The Last Policeman

3.

“Roll through, please.”

The soldier’s chin is perfectly square, his eyes are sharp and cheerless, his face is cold and impassive beneath a wide black helmet, the minuteman logo of the National Guard emblazoned across the brim. He motions me forward with the tip of his firearm, which appears to be an M-16 semiautomatic. I roll through. This morning I reattached the snow chains, triple-checking the cable connects, drawing tight the slack. Thom Halburton, the department mechanic, said the car’ll drive just fine even with the dent, and so far it seems like he’s right.

I’m not even a half mile from downtown Concord, I can still see the spire of the state house in one direction and the Outback Steakhouse billboard in the other, but it’s a different world. Barbed-wire fences, one-story windowless brick buildings, a blacktop service road marked with white arrows and yellow arrows and stone pylons. Guard towers, green directional signs riddled with cryptic acronyms. More soldiers. More machine guns.

The IPSS Act is known to contain a raft of so-called black titles, classified sections generally assumed to relate to the various branches of the armed services. The exact content of those black titles is unknown—except, presumably, to its drafters, a joint House and Senate armed forces committee; to the military commanders and high-level officers of the affected branches; and to various relevant members of the executive branch.

But everyone knows, or at least everyone in law enforcement is fairly certain, that the organization of the United States military has been extensively revamped, its powers and resources expanded—all of which makes this the last place I would choose to be, on a gray and windy Friday morning when I’m hip-deep in a murder investigation: navigating my Chevrolet Impala through the headquarters of the New Hampshire National Guard.

Thanks, Nico. I owe you one.

I climb out of the Impala at the brig, a squat and windowless concrete building with a small forest of antennae bristling along the flat lines of its roof, at 10:43. Thanks to Culverson, and Culverson’s contacts, I’ve got five minutes, beginning at exactly 10:45 a.m.

A severe and charmless female reserve officer in green camouflage pants stares at my badge in silence for thirty seconds before nodding once and ushering me down a short hallway to a massive metal door with a small square Plexiglas window in its dead center.

“Thanks,” I say, and she grunts and heads back down the hallway.

I peer in the window, and there he is: Derek Skeve, sitting in the middle of the floor of his cell, cross-legged, breathing slowly and elaborately.

He’s meditating. For the love of God.

I make a fist and knock on the little window.

“Skeve. Hey.” Knock, knock. “Derek.”

I wait a second. I tap again.

“Hey.” Louder, sharper: “Derek.”

Skeve, eyes still closed, raises one finger of one hand, like a doctor’s receptionist busy on the phone. Rage boils in my cheeks, this is it, I’m ready to go home. Surely it’s better to let this self-involved doofus sit in military prison aligning his chakras until Maia gets here. I’ll turn around, say “thanks anyway” to the charmer at the door, call Nico and give her the bad news, and get back to work finding Peter Zell’s killer.

But I know Nico, and I know myself. I can tell her whatever I feel like, I’ll just end up driving back out here tomorrow.

So I bang on the window again, and at last the prisoner unfolds himself and stands. Skeve is in a tan jumpsuit with NHNG stenciled across the front, an incongruous complement to his long, matted ropes of hair, those ridiculous Caucasian dreadlocks that make him look like a bike messenger—which in fact he has been, among many other short-lived quasi-professions. Several days’ growth of fuzz coat his cheeks and chin.

“Henry,” he says, smiling beatifically. “How are you, brother?”

“What’s going on, Derek?”

Skeve shrugs absently, as if the question doesn’t really concern him.

“I am as you find me. A guest of the military-industrial complex.”

He looks around at the cell: smooth concrete walls, a thin and utilitarian bunk bed bolted to one corner, a small metal toilet to the other.

I lean forward, filling the small window with my face. “Can you expand on that, please?”

“Sure. I mean, what can I tell you? I’ve been arrested by the military police.”

“Yes, Derek. I see that. For what?”

“I think the charge is operating an all-terrain vehicle on federal land.”

“That’s the charge? Or you think that’s the charge?”

“I believe that I think that is the charge.” He smirks, and I would smack him if it were physically possible, I really would.

I step away from the window, take a deep calming breath, and look at my watch. 10:48.

“Well, Derek. Were you, in fact, operating an ATV on the base for some reason?”

“I don’t remember.”

He doesn’t remember. I stare at him, standing there, still smirking. It’s such a fine line with some people, whether they’re playing dumb or being dumb.

