Ben H. Winters Read online

  Still, on the street, in the wary eyes of the citizenry, one senses at all times the potential for violence, and for an active-duty patrol officer, as for a soldier in war, that potential for violence takes a slow and grinding toll. So, if I’m Ritchie Michelson, I’m bound to be a little tired, a little burned out, prone to the occasional snippy remark.

  The traffic light at Warren Street is working, and even though I’m a policeman and even though there are no other cars at the intersection, I stop and I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and I wait for the green light, staring out the windshield and thinking about that woman, the one in a hurry and wearing no coat.

  * * *

  “Everybody hear the news?” asks Detective McGully, big and boisterous, hands cupped together into a megaphone. “We’ve got the date.”

  “What do you mean, ‘we’ve got the date’?” says Detective Andreas, popping up from his chair looking at McGully with open-mouthed bafflement. “We already have the date. Everybody knows the goddamned date.”

  The date that everybody knows is October 3, six months and eleven days from today, when a 6.5-kilometer-diameter ball of carbon and silicates will collide with Earth.

  “Not the date the big meatball makes landfall,” says McGully, brandishing a copy of the Concord Monitor. “The date the geniuses tell us where it’s gonna hit.”

  “Yeah, I saw that,” nods Detective Culverson, settled at his own desk with his own paper; he reads the New York Times. “April 9, I think.”

  My own desk is in the far corner of the room, by the trash can and the little fridge. I have my notebook open in front of me, reviewing my observations on the crime scene. It’s actually a blue book, the kind college students use to take their exams. My father was a professor, and when he died we found about twenty-five boxes of these things up in the attic, slim paper books of robin’s-egg blue. I’m still using them.

  “April 9? That seems so soon.” Andreas slumps back down in his chair, and then he echoes himself in a ghostly murmur. “Seems soon.”

  Culverson shakes his head and sighs, while McGully chortles. This is what remains of the Concord Police Department’s division of Criminal Investigations, Adult-Crimes Unit: four guys in a room. Between August of last year and today, Adult Crimes has had three early retirements, one sudden and unexplained disappearance, plus Detective Gordon, who broke his hand in the course of a domestic-violence arrest, took medical leave and never came back. This wave of attrition has been insufficiently countered by the promotion, in early December, of one patrolman. Me. Detective Palace.

  We’re pretty fortunate, personnel-wise. Juvenile Crime is down to two officers, Peterson and Guerrera. Tech Crime was disbanded entirely, effective November 1.

  McGully opens today’s New York Times and begins to read aloud. I’m thinking about the Zell case, working through my notes. No signs of foul play or struggle // cell phone? // Ligature: belt, gold buckle.

  A black belt of handsome Italian leather, emblazoned “B&R.”

  “The crucial date is April 9, according to astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts,” reads McGully from the Monitor. “Experts there, along with legions of other astronomers, astrophysicists, and dedicated amateurs following the steady progress of Maia, the massive asteroid formally known as 2011GV1—”

  “Jesus,” moans Andreas, mournful and furious, jumping up again and hurrying over to McGully’s desk. He’s a small guy, twitchy, in his early forties, but with a thick head of tight black curls, like a cherub. “We know what it is. Is there anyone left on the planet who doesn’t know all of this already?”

  “Take it easy, pally,” says McGully.

  “I just hate how they give all the information over and over again, every time. It’s like they’re rubbing it in or something.”

  “That’s just how newspaper stories are written,” Culverson says.

  “Well, I hate it.”

  “Nevertheless.” Culverson smiles. He’s the only African American officer in the Criminal Investigations Unit. He is in fact the only African American officer on the Concord force and is sometimes lovingly referred to as “The Only Black Man in Concord,” though this is not technically true.

  “All right, all right, I’ll skip ahead,” says McGully, patting poor Andreas on the shoulder. “Scientists have been … I’ll skip, I’ll skip … some disagreement, now largely resolved, as to … skip skip skip. Here: ‘On the April date, with only five and a half months remaining until impact, sufficient points of declination and right ascension will have been mapped to pinpoint the precise location on the surface of Earth where Maia will land, to an accuracy of within fifteen miles.”

