—I hope—listen—” There are tears in my voice, somehow, for some reason. I clear my throat. I am trying to formulate an explanation that will satisfy, trying to explain how I could have stolen blood and had it tested under false pretenses—how sure I was that this was a drugs case, how imperative it was to prove or disprove that Peter Zell was an addict—and of course now it doesn’t matter, turns out never to have mattered, it was about insurance claims, about insurance all along—and I am meanwhile melting under the combined effect of her glare and the brightness of the lights—and there, too, is Peter, she’s taken his body out of its drawer and laid it on the cold slab of the mortuary table, stone dead and staring straight up into the lights.

“I’m sorry,” is all I can muster, at last. “I’m really sorry, Dr. Fenton.”

“Yes.” Her face is neutral, impassive, behind the perfect O’s of her glasses. “Me, too.”

“What?”

“I said that I am also sorry, and if you think I’m going to say it a third time, you are deeply mistaken.”

“I don’t understand.”

Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. “These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”

“In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.

“This man was murdered.”

My mouth drops open, and I can’t help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. “I knew it. Oh, my God, I knew it all along.”

Fenton pushes up her glasses slightly where they have slipped down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. “First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”

“I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see Distant Pale Glimmers. They had a bunch of beers.

“Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, “were significant traces of a controlled substance.”

“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 campus, 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?”