“I’m not a policeman right now, Derek. I’m your friend.” I stop myself, start again. “I’m Nico’s friend. I’m her brother, and I love her. And she loves you, and so I’m here to help you. So start at the beginning, and tell me exactly what happened.”

“Oh, Hank,” he says, like he pities me. Like my entreaties are something childish, something he thinks is cute. “I seriously wish that I could.”

“You wish?”

This is madness. It’s madness.

“When are you being arraigned?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?” I check my watch. Thirty seconds left, and I can hear the heavy footfalls of the reservist from the desk, making her way back to collect me. One thing about the military, they like their schedules.

“Derek, I came all the way down here to help you.”

“I know, and that’s really decent of you. But, you know, I didn’t ask you to do that.”

“Yes, but Nico did ask me. Because she cares about you.”

“I know. Isn’t she an amazing person?”

“All right sir.”

It’s the guard. I talk quickly into the hole in the door. “Derek, there is nothing I can do for you unless you can tell me what’s going on.”

Derek’s smug grin widens for a moment, the eyes misting with kindness, and then he walks slowly over to the bed and sprawls out, his hands folded behind his head.

“I totally hear what you’re saying, Henry. But it’s a secret.”

That’s it. Time’s up.

* * *

I was twelve years old and Nico was only six when we moved from the house on Rockland to the farmhouse on Little Pond Road, halfway to Penacook. Nathanael Palace, my grandfather, only recently retired from forty years in banking, had a wide range of interests: model trains, shooting, building stone walls. Already by prepubescence a bookish and private person, I was uninterested to varying degrees in all these activities but was forced by Grandfather to take part. Nico, a lonesome and anxious child, was avidly interested in all of them and rigorously ignored. He once got a set of World War II–era model airplanes, and we sat in the basement, the three of us, and Grandfather harangued me for an hour, refusing to let me quit until I’d successfully attached both wings to the body, while mechanically minded Nico sat in the corner, clutching a handful of tiny gunmetal gray airplane parts, waiting for her turn: at first excited, then restlessly, and finally in tears.

That was springtime, I think, not that long after we moved in with him. The years have been like that, for her and me, a lot of ups and downs.

“So, you’ll go back.”

“No.”

“Why not? Can’t Culverson get you another appointment? Maybe Monday.”

“Nico.”

“Henry.”

“Nico.” I’m leaning forward, sort of hollering into the phone, which is on speaker on the passenger seat. We’ve got a terrible line, cell to cell, all kinds of stops and starts, which isn’t helping. “Listen to me.”

But she’s not going to listen.

“I’m sure you just misunderstood him or something. He can be weird.”

“That is true.”

I’m parked in the abandoned lot next to what remains of the Capitol Shopping Center, a several-block stretch just east of Main Street along the banks of the Merrimack. The Presidents’ Day riots burned away the last remaining shops here, and now there are just a few scattered tents full of drunks and homeless people. This is where Mr. Shepherd, my scout leader, was living when the Brush Cuts ran him in on vagrancy.

“Nico, are you okay? Are you eating?”

“I’m fine. You know what I bet?” She’s not fine. Her voice is raspy, haggard, like she’s been doing nothing but smoking since Derek’s disappearance. “I bet he just didn’t want to say anything in front of the guards.”

“Nope,” I say. “No, Nico.” Exasperating. I tell her how easy it was for me to get in there, how few guards are watching over Derek Skeve.

“Really?”

“There’s one woman. A reservist. They don’t care about some kid who went joyriding on a military base.”

“So why can’t you get him out?”

“Because I don’t have a magic wand.”

Nico’s denial of reality, as maddening as her husband’s dull obstinacy, is a long-standing aspect of her character. My sister was a mystic from an early age, a firm believer in fairies and miracles, and her starry little spirit demanded magic. In the immediate aftermath of our becoming orphans, she could not and would not accept that it was all real, and I’d gotten so mad, I’d stormed away, and then I’d reeled back around, shouting. “They’re both dead! Period. End of story. Dead, dead, d-dead-d-dead! Okay? No ambiguity!”

This was at Father’s wake, the house full of friends and well-meaning strangers. Nico had stared back at me, tiny rose lips pursed, the word ambiguity vastly above her six-year-old pay grade, the severity of my tone nevertheless unmistakable. The assembled mourners staring at the sad little pair of us.

And now, the present, new times, Nico’s powers of disbelief unwavering. I try to change the subject.

“Nico, you’re good at math. Does the number 12.375 mean anything?”

“What do you mean, does it mean anything?”

“I don’t know, is it, like, pi or something, where—”

“No, Henry, it’s not,” she says quickly, coughs. “So what are we going to do next?”

