The Last Policeman

4.

A loud and terrible noise is filling my room, a shrieking and violent eruption of sound rushing into the darkness, and I’m sitting up and I’m screaming. It’s here, I’m not ready, my heart is exploding in my chest because it’s here, it’s early, it’s happening now.

But it’s just my phone. The shrieking, the horrendous noise, it’s just the landline. I’m sweating, my hand clutched to my chest, shivering on my thin mattress on the floor that I call a bed.

It’s just my stupid phone.

“Yeah. Hello?”

“Hank? What are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” I look at the clock. It’s 4:45 a.m. “I’m sleeping. I was dreaming.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. But I need your help, I really do, Henny.”

I breathe deeply, sweat cooling on my forehead, my shock and confusion rapidly fading into irritation. Of course. My sister is the only person who would be calling me at five o’clock in the morning, and she’s also the only person who still calls me Henny, a miserable childhood nickname. It sounds like a vaudeville comedian or a small addled bird.

“Where are you, Nico?” I ask, my voice gruff with sleep. “Are you okay?”

“I’m at home. I’m flipping out.” Home means the house where we grew up, where Nico still lives, our grandfather’s renovated redbrick farmhouse, on one and a half rolling acres on Little Pond Road. I’m cycling through the litany of reasons my sister would be calling with such urgency at this ungodly hour. Rent money. A ride. Plane ticket, groceries. Last time, her bicycle had been “stolen,” loaned to a friend of a friend at a party and never returned.

“So, what’s going on?”

“It’s Derek. He didn’t come home last night.”

I hang up, throw the phone on the ground, and try to fall back asleep.

* * *

What I’d been dreaming about was my high-school sweetheart, Alison Koechner.

In the dream, Alison and I are strolling with linked arms through the lovely downtown area of Portland, Maine, gazing through the window of a used-book store. And Alison’s leaning gently on my arm, her wild bouquet of orchid-red curls tickling into my neck. We’re eating ice cream, laughing at a private joke, deciding what movie to see.

It’s the kind of dream that’s hard to get back into, even if you can fall back asleep, and I can’t.

* * *

At seven-forty it is bright and clear and cold and I am winding my way through Pill Hill, the upscale West Concord neighborhood that wraps around the hospital, where its surgeons and administrators and attending physicians live in tasteful colonials. These days a lot of these homes are patrolled by private-duty security guards, gun bulges under their winter coats, as if all of a sudden this is a Third World capital. There’s no guard, though, at 14 Thayer Pond Road, just a wide lawn blanketed with snow so perfect and vivid in its new-fallen whiteness I almost feel bad tromping across it in my Timberlands to get to the front door.

But Sophia Littlejohn is not at home. She had to rush out early to perform an emergency delivery at Concord Hospital, a turn of events for which her husband is profusely apologetic. He meets me on the stoop wearing khaki slacks and a turtleneck, a gentle man with a trim golden beard carrying a mug of fragrant tea, explaining how Sophia often has irregular hours, especially now that most of the other midwives in her practice have quit.

“Not her, though. She’s determined to do right by her patients, right up to the end. And believe it or not, there are plenty of new patients. My name is Erik, by the way. Would you care to come inside anyway?”

He looks slightly surprised when I say yes, says, “Oh, okay … great,” steps back into the living room, and gestures me inside. The thing is, I’ve been up and dressed for two hours, waiting to learn more about Peter Zell, and his brother-in-law is bound to know something. Littlejohn leads me inside, takes my coat and hangs it on a hook.

“Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

“No, thanks. I won’t take but a few minutes of your time.”

“Well, good, because that’s about what I have available,” he says, and tips me a friendly little wink, makes sure I know his diffidence is playful. “I need to walk our son to school and myself to the hospital for nine o’clock.”

He gestures me into an armchair and sits down himself, crossing his legs, relaxing. He has a broad gracious face, a wide and friendly mouth. There’s something powerful but unthreatening about the man, like he’s a friendly cartoon lion, the genial overseer of his pride.

