The Last Policeman (25 page)

“Where is she?” he asks again.

“Where is who?”

“Nico.”

Oh, God. Nico. It’s raining harder and harder while we’re standing here. I’m not even wearing a raincoat, just my gray blazer and blue tie. A rat darts by, out from behind a Dumpster, bounds across the square and out toward Main Street. I track it with my eyes while my assailant licks his lips.

“I don’t know where Nico is,” I tell him.

“Yes, you do, you do know.”

He jams the pistol in harder, digs it deeper into the thin cotton of my dress shirt, and I can feel him itching to fire it, his anxious energy warming the coldness of the barrel. I picture the hole that had been left in Naomi, just above and to the right of her left eye. I miss her. It’s so cold out here, my face is soaked. I left my hat in the car, with the dog.

“Please listen to me, sir,” I say, raising my voice over the drumbeat of the rain. “I do not know where she is. I’ve been trying to find her myself.”

“Bullshit.”

“It’s true.”

“Bull
shit
.”

“Who are you?”

“Don’t worry about who I am.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a friend of hers, okay?” he says anyway. “I’m a friend of Derek’s.”

“Okay,” I say, and I’m trying to remember everything Alison told me about Skeve and his ridiculous organization: the Catchman
report, secret bases on the Moon. All nonsense and desperation, and yet here we are, and if this man twitches just one finger just a little bit, I’ll be dead.

“Where’s Derek?” I ask, and he snorts, angrily, says, “You
asshole
,” and heaves back with his other hand, the one not holding the gun, and punches me closed-fist on the side of my head. Instantly, the world loses focus, blurs, and I double over and he hits me again, an undercut rushing up into my mouth, and I bounce backward against the wall of the plaza, my head banging against the bricks. The gun is immediately back in place, grinding into my ribcage, and now the world is spinning, swimming, rain overflowing around my eye patch and flooding my face, blood oozing from my upper lip into my mouth, my pulse roaring in my head.

He comes in close, hisses into my ear. “Derek Skeve is dead, and you know that he’s dead because you killed him.”

“I didn’t—” my mouth fills with blood, I spit it out. “No.”

“Oh, okay, so you
had
him killed. That is a pretty cutthroat technicality.”

“I promise you. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

It’s funny, though, I’m thinking, as the world slowly stops rotating, the furious face of the mustache man comes back into focus with the cold desolation of the plaza behind him, I sort of
did
know. I probably would have said that Skeve was dead, if you’d asked. But I haven’t really had time to think about it. God, you wake up one day and everybody is dead. I turn my head, spit out another black stream of blood.

“Listen, friend,” I say, bringing my voice to an easy place. “I promise you—no, wait, look at me, sir. Will you look at me?” He
jerks his head up, his eyes are wide and scared, his lips twitching under the heavy mustache, and for a second we’re like grotesque lovers, gazing into each other’s eyes in this cold wet public square, a gun barrel between us.

“I do not know where Nico is. I do not know where Skeve is. But I might be able to help you, if you tell me what you know.”

He thinks it over, his fearful inner debate playing out in his big, dolorous eyes, his mouth slightly open, breathing heavily. And then, suddenly and too loudly he says, “You’re lying. You do know. Nico said her brother had this plan, some secret policeman plan—”

“What?”

“To get Derek out of there—”

“What?”

“Nico says her brother has this plan, he gets her a car—”

“Slow down—wait—”

The rain is pounding.

“And then Derek gets shot dead, and I barely get out of there, and when I get out she’s nowhere.”

“I don’t know about any of this.”

“Yes, you
do
.”

A cold metal snap as he clicks off the safety. I yelp twice and clap my hands, and Mustache Man says, “Hey—” and then there’s a ferocious bark from the street side of the square, and he turns his head toward it, and I raise my hands and shove him hard in the face, and he stumbles backward and lands on his rear end. “Shit,” he says from the ground, and I draw my sidearm and aim, right down at his thick torso, but the sudden motion has thrown off my balance, and it’s dark and my face is soaked, I’m seeing double again, and I must
be pointing the gun at the wrong man, because the kick comes out of nowhere—he swipes out with his feet and catches me in the heel, and I topple like a statue being pulled down with ropes. I roll over, look wildly around the plaza. Nothing. Silence. Rain.

“Shoot,” I say, sitting up and drawing out my handkerchief and holding it up to my lip. Houdini comes over and stands in front of me, bouncing back and forth, growling tenderly, and I hold out my hand, let him sniff it.

“He’s lying,” I tell the dog. Why would Nico have told some story about me having a prison-break plan? Where would Nico get a vehicle?