“Nico, come on. Are you not listening to me? It’s military, which is on a totally different set of rules. I wouldn’t even know how to try to get him out of there.”

One of the homeless guys stumbles out of his tent, and I give him a small two-fingered wave; his name is Charles Taylor, and we went to high school together.

“This thing is going to fall out of the sky,” says Nico, “it’s going to fall on our heads. I don’t want to be sitting here by myself when it happens.”

“It is not falling on our heads.”

“What?”

“Everybody says that, and it’s just—it’s just arrogant, is what it is.” I’m so tired of this, all of it, and I should stop talking, but I can’t. “Two objects are moving through space on separate but overlapping orbits, and this one time, we’ll both be at the same place at the same time. It’s not ‘falling on our heads,’ okay? It’s not ‘coming for us.’ It just is. Do you understand?”

It suddenly seems incredibly, weirdly, quiet, and I realize I must have been yelling. “Nico? I’m sorry. Nico?”

But then she’s back, her voice small and flat. “I just miss him, is all.”

“I know that.”

“Forget it.”

“Wait.”

“Don’t worry about me. Go solve your case.”

She hangs up, and I sit there in the car, my chest trembling as if struck.

Bam!

* * *

It’s a science-fiction serial, is what it is, Distant Pale Glimmers, one new half-hour episode coming out every week, running like gangbusters since Christmastime. Here in Concord it’s showing at the Red River, the indie house. Apparently it’s about an intergalactic battleship called the John Adams, piloted by a General Amelie Chenoweth, who is portrayed by a bombshell named Kristin Dallas, who also writes and directs. The John Adams charts the distant reaches of the universe circa 2145. Of course the subtext, as subtle as a blow to the head, is that somehow, someone makes it, survives, prospers, the human race resurgent among the stars.

I went with Nico and Derek once, a few weeks ago, the first Monday in March. I didn’t care for it much, personally.

I wonder if Peter was there, that same night? Maybe alone, maybe with J. T. Toussaint.

I bet he was.

* * *

“Detective Culverson?”

“Yeah?”

“How reliable are the snow chains on the Impalas?”

“How reliable are they? What do you mean?”

“The chains. On the cars. They’re good, right? They stay on, for the most part?”

Culverson shrugs, engrossed in the newspaper. “I guess.”

I’m in my chair, at my desk, blue books arranged in a neat rectangle in front of me, trying to forget about my sister, move on with my life. A case to investigate. A man is dead.

“They’re f*cking tremendous,” calls McGully from his desk, and his pronouncement is punctuated by the slam of his front chair legs hitting the floor as he leans forward. He’s got a pastrami sandwich from the Works, he’s got a napkin for a bib, spread out like a picnic blanket over his stomach. “They won’t come off for shit, not unless you latch ’em wrong. What happened? You spin out?”

“I did. Yesterday afternoon. Hit a tree.”

McGully bites his sandwich. Culverson mutters “Jesus,” but not about the accident, about something in the newspaper. Andreas’s desk is empty. Our window unit is clanking, burping out drifts of heat. Outside, on the sill, a slowly deepening shelf of new snow.

“It’s a tricky little latch on those bastards, and you really gotta keep the slack out.” McGully grins, mustard on his chin. “Don’t beat yourself up.”

“Yep. But, you know, I’ve been doing them a while. I did a winter on patrol.”

“Yeah, but were you servicing your own vehicle last winter?”

“No.”

Culverson, meanwhile, sets down his newspaper and looks out the window. I get up and start pacing. “Someone could have uncoupled them pretty easily, right? If they wanted to.”

McGully snorts, swallows a big bite of sandwich. “In the garage, here?”

“No, out in the field. While I was parked somewhere.”

“You mean—” he stares at me, lowers his voice, mock-serious, “somebody who’s trying to murder you?”

“Well—I mean—sure.”

“By unlatching your snow chains?” McGully brays laughter, hunks of pastrami erupting from his maw and bouncing off the napkin, onto the desk. “I’m sorry, kid, are you in a spy movie?”

“No.”

“Are you the president?”

“No.”

People have been trying to assassinate the president, that’s one of the deranged features of the national scene, the last three months—that’s the joke there.

I look at Culverson, but he’s still up in his head somewhere, eyes fixed on the drifting snow.

“Well, then, no offense, kid,” says McGully, “but I don’t think anybody’s trying to murder you. Nobody cares about you.”

“Right.”

“Nothing against you. Nobody cares about anything.”

Culverson stands abruptly, drops his newspaper in the garbage.

