Everybody is smoking, actually, dull gray tendrils curling up under every light fixture. It’s like how it used to be in here, before they outlawed smoking in places of public accommodation, a law I strongly supported, as the only nonsmoker among my group of misfit high-school sophomores. The regulation is still on the books, but it’s widely flouted, and CPD policy at this point is to look the other way.
I fiddle with my cutlery and sip my coffee and think.
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 space, wishing it weren’t so smoky in here.
5.
The expansion of Concord Hospital was announced with much fanfare eighteen months ago: a public–private 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 buttons, 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. Hello.”
“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 glasses, 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 hell 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 basement’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 glasses.
“Per Title 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 goddamn 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.