“These must be difficult times to be a policeman.”

“Yes, sir. You work at the hospital?”

“Yes. I’ve been there about nine years. I’m the director of Spiritual Services.”

“Oh. And what is that, exactly?”

“Ah.” Littlejohn leans forward, laces his fingers, clearly pleased with the question. “Anyone who walks through the doors of a hospital has needs beyond the strictly physical. I’m referring to the patients, of course, but also family members, friends, and, yes, even the doctors and nurses themselves.” All this he presents in a smooth, confident disquisition, rapid and unfaltering. “It is my job to minister to such needs, however they might manifest themselves. I am, as you can imagine, rather busy these days.”

His warm smile is unwavering, but I can hear the echoes in the single word, busy, see it in the big expressive eyes: the exhaustion, the long nights and wearying hours, trying to offer comfort to the perplexed and the terrified and the ill.

From the corner of my eye I’m catching flashes of my interrupted dream, pretty Alison Koechner as if she were sitting next to me, gazing out the window at the snow-frosted dogwoods and black tupelo.

“But—” Littlejohn clears his throat abruptly, looking significantly at my blue book and pen, which I have out and balanced on my lap. “You’re here to ask about Peter.”

“Yes, sir.”

Before I can pose a specific question, Littlejohn sets in, speaking in the same tone, rapid and composed. He tells me how his wife and her brother had grown up here, in West Concord, not far from where we’re sitting. Their mother is dead of cancer, twelve years ago, and the father is at Pleasant View Retirement with a host of physical problems, plus the early stages of dementia—very sad, very sad, but God’s plans are for God alone to divine.

Peter and Sophia, he explains, have never been terribly close, not even as children. She was tomboyish, outgoing; he was nervous, inward, shy. Now that they both had careers, and Sophia her family, they socialized only rarely.

“We reached out to him once or twice, of course, when all this began, but without much success. He was in rather a bad place.”

I look up, raise one finger to pause Littlejohn’s onrushing tide of narrative.

“What do you mean, ‘a bad place’?”

He takes a deep breath, as if weighing whether it’s fair to say what he’s about to, and I lean forward, pen poised above my book.

“Well, look. I have to tell you that he was extremely disturbed.”

I tilt my head. “He was depressed, or disturbed?”

“What did I say?”

“You said disturbed.”

“I meant depressed,” says Littlejohn. “Would you excuse me a quick second?”

He rises before I can answer and walks to the far side of the room, allowing me a view into a bright and well-loved kitchen: a row of hanging pots, a gleaming refrigerator adorned with alphabet magnets, report cards, and school pictures.

Littlejohn is at the foot of the stairs, gathering together a navy blue backpack and a pair of child-size hockey skates from where they’re slung over the banister. “Are we brushing teeth up there, Kyle?” he shouts. “We’re at T-minus nine minutes, here.”

A hollered “okay, dad” echoes down the steps, followed by the rattle of footsteps, a faucet going on, a door slamming open. The framed picture on Zell’s dresser, the clumsily smiling lad. The Concord School District, I know, has remained open. A feature had run in the Monitor: the dedicated staff, learning for the sake of learning. Even in the newspaper pictures, you could see that the classrooms were half full. A quarter, even.

Littlejohn settles back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair. He’s got the skates cradled in his lap. “Kid can play. He’s ten years old, skates like Messier, no kidding. He’ll play in the NHL one day, make me a millionaire.” He smiles softly. “Alternate universe. Where were we?”

“You were describing your brother-in-law’s mental state.”

“Right, right. I’m thinking of our little summer party. We had a barbecue, you know, hot dogs, beer. The whole drill. And Peter, he was never the most social person, the most outgoing, but it seemed clear that he was sinking into a depression. There but not there, if you can see what I mean.”

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.