The Last Policeman

2.

“Petey’s not dead.”

“He is.”

“Just hung out with him. Couple days ago. Tuesday night, I think.”

“No, sir, you didn’t.”

“Think I did.”

“Actually, sir, it was Monday.”

I’m at the bottom of a metal extension ladder that’s leaned against the side of a house, a squat frame house with a sharp shingle roof. My hands are cupped together, my head is tilted back, and I’m calling up through a light drift of snow. J. T. Toussaint, an unemployed construction worker and quarryman, a giant of a man, is up on the ladder, heavy tan work boots planted on the topmost metal rung, a considerable stomach balanced against the overhanging gutters of his roof. I can’t yet clearly see his face, just the lower-right quadrant of it, turned down toward me, framed inside the hood of a blue sweatshirt.

“You picked him up from his place of employment on Monday evening.”

Toussaint makes a noise for “oh yeah?” but elided into one thick uncertain utterance: “Ohuh?”

“Yes, sir. In your red pickup truck, with the American flag on the side. That’s your truck right there?”

I point to the driveway, and Toussaint nods, shifts his weight against the rain spout. The base of the ladder trembles a little.

“On Tuesday morning he was found dead.”

“Oh,” he says, up on the roof. “Damn. A hanger?”

“That’s how it looks. Will you come down off the ladder, please?”

It’s an ugly block of a house, wooden and dilapidated and uneven, like the torso of a soapbox racer left forgotten in the dirt. In the front yard is a single ancient oak tree, crooked branches reaching for the sky as if under arrest; around the side there’s a doghouse and a row of thick, untended thorn bushes along the property line. As Toussaint descends, the ladder’s metal legs jerk back and forth alarmingly, and then he’s standing there in his hooded sweatshirt and his heavy workingman’s boots, a caulking gun dangling loosely from one thick fist, looking me up and down, both of us breathing cold puffs of condensation.

It’s true what everyone has been saying, he’s a big man, but he’s big and solid, the sturdily formed weight of someone who used to play football. There’s a steel in his bigness, and he looks like he could run and jump if he had to. Throw a tackle if he had to. Toussaint’s head is like a brick of granite: jutting oblong jaw, broad forehead, the flesh hard and mottled, as if irregularly eroded.

“My name is Detective Henry Palace,” I say. “I’m a policeman.”

“No kidding,” he says, and then he takes a big sudden lunging step toward me, yelps twice sharply and claps his hands, and I jerk backward, startled, fumble for my shoulder holster.

But it’s just a dog, he’s calling his dog. Toussaint squats and it scampers over, a scruffy thing with patchy curls of white fur, some kind of poodle or something.

“Hey, Houdini,” he says, opens his arm. “Hey, boy.”

Houdini rubs his small face along Toussaint’s meaty palm, and I’m trying to get it together, take a deep breath, and the big man looks up at me from his crouch, amused, and he can tell, I know he can—he can see right through me.

* * *

The house is ugly and dull inside, with dingy walls of yellowing plaster, every ornamentation strictly functional: a clock, a calendar, a bottle opener bolted to the doorframe of the kitchen. The small fireplace is filled with garbage, empty bottles of imported beer—expensive stuff when even the cheap brands are price controlled by ATF at $21.99 for a six-pack, ranging a lot higher on the black market. As we walk past, a bottle of Rolling Rock slips free from the pile and rattles across the hardwood of the living room.

“So,” I say, pulling out a blue book and a pen. “How do you know Peter Zell?”

Toussaint lights a cigarette and slowly inhales before answering. “From grammar school.”

“Grammar school?”

“Broken Ground. Right up the street, here. Curtisville Road.” He tosses his caulking gun into a toolbox, kicks the toolbox under the beat-up sofa. “Sit if you want, man.”

“No, thanks.”

Toussaint doesn’t sit either. He lumbers past me into the kitchen, cigarette exhaust swirling up around his head like dragon-smoke.

There’s a scale model of the New Hampshire state house on the mantel above the fireplace, six inches high and fastidiously detailed: the white stone facade, the gilded dome, the tiny imperious eagle jutting from the top.

“Like that?” says Toussaint when he comes back in, holding a Heineken by the neck, and I set the model down abruptly. “My old man made that.”

“He’s an artist?”

“He’s dead,” he says, and flips open the dome, revealing the inside to be an ashtray. “But yeah, an artist. Among other things.”

He taps his ash into the inverted dome of the state house and looks at me and waits.