“What’s up your ass?” says McGully, craning his head around.

“The Pakistanis. They want to nuke it.”

“Nuke what?”

“Maia. They made some kind of a proclamation. They cannot leave the survival of their proud and sovereign people in the hands of the Western imperialist et cetera et cetera et cetera.”

“The Pakistanis, huh?” says McGully. “No kidding? I thought Iran were the pricks to worry about on this thing.”

“No, see, the Iranians have uranium, but no missile. They can’t fire it.”

“Pakistanis can fire it?”

“They have missiles.”

I’m thinking about my snow chains, feeling the lurch of the road spinning out from under me, remembering the shudder and the thud of impact.

Culverson’s shaking his head. “So the State Department is saying, basically, you try to nuke it, we’ll nuke you first.”

“Good times,” says McGully.

“I have a pretty clear memory of checking the chain latches,” I say, and they both look over at me. “Monday morning, first thing.”

“Jesus, Palace.”

“But, so, wait. Let’s just imagine I am a murderer. Let’s imagine there’s a detective who’s working the case, and he’s, he’s”—I pause, conscious of coloring a little—“he’s closing in on me. So I want this detective dead.”

“Yes,” says McGully, and I think for a second he’s being serious, but then he sets down his sandwich, rises slowly with a solemn expression. “Or maybe it was a ghost.”

“Okay, McGully.”

“No, I’m serious.” He comes over. His breath smells like pickles. “It’s the ghost of this hanger, and he’s so annoyed that you’re trying to pretend he got murdered, he’s trying to scare you into dropping the investigation.”

“Okay, McGully, okay. I don’t think it was a ghost.”

Culverson has pulled the Times out of the trash, he’s reading the story again.

“Yeah, you’re right,” says McGully, going back to his desk and the remainder of his lunch. “You probably forgot to latch the chains.”

* * *

Another of my father’s favorite jokes was the one he rolled out whenever people asked why we lived up in Concord, considering that he worked at St. Anselm’s, half an hour away, outside Manchester. He would reel back, astonished, and just say, “Because it’s Concord!” as if it that were explanation enough, like it’s London or Paris.

This was to become a favorite joke between Nico and me, in our years of surly teenage discontent, which for Nico have never really ended. Why couldn’t we find a place to eat a decent steak after nine p.m.? Why did every other city in New England get a Starbucks before we did?

Because it’s Concord!

But the real reason my parents stayed was for my mother’s work. She was the department secretary for the Concord police, planted behind the bullet-proof glass in the front lobby, handling visitors, calmly accepting complaints from drunks and vagrants and sex offenders, ordering a cake shaped like a semiautomatic pistol for every retiring detective.

Her salary was maybe half of my father’s income, but she’d held that job before she even met Temple Palace, and she married him only on the express condition that they would remain in Concord.

He was trying to be funny when he said “because it’s Concord!” but really, he didn’t care where he lived. He loved my mother a whole heck of a lot, was the explanation, and he just wanted to be where she was.

* * *

It’s Friday, late, coming up on midnight. The stars are gleaming dully through a gray wreath of clouds. I’m sitting on my back porch, looking out on the undeveloped acreage, former farmland, that abuts my row of townhouses.

I’m sitting here telling myself I was honest with Nico, and there’s nothing else I can do.

But she’s right, unfortunately. I love her, and I don’t want her to die alone.

Technically, I don’t want her to die at all, but there’s not much I can do about that.

It’s way past business hours, but I go inside and pick up the landline and dial the number anyway. Someone will answer. It’s never been the sort of office that shuts down for nights and weekends, and I’m sure that in the asteroid era the schedule has only gotten busier.

“Hello?” says a voice, quiet and male.

“Yeah, good evening.” Tilting my head back, taking a deep breath. “I need to speak to Alison Koechner.”

* * *

On Saturday morning I go for a jog, five miles along an eccentric route of my own invention: up to White Park, over to Main Street, and then home along Rockingham, sweat trickling down my forehead, mingling with the dusting of snow. My leg drags a little from the car accident, and there’s a tightness in my chest, but it feels good to be running, to be outdoors.

Okay. I could have forgotten to latch one of the chains on the tires, sure, I could see that. I’m hurrying, I’m anxious. Maybe I neglected to latch one. But all four?

I get home and turn on my cell phone and find that I have two service bars, and that I’ve missed a call from Sophia Littlejohn.