The problem is, a person like this guy doesn’t have the brains to lie. A person who really thinks that the United States government somehow, over the last half decade, secretly constructed a warren of habitable bases on the dark side of the Moon, that we would have dedicated that level of resources toward mitigating the risk of a 1-in-250-million event.

It’s weird, I think, struggling to my feet. My sister is too smart for this nonsense.

I wipe my mouth on the back of my sleeve and start to lope back to the car.

The thing is, she really is. She really is too smart for this nonsense.

“Huh,” I say. “Huh.”

* * *

An hour later I’m down in Cambridge, in the sunken plaza across from Harvard Yard, where there’s a group of ragged college-age
homeless kids in a drum circle, and a couple of hippies dancing, and a man selling paperback books from a shopping cart, and a woman in a halter top on a uni cycle, jugging bowling pins, singing “Que Sera Sera.” A very old woman in a silver pantsuit is smoking a marijuana cigarette, trading it back and forth with a black man in thrift-store fatigues. A drunk snores loudly, sprawled across the steps, his lower half soaked with urine. A Massachusetts state trooper keeps a wary eye on the scene, his big mirrored sunglasses propped atop his ranger-style hat. I nod at him, a fellow policeman’s nod, but he doesn’t nod back.

I cross Mt. Auburn Street and find the little green kiosk with the boarded-up windows. I still have no idea where Alison Koechner works, and there is no one answering the phone at the old number, so this is all I’ve got: one place I know she goes a lot

“Well, well,” says the Coffee Doctor in his hat and beard. “If it isn’t my old nemesis.”

“I’m sorry?” I say, narrowing my eyes, looking around at the dark room, empty but for me and the kid. He puts his hands up, grins. “Just kidding, man. Just something I say.” He points at me with both hands, a big boisterous two-finger point. “You look like you could use a latte, friend.”

“No, thank you. I need information.”

“I don’t sell that. I sell coffee.”

He bustles around behind his counter, swiftly and efficiently, inserting the conical base of the portable filter into the espresso machine and pulling it out again, a light
ka-chunk
. He levels off the ground beans, tamps them down.

“I was in here a couple days ago.”

“Okay,” he says, eyes on his machine. “If you say so.”

The paper cups are still lined up along the counter, one for each continent, step right up and place your bets. North America has only one or two beans in there—Asia a handful—Africa a handful. Antarctica remains in the lead, overspilling with beans. Wishful thinking. As if the thing would just plow into the snow, snuff out like a candle.

“I was here with a woman. About this tall, short red hair. Pretty.”

He nods, pours milk from a carton into a metal jug. “Sure.” He sticks a wand into the jug, flicks a switch, it begins to foam. “Coffee Doctor remembers all.”

“Do you know her?”

“I don’t
know
her, but I see her a lot.”

“Okay.”

For a moment I lose my train of thought, entranced by the frothing of the milk, staring along with the Coffee Doctor into his jug, and then he flicks the thing off with a sharp, birdlike movement, exactly at the moment before it would have foamed over.

“Ta-da.”

“I need to leave her a message.”

“Oh, yeah?”

The Coffee Doctor cocks an eyebrow. I massage my side, where the assailant’s gun barrel has left me with a patch of tenderness, just below the ribs.

“Tell her that Henry was here.”

“I can do that.”

“And let her know that I need to see her.”

“I can do that, too.” He lifts a white ceramic demitasse off a
hook and fills it with espresso, layers in the foamed milk with a long-handled spoon. There’s a kind of genius at work here, a delicate sensibility being applied.

“You didn’t always do this,” I say. “Coffee, I mean.”

“No.” He keeps his eyes on his work, he’s got the demitasse cradled in his palm and he’s delicately jostling it, conjuring a pattern of dark coffee and cloudy foam. “I was a student of applied mathematics,” he says, and very lightly inclines his head to indicate Harvard, across the street. He looks up, beaming. “But you know what they say,” he concludes and presents me my latte, which bears a perfect and symmetrical oak leaf in milk foam. “There’s no future in it.”

He’s smiling, and I’m supposed to laugh, but I don’t. My eye hurts. My lip is throbbing where I got punched.

“So, you’ll let her know? That Henry was here?”

“Yes, dude. I’ll tell her.”

“And please tell her—” You know what? At this point, why not? “Tell her Palace needs to know what all this Jules Verne moon-shot hokum is covering up. Tell her I know there’s more to this, and I want to know who these people are, and what it is they want.”

“Wow. See, now, that’s a message.”

I’m pulling my wallet out of my pocket, and the Coffee Doctor reaches up and stills my hand.

“No, no,” he says. “On the house. I gotta be honest, friend. You don’t look so good.”

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 fucked,” 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 fucking 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, asshole,’ 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 sunglasses.”

“Sunglasses?”

“Yeah,” he says, “
sunglasses
,” 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 fuck on.”