Forty-eight hours, is what I’m thinking. Most murder cases that get solved are solved within forty-eight hours of the commission of the crime.
Mine is the only car on the road, and the pedestrians turn their heads to watch me pass. A bum leans against the boarded-up door of White Peak, a mortgage broker and commercial real-estate firm. A small pack of teenagers is loitering outside an ATM vestibule, passing around a marijuana cigarette, a kid with a scruffy goatee languorously exhaling into the cold air.
Scrawled across the glass window of what used to be a two-story office building, at the corner of State and Blake, is graffiti, six-foot-tall letters that say LIES LIES IT’S ALL LIES.
I regret giving Ritchie Michelson a hard time. Life for patrol officers had gotten pretty rough by the time I was promoted, and I’m sure that the fourteen subsequent weeks have not made things easier. Yes, cops are steadily employed and earning among the best salaries in the country right now. And, yes, Concord’s crime rate in most categories is not wildly elevated, month against month, from what it was this time last year, with notable exceptions; per the IPSS Act, it is now illegal to manufacture, sell, or purchase any kind of firearm in the United States of America, and this is a tough law to enforce, especially in the state of New Hampshire.
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.