The Last Policeman Part 24

Detectives must consider all possibilities, consider and weigh each conceivable set of events that might have led to a crime, to determine which are most likely, which might prove to be true.

When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for Peter's insurable-interest files because she knew I was intrigued by them, and she was helping me in my investigation.

When she was murdered, Naomi was looking for the files to hide them before I could find them.

Someone shot her. A stranger? An accomplice? A friend?

For one hour I'm driving back from Cambridge to Concord, an hour of dead highway and vandalized exit signs and deer standing tremulously along the lip of 93 North. I'm thinking about Naomi in the doorway of my bedroom, Monday night. The more I think of that moment, the more certain I become that whatever she had to tell me-whatever she started to say and then stopped-it was not merely sentimental or interpersonal. It was relevant to the mechanics of my ongoing investigation.

But do you stand in the moonlight half-dressed and tell somebody one more thing about contestability clauses and insurable interest?

It was something else, and I'll never know what it was. But I want to.

Normally, when I arrive at CPD headquarters on School Street, I park in the lot and enter through the back door that leads to the garage. This afternoon for some reason I go around to the front and use the main door, the public entrance, which I first walked through when I was four, maybe five years old. I say hey to Miriam, who works at the desk where my mother used to work, and I go upstairs to call Naomi Eddes's family.

Only thing is, now I'm up here, and the landline's not working.

No dial tone, no nothing. Dead plastic. I lift the cord, trace it back to the jack and then back to the desk, click the switch hook a few times. I look around the room, bite my lip. Everything is the same: the desks are in place, the piles of papers, filing cabinets, sandwich wrappers, soda cans, the wan winter light tilting in through the window. I travel around the room to Culverson's desk, lift up his receiver. It's the same: no dial tone, no life. I place the receiver back gently in the cradle.

"Something's f.u.c.ked," says Detective McGully, appearing in the doorway with his arms crossed, sleeves of his sweatshirt pushed up, cigar jabbing out of the side of his face. "Right?"

"Well," I say. "I can't get a line."

"Tip of the f.u.c.king iceberg," he growls, digging in the pockets of his sweatpants for a matchbox. "Something's up, New Guy."

"Huh," I say, but he is serious, dead serious-in all the time I've known him I've never seen an expression like this one on McGully's face. I go over and take Andreas's chair down off his desk, give his phone a try. Nothing. I can hear the Brush Cuts in the little coffee room two doors down, loud voices, someone guffawing, someone going, "So I say-I say-listen, wait." Somewhere a door slams; footsteps are rushing this way and that way outside.

"I ran into the chief when I came in this morning," McGully says, wandering into the room, leaning against the wall by the radiator, "and I said, 'hey, a.s.shole,' like I always do, and he just walked right past me. Like I was a ghost."

"Huh."

"Now there's some kind of meeting going on in there. Ordler's office. The chief, the DCO, the DCA. Plus a bunch of jerks I don't recognize." He puffs on the cigar. "In wraparound sungla.s.ses."

"Sungla.s.ses?"

"Yeah," he says, "sungla.s.ses," like it signifies something, but whatever the drift is I'm not catching it, and I'm only half listening, anyway. There's a small tender swelling on the back of my head, where it slammed against the brick wall in Eagle Square this morning.

"You mark my words, kid." He points at me with his unlit cigar, gestures with it all around the room, like the Ghost of Christmas Future. "Something is going the f.u.c.k on."

In the lobby of the main branch of the Concord Public Library is a neat display of cla.s.sics, the greatest hits of the Western canon arranged in a tidy pyramid: The Odyssey, The Iliad, Aeschylus and Virgil providing the foundation, Shakespeare and Chaucer the second row, upward and forward in time all the way through The Sun also Rises at the capstone. No one has felt it necessary to provide a t.i.tle for the display, although the theme is clearly things to read before you die. Somebody, maybe the same joker who put the R.E.M. song on heavy rotation on the Penuche's jukebox, has slipped a paperback copy of On the Beach into this display, shoehorned between Middlemarch and Oliver Twist. I take it out and carry it over to Fiction and refile it before going down to the bas.e.m.e.nt to find the reference section.

This is what it must have meant to be a policeman in a predigital age, I'm thinking, enjoying the experience in a visceral way, digging out the fat phonebook for suburban Maryland, thumping it open along the spine, running my forefinger along the tiny columns of type, flipping through the tissue-thin pages for a name. Will there be policemen afterward, I do not know. No-there won't-eventually, maybe-but not for a while.

There are three listings for Eddes in Gaithersburg, Maryland, and I carefully copy the numbers into my blue book and go back up to the lobby, past the Shakespeare and John Milton, to where they have an old-fashioned phone booth by the front entrance. There's a line, and I wait for about ten minutes, gazing out the tall deco windows, my eyes resting on the skinny branches of a little gray musclewood tree outside the library entrance. I get in there, take a breath, and start dialing.

Ron and Emily Eddes, on Maryland Avenue. No answer, no machine.

