“I don’t understand.”
Fenton turns to her cart to pick up a single sheet of paper. “These are the results of the serology tests, and as you will see they have caused me to revise my understanding of the case.”
“In what way?” I ask, trembling a little bit.
“This man was murdered.”
My mouth drops open, and I can’t help it, I am thinking the words and then I am saying them aloud. “I knew it. Oh, my God, I knew it all along.”
Fenton pushes up her glasses slightly where they have slipped down the bridge of her nose and reads from the paper. “First. The bloodwork reveals not only a high blood-alcohol level but also alcohol in the stomach itself, which means he had done some heavy drinking in the hours before he died.”
“I knew that,” I say. J. T. Toussaint, in our first interview: they went to see Distant Pale Glimmers. They had a bunch of beers.
“Also present in the blood,” Fenton continues, “were significant traces of a controlled substance.”
“Right,” I say, nodding, mind buzzing, one step ahead of her. “Morphine.”
“No,” says Fenton, and looks up at me, curious, surprised, a little irritated. “Morphine? No. No traces of opiates of any kind. What he had in his system was a chemical compound called gamma-hydroxybutyric acid.”
I squint over her shoulder at the lab report, a thin sheet of paper, decorated with calculations, checked-off boxes, someone’s precise backward-slanting handwriting. “I’m sorry. What kind of acid?”
“GHB.”
“You mean—the date-rape drug?”
“Stop talking, Detective,” says Fenton, pulling on a pair of clear latex gloves. “Come here and help me turn over the body.”
We slip our fingers under his back and carefully lift Peter Zell and flip him over onto his stomach, and then we’re looking at the broad paleness of his back, the flesh spreading away from the spine. Fenton fits into her eye a small lens, like a jeweler’s glass, reaches up to adjust the hallucinogenically bright lamp overhanging the autopsy table, aiming it at a blotchy brown bruise on the back of Zell’s left calf, just above the ankle.
“Look familiar?” she says, and I peer forward.
I’m still thinking about GHB. I need a notebook, I need to write all this down. I need to think. Naomi stopped in the doorway of my bedroom, she almost said something, and then she changed her mind and slipped away. I experience a pang of longing so strong that it momentarily buckles my knees, and I lean against the table, grasp it with both hands.
Easy, Palace.
“This is what I really have to apologize for,” she says flatly. “In my rush to conclude an obvious suicide case I failed to make thorough survey of the things that could cause a ring of bruises above a person’s ankle.”
“Okay. And so…” I stop talking. I don’t know what she means at all.
“At some point in the hours before he ended up where you found him, this man was knocked unconscious and dragged by the leg.”
I look at her, unable to speak.
“Probably to the trunk of a car,” she continues, placing the paper back on the cart. “Probably to be taken to the scene, and hanged. Like I said, I have significantly revised my understanding of this case.”
I catch an inward glimpse of Peter Zell’s dead eyes, the glasses, disappearing into the darkness of the trunk of a car.
“Do you have any questions?” Fenton asks.
I have nothing but questions.
“What about his eye?”
“What?”
“The other cluster of old bruises. On his cheek, below his right eye. He apparently reported that he fell down some stairs. Is that possible?”
“Possible, but unlikely.”
“And are you sure there was no morphine in his system? Are you sure he wasn’t using it the night he died?”
“Yes. Nor for at least three months beforehand.”
I have to rethink this whole thing, go over it again from top to bottom. Rethink the timeline, rethink Toussaint, rethink Peter Zell. Having been right all along, having guessed correctly that he was murdered, provides no joy, no powerful self-righteous rush. To the contrary, I feel confused—sad—uncertain. I feel like I’ve been thrown in a trunk, like I’m surrounded by darkness, peering up toward a crack of daylight. On my way out of the morgue I stop at the small black door with the cross on it, and I reach out and run my fingers along the symbol, remembering that so many people are feeling so awful these days that they had to close down this little room, move the nightly worship service to a bigger space, elsewhere in the building. That’s just how things are.
As soon as I step outside into the Concord Hospital parking lot, my phone rings.
“Jesus, Hank, where have you been?”
“Nico?”
It’s hard to hear her, there’s a loud noise in the background, a kind of roar.
“I need you to listen to me closely, please.”
The noise is intense behind her, like wind whipping through an open window. “Nico, are you on a highway?”
It’s too loud in the parking lot. I turn around and go back into the lobby.
“Henry, listen.”
The wind behind her is growing louder, and I’m starting to hear the distinct menacing whine of sirens, a distant shrieking mixed in with the whoosh and howl of the wind. I’m trying to place the sound of the sirens, those aren’t CPD sirens. Are they state cars? I don’t know—what are federal marshals driving right now?
“Nico, where are you?”
“I am not leaving you behind.”
“What on Earth are you talking about?
Her voice is stiff as steel; it’s her voice but not her voice, like my sister is reading lines from a script. The roar behind her stops abruptly, and I hear a door slam, I hear feet running.
“Nico!”
“I’ll be back. I’m not leaving you behind.”
The line goes dead. Silence.
I drive 125 miles an hour at full code all the way to the New Hampshire National Guard station, running the dashboard emitter to turn the red lights green as I go, burning precious gasoline like a forest fire.
The steering wheel shudders in my hands, and I’m shouting at myself full volume, stupid stupid stupid, should have told her, why didn’t I tell her? I should have just told her every single thing that Alison had told me: Derek had lied to her all along about what he was mixed up in, where he was going; he had gotten himself mixed up in this secret-society nonsense; the government considered him a terrorist, a violent criminal, and if she persisted in trying to be with him, she would end up with the same fate.
I make a fist, pound it into the steering wheel. I should have just told her, how little it was worth it, to sacrifice herself for him.
I call Alison Koechner’s office, and of course there’s no answer. I try to call back, and the phone fails, and I hurl it angrily into the backseat.
“God damn it.”
Now she’s going to do something stupid, get herself shot up by military police, get herself thrown in the brig for the duration, right alongside that moron.
I squeal to a halt at the entrance of NGNH, and I’m gibbering like an idiot to the guard at the gate.
“Hey! Hey, excuse me. My name is Henry Palace, I’m a detective, and I think my sister is in here.”
The guard says nothing. It’s a different guard than was at the front the last time.
“My sister’s husband was in jail here, and I think my sister is here and I need to find her.”
The gate guard’s expression doesn’t change. “We are holding no prisoners at present.”