The Last Policeman Part 10

"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 gla.s.s.

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, repet.i.tive motion, simple action, irresistible. In the outer reaches of its...o...b..t, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 G.o.d'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 b.u.t.ton 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, G.o.d 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 jacka.s.s 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!

"Roll through, please."

The soldier's chin is perfectly square, his eyes are sharp and cheerless, his face is cold and impa.s.sive 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 t.i.tles, cla.s.sified sections generally a.s.sumed to relate to the various branches of the armed services. The exact content of those black t.i.tles 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 ma.s.sive 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 G.o.d.

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.