“So,” I say. “Grammar school.”

“Yeah.”

According to Toussaint, he and Peter Zell had been best friends from the second grade through the sixth. Both were unpopular, Toussaint a poor kid, a free-breakfast kid, wearing the same dime-store clothes every day; Zell well-off but painfully awkward, sensitive, a born victim. So they formed a bond, two little weirdos, played ping-pong in the Zells’ finished basement, rode their bikes up and down the hills around the hospital, played Dungeons & Dragons in this very house, right where we’re sitting now. Summertime, they’d ride the couple miles to the quarry on State Street, past the jail, strip down to their underpants and dive in, splash around, dunk each other’s heads under the cold fresh water.

“You know,” Toussaint concludes, smiling, enjoying his beer. “Kid stuff.”

I nod, writing, intrigued by the mental picture of my insurance man as a child: the pasty adolescent body and the thick glasses, clothes carefully folded at the lip of the swimming hole, the young version of the obsessive, timid actuary he was destined to become.

J. T. and Peter, as was perhaps inevitable, drifted apart. Puberty hit and Toussaint got tough, got cool, started shoplifting Metallica CDs from Pitchfork Records and sneaking beers and smoking Marlboro Reds, while Zell remained locked in the stiff and permanent contours of his character, rigid and anxious and geeky. By middle school they would nod to each other in the hallway, and then Toussaint dropped out and Peter graduated and went to college and then twenty years passed without a word between them.

I write it all down. Toussaint finishes his beer and tosses the empty into the pile in the fireplace. There are small gaps in the joinings of the house’s wooden sides, or there must be, because in the pauses in our conversation there’s a howling whistle, the wind whipping around out there, intensified as it tries to slide in through the cracks.

“Then he calls me up, man. Jack-blue sky. Says, let’s have lunch.”

I click my pen open and closed three times.

“Why?”

“Don’t know.”

“When?”

“Don’t know. July? No. It was right after I got shit-canned. June. Says he’s been thinking about me, since all this bullcrap got started.”

He extends one forefinger and aims it out the window, up at the sky. All this bullcrap. My phone rings, and I glance down at it. Nico. I thumb it off.

“And so, what exactly did you and Mr. Zell do together, the two of you?”

“Same stuff, man.”

“You played Dungeons & Dragons?”

He looks at me, snorts, shifts in his chair. “Okay, man. Different stuff. We drank beers. We drove around. Did some shooting.”

I pause, the wind whipping. Toussaint lights another butt, guesses what I’m going to say next. “Three Winchester rifles, officer. In a cabinet. Unloaded. They’re mine and I can prove they’re mine.”

“Locked up tight, I hope.”

Gun theft is a problem. People are stealing them and hoarding them, and other people are stealing them to sell, for astronomical sums, to the first kind of people.

“Nobody’s going to take my f*cking guns,” he says quickly, harshly, and levels a hard look at me, like I was considering it.

I move on. I ask Toussaint about Monday night, the last night of Peter Zell’s life, and he shrugs.

“Picked him up after work.”

“What time?

“I don’t know,” he says, and I can feel it, he’s liking me less and less, he’s ready for me to go, and maybe this man killed Peter and maybe he didn’t, but there is no avoiding the impression that he could pound me to death if he wanted to, just like that, three or four blows, like a caveman destroying a deer. “After-work time.”

Toussaint says they cruised around for a bit, then went to see the new episode of Distant Pale Glimmers, the science-fiction serial, at the Red River. They had some beers, they watched the movie, and then they split up, Peter saying he wanted to walk home.

“Did you see anyone at the theater?”

“Just the people who work there and stuff.”

He sucks the last life out of his second cigarette, crushes out the butt in the state house. Houdini pads over unevenly, darting pink tongue finding the last bites of biscuit at the corners of his mouth, and rubs his thin head against the broad expanse of his master’s leg.

“I’m gonna have to shoot this dog,” Toussaint says, suddenly, absently, matter-of-fact, and stands up. “At the end, I mean.”

“What?”

“He’s a little scaredy cat, this one.” Toussaint is looking down at the dog, his head tilted, as if evaluating, trying to imagine how it’s going to feel. “Can’t think of him dying like that, fire or cold or drowning. Probably I’m gonna go ahead and shoot him.”

I’m ready to get out of here. I’m ready to go.

“Last thing, Mr. Toussaint. Did you happen to notice the bruising? Under Mr. Zell’s right eye?”

