The Last Policeman Part 6

Yes, Mr. Dotseth, it is true a lot of people are depressed, and a lot of those people have chosen to take their own lives. But I cannot, as a responsible police detective, accept this piece of context as evidence that Peter Zell was a 10-54S. If the coming destruction of the planet was enough to make people kill themselves, this restaurant would be empty. Concord would be a ghost town. There'd be no one left for Maia to kill, because we'd all be dead already.

"Three-egg omelet?"

"Whole wheat toast," I say, and then add, "Ruth-Ann, I got a question for you."

"I have an answer." She has not written down my order, but I've been ordering the same thing since I was eleven. "You go first."

"What do you make of all this hanger-town business? The suicides, I mean. Would you ever-"

Ruth-Ann growls, disgusted.

"You kidding? I'm Catholic, honey. No. Absolutely not."

See, I don't think I would either. My omelet arrives and I eat it slowly, staring into s.p.a.ce, wishing it weren't so smoky in here.

The expansion of Concord Hospital was announced with much fanfare eighteen months ago: a publicprivate partnership to add a new long-term-care wing and make wide-ranging improvements to pediatrics, to obstetrics/gynecology, and to the ICU. They broke ground last February, made steady progress through the spring, and then financing dried up and construction slowed and then stopped entirely by the end of July, leaving a maze of half-built hallways, towers of skeletal scaffolding, lots of awkward temporary arrangements made permanent, everybody walking in circles and giving one another wrong directions.

"The morgue?" says a white-haired volunteer in a cheerful red beret, consulting a handheld map. "Let's see ... the morgue, the morgue, the morgue. Oh. Here." A pair of doctors rushes past, clutching clipboards, while the volunteer gestures at her map, which I can see is covered with scrawled emendations and exclamation points. "What you need is Elevator B, and Elevator B is ... oh, dear."

My hands are twitching at my sides. One thing you don't want to do, when you're meeting Dr. Alice Fenton, is be late.

"Oh. That way."

"Thank you, ma'am."

Elevator B, according to the sign written in black permanent marker and taped above the b.u.t.tons, goes either up-to oncology, to special surgery, to the pharmacy-or down, to the chapel, the custodial department, and the morgue. I step off, checking my watch, and hustle down the hallway past an office suite, past a supply closet, past a small black door with a white Christian cross on it, thinking, oncology-thinking, you know what would really be awful right about now? Having cancer.

But then I push open the thick metal doors of the morgue, and there's Peter Zell, his body laid out on the table in the center of the room, spot-lit dramatically by the arching bank of hundred-watt autopsy lights. And standing beside him, waiting for me, is the chief medical examiner of the state of New Hampshire. I stick out a hand in greeting. "Good morning, Dr. Fenton. Afternoon, sorry. h.e.l.lo."

"Tell me about your corpse."

"Yes, ma'am," I say, letting my proffered hand float dumbly back to my side, and then I just stand there like an idiot, speechless, because Fenton is here, in front of me, standing in the stark white light of the morgue, one hand resting on the front end of her sleek silver cart like a captain at the tiller. She stares out from behind her famous perfect-circle gla.s.ses, waiting with an expression I've heard repeatedly described by other detectives, owlish and expectant and intense.

"Detective?"

"Yes," I say, again. "Okay." I get my act together and give Fenton what I've got.

I tell her about the crime scene, about the expensive belt, the absence of the victim's cell phone, the absence of a suicide note. As I speak, my eyes are flicking back and forth from Fenton to the items on her cart, the tools of the pathologist's trade: the bone saw, the chisel and the scissors, rows of vials for the collection of various precious fluids. Scalpels of a dozen different widths and keennesses, arrayed on clean white fabric.

Dr. Fenton remains silent and still through my recitation, and when at last I shut up she continues to stare, her lips pursed and her brow minutely furrowed.

"Okay, then," she says at last. "So, what the h.e.l.l are we doing here?"

"Ma'am?"

Fenton's hair is steely gray and cut short, bangs running in a precise line across her forehead.

"I thought this was a suspicious death," she says, her eyes narrowing to two flashing points. "What I'm hearing from you does not comprise evidence of a suspicious death."

"Well, yes, no," I stammer. "Not evidence, per se."

"Not evidence, per se?" she echoes, in a tone that somehow makes me keenly aware of the bas.e.m.e.nt's unusually low ceiling, the fact that I'm standing slightly stooped so as not to bang my forehead on the bank of overhead lights, whereas Dr. Fenton, at five foot three, stands fully upright, her spine military-straight, glaring at me from behind the gla.s.ses.

