“Come on,” I say, waiting, watching the big garage doors that are now halfway rolled up, revealing a newly installed loading dock where the repair garage used to be. “Come on, buddy.”
The personnel turnover in the last few months has been dramatic, the police force remaking itself, sinking deeper into its core missions—not stopping crime, not investigating it or containing it, just keeping as many people alive and unharmed as possible. Keeping everyone alive to die later, as McGully puts it. But there’s at least one cop of my acquaintance who is still in there, and who I happen to know has recently taken up smoking, and who enjoys the day’s first cigarette break every day at twelve o’clock.
I check my watch. “Come on.”
Someone rolls up the big garage doors the rest of the way, and a pair of long flat metal ramps are clattered out off the lip of the loading dock. Cops scuttle down the cement steps to ground level, lining up pallets and carts and gesturing to one another and muttering into their walkie-talkies. I risk a closer look, ducking out from behind the Dumpster and walking slowly down the street, until I slump in the empty doorway of Granite State Ice Cream. The activity in the loading dock is increasing now, cops pouring in and out of the building, like robots, like ants, thick black uniforms heavy in the sun.
“Hello, Detective Palace. How’s retirement?”
She’s right on time and she’s smiling, finding space for herself beside me in the narrow doorway, no more than five feet tall even in the military boots, her Plexiglas riot mask tipped back to make room for the noontime cigarette.
“Officer McConnell,” I say. “I need your help.”
“Really?”
A flash of excitement followed immediately by wariness. We always enjoyed working together, Trish and I, first as fellow patrol officers and then during my brief stint on the detectives. But everything is changed now. She drags on the cigarette. “Okay, well, first I should warn you that if my sergeant sees me out here talking to you, I’m going to have to pretend you’re a perp, and probably tase you. I’m sorry.”
“Sergeant who—Gonzales?”
“No, Belewski. Gonzales? Carlos is long gone. No, Belewski, you don’t know him, but he’s looking for people to cut, and he doesn’t like us holdovers.”
She jerks her head, and we leave the doorway of the ice cream parlor, fall into step, walking uptown from headquarters.
“Is Belewski a fed?” I ask. “From out of town?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Army guy?”
“I can’t tell you that, Detective. Are you doing okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve got enough to eat?”
“I’m fine. I’m working on this case.”
“Okay,” she says, nods, and her voice goes all business. “What have you got? Arson?”
“Missing person.”
“You kidding? Everyone’s a missing person.”
“I know,” I say. “But this is different.”
“Is it? Because a lot of people are missing. Like half the Eastern Hemisphere, just for starters.”
We’ve stopped walking outside what used to be a Subway sandwich shop: shattered front glass, furniture overturned, extensive graffiti on the sneeze guard of the toppings line.
“Those are refugees,” I tell her. “What I’ve got is a thirty-three-year-old Caucasian male, happy marriage, gainfully employed.”
“Gainfully employed? Are you drunk? Do you know what day it is?”
“He disappears from his workplace at 8:45 in the morning, never comes back.”
“His workplace?”
“Pizza restaurant.”
“Oh, dear. Maybe he fell into an alternate dimension. Have you checked the alternate dimensions?”
A small knot of policemen walk by, boots crunching on the broken glass on the sidewalk outside the Subway. One of them hesitates for half a second, looking from Trish to me; she stares back hard, gives him a curt nod. She wouldn’t really tase me—I don’t think so, anyway. McConnell looks different than she used to, more adult somehow; her small ponytail and short stature, which always struck me in the past as awkward and quasi-adolescent, seem this morning like the opposite: signs of maturity, readiness.
“Keep moving,” says McConnell, when her fellow officers are gone. “Let’s keep moving.”
I brief her on my investigation as we circle the block, giving her the high points, from memory: Martha Cavatone, wild eyed, wringing her hands; Rocky Milano and his defiantly bustling pizza place; my late-night visit from Jeremy Canliss, his strong suggestion that Brett has a girl somewhere.
“So the guy is getting laid. Or he’s getting drunk on a beach. What’s the point?”
We’ve made the circuit and are now back at the Dumpster where I was hiding out before, trash spilling out on all sides. I’ve got a foot and a half on McConnell, easy, and now she stares up at me, CPD headquarters looming behind her like an alien planet.
“He used to be a cop,” I say. “The husband.”
“Oh, yeah?” McConnell’s walkie-talkie crackles and mutters, and she looks at it, and then over at the loading dock, now swarming with bustling police.
“Yeah. A state trooper.”
She looks back at me, uncertain for a moment, and then her face changes. “You want the file.”
“Only if—”
“You asshole.”
She’s shaking her head but I press on, feeling bad, but I can’t help it—she’s the only person I’ve got left in there. “Concord is the HQ for the whole state now, right? So any paper related to state-force personnel will be here in the basement. Anything with the seal of the state of New Hampshire.”
McConnell answers slowly. “It’s not like it used to be, Hank. You don’t just stroll down to the basement and fill out a form with—what was his name? Wilentz?”
“Wilentz.”
She doesn’t seem angry, just sad. Resigned. “You don’t just go down and fill out a form and then Wilentz jokes around, makes you admire his stupid hat collection. I go down there now and request a file, I’ve got three supervisors who are total strangers to me asking what I want it for. Next thing you know that’s it, I’m done. I’m out on the streets doing whatever you’re doing all day.”
“Reading,” I say. “Teaching the dog some tricks.”
“That drug dealer’s dog? How’s that going?”
“Poorly.”
“They’re paying, Palace. You know that, right? That’s why I’m still in the uniform.” She spits out the word uniform, like it’s cancer. “A siren is going to blow, and then a truck rolls in.” She glances at her watch. “In forty-five seconds. And the shit that’s coming off there—food, water, supplies—as long as I’m in this gear, I get dibs. That’s how they’re doing this. That’s how there is any law-enforcement activity of any kind: because the assholes in the uniform get first crack.”
“I get it.”
“Do you? I cannot lose my job.”
McConnell’s daughter Kelli is nine years old; Robbie, I think, is five. Their father took off four years ago, before the asteroid, before any of this. “Barry went Bucket List,” Trish said to me once, “before Bucket List was cool.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I should have thought.”
“Don’t worry about it.”