And then will come the ash cloud, the darkness, the twenty-degree dip in global temperatures. No crops, no cattle, no light. The slow cold fate of those who remain.
Answer this, in your blue books, Professor Palace: what effect does it have on motive, all this information, all this unbearable immanence?
Consider J. T. Toussaint, a laid-off quarryman with no previous criminal history.
No verifiable alibi for the time of death. He was at home, he says, reading.
Under normal circumstances, then, we would next turn our attention to the question of motive. We would wonder about those hours they spent together, that final evening: they went to Distant Pale Glimmers, they got loaded on movie-theater beer. They fought over a woman, perhaps, or some silly old half-remembered elementary-school insult, and tempers flared.
The first problem with such a hypothesis is that’s just not how Peter Zell got killed. A murder resulting from a long night of drinking, a murder about a woman or a pissing contest, is a murder committed with a bat, or a knife, or a .270 Winchester rifle. Here instead we have a man who is strangled, his body moved, a suicide scene deliberately and carefully constructed.
But the second and much larger problem is that the very idea of motive must be reexamined in the context of the looming catastrophe.
Because people are doing all sorts of things, for motives that can be difficult or impossible to divine clearly. In recent months the world has seen episodes of cannibalism, of ecstatic orgies; outpourings of charity and good works; attempted socialist revolutions and attempted religious revolutions; mass psychoses including the second coming of Jesus; of the return of Mohammed’s son-in-law Ali, the Commander of the Faithful; of the constellation Orion with sword and belt, climbing down from the sky.
People are building rocket ships, people are building tree houses, people are taking multiple wives, people are shooting indiscriminately in public places, people are setting fire to themselves, people are studying to be doctors while doctors quit work and build huts in the desert and sit in them and pray.
None of these things, so far as I know, has happened in Concord. Still, the conscientious detective is obliged to examine the question of motive in a new light, to place it within the matrix of our present unusual circumstance. The end of the world changes everything, from a law-enforcement perspective.
I’m at Albin Road just past Blevens when the car catches a patch of bad ice and heaves itself violently to the right, and I try to jerk it back to the left and nothing happens. The steering wheel spins uselessly under my hands, I’m rolling it this way and that, and I can hear the snow chains ricocheting against the rims with a series of vicious clangs.
“Come on, come on,” I say, but it’s like the wheel has lost communication with the steering column, spinning and spinning, and meanwhile the whole car is hurtling to the right, a giant hockey puck that someone whaled at, sliding furiously toward the ditch at the side of the road.
“Come on,” I say again, “come on,” my stomach lurching. I’m pumping the brake, nothing is happening, and now the back of the car is rolling up and pulling even with the front, the nose of the Impala nearly perpendicular to the roadway, and I feel the back wheels lift up while the front goes sailing forward, bounces over the ditch and into the wide sturdy trunk of an evergreen, and my head slams back against the headrest.
And then all is still. The silence sudden and complete. My breath. A winter bird sounding, way off somewhere. A small defeated hiss from the engine.
Slowly, I become aware of a clicking noise and it takes me a second to discover that the sound is my teeth, chattering. My hands are trembling, too, and my knees are clacking like marionette legs.
My collision with the tree shook loose a lot of snow, and some of it is still drifting down, a gentle powdery false storm, a dusting of accumulation on the cracked windshield.
I shift, breathe, pat myself down like I’m frisking a suspect, but I’m fine. I’m fine.
The front of the car is bent in, just one big dent, dead center, like a giant reeled back and kicked it once, hard.
My snow chains have come off. All four of them. They lay splayed out in crazy directions like fishermen’s nets, in jumbled heaps around the tires.
“Holy moly,” I say aloud.
I don’t think he killed him. Toussaint. I gather up the snow chains and lay them in the trunk in a loose pile.
I don’t think he’s the killer. I don’t think it’s right.
There are a total of five staircases at police headquarters but only two that go down to the basement. One is a set of rough concrete steps that descends from the garage, so when the units pull in with cuffed suspects in the backseat, they can be led right down to processing, to the part of the basement with the mug-shot camera and the fingerprint ink and the regular holding cell and the drunk tank. The drunk tank is always full these days. To access the other part of the basement you use the front northwest stairwelclass="underline" you wave your ID badge at the keypad, wait for the door to click open, and go down to the cramped domain of Officer Frank Wilentz.
“Why, Detective Sky-high,” says Wilentz, and he throws me a friendly mock-salute. “You look a little pale.”
“I hit a tree. I’m fine.”
“How’s the tree?”
“Can you run a name for me?”
“Do you like my hat?”
“Wilentz, come on.”
The administrative technician of the CPD records unit works in a four-foot-square caged-off pen, a former evidence enclosure, at a desk littered with comic books and bags of candy. A row of hooks along the chain mesh of his cage is hung with major-league ball caps, one of which, a bright red souvenir Phillies cap, sits on Wilentz’s head at a rakish angle.
“Answer me, Palace.”
“I like your hat very much, Officer Wilentz.”
“You’re just saying that.”
“So, I need you to run a name for me.”
“I got one hat for every team in the league. D’ja know that?”
“I think you’ve mentioned it, yes.”
The problem is that at this point Wilentz has the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the building; for all I know, it’s the only consistently functional high-speed Internet connection in the county. Something to do with the CPD being allowed one machine that connects with some kind of gold-plated Department of Justice law-enforcement router. It just means that if I want to connect to the FBI’s servers to perform a nationwide criminal-background check, I first need to admire Frank’s hat collection.
“I used to be collecting these bastards to give ’em to my children one day, but since now it seems clear that I shall not be having any children, I’m just enjoying ’em myself.” His deadpan gives way to a big, gap-toothed grin. “I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, myself. Did you need something?”
“Yep. I need you to run a name for me.”
“Oh, right, you said that.”
Wilentz types in the name and the address on Bow Bog, checks off boxes on a DOJ login screen, and I’m standing at his desk, watching while he types, tapping my own fingers thoughtfully on the side of his cage.
“Wilentz?”
“Yes?”
“Would you ever kill yourself?”
“No,” he says immediately, still typing, clicking on a link. “But I will confess that I have considered it. The Romans, you know, they thought it was, like, the bravest thing you could do. In the face of tyranny. Cicero. Seneca. All those guys.” He slowly draws a finger across his neck, slash.