“He said he fell down some stairs.”

“Did you believe him?”

He chuckles, scratches the dog’s thin head. “If it were anyone else, I wouldn’t. I’d figure he whistled at the wrong dude’s girlfriend. But Pete, who knows? I bet he fell down some stairs.”

“Right,” I say, thinking, I bet he didn’t.

Toussaint cradles Houdini’s head in his hands, and they’re gazing at each other, and I can see into the future to the terrible and agonized moment, the raised .270, the trusting animal, the blast, the end.

He looks away from his dog, back up at me, and the spell is broken.

“Anything else? Mr. Policeman?”

* * *

One of my father’s favorite jokes was when people asked him what he did for a living, he would say he was a philosopher king. He would make this claim with perfect seriousness, and the thing about Temple Palace was that he wouldn’t let go of it. Inevitably, he would get that blank look from whoever had asked—the barber, say, or someone at a cocktail party, or one of my friends’ parents, and there I am looking at the ground in rank embarrassment—and he’d just say, “What?” opening his palms, imploring, “What? I’m serious.”

What he really did was teach English literature, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne, down at St. Anselm’s. At home he was always coming out with quotes and allusions, murmuring literary lessons from the side of his mouth, responding to the random events and mundane conversations of our household with dollops of abstract commentary.

The substance of most of these asides I have long since forgotten, but one stays with me.

I’d come home whimpering, tearful, because this kid Burt Phipps had shoved me off a swing. My mother, Peg, pretty and practical and efficient, wrapped three pieces of ice in a sandwich bag and held them to my injury, while my father leaned against the green linoleum counter, wondering why this Burt character would do such a thing.

And I, sniffling, go, “Well, because he’s a jerk.”

“Ah, but no!” pronounces my father, holding his glasses up to the kitchen light, polishing them with a dinner napkin. “One thing we can learn from Shakespeare, Hen, is that every action has a motive.”

I’m looking at him, holding this drooping sandwich bag full of ice to my bruised forehead.

“Do you see it, son? Anybody does anything, I don’t care what it is, there’s a reason for it. No action comes divorced from motive, neither in art nor in life.”

“For heaven’s sake, dear,” says my mother, squatting before me, peering into my pupils to eliminate the possibility of concussion. “A bully is a bully.”

“Ah, yes,” Father says, pats me on the head, wanders out of the kitchen. “But, wherefore doth he become a bully?”

My mother rolls her eyes at him and kisses me on my wounded head, gets up. Nico’s in the corner, age five, building a multistory palace of Legos, lowering into place the carefully cantilevered roof.

Professor Temple Palace did not live to see the advent of our present unfortunate circumstance; neither, unfortunately, did my mother.

In a little more than six months, according to the most reliable scientific predictions, at least half the planet’s population will die in a series of interlocking cataclysms. A ten-megaton explosion, roughly equaling the blast force of a thousand Hiroshimas, will scorch a massive crater into the ground, touching off a series of Richter-defying earthquakes, sending towering tsunamis ricocheting across the oceans.

And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.

Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information, all this unbearable immanence?

Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.

No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.

Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to Distant Pale Glimmers, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.

The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.

But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.

Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine clearly. In recent months the world has seen episodes of cannibalism, of ecstatic orgies; outpourings of charity and good works; attempted socialist revolutions and attempted religious revolutions; mass psychoses including the second coming of Jesus; of the return of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, the Commander of the Faithful; of the constellation Orion with sword and belt, climbing down from the sky.

People are building rocket ships, people are building tree houses, people are taking multiple wives, people are shooting indiscriminately in public places, people are setting fire to themselves, people are studying to be doctors while doctors quit work and build huts in the desert and sit in them and pray.

None of these things, so far as I know, has happened in Concord. Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.

* * *

I’m at Albin Road just past Blevens when the car catches a patch of bad ice and heaves itself violently to the right, and I try to jerk it back to the left and nothing happens. The steering wheel spins uselessly under my hands, I’m rolling it this way and that, and I can hear the snow chains ricocheting against the rims with a series of vicious clangs.

“Come on, come on,” I say, but it’s like the wheel has lost communication with the steering column, spinning and spinning, and meanwhile the whole car is hurtling to the right, a giant hockey puck that someone whaled at, sliding furiously toward the ditch at the side of the road.