  McGully gets a little hushed at the end there, his baritone bluster softening, and he gives out a whistle, low and long. “Fifteen miles.”

  A silence follows, filled by the small clanging noises of the radiator. Andreas stands at McGully’s desk, staring down at the newspaper, his hands balled in fists at his side. Culverson, in his comfortable corner, picks up a pen and begins tracing long lines on a piece of paper. I close the blue book, tilt my head back, and fix my eyes on a point in the ceiling, near the scalloped light fixture in the center of the room.

  “Well, that’s the gist of it, ladies and germs,” says McGully, bluster recovered, sweeping the paper closed with a flourish. “Then it gets into all the reaction and so on.”

  “Reaction?” howls Andreas, flapping his hands angrily in the direction of the newspaper. “What kind of reaction?”

  “Oh, you know, the prime minister of Canada says, hey, hope it lands in China,” says McGully, laughing. “President of China says, ‘Listen, Canada, no offense or anything, but we’ve got a different perspective.’ You know. Blah blah blah.”

  Andreas growls in disgust. I’m watching all this, sort of, but really I’m thinking, eyes focused on the light fixture. Guy walks into a McDonald’s in the middle of the night and hangs himself in a handicapped stall. Guy walks into a McDonald’s, it’s the middle of the night …

  Culverson solemnly lifts his paper, reveals it to be cross-hatched into a large simple chart, X axis and Y axis.

  “Official Concord Police Department asteroid pool,” he announces, deadpan. “Step right up.”

  I like Detective Culverson. I like that he still dresses like a real detective. Today he’s in a three-piece suit, a tie with a metallic sheen, and a matching pocket square. A lot of people, at this point, have wholly given themselves over to comfort. Andreas, for example, is presently wearing a long-sleeve T-shirt and relaxed-fit jeans, McGully a Washington Redskins sweatsuit.

  “If we must die,” Culverson concludes, “let us first collect a few bucks from our brothers and sisters in the patrol division.”

  “Sure, but,” Andreas looks around uneasily, “how are we supposed to predict?”

  “Predict?” McGully whacks Andreas with the folded-up Monitor. “How are we supposed to collect, goofus?”

  “I’ll go first,” says Culverson. “I’m taking the Atlantic Ocean for an even hundred.”

  “Forty bucks on France,” says McGully, rifling through his wallet. “Serve ’em right, the pricks.”

  Culverson walks his chart to my corner of the room, slides it on the desk. “What about you, Ichabod Crane? What do you think?”

  “Gee,” I say absently, thinking about those angry lesions beneath the dead man’s eye. Someone punched Peter Zell in the face, hard, in the recent-but-not-too-recent past. Two weeks ago, maybe? Three weeks? Dr. Fenton will tell me for sure.

  Culverson is waiting, eyebrows raised expectantly. “Detective Palace?”

  “Hard to say, you know? Hey, where do you guys buy your belts?”

  “Our belts?” Andreas looks down at his waist, then up, as if it’s a trick question. “I wear suspenders.”

  “Place called Humphrey’s,” says Culverson. “In Manchester.”

  “Angela buys my belts,” says McGully, who’s moved
on to the sports section, leaned way back, feet propped up. “The hell are you talking about, Palace?”

  “I’m working on this case,” I explain, all of them looking back at me now. “This body we found this morning, at the McDonald’s.”

  “That was a hanger, I thought,” says McGully.

  “We’re calling it a suspicious death, for now.”

  “We?” says Culverson, smiles at me appraisingly. Andreas is still at McGully’s desk, still staring at the front section of the paper, one hand clapped to his forehead.

  “The ligature in this case was a black belt. Fancy. Buckle said ‘B&R.’ ”

  “Belknap and Rose,” says Culverson. “Wait now, you’re working this as a murder? Awfully public place for a murder.”

  “Belknap and Rose, exactly,” I say. “See, because everything else the victim was wearing was nothing to write home about: plain tan suit, off the rack, an old dress shirt with stains at the pits, mismatched socks. And he was wearing a belt, too, a cheap brown belt. But the ligature: real leather, hand stitching.”

