I could have known it right then, had I wanted to know.
“I wish I could tell you more,” Fenton says. “If the girl had some hair on her head, I could tell you if she’s been using morphine for a long time.”
“Oh, yeah?”
I’m not really listening. Here’s a girl who felt compelled to help this random coworker, this man she barely knew, when she saw that he was suffering. Here’s a girl with her own long experience of drug addiction, who’s put her parents through hell, so much so that her father hangs up the phone as soon as he hears her name, hears the word policeman.
“If you’ve got a long enough piece of hair, you can cut it into quarter-inch sections, break them down and test them one by one,” Fenton says, “figure out what substances were metabolized, month by month. Pretty fascinating stuff, actually.”
“I’ll see you over there,” I say. “And I will. I’ll buy you that dinner.”
“Sure you will, Palace,” she says. “Around Christmas, right?”
I know what the hair test would have revealed. Naomi had been using, this time, for three months. I don’t know about her past usage, her periods of addiction and recovery and relapse, but this time she was using for almost three months exactly. Since Tuesday, January 3, when Professor Leonard Tolkin of the Jet Propulsion Lab went on television and gave her the same bad news he gave everybody else. My guess is, if she didn’t renew her active use of controlled substances that night, it was the day after, or the day after that.
I reload the magazine, snap it into place, depress the safety, and return my sidearm to the holster. I’ve already done this exercise in its entirety—open the magazine, check the bullets, close it up—several times since waking this morning at seven thirty.
Peter Zell had made his risk assessment and taken his plunge months before, gone through his whole cycle of attraction, experimentation, addiction, and withdrawal as the odds climbed steadily through the months. But Naomi, along with a lot of other people, took her own plunge only when it was official, when the odds of impact jumped all the way to one hundred percent. Millions of people all around the world deciding to get high as satellites and stay that way, scrambling for whatever they could—dope or junk or NyQuil or whippets or stolen bottles of hospital painkillers—and slip into pure pleasure mode, tune out the terror and the dread, in a world where the idea of long-term consequences had magically disappeared.
I will myself back in time, back to the Somerset Diner, reach across the table and take Naomi’s hands in my own, and I tell her to go ahead and tell me the truth, tell me about her weakness, and I’d tell her I don’t care and I’m going to fall for her anyway. I would have understood.
Would I have understood?
My father taught me about irony, and the irony here is that in October, when it was still fifty-fifty, when there was still hope, it was Naomi Eddes who had helped Peter Zell kick his stupid habit—helped him so well that when the end of the world was officially announced he fought through it, stayed clean. But Naomi, whose own addiction was deeper bred, whose habit was lifelong, not the result of a cold calculation of the odds… Naomi wasn’t that strong.
Another irony: it wasn’t so easy, in early January, to get ahold of drugs, especially the kind Naomi needed. New laws, new cops, demand spiking wildly, new choke points on supply, all the way up and down the line. But Naomi had known just where to go. She knew from her nightly conversations with Peter about his ongoing temptation: his old pal J. T. was still dealing, still getting morphine, in some form, from somewhere.
So that’s where she went, to the squat dirty house on Bow Bog Road, started buying, started using, never told Peter, never told anyone, and the only people who knew were Toussaint and the person who was his new supplier.
And that person—that person is the killer.
In the dark, at my house, frozen in the doorway, she almost told me the whole truth. Not only the truth about her addiction, but the truth about insurable interest, fraud claims, I thought of something that might be helpful to you, in your case. If I’d gotten out of bed, taken her wrists, kissed her and pulled her back into bed, she’d still be alive.
If she’d never met me, she’d still be alive.
I feel the weight of the gun in the holster, but I don’t take it out, not again. It’s ready, it’s loaded. I’m ready.
My Impala rolls through the gigantic parking lot, the asphalt painted black and wet with runoff. It’s 9:23.
There is only one thing left that I don’t understand, and that’s why. Why would someone do something like this—why would this person do these things?
I get out of the car and walk into the hospital.
I have to apprehend the suspect. And even more so, I have to know the answer.
In the crowded lobby I loiter behind a column, hunched over to minimize my height, my bandaged face hidden behind the Monitor like a spy. After a few minutes I see the murderer coming, striding purposefully down the hall, right on time. It’s urgent, important, work to be done in the basement.
I’m hunched in the hospital hallway, twitching with nervousness, ready for action.
The motive, on the one hand, is obvious: money. The same reason anybody steals and then sells controlled substances and commits murders to cover up those activities. Money. Especially now, high demand, low supply, the cost-benefit analysis on drug sales is skewed, someone is going to take the risk, someone is going to put together a small fortune.
But—somehow—it’s wrong. For this killer, for these crimes. These risks. Murder and then double murder, and worse than murder, and for what, for money? The risk of jail, of execution, of throwing away what little time is left? Just money?
Soon I’ll know all the answers. I’m going to go down there, it’s going to work, and then this will be over. The thought of it, the whole thing being over, rolls over me, inevitable, joyless, cold, and I clutch my newspaper. Peter’s killer—Naomi’s killer—gets on the elevator, and a few seconds later, I go down the stairs.
The morgue is cold. The autopsy lights are off, and it’s dim and hushed. The walls are gray. It’s like being inside a refrigerator, inside a coffin. I step into the chilling silence just in time to see Erik Littlejohn shake hands with Dr. Fenton, who gives him a curt, businesslike nod.
“Sir.”
“Good morning, Doctor. As I believe I mentioned on the phone, I do have a visitor coming at ten, but in the meantime I am happy to be of service.”
“Of course,” says Fenton. “Thanks.”
Littlejohn’s voice is hushed and sensitive and appropriate. The director of Spiritual Services. The gold beard, the big eyes, the aura of respect. A handsome new-looking jacket of creamy mahogany leather, a gold watch.
But money’s not enough—a gold watch—a new jacket—to do all that he’s done, the horrors that he has committed. It’s not enough. I can’t accept it. I don’t care what’s coming toward us in the sky.
I tuck myself against a wall, in a far corner, close by the door, the door leading back down the hallway, to the elevator.
Littlejohn turns now and nods his head deeply, respectfully, to Officer McConnell, who is supposed to be looking bereaved, in character, but who instead looks irritated, probably because she is following my instructions, wearing a skirt and blouse and carrying a black pocketbook, wearing her hair down, no ponytail.