"Per t.i.tle LXII statute 630 of the criminal code of New Hampshire, as revised in January by the general court sitting in combined session," Fenton says, and I'm nodding, vigorously nodding to show her that I know all this, I've studied the binders, federal, state, and local, but she keeps going, "the OCME will not perform autopsies when it can be reasonably ascertained at the scene that the death was the result of suicide."

"Right," I say, muttering "yes" and "of course," until I can respond. "And it was my determination, ma'am, that there may have been some question of foul play."

"There were signs of struggle at the scene?"

"No."

"Signs of forced entry?

"No."

"Missing valuables?"

"Well, the, uh, he didn't have a phone. I think I mentioned that."

"Who are you again?"

"We haven't met, officially. My name is Detective Henry Palace. I'm new."

"Detective Palace," says Fenton, pulling on her gloves with a series of fierce movements, "my daughter has twelve piano recitals this season, and I am, at this very moment, missing one of them. Do you know how many piano recitals she will have next season?"

I don't know what to say to that. I really don't. So I just stand there for a minute, the tall and stupid man in the brightly lit room full of corpses.

"Okey-dokey then," says Alice Fenton with menacing cheer, turning to her cart of equipment. "This better be a G.o.dd.a.m.n murder."

She takes up her blade and I stare at the floor, feeling distinctly that what I'm supposed to do, here, is stand very quietly until she is through-but it's hard to do that, it really is, and as she begins the meticulous stepwise progression of her work, I look up and inch forward and watch her do it. And it is a glorious thing to watch, the cold and beautiful precision of the autopsy, Fenton in motion, a master moving meticulously through the steps of her craft.

The perseverance in this world, despite it all, of things done right.

Carefully Dr. Fenton cuts free the black leather belt and slips it off Zell's neck, measures the width of the band and the length from end to end. With bra.s.s calipers she takes the dimensions of the bruising beneath the eye, and the bruise from the belt buckle, digging up beneath the chin, yellowish and dry like a patch of sere terrain running up on either side toward his ears, an angry ragged V. And she's pausing, moment to moment, to take pictures of everything: the belt while it's still on the neck, the belt alone, the neck alone.

And then she cuts away the clothes, rinses off the insurance man's pallid body with a damp cloth, her gloved fingers moving rapidly over his midsection and his arms.

"What are you looking for?" I venture, and Fenton ignores me; I fall silent.

With a scalpel she tucks into the chest, and I take another step forward, now I'm standing beside her under the bright halo of the mortuary light, peering wide-eyed as she makes a deep Y-shaped incision, peels back the skin and the flesh beneath. I'm leaning way over the body, pushing my luck, as Fenton draws the dead man's blood, piercing a vein near the center of the heart, filling three vials in quick succession. And I realize at some point during all this that I'm barely breathing, that as I'm watching her go point by point through this process, weighing the organs and recording their weights, lifting the brain from the skull and turning it in her hands, I'm waiting for her impa.s.sive expression to sharpen, waiting for her to gasp or mutter "hmm" or turn to me in astonishment.

To have found whatever it is that will prove that Zell was killed, and not by his own hand.

Instead, at last, Dr. Fenton puts down her scalpel and flatly says, "Suicide."

I stare at her. "Are you sure?"

Fenton doesn't answer. She's moving rapidly back over to her cart, opening a box containing a thick roll of plastic bags, and peeling the top one off.

"Wait, ma'am. I'm sorry," I say. "What about that?"

"What about what?" I can feel myself growing desperate, a heat building in my cheeks, a squeak sneaking into my voice, like a child's voice. "That? Is that bruising? Above his ankle?"

"I saw that, yes," Fenton says coolly.

"Where did it come from?"

"We shall never know." She doesn't stop bustling, doesn't look at me, her flat voice glazed with sarcasm. "But we do know he didn't die from a bruise to the calf."

"But aren't there are other things we do know? Just in terms of determining the cause of death?" I'm saying this and I'm fully conscious of how ridiculous it is to be challenging Alice Fenton, but this can't be right. I scour my memory, flipping frantically in my mind through the pages of the relevant textbooks. "What about the blood? Do we perform a toxicity screening?"

"We would if we'd found anything to indicate it. Needle marks, muscles atrophied in suggestive patterns."

"But we can't just do it?"

Fenton laughs dryly, shaking open the plastic bag. "Detective, are you familiar with the state police forensic lab? On Hazen Drive?"

"I've never been there."