“Come on,” I say again, “come on,” my stomach lurching. I’m pumping the brake, nothing is happening, and now the back of the car is rolling up and pulling even with the front, the nose of the Impala nearly perpendicular to the roadway, and I feel the back wheels lift up while the front goes sailing forward, bounces over the ditch and into the wide sturdy trunk of an evergreen, and my head slams back against the headrest.

And then all is still. The silence sudden and complete. My breath. A winter bird sounding, way off somewhere. A small defeated hiss from the engine.

Slowly, I become aware of a clicking noise and it takes me a second to discover that the sound is my teeth, chattering. My hands are trembling, too, and my knees are clacking like marionette legs.

My collision with the tree shook loose a lot of snow, and some of it is still drifting down, a gentle powdery false storm, a dusting of accumulation on the cracked windshield.

I shift, breathe, pat myself down like I’m frisking a suspect, but I’m fine. I’m fine.

The front of the car is bent in, just one big dent, dead center, like a giant reeled back and kicked it once, hard.

My snow chains have come off. All four of them. They lay splayed out in crazy directions like fishermen’s nets, in jumbled heaps around the tires.

“Holy moly,” I say aloud.

I don’t think he killed him. Toussaint. I gather up the snow chains and lay them in the trunk in a loose pile.

I don’t think he’s the killer. I don’t think it’s right.

* * *

There are a total of five staircases at police headquarters but only two that go down to the basement. One is a set of rough concrete steps that descends from the garage, so when the units pull in with cuffed suspects in the backseat, they can be led right down to processing, to the part of the basement with the mug-shot camera and the fingerprint ink and the regular holding cell and the drunk tank. The drunk tank is always full these days. To access the other part of the basement you use the front northwest stairwell: you wave your ID badge at the keypad, wait for the door to click open, and go down to the cramped domain of Officer Frank Wilentz.

“Why, Detective Sky-high,” says Wilentz, and he throws me a friendly mock-salute. “You look a little pale.”

“I hit a tree. I’m fine.”

“How’s the tree?”

“Can you run a name for me?”

“Do you like my hat?”

“Wilentz, come on.”

The administrative technician of the CPD records unit works in a four-foot-square caged-off pen, a former evidence enclosure, at a desk littered with comic books and bags of candy. A row of hooks along the chain mesh of his cage is hung with major-league ball caps, one of which, a bright red souvenir Phillies cap, sits on Wilentz’s head at a rakish angle.

“Answer me, Palace.”

“I like your hat very much, Officer Wilentz.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“So, I need you to run a name for me.”

“I got one hat for every team in the league. D’ja know that?”

“I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.”

The problem is that at this point Wilentz has the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the building; for all I know, it’s the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the county. Something to do with the CPD being allowed one machine that connects with some kind of gold-plated Department of Justice law-enforcement router. It just means that if I want to connect to the FBI’s servers to perform a nationwide criminal-background check, I first need to admire Frank’s hat collection.

“I used to be collecting these bastards to give ’em to my children one day, but since now it seems clear that I shall not be having any children, I’m just enjoying ’em myself.” His deadpan gives way to a big, gap-toothed grin. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, myself. Did you need something?”

“Yep. I need you to run a name for me.”

“Oh, right, you said that.”

Wilentz types in the name and the address on Bow Bog, checks off boxes on a DOJ login screen, and I’m standing at his desk, watching while he types, tapping my own fingers thoughtfully on the side of his cage.

“Wilentz?”

“Yes?”

“Would you ever kill yourself?”

“No,” he says immediately, still typing, clicking on a link. “But I will confess that I have considered it. The Romans, you know, they thought it was, like, the bravest thing you could do. In the face of tyranny. Cicero. Seneca. All those guys.” He slowly draws a finger across his neck, slash.

“We’re not facing tyranny, though.”

“Ah, but we are. Fascist in the sky, baby.” He turns away from the computer and selects a miniature Kit Kat from his pile. “But I won’t do it. And you know why not?”

“Why?”

“Because … I …” He turns back, hits a final key. “… am a coward.”

It’s hard to tell, with Wilentz, if he’s kidding, but I think he’s not, and anyway I turn my attention to what’s happening on the monitor, long columns of data marching up the screen.

“Well, my friend,” says Officer Wilentz, unwrapping his candy. “What you got here is a gosh-darn Boy Scout.”

“What?”

Mr. J. T. Toussaint, as it turns out, has never committed a crime, or at least has never been caught for one.

