The Last Policeman

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 prisoner 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.

She sat at the foot of my bed before she left; she was going to tell me something and then she stopped herself and went home.

He told her about the McDonald’s: if he was going to kill himself, that’s where he would do it. But he’d told his sister the same thing. Who knows who else?

Sixty-milligram bottles of MS Contin, in a bag, in a doghouse.

I’m dimly aware of a cup of coffee growing cold in front of me on the counter, dimly aware of the television floating above me, bolted high on a metal arm. A newsman stands in front of some kind of palace, speaking in agitated tones about “a minor confrontation beginning to assume the dimensions of a crisis.”

Peter Zell and J. T. Toussaint, Detective Andreas, Naomi Eddes.

“All right, honey,” says Ruth-Ann, apron, order pad, one fist around the handle of a coffeepot.

“What’s this music?” I say. “Where’s Maurice?”

“He quit,” she says. “You look terrible.”

“I know. More coffee, please.”

And then, too, there is my baby sister. Missing, possibly dead, possibly in jail. Another catastrophe I failed to predict or prevent.

The television now shows jerky footage of a line of South Asian men behind a table, green military uniforms with gold epaulets, one of them speaking sternly into a microphone. A guy two stools down from me makes an agitated harumph. I take him in, a soft middle-aged man in a Harley jacket, a thick mustache and beard; he says, “You mind?” I shrug, and he climbs up onto the counter, balances awkwardly on his knees to change the channel.

My phone is shivering.

Culverson.

“Hey, Detective.”

“How you feeling, Henry?”

“Yeah,” I say. “I’m all right.”

The Pakistanis on the TV are gone, replaced by a pitchman, grinning obscenely before a pyramid of canned food.

Culverson runs through what he’s got so far. Theodore Gompers, in his office with his bottle, heard a shot fired at around 2:15, but by his own admission he was pretty drunk, and it took him several minutes to set out in search of the noise, and then several minutes more to locate the narrow storeroom, where he found Naomi’s body and called the police at 2:26.

“What about the rest of the staff?”

“It was just Gompers in there when it happened. He’s got three other employees at present, and they were all out, enjoying a long lunch at the Barley House.”

“Bad luck.”

“Yeah.”

I stack the blue books, spread them out, shift them into a square, like a fortification around my coffee cup. Culverson is going to do a ballistics workup on the bullet—on the off chance, the way-off chance, he says, that this gun was bought legally, pre-IPSS, and we can trace it. In the corner of my eye the bearded guy in the Harley jacket mops up egg yolk with a crust of toast. The TV pitchman scornfully tosses the canned food into the garbage, and now he’s demonstrating some kind of countertop vacuum sealer, dumping a bowl of strawberries in its stainless-steel funnel. McConnell, says Culverson, canvassed the rest of the Water West Building, four stories of office suites, half of them empty, no one saw anything or heard anything strange. No one cares. The old security guard says no one came in or out that he didn’t recognize—but there are two back entrances, and one of them leads directly to the rear stairwell, and the security cameras are long gone.

More clues. More puzzles. More facts.

I stare at the TV screen, where the pitchman dumps out his cardboard carton of blueberries into the funnel and switches on the machine. My counter-mate whistles appreciatively, chuckles.

“And the uh—” I say.

And then I’m just frozen, I’m sitting there, holding my head in my forehead. Right at this moment I have to decide, is the thing, am I going to leave town and go north to Maine and find a house on Casco Bay and sit there and stare out the window with my sidearm and wait, or am I going to stay here and do my work and finish my case. My cases.

“Palace?” says Culverson.

“The files,” I say, I clear my throat, I sit up on my stool, stick a finger in my ear to block out the TV and the bad music, reach for a blue book. “What about the files?”

“Ah, yes, the files,” says Culverson. “The terribly helpful Mr. Gompers basically says we’re up the metaphorical creek, on that front.”

“Huh,” I say.

“Just eyeballing the file cabinet, he says there are maybe three dozen files missing, but he can’t tell me what the claims were, or who was working on them, or anything. They gave up on computer files in January, and there are no backups of the paper files.”

“Bad luck,” I say, I get out a pen, I’m writing, I’m getting it all down.

“Tomorrow I’m going to try and track down some friends and family on this Eddes girl, give ’em the bad news, see if they know anything.”

“I’ll do that,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“Sure.”

“You sure?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

I get off the phone and pack up my notebooks, sliding them one by one into the pocket of my blazer. The question as before is why. Why does anybody do this? Why now? A murder, calculated, cold blood. To what purpose, for what gain? Two stools over the mustache man makes his agitated harumphing noise again, because the infomercial has been broken into by a news report, women in abayas somewhere, running in a panic through a dusty marketplace.

He turns my way with doleful eyes, shakes his head, as if to say, boy oh boy, huh? and I can tell he’s about to try to talk to me, have some sort of human moment, and I don’t have time, I can’t do it. I have work to do.

* * *

At home I peel out of the clothes I’ve been wearing all day—to the morgue, to the National Guard, to the scene of crime—and I stand in the bedroom and look around.

Last night past midnight I woke in this room, in this same darkness, and Naomi was framed in the doorway, slipping her red dress over her head in the moonlight.

I’m pacing, thinking.

She put on the dress and she sat on the mattress and she started to talk—to tell me something—but then she stopped herself, “Forget it.”

I walk slowly in a circle in my bedroom. Houdini stands in the doorway, unsure, unsettled.

Naomi started to say something, and then she stopped, and then instead she said that, no matter what happened, it was real and good and right. And she won’t forget it, no matter how it ends.

I pace in a circle, snapping my fingers, biting at the ends of my mustache. Real and good and right, no matter how it ends is what she said, but she was going to say something else, instead.

In my restless dream the bullet that tore through Naomi’s skull becomes a ball of fire and rock charging through Earth’s fragile crust, gouging trenches into the landscape, blasting away sedimentary rock and soil, goring into the ocean floor and sending up spumes of boiled ocean. Deeper and deeper it goes, plowing forward, releasing its stores of kinetic energy, as a bullet rips through a brain, tearing through warm clots of gray matter, severing nerves, creating blackness, pulling thought and life down around it as it goes.

I wake up with the dead yellow light of the sun filling my bedroom, with the next phase of the investigation having announced itself in my head.

A tiny little thing, a little lie to follow up on.