"Well, it is the only forensic laboratory in the state, and right now there is a new person running the show over there, and he is an idiot. He is an a.s.sistant to an a.s.sistant who is now chief toxicologist, since the real chief toxicologist left town in November to go study life drawing in Provence."

"Oh."

"Yes. Oh." Fenton's lip curls up with evident distaste. "Apparently it's what she's always wanted to do. It's a mess over there. Orders getting left on the table. It's a mess."

"Oh," I say again, and I turn to what remains of Peter Zell, the chest cavity yawning open on the table. I'm looking at him, at it, and I'm thinking how sad it is, because however he died, whether he killed himself or not, he's dead. I'm thinking the dumb and obvious thought that here was a person, and now he's gone and he's never coming back.

When I look up again, Fenton is standing beside me, and her voice has changed a little, and she's pointing, directing my gaze to Zell's neck.

"Look," she says. "What do you see?"

"Nothing," I say, confused. The skin is peeled back, revealing the soft tissue and muscle, the yellow-white of the bone beneath. "I don't see anything."

"Exactly. If someone had snuck up behind this man with a rope, or strangled him with bare hands, or even with this extremely expensive belt you've become fixated on, the neck would be a mess. There would be tissue abrasion, there would be pools of blood from internal hemorrhaging."

"Okay," I say. I nod. Fenton turns away, back to her cart.

"He died by asphyxiation, Detective," she says. "He leaned forward, on purpose, into the knot of the ligature, his airway was sealed, and he died."

She zips the corpse of my insurance man back into the body bag from whence it came and slides the body back into its designated slot in the refrigerated wall. I'm watching all this mutely, stupidly, wishing I had more to say. I don't want her to leave.

"What about you, Dr. Fenton?"

"Excuse me?" She stops at the door, looks back.

"Why haven't you left, gone off to do whatever it is you've always wanted to do?"

Fenton tilts her head, looks at me like she's not exactly sure she understands the question. "This is what I've always wanted to do."

"Right. Okay."

The heavy gray door swings closed behind her, I rub my knuckles into my eyes, thinking, what next? Thinking, what now?

I stand there alone for a second, alone with Fenton's rolling cart, alone with the bodies in their cold lockers. Then I take one of the vials of Zell's blood off the cart, slip it into the inside pocket of my blazer, and go.

I find my way out of Concord Hospital, weaving my way through the unfinished corridors, and then, because it's already been a long and difficult day, because I am frustrated and exhausted and confused, and wanting to do nothing but figure out what I'm going to do next, my sister is waiting for me at my car.

Nico Palace in her ski hat and winter coat is seated cross-legged on the sloping front hood of the Impala, undoubtedly leaving a deep dent, because she knows I will hate that, and tapping ash from her American Spirit cigarette directly onto the windshield. I trudge toward her through the snow-crusted emptiness of the hospital parking lot, and Nico greets me with one hand raised, palm up, like an Indian squaw, smoking her cigarette, waiting.

"Come on, Hank," she says, before I can say a word. "I left you, like, seventeen messages."

"How'd you know where I was?"

"Why'd you hang up on me this morning?"

"How'd you know where I was?"

This is how we talk. I pull the sleeve of my jacket up over my hand and use it to brush ash off the car down into the snow.

"I called the station," says Nico. "McGully told me where I could find you."

"He shouldn't have done that," I say. "I'm working."

"I need your help. Seriously."

"Well, I'm seriously working. Would you climb down off the vehicle, please?"

Instead she casts out her legs and settles back on the windshield like she's spreading out on a beach chair. She's wearing the thick army-issue winter coat that was our grandfather's, and I can see where the bra.s.s b.u.t.tons are etching little trails into the paint job of the department's Impala.

I wish Detective McGully hadn't told her where to find me.

"I don't mean to be a pain in the a.s.s, but I'm freaking out, and what's the point of having a brother who's a cop if he won't help you?"

"Indeed," I say, and look at my watch. The snow has started again, very lightly, stray slow drifting flakes.

"Derek didn't come home last night. I know you're going to be like, okay, they had another fight, he disappeared. But that's the thing, Hen: we didn't fight this time. No argument, nothing. We made dinner. He said he had to go out. Said he wanted to take a walk. So I said sure. I cleaned up the kitchen, smoked a joint, and went to bed."

I scowl. My sister, I believe, loves the fact that she can smoke pot now, that her policeman brother can no longer lecture her sternly about it. For Nico, I think, this is a silver lining. She takes a last drag and pitches the b.u.t.t into the snow. I crouch down and pick up the doused stub of cigarette between two fingers and hold it in the air. "I thought you cared about the environment."