  “Okay,” says Culverson. “So he went to B&R and bought himself a fancy belt for the purposes of killing himself.”

  “There you go,” puts in McGully, turns the page.

  “Really?” I stand up. “It just seems like, I’m going to hang myself, and I’m a regular guy, I wear suits to work, I probably own a number of belts. Why do I drive the twenty minutes to Manch, to an upscale men’s clothing store, to buy a special suicide belt?”

  I’m pacing a little bit now, hunched forward, back and forth in front of the desk, stroking my mustache. “Why not, you know, just use one of my many existing belts?”

  “Who knows?” says Culverson.

  “And more important,” adds McGully, yawning, “who cares?”

  “Right,” I say, and settle back into my seat, pick up the blue book again. “Of course.”

  “You’re like an alien, Palace. You know that?” says McGully. In one swift motion, he balls up his sports section and bounces it off my head. “You’re like from another planet or something.”

  2.

  There is a very old man behind the security desk at the Water West Building, and he blinks at me slowly, like he just woke up from a nap, or the grave.

  “You got an appointment with someone here in the building?”

  “No, sir. I’m a policeman.”

  The guard is in a severely rumpled dress shirt, and his security-guard cap is misshapen, dented at the peak. It’s late morning, but the gray lobby has a gloaming quality, motes drifting listlessly in the half light.

  “My name is Detective Henry Palace.” I display my badge—he doesn’t look, doesn’t care—I tuck it carefully away again. “I’m with the Criminal Investigations Division of the Concord Police Department, and I’m looking into a suspicious death. I need to visit the offices of Merrimack Life and Fire.”

  He coughs. “What are you, anyway, son? Like, six foot four?”

  “Something like that.”

  Waiting for the elevator I absorb the dark lobby: a giant potted plant, squat and heavy, guarding one corner; a lifeless White Mountains landscape above a row of brass mailboxes; the centenarian security man examining me from his perch. This, then, was my insurance man’s morning vista, where he started his professional existence, day in and day out. As the elevator door creaks open, I take a sniff of the musty air. Nothing arguing against the case for suicide, down here in the lobby.

  * * *

  Peter Zell’s boss is named Theodore Gompers, a jowly, pallid character in a blue wool suit, who evinces no surprise whatsoever when I tell him the news.

  “Zell, huh? Well, that’s too bad. Can I pour you a drink?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “How about this weather, huh?”

  “Yep.”

  We’re in his office, and he’s drinking gin from a short square tumbler, absently rubbing his palm along his chin, staring out a big window at the snow tumbling down onto Eagle Square. “A lot of people are blaming it on the asteroid, all the snow. You’ve heard that, right?” Gompers talks quietly, ruminatively, his eyes fixed on the street outside. “It’s not true, though. The thing is still 280 million miles from here at this point. Not close enough to affect our weather patterns, and it won’t be.”

  “Yep.”

  “Not until afterward, obviously.” He sighs, turns his head to me slowly, like a cow. “People don’t really understand, you know?”

  “I’m sure that’s true,” I say, waiting patiently with my blue book and a pen. “Can you tell me about Peter Zell?”

  Gompers takes a sip of his gin. “Not that much to tell, really. Guy was a born actuary, that’s for sure.”

  “A born actuary?”

  “Yeah. Me, I started out on the actuarial side, degree in statistics and everything. But I switched to sales, and at some point I sort of drifted up to management, and here I have remained.” He opens his hands to take in the office and smiles wanly. “But Peter wasn’t going anywhere. I don’t mean that in a bad way necessarily, but he wasn’t going anywhere.”

  I nod, scratching notes in my book, while Gompers continues in his glassy murmur. Zell, it seems, was a kind of wizard at actuarial math, had a nearly supernatural ability to sort through long columns of demographic data and draw precise conclusions about risk and reward. He was also almost pathologically shy, is what it sounds like: walked around with his eyes on the floor, muttered “hello” and “I’m fine” when pressed, sat in the back of the room at staff meetings, looking at his hands.

