The Last Policeman (12 page)

“We’re not facing tyranny, though.”

“Ah, but we are. Fascist in the sky, baby.” He turns away from the computer and selects a miniature Kit Kat from his pile. “But I won’t do it. And you know why not?”

“Why?”

“Because … I …” He turns back, hits a final key. “… am a coward.”

It’s hard to tell, with Wilentz, if he’s kidding, but I think he’s not, and anyway I turn my attention to what’s happening on the monitor, long columns of data marching up the screen.

“Well, my friend,” says Officer Wilentz, unwrapping his candy. “What you got here is a gosh-darn Boy Scout.”

“What?”

Mr. J. T. Toussaint, as it turns out, has never committed a crime, or at least has never been caught for one.

Never has he been arrested by the Concord force, pre- or post-Maia, nor by the state of New Hampshire, nor by any other state, county, or local official. He’s never done federal time, he’s got no FBI or Justice Department file. Nothing international, nothing military. Once, it looks like, he parked a motorcycle illegally in a small town called Waterville Valley, up in the White Mountains, and earned himself a parking ticket, which he promptly paid.

“So, nothing?” I say, and Wilentz nods.

“Nothing. Oh, unless he popped someone in Louisiana. New Orleans is cut off from the grid.” Wilentz stands, stretches, adds the crumpled candy wrapper to the pile on the desk. “Kind of thinking
of going down there, myself. Wild times down there. All kinda sex stuff going on, I hear.”

I head back up the stairs with a one-page printout of J. T. Toussaint’s criminal history, or lack thereof. If he’s the kind of guy who goes around killing people and stringing them up in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, he only recently elected to become so.

* * *

Upstairs, at my desk, I get back on the landline and try Sophia Littlejohn again, and I am again treated to the bland peppy tones of the Concord Midwifery receptionist. No, Ms. Littlejohn is out; no, she doesn’t know where; no, she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.

“Could you tell her to call Detective Palace, at the Concord PD?” I say, and then I add, impulsively, “Tell her I’m her friend. Tell her I want to help.”

The receptionist pauses for a moment and then says, “Oooo-kay” drawing out that first syllable like she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about. I can’t blame her, because I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about, either. I take the tissue I’ve been holding up to my head and throw it in the garbage. I’m feeling restless and dissatisfied, staring at J. T. Toussaint’s clean record, thinking about the whole house, the dog, the roof, the lawn. The other thing is, I have a fairly clear memory of carefully latching my snow chains yesterday morning, checking their slack, as is my habit, once a week.

“Hey, Palace, come over here and look at this.”

It’s Andreas, at his computer. “Are you watching this on dial-up?”

“No,” he says. “This is on my hard drive. I downloaded it the
last time we were online.”

“Oh,” I say, “All right, well …” But it’s too late, I’ve walked across the room to his desk and now I’m standing beside him, and he’s got one hand clutched at my elbow, the other hand pointed at the screen.

“Look,” says Detective Andreas, breathing rapidly. “Look at this with me.”

“Andreas, come on. I’m working on a case.”

“I know, but look, Hank.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Everyone has seen it. A few days after Tolkin, after the CBS special, the final determination, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA released a short video to promote public understanding of what’s going on. It’s a simple Java animation, in which crude pixelated avatars of the relevant celestial bodies wing their way around the Sun: Earth, Venus, Mars, and, of course, the star of the show, good old 2011GV
₁
. The planets and the infamous minor planetoid, all cruising around the Sun at their varying speeds in their varying ellipses, clicking forward, frame by frame, each instant on screen representing two weeks of real time.

“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 glass.

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, repetitive motion, simple action, irresistible. In the outer reaches of
its orbit, 2011GV
₁
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 space 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 God’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 button 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, God 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 jackass 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 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.