Never has he been arrested by the Concord force, pre- or post-Maia, nor by the state of New Hampshire, nor by any other state, county, or local official. He’s never done federal time, he’s got no FBI or Justice Department file. Nothing international, nothing military. Once, it looks like, he parked a motorcycle illegally in a small town called Waterville Valley, up in the White Mountains, and earned himself a parking ticket, which he promptly paid.

“So, nothing?” I say, and Wilentz nods.

“Nothing. Oh, unless he popped someone in Louisiana. New Orleans is cut off from the grid.” Wilentz stands, stretches, adds the crumpled candy wrapper to the pile on the desk. “Kind of thinking of going down there, myself. Wild times down there. All kinda sex stuff going on, I hear.”

I head back up the stairs with a one-page printout of J. T. Toussaint’s criminal history, or lack thereof. If he’s the kind of guy who goes around killing people and stringing them up in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, he only recently elected to become so.

* * *

Upstairs, at my desk, I get back on the landline and try Sophia Littlejohn again, and I am again treated to the bland peppy tones of the Concord Midwifery receptionist. No, Ms. Littlejohn is out; no, she doesn’t know where; no, she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.

“Could you tell her to call Detective Palace, at the Concord PD?” I say, and then I add, impulsively, “Tell her I’m her friend. Tell her I want to help.”

The receptionist pauses for a moment and then says, “Oooo-kay” drawing out that first syllable like she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about. I can’t blame her, because I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about, either. I take the tissue I’ve been holding up to my head and throw it in the garbage. I’m feeling restless and dissatisfied, staring at J. T. Toussaint’s clean record, thinking about the whole house, the dog, the roof, the lawn. The other thing is, I have a fairly clear memory of carefully latching my snow chains yesterday morning, checking their slack, as is my habit, once a week.

“Hey, Palace, come over here and look at this.”

It’s Andreas, at his computer. “Are you watching this on dial-up?”

“No,” he says. “This is on my hard drive. I downloaded it the last time we were online.”

“Oh,” I say, “All right, well …” But it’s too late, I’ve walked across the room to his desk and now I’m standing beside him, and he’s got one hand clutched at my elbow, the other hand pointed at the screen.

“Look,” says Detective Andreas, breathing rapidly. “Look at this with me.”

“Andreas, come on. I’m working on a case.”

“I know, but look, Hank.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Everyone has seen it. A few days after Tolkin, after the CBS special, the final determination, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA released a short video to promote public understanding of what’s going on. It’s a simple Java animation, in which crude pixelated avatars of the relevant celestial bodies wing their way around the Sun: Earth, Venus, Mars, and, of course, the star of the show, good old 2011GV1. The planets and the infamous minor planetoid, all cruising around the Sun at their varying speeds in their varying ellipses, clicking forward, frame by frame, each instant on screen representing two weeks of real time.

“Just wait a second,” says Andreas, loosening his grip but not letting go, leaning forward even farther on his desk. His cheeks are flushed. He’s staring at the screen with an awestruck expression, wide-eyed, like a kid gazing into the aquarium glass.

I stand there behind him, watching in spite of myself, watching Maia make her wicked way around the Sun. The video is eerily entrancing, like an art film, an installation in a gallery: bright colors, repetitive motion, simple action, irresistible. In the outer reaches of its orbit, 2011GV1 moves slowly, methodically, just sort of chugging along in the sky, much slower on its track than Earth on hers. But then, in the last few seconds, Maia speeds up, like the second hand of a clock suddenly swooping from four to six. In proper obedience to Kepler’s Second Law, the asteroid gobbles up the last few million miles of space in the last two months, catches up with the unsuspecting Earth, and then … bam!

The video freezes on the last frame, dated October 3, the day of impact. Bam! In spite of myself, my stomach lurches at the sight of it, and I turn away.

“Great,” I mutter. “Thanks for sharing.” Like I told the guy, I’ve seen it before.

“Wait, wait.”

Andreas drags the scroll bar back, to a few seconds before impact, moment number 2:39.14, then lets it play again; the planets jerk forward two frames, and then he pauses it again. “There? You see it?”

“See what?”

He rewinds it again, plays it again. I’m thinking about Peter Zell, thinking about him watching this—surely he saw the video, probably dozens of times, and maybe he took it apart, frame by frame, as Andreas is doing. The detective lets go of my arm, pushes his face all the way forward, until his nose is almost brushing against the cold plastic of the monitor.

“Right there: the asteroid joggles only slightly to the left. If you read Borstner—have you read Borstner?”