“Oh, no,” I mutter, pressing the button to play the voicemail. Forty-five minutes I’d been out, an hour maybe, and it was the first time I had turned off my phone in a week, the first time since I laid eyes on Peter Zell’s body in the bathroom of the pirate McDonald’s.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you,” says Ms. Littlejohn on the message, her voice neutral and steady. I’m cradling the phone under my neck, flipping open a blue book, clicking open a pen. “But the thing is, I really don’t know what to tell you.”

And then she just starts talking, a four-minute message that does nothing but recapitulate what her husband told me at their house on Wednesday morning. She and her brother had never been close. He had reacted terribly to the asteroid, become withdrawn, detached, more so than ever. She is obviously disappointed that he chose to kill himself, but not surprised.

“And so, Detective,” she says, “I thank you for your diligence, for your concern.” She stops, and there’s a few seconds of silence, I think the message is over, but then there’s a murmuring, supportive whisper behind her—handsome husband Erik—and she says, “He was not a happy man, Officer. I wanted you to know that I cared for him. He was a sad man, and then he killed himself. Please don’t call me again.”

Beep. End of message.

I sit drumming my fingers on the warped tile of my kitchen counter, the warm sweat of my exertion drying and turning cold on my forehead. In her message, Sophia Littlejohn hadn’t mentioned the aborted suicide note, if that’s what it was—Dear Sophia. But I had told her husband about it, and it’s a safe bet that he told her.

I call her back on the landline. At home, and then on her cell, and then at work, and then at home again.

Maybe she’s not answering because she doesn’t recognize the number, so I try all the numbers again on my cell phone, except halfway through the second call I lose all my bars, no signal, dead plastic, and I throw the stupid thing across the room.

* * *

You can’t see it in people’s eyes, not in this weather: winter hats pulled down low, faces turned down to the sleet-covered sidewalk. But you read it in their gaits, in that low weary shuffle. You can see the ones who aren’t going to make it. There’s a suicide. There’s one. This guy’s not going to make it. That woman, the one with face front, chin up high. She’ll hold up, do her best, pray to someone or something, right up until the end.

On the wall of the former office building, the graffiti: LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.

I’m walking over to the Somerset for a bachelor’s solitary Saturday night dinner, and I go out of my way to pass the McDonald’s on Main Street. I eye the empty parking lot, the stream of pedestrians going in, coming out with their paper bags, steaming from the tops. There’s an overflowing black Dumpster along the side of the building, partially concealing the side entrance. I stand for a second, and I imagine that I’m a killer. I’ve got my car—it’s a WVO engine, or I’ve put together a half tank somehow.

I’ve got a body in the trunk.

I wait patiently for midnight to roll around, midnight or one. Well past the dinner rush but before the tide of late-night postbar customers starts to wash in. The restaurant is mostly empty.

Casually, looking around the dimly lit lot, I pop the trunk and pull out my friend; lean him against my body and walk with him, three-legged, like a couple of drunks supporting ourselves, past the barrier of the Dumpster and in that side entrance, right down the little hall to the men’s john. Slide closed the lock. Take off my belt …

When I get to the Somerset, Ruth-Ann nods hello and fills up my coffee. Dylan is playing from the kitchen, Maurice loudly singing along to “Hazel.” I push the menu aside, surround myself with blue books. Listing and relisting the facts I’ve got thus far.

Peter Zell died five days ago.

He worked in insurance.

He loved math.

He was obsessed with the oncoming asteroid, collected information and tracked it in the sky, learning everything he could. He kept this information in a box marked “12.375,” for reasons I have yet to understand.

His face. He died with bruises on his face, below his right eye.

He was not close with his family.

He appeared to have had only one friend, a man named J. T. Toussaint, whom he’d loved as a child and then decided, for reasons of his own, to make contact with again.

I sit in front of my dinner for an hour, reading and rereading my notes, muttering to myself, waving away the slow-moving cigarette clouds that drift over from neighboring tables. At some point Maurice wanders out of the kitchen, white apron, hands on his hips, and looks down at my plate with stern disapproval.

“What’s the problem, Henry?” he says. “There a ladybug in your eggs or something?”

“Just not hungry, I guess. No offense.”

“Well, you know, hate to waste the food,” says Maurice, a high-pitched giggle sneaking into his voice, and I look up, sensing a punch line coming. “But it’s not the end of the world!”

Maurice dies laughing, stumbles back into the kitchen.

I pull out my wallet, slowly count out three tens for the check and an even thousand for a tip. The Somerset has to abide by the price controls or get shut down, so I always try to make it right on the table.

Then I gather up my blue books and shove them in the inside pocket of my blazer.

Basically, I know nothing.