Maria Eddes, Autumn Hill Place. She answers, but first of all she sounds very young and second she speaks only Spanish. I manage to ask her if she knows a Naomi Eddes, and she manages to reply no, she does not. I apologize and hang up.

It's drizzling out there again. I dial the last number and while it rings I watch a single lonesome ovular leaf, alone on the farthest reach of a twisting branch, get pelted by the raindrops.

"h.e.l.lo?"

"William Eddes?"

"Bill. Who's this?"

My teeth clench. I clutch my forehead with my palm. My stomach is a tight black knot.

"Sir, are you related to a woman named Naomi Eddes?"

The pause that follows is long and painful. This is her father.

"Sir?" I say at last.

"Who is this?" he says, his voice tight and cold and formal.

"My name is Detective Henry Palace," I say. "I'm a policeman, in Concord, New Hampshire."

He hangs up.

The musclewood leaf, the one I was watching, is gone. I look and I think I can see where it landed, a black smear in the slush of the lawn. I call Bill Eddes back and I do not get an answer.

There's someone outside the phone booth, an agitated-looking old lady, bent over a small wire-frame shopping cart, the kind you get from the hardware store. I hold up one finger, smile apologetically, and I call Bill Eddes a third time, and I'm not surprised at all when there's no answer, and that the phone abruptly stops ringing entirely. Naomi's father, in his living room or kitchen, has yanked the phone from the wall. He's slowly winding the slim gray cord around the phone, placing the phone on the shelf of a closet, like you put away something not to be thought of again.

"Sorry, ma'am," I say, holding open the door for the old lady with the cart, and she asks, "What happened to your face?" but I don't answer. I'm leaving the library, I'm chewing on an end of my mustache, holding one hand over my heart, palming it, feeling it beat-holy moly-this is it-holy moly-hurrying, running now, through the sodden lawn and back to the car.

It's such a small town, Concord, sixty square miles taking in all the outskirts, and to drive just from downtown to the hospital with no other cars on the road? Ten minutes, which is not time enough to figure it all out, but is time enough to be sure that I will figure it out, that I've got it, that I will solve this murder-these murders-two murders, one murderer.

Here I am already, at the intersection of Langley Parkway and Route 9, looking up at Concord Hospital, where it sits like a child's model of a castle on a hill, surrounded by its outbuildings and sprawling parking lots and office suites and clinics. The new wing, unfinished and never-to-be finished, piles of timber, panes of gla.s.s, frames of scaffolding hidden under tarps.

I pull in, sit in the parking lot, drum my fingers on the wheel.

Bill Eddes reacted how he did for a reason, and I know what the reason is.

That fact implies a second fact, which leads me on to a third.

It's like you walk into a dark room, and there's a sliver of pale light under a doorway on the opposite side. You open that door and it leads on to a second room, slightly brighter than the last, and there's another door on the other side, with light under that one. And you keep going forward, one room after the other, more and more rooms, more and more light.

There's a bank of spherical lights over the main doors, and all were lit the last time I was here, and now two are out, and that's just it. The world is decaying bit by bit, every piece degrading at its own erratic rate, everything trembling and crumbling in advance, the terror of the coming devastation a devastation of its own, and each minor degradation has its consequences.

There's no volunteer behind the horseshoe desk in the lobby today, just a family sitting on the couches in a small anxious knot, a mom and a dad and a kid, and they look up as I walk past, as if I might have the bad news they're waiting for. I nod apologetically and then I stand there, turning in all directions, trying to orient myself, looking for Elevator B.

A nurse in scrubs rushes past me, stops at a doorway, mutters, "Oh, shoot," and turns back the other way.

I think I've figured out which way I'm going, and I take two steps and experience a pulse of intense pain from my bandaged eye. I gasp, raise my hand to it, shake it off, no time just now.

The pain, because-what was it that Dr. Wilton told me while winding gauze around my head? The hospital is experiencing a shortage of palliative resources.

Facts are connecting themselves, glowing to life in my memory and then connecting themselves, one to the other, forming pictures like constellations. But there is no joy, I feel no pleasure at all, because my face hurts, and my side where the gun barrel dug into it, the back of my head where it banged against the wall, and I'm thinking, Palace, you dunce. Because if I could just go back in time and see things clearer, see them correctly quicker, I would have solved the Zell case-and there would be no Eddes case. Naomi would not be dead at all.

The elevator door slides open and I step inside.

No one else gets on; it's just me, the tall quiet policeman with one eye, running his fingers up and down the sign, like a blind man reading Braille, trying to read the answers off the sign.

I ride it for a while, a few times up, a few times down. "Where," I mutter to myself, "where could you be keeping it?" Because somewhere in this building is a place a.n.a.logous to the doghouse at J. T. Toussaint's, where presale product and ill-gotten gains are being h.o.a.rded. But a hospital is a place full of places-storerooms and surgeries, office suites and hallways-especially a hospital like this one, chaotic, chopped up, frozen midrenovation, it's a place full of places.

At last I call it quits and get off in the bas.e.m.e.nt and find Dr. Fenton in her office, down a short hallway from the morgue, a small and immaculate office decorated with fresh flowers and family pictures and a print of Mikhail Baryshnikov, the Bolshoi Ballet, 1973.

Fenton looks surprised and not pleased to see me, like I'm a garden pest, a racc.o.o.n maybe, she thought she was rid of.

"What?"

I tell her what I need done and ask her how long that takes, typically. She scowls, and says, "Typically?" like the word no longer has meaning, but I say, "Yes, typically."

"Typically, between ten days and three weeks," she says. "Although, the Hazen Drive staff being what it is, at present, I imagine it would be more like four to six weeks."

"Okay-well-can you do it by the morning?" I ask, and I'm waiting for the scornful bray of laughter, bracing myself, thinking how I'm going to beg for it.

But she takes off her gla.s.ses, gets up from her chair, and looks at me carefully. "Why are you trying so hard to solve this murder?"

"I mean-" I hold up my hands. "Because it's unsolved."

"Okay," she says, and tells me she'll do it, as long as I promise never to call her or seek her out again, for any reason, forever.

And then, on my way back to the elevator, I find it, the place I was looking for, and I gasp, my jaw drops open and I literally gasp, and I say, "Oh, my G.o.d," my voice echoing down the concrete bas.e.m.e.nt hallway, and then I turn and run back to ask Fenton for one more thing.

My cell phone isn't working. No bars. No service. It's getting worse.

I can picture them in my mind: untended cell towers tilting over slowly and then falling, connecting cables drooping, dead.

I drive back to the library, put quarters in the meter. I wait in line for the phone booth, and when it's my turn I reach Officer McConnell at home.

"Oh, hey, Palace," she says. "You work upstairs. You want to tell me what on earth is going on over there? With the chiefs?"

"I don't know." Mysterious men in sungla.s.ses. McGully, something's f.u.c.ked. "I need your help with something, Officer. Do you have any clothes that aren't pants?"

"What?"

McConnell writes down where she's supposed to go and when, where Dr. Fenton will meet her in the morning. There's a line forming outside the phone booth. The old lady with the wire cart from the hardware store is back, waving her arms at me, like, h.e.l.lo, and behind her is a businessman type in a brown suit, with a briefcase, and a mom with twin girls. I flash my badge through the gla.s.s of the phone booth and duck down, trying to arrange myself comfortably in this tiny wooden room.

I raise Detective Culverson on the CB and I tell him that I solved the case.

"You mean, your hanger?"

"Yeah. And your case, too. Eddes."

"What?"

"Your case, too," I say. "Same killer."

I run over the whole thing for him, and then there's a long pause, radio crackling in the silence, and he says that's quite a lot of police work I've been doing.

"Yeah."

He says the same thing I said to McConnell last week: "You're going to be a great detective one day."

"Yep," I say. "Right."

"Are you coming back to headquarters?"

"No," I say. "Not today."

"Good," he says. "Don't."

Even in the most quiescent policing environments, there is that occasional violent and random incident, where someone is murdered for no good reason in broad daylight on a busy street or in a parking lot.

The entire Concord Police Department was on hand for my mother's funeral, and they all rose and stood at attention as the coffin was carried in-fourteen staff members and eighty-six officers in their uniform blues, stiff as statues, saluting. Rebecca Forman, the force's certified public accountant, a st.u.r.dy middle-aged lady with salt-and-pepper hair, seventy-four years old, dissolved into sobs and had to be escorted out. The only person who remained seated was Professor Temple Palace, my father; he sat slackly in his pew throughout the short service, dull-eyed, eyes staring straight ahead, like a man waiting for a bus, his twelve-year-old son and six-year-old daughter standing wide-eyed on either side of him. He sat there, just sort of slumped against my hip, looking more perplexed than grief-stricken, and you could tell right there-I could tell-he wasn't going to make it.

I am sure that in retrospect what was hard for my father the English professor was not just the simple fact of her death, but the irony: that his wife, who sat from nine to five Monday through Friday behind bulletproof gla.s.s in a police station, should be shot through the heart by a thief in the T.J. Maxx parking lot on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon.

Just to give you a sense of how low the crime rate was in Concord at that time: in the year in question, 1997, according to FBI records, my mother was the only person killed. Which means that, retrospectively, my mother's odds of falling victim to a murderer in Concord, in that year, came in at one in forty thousand.

But that's how it works: no matter what the odds of a given event, that one-in-whatever-it-is has to come in at some point, or it wouldn't be a one-in-whatever chance. It would be zero.

After the wake, my father looked at the kitchen, his gla.s.ses sitting on his nose, his eyes large and confused, and said to his children, "Well, now, what are we going to do for dinner?" and he meant not just tonight but forever. I smiled uneasily at Nico. The clock was ticking. He wasn't going to make it.