“No.”

“Oh, Hank.” He looks around at me, like I’m the crazy one, then he turns back to the screen. “He’s a blogger, or he was, now he’s got this newsletter. A friend of mine out in Phoenix, he called me last night, gave me the whole rundown, told me to watch the video again, to stop it right …” He clicks Pause, 2:39.14. “Right there. Look. Okay? See?” He plays it again, pauses it again, plays it again. “What Borstner points out, here, if you compare this video, I mean.”

“Andreas.”

“If you compare it with other asteroid-path projections, there are anomalies.”

“Detective Andreas, no one doctored the film.”

“No, no, not the film. Of course no one doctored the film.” He cranes his head around again, squints at me, and I catch a quick whiff of something on his breath, vodka, maybe, and I step back. “Not the film, Palace, the ephemeris.”

“Andreas.” I’m fighting a powerful urge, at this point, simply to yank his computer free from the wall and throw it across the room.

I have a murder to solve for God’s sake. A man is dead.

“See—there—see,” he’s saying. “See where she almost strays, but then sort of veers back? If you compare it to Apophis or to 1979 XB. If you—see—Borstner’s theory is that an error was made, a fundamental early error in the, the, calculus, you know, the math of the thing. And just starting with the discovery itself, which, you must know, was totally unprecedented. A seventy-five-year orbit, that’s off the charts, right?” He’s talking quicker and quicker, his words spilling out, slipping over one another. “And Borstner has tried to contact JPL, he’s tried to contact the DOD, explain to them what, what’s, you know—and he’s just been rebuffed. He’s been ignored, Palace. Totally ignored!”

“Detective Andreas,” I say firmly, and instead of smashing his computer I just lean forward next to him, wrinkling my nose at his stink of stale liquor and sweaty desperation, and turn off the monitor.

He lifts his head to me, eyes wide. “Palace?”

“Andreas, are you working on any interesting cases?”

He blinks, baffled. The word cases is from a foreign language he used to know, a long time ago.

“Cases?”

“Yeah. Cases.”

We stare at each other, the radiator making its indistinct gurglings from the corner, and then Culverson comes in.

“Why, Detective Palace.” He’s standing in the doorway, three-piece suit, Windsor knot, a warm grin. “Just the man I was looking for.”

I’m glad to turn away from Andreas, and he from me; he fumbles for the button to turn his monitor on again. Culverson is waving me over with a small slip of yellow paper. “You doing okay, son?”

“Yeah. I ran into a tree. What’s up?”

“I found that kid.”

“What kid?”

“The kid you were looking for.”

As it turns out, Culverson was paying attention from his side of the room when I was on the phone yesterday, spinning my wheels in search of my sister’s village idiot of a husband. So, Culverson, he goes ahead and makes some calls of his own, God bless him, and because he’s a much better investigator than I will ever be, he cracked it.

“Detective,” I say. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Forget about it,” he says, still grinning. “You know me, I like a challenge. And also, before you thank me too much, take a look at what I found out.”

He slides the little piece of paper into my palm, and I read it and groan. We stand there for a second, Culverson grinning wickedly, Andreas in his corner watching his movie and wringing his sweaty hands together.

“Good luck, Detective Palace,” says Culverson, patting me on the shoulder. “Have fun.”

* * *

He’s wrong.

Andreas, I mean.

Along with this Borstner, the blogger or pamphleteer or whatever he is: the jackass in Arizona getting people’s hopes up.

There are many such characters, and they’re all wrong, and it’s irritating to me because Andreas has responsibilities, he has a job to do; the public is relying on him, just as they are on me.

Still, at some point, a few hours later, before I call it a day, I stop at his desk to watch the Jet Propulsion Lab video again. I lean forward, hunch forward really, and squint. There’s no swerve, no stop-start flicker in the animation that might credibly suggest an error in the underlying data. Maia does not jog or bobble on its course, it’s clear forward motion all the way. It just comes, on and on, unerring, as it’s been coming since long before I was born.

I can’t purport to understand the science, but I know that there are a lot of people who do. There are many observatories, Arecibo and Golds tone and the rest of them, there are a million or more amateur astronomers tracking the thing across the sky.

Peter Zell, he did understand the science, he studied it, he sat in his small apartment silently absorbing the technical details of what is happening, making his notes, underlining details.

I restart the video, watch the asteroid swing around one more time, speed up furiously in the homestretch, and then … bam!