  “And, boy, when those meetings ended he would always be the first guy out the door,” Gompers says. “You got the feeling he was a lot happier at his desk, doing his thing with his calculator and his statistics binders, than he was with the rest of us humans.”

  I’m scratching away, nodding encouragingly and empathetically to keep Gompers talking, and I’m thinking how much I’m starting to like this guy, this Peter Anthony Zell. I like a guy who likes to get his work done.

  “The thing about him, though, about Zell, is that this craziness never seemed to affect him too much. Even at the beginning, even when it all first started up.”

  Gompers inclines his head backward, toward the window, toward the sky, and I’m guessing that when he says “when it all first started up,” he means early summer of last year, when the asteroid entered the public consciousness in a serious way. It had been spotted by scientists as early as April, but for those first couple months, it only appeared in News-of-the-Weird kinds of reports, funny headlines on the Yahoo! homepage. “Death from Above?!” and “The Sky is Falling!”—that sort of stuff. But for most people, early June was when the threat became real; when the odds of impact rose to five percent; when Maia’s circumference was estimated at between 4.5 and 7 kilometers.

  “So, you remember: people are going nuts, people are weeping at their desks. But Zell, like I said, he just keeps his head down, does his thing. Like he thought the asteroid was coming for everyone except him.”

  “And what about more recently? Any change in that pattern? Depression?”

  “Well,” he says. “You know, wait.” He stops abruptly, puts one hand over his mouth, narrows his eyes, as if trying to see something murky and far away.

  “Mr. Gompers?”

  “Yeah, I just … Sorry, I’m trying to remember something.” His eyes drift shut for a second, then snap open, and I have a moment of concern for the reliability of my witness here, wondering how many glasses of gin he’s already enjoyed this morning. “The thing is, there was this one incident.”

  “Incident?”

  “Yeah. We had this girl Theresa, an accountant, and she came to work on Halloween dressed as the asteroid.”

  “Oh?”

  “I know. Sick, right?” But Gompers grins at the memory. “It was just a big black garbage bag with the number, you know, two-zero-one-one-G-V-one, on a name tag. Most of us laughed, some people more than others. But Zell,
out of nowhere, he just flipped. He starts yelling and screaming at this girl, his whole body is shaking. It was really scary, especially because, like I said, he’s normally such a quiet guy. Anyway, he apologized, but the next day he doesn’t show up for work.”

  “How long was he gone?”

  “A week? Two weeks? I thought he was out for good, but then he turned up again, no explanation, and he’s been the same as ever.”

  “The same?”

  “Yeah. Quiet. Calm. Focused. Hard work, doing what he’s told. Even when the actuarial side dried up.”

  “The—I’m sorry?” I say. “What?”

  “The actuarial end. Late fall, early winter, you know, we stopped issuing policies entirely.” He sees my questioning expression and smiles grimly. “I mean, Detective: would you like to buy life insurance right now?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Right,” he says, sniffs, drains his glass. “I guess not.”

  The lights flicker and Gompers looks up, mutters “come on,” and a moment later they glow brightly again.

  “Anyway, so then I’ve got Peter doing what everyone else is doing, which is inspecting claims, looking for false filings, dubious claims. It seems loony, but that’s what our parent company, Variegated, is obsessed with these days: fraud prevention. It’s all about protecting the bottom line. A lot of CEOs have cashed in their chips, you know, they’re in Bermuda or Antigua or they’re building bunkers. But not our guy. Between you and me, our guy thinks he’s going to buy his way into heaven when the end comes. That’s the impression I get.”

  I don’t laugh. I tap the end of the pen on my book, trying to make sense of all the information, trying to build a timeline in my head.

  “Do you think I might speak to her?

  “To who?”

  “The woman you mentioned.” I glance down at my notes. “Theresa.”

  “Oh, she’s long gone, Officer. She’s in New Orleans now, I believe.” Gompers inclines his head, and his voice peters down to a murmur. “A lot of the kids are going down there. My daughter, too, actually.” He looks out the window again. “Anything else I can tell you?”