“Good morning, ma’am,” says Peter Zell’s murderer. “My name is Erik. Dr. Fenton has asked me to be present this morning, and I understand that that is your wish.”
McConnell nods gravely and launches into the little speech we wrote for her.
“My husband, Dale, he went and he shot himself with his old hunting rifle,” says McConnell. “I don’t know why he did it. I mean, I do know, but I thought—” and then she plays at being unable to continue, her voice trembles and catches, me thinking, there you go, very impressive, Officer McConnell. “I thought we’d have the rest of it together, the rest of our time together.”
“The wound is rather severe,” says Dr. Fenton, “and so Ms. Taylor and I agreed that she might benefit from your presence in viewing her husband’s body for the first time.”
“Of course,” he murmurs, “absolutely.” My eyes flicker over his body, top to bottom, looking for the bulge of a firearm. If he’s got one, it’s well hidden. I don’t think he does.
Littlejohn smiles at McConnell with radiant kindness, places a reassuring hand on her shoulder, and turns to Fenton.
“And where,” he asks in a delicate undertone, “is Ms. Taylor’s husband now?”
My stomach tightens. I place a hand over my mouth to control the sound of my breathing, to control myself.
“This way,” Fenton answers—and here we are, this is the pivot point of the whole affair, because now she’s leading the two of them—Littlejohn with his gentle hand guiding McConnell, the fake widow—leading the two of them across the room, toward where I am, toward the hallway.
“We’ve laid the body out,” explains Dr. Fenton, “in the old chapel.”
“What?”
Littlejohn hesitates, a small stutter step, his eyes flashing with fear and confusion, and my heart catches in my throat, because I’m right—I knew I was right, and yet I cannot believe it. I’m staring at him, imagining those soft hands winding a long black belt around Peter Zell’s neck, slowly tightening. Imagining a pistol trembling in his hand, Naomi’s big black eyes.
A moment more, Palace. A moment more.
“I believe you are mistaken, Doctor,” he says quietly to Fenton.
“No mistake,” she replies briskly, smiling tightly, reassuringly at McConnell. She’s enjoying this, Fenton. Littlejohn keