The Last Policeman (2 page)

“Except, wait.”

“Sorry?”

I stand up straight and turn and face him. “So. I’m going to murder somebody.”

A pause. Dotseth waiting, amused, exaggerated patience. “All righty.”

“And I live in a time and a town where people are killing themselves all over the place. Right and left. It’s hanger town.”

“Okay.”

“Wouldn’t my move be, kill my victim and then arrange it to appear as a suicide?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe, right?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But that right there?” Dotseth jabs a cheerful thumb toward the slumped corpse. “That’s a suicide.”

He winks, pushes open the door of the men’s room, and leaves me alone with Peter Zell.

* * *

“So what’s the story, Stretch? Are we waiting for the meat wagon on this one, or cuttin’ down the piñata ourselves?”

I level Officer Michelson a stern and disapproving look. I hate that kind of casual fake tough-guy morbidity, “meat wagon” and “piñata” and all the rest of it, and Ritchie Michelson knows that I hate it, which is exactly why he’s goading me right now. He’s been waiting at the door of the men’s room, theoretically guarding the crime scene, eating an Egg McMuffin out of its yellow cellophane wrapper, pale grease dripping down the front of his uniform shirt.

“Come on, Michelson. A man is dead.”

“Sorry, Stretch.”

I’m not crazy about the nickname, either, and Ritchie knows that also.

“Someone from Dr. Fenton’s office should be here within the hour,” I say, and Michelson nods, burps into his fist.

“You’re going to turn this over to Fenton’s office, huh?” He balls up his breakfast-sandwich wrapper, chucks it into the trash. “I thought she wasn’t doing suicides anymore.”

“It’s at the discretion of the detective,” I say, “and in this case, I think an autopsy is warranted.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He doesn’t really care. Trish McConnell, meanwhile, is doing her job. She’s on the far side of the restaurant, a short and vigorous woman with a black ponytail jutting out from under her patrolman’s cap. She’s got a knot of teenagers cornered by the soda fountain. Taking statements. Notebook out, pencil flying, anticipating and fulfilling her supervising investigator’s instructions. Officer McConnell, I like.

“You know, though,” Michelson is saying, talking just to talk, just getting my goat, “headquarters says we’re supposed to fold up the tent pretty quick on these.”

“I know that.”

“Community stability and continuity, that whole drill.”

“Yes.”

“Plus, the owner’s ready to flip, with his bathroom being closed.”

I follow Michelson’s gaze to the counter and the red-faced proprietor of the McDonald’s, who stares back at us, his unyielding gaze made mildly ridiculous by the bright yellow shirt and ketchup-colored vest. Every minute of police presence is a minute of lost profit, and you can just tell the guy would be over here with a finger in my face if he wanted to risk an arrest on Title XVI. Next to the manager is a gangly adolescent boy, his thick mullet fringing a counterman’s visor, smirking back and forth between his disgruntled boss and the pair of policemen, unsure who’s more
deserving of his contempt.

“He’ll be fine,” I tell Michelson. “If this were last year, the whole scene of crime would be shut down for six to twelve hours, and not just the men’s john, either.”

Michelson shrugs. “New times.”

I scowl and turn my back on the owner. Let him stew. It’s not even a real McDonald’s. There are no more real McDonald’s. The company folded in August of last year, ninety-four percent of its value having evaporated in three weeks of market panic, leaving behind hundreds of thousands of brightly colored empty storefronts. Many of these, like the one we’re now standing in, on Concord’s Main Street, have subsequently been transformed into pirate restaurants: owned and operated by enterprising locals like my new best friend over there, doing a bustling business in comfort food and no need to sweat the franchise fee.

There are no more real 7-Elevens, either, and no more real Dunkin’ Donuts. There are still real Paneras, but the couple who owns the chain have undergone a meaningful spiritual experience and restaffed most of the restaurants with coreligionists, so it’s not worth going in there unless you want to hear the Good News.

I beckon McConnell over, let her and Michelson know we’re going to be investigating this as a suspicious death, try to ignore the sarcastic lift of Ritchie’s eyebrows. McConnell, for her part, nods gravely and flips her notebook to a fresh page. I give the crime-scene officers their marching orders: McConnell is to finish collecting statements, then go find and inform the victim’s family. Michelson is to stay here by the door, guarding the scene until someone from Fenton’s office arrives to collect the corpse.

“You got it,” says McConnell, flipping closed her notebook.

“Beats working,” says Michelson.

“Come on, Ritchie,” I say. “A man is dead.”

“Yeah, Stretch,” he says. “You said that already.”

I salute my fellow officers, nod goodbye, and then I stop short, one hand on the handle of the parking-lot-side door of the McDonald’s, because there’s a woman walking anxiously this way through the parking lot, wearing a red winter hat but no coat, no umbrella against the steady drifts of snow, like she just ran out of somewhere to get here, thin work shoes slipping on the slush of the parking lot. Then she sees me, sees me looking at her, and I catch the moment when she knows that I’m a policeman, and her brow creases with worry and she turns on her heel and hurries away.

* * *

I drive north on State Street away from the McDonald’s in my department-issued Chevrolet Impala, carefully maneuvering through the quarter inch of frozen precipitation on the roadway. The side streets are lined with parked cars, abandoned cars, drifts of snow collecting on their windshields. I pass the Capitol Center for the Arts, handsome red brick and wide windows, glance into the packed coffee shop that someone’s opened across the street. There’s a snaking line of customers outside Collier’s, the hardware store—they must have new merchandise. Lightbulbs. Shovels. Nails. There’s a high-school-age kid up on a ladder, crossing out prices and writing in new ones with a black marker on a cardboard
sign.

Forty-eight hours, is what I’m thinking. Most murder cases that get solved are solved within forty-eight hours of the commission of the crime.

Mine is the only car on the road, and the pedestrians turn their heads to watch me pass. A bum leans against the boarded-up door of White Peak, a mortgage broker and commercial real-estate firm. A small pack of teenagers is loitering outside an ATM vestibule, passing around a marijuana cigarette, a kid with a scruffy goatee languorously exhaling into the cold air.

Scrawled across the glass window of what used to be a two-story office building, at the corner of State and Blake, is graffiti, six-foot-tall letters that say
LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES
.

I regret giving Ritchie Michelson a hard time. Life for patrol officers had gotten pretty rough by the time I was promoted, and I’m sure that the fourteen subsequent weeks have not made things easier. Yes, cops are steadily employed and earning among the best salaries in the country right now. And, yes, Concord’s crime rate in most categories is not wildly elevated, month against month, from what it was this time last year, with notable exceptions; per the IPSS Act, it is now illegal to manufacture, sell, or purchase any kind of firearm in the United States of America, and this is a tough law to enforce, especially in the state of New Hampshire.

Still, on the street, in the wary eyes of the citizenry, one senses at all times the potential for violence, and for an active-duty patrol officer, as for a soldier in war, that potential for violence takes a slow and grinding toll. So, if I’m Ritchie Michelson, I’m bound to be a little tired, a little burned out, prone to the occasional snippy remark.

The traffic light at Warren Street is working, and even though I’m a policeman and even though there are no other cars at the intersection, I stop and I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and I wait for the green light, staring out the windshield and thinking about that woman, the one in a hurry and wearing no coat.

* * *

“Everybody hear the news?” asks Detective McGully, big and boisterous, hands cupped together into a megaphone. “We’ve got the date.”

“What do you mean, ‘we’ve got the date’?” says Detective Andreas, popping up from his chair looking at McGully with open-mouthed bafflement. “We already have the date. Everybody knows the goddamned date.”

The date that everybody knows is October 3, six months and eleven days from today, when a 6.5-kilometer-diameter ball of carbon and silicates will collide with Earth.

“Not the date the big meatball makes landfall,” says McGully, brandishing a copy of the
Concord Monitor
. “The date the geniuses tell us where it’s gonna hit.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” nods Detective Culverson, settled at his own desk with his own paper; he reads the
New York Times
. “April 9, I think.”

My own desk is in the far corner of the room, by the trash can and the little fridge. I have my notebook open in front of me, reviewing my observations on the crime scene. It’s actually a blue book, the kind college students use to take their exams. My father was a professor, and when he died we found about twenty-five
boxes of these things up in the attic, slim paper books of robin’s-egg blue. I’m still using them.

“April 9? That seems so soon.” Andreas slumps back down in his chair, and then he echoes himself in a ghostly murmur. “Seems soon.”

Culverson shakes his head and sighs, while McGully chortles. This is what remains of the Concord Police Department’s division of Criminal Investigations, Adult-Crimes Unit: four guys in a room. Between August of last year and today, Adult Crimes has had three early retirements, one sudden and unexplained disappearance, plus Detective Gordon, who broke his hand in the course of a domestic-violence arrest, took medical leave and never came back. This wave of attrition has been insufficiently countered by the promotion, in early December, of one patrolman. Me. Detective Palace.

We’re pretty fortunate, personnel-wise. Juvenile Crime is down to two officers, Peterson and Guerrera. Tech Crime was disbanded entirely, effective November 1.

McGully opens today’s
New York Times
and begins to read aloud. I’m thinking about the Zell case, working through my notes.
No signs of foul play or struggle // cell phone? // Ligature: belt, gold buckle
.

A black belt of handsome Italian leather, emblazoned “B&R.”

“The crucial date is April 9, according to astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” reads McGully from the
Monitor
. “Experts there, along with legions of other astronomers, astrophysicists, and dedicated amateurs following the steady progress of Maia, the massive asteroid
formally known as 2011GV
₁
—”

“Jesus,” moans Andreas, mournful and furious, jumping up again and hurrying over to McGully’s desk. He’s a small guy, twitchy, in his early forties, but with a thick head of tight black curls, like a cherub. “We know what it is. Is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know all of this already?”

“Take it easy, pally,” says McGully.

“I just hate how they give all the information over and over again, every time. It’s like they’re rubbing it in or something.”

“That’s just how newspaper stories are written,” Culverson says.

“Well, I hate it.”

“Nevertheless.” Culverson smiles. He’s the only African American officer in the Criminal Investigations Unit. He is in fact the only African American officer on the Concord force and is sometimes lovingly referred to as “The Only Black Man in Concord,” though this is not technically true.

“All right, all right, I’ll skip ahead,” says McGully, patting poor Andreas on the shoulder. “Scientists have been … I’ll skip, I’ll skip … some disagreement, now largely resolved, as to … skip skip skip. Here: ‘On the April date, with only five and a half months remaining until impact, sufficient points of declination and right ascension will have been mapped to pinpoint the precise location on the surface of Earth where Maia will land, to an accuracy of within fifteen miles.”

McGully gets a little hushed at the end there, his baritone bluster softening, and he gives out a whistle, low and long. “Fifteen miles.”

A silence follows, filled by the small clanging noises of the radiator.
Andreas stands at McGully’s desk, staring down at the newspaper, his hands balled in fists at his side. Culverson, in his comfortable corner, picks up a pen and begins tracing long lines on a piece of paper. I close the blue book, tilt my head back, and fix my eyes on a point in the ceiling, near the scalloped light fixture in the center of the room.

“Well, that’s the gist of it, ladies and germs,” says McGully, bluster recovered, sweeping the paper closed with a flourish. “Then it gets into all the reaction and so on.”

“Reaction?” howls Andreas, flapping his hands angrily in the direction of the newspaper. “What kind of
reaction
?”

“Oh, you know, the prime minister of Canada says, hey, hope it lands in China,” says McGully, laughing. “President of China says, ‘Listen, Canada, no offense or anything, but we’ve got a different perspective.’ You know. Blah blah blah.”

Andreas growls in disgust. I’m watching all this, sort of, but really I’m thinking, eyes focused on the light fixture. Guy walks into a McDonald’s in the middle of the night and hangs himself in a handicapped stall. Guy walks into a McDonald’s, it’s the middle of the night …

Culverson solemnly lifts his paper, reveals it to be cross-hatched into a large simple chart, X axis and Y axis.

“Official Concord Police Department asteroid pool,” he announces, deadpan. “Step right up.”

I like Detective Culverson. I like that he still dresses like a real detective. Today he’s in a three-piece suit, a tie with a metallic sheen, and a matching pocket square. A lot of people, at this point, have wholly given themselves over to comfort. Andreas, for example,
is presently wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans, McGully a Washington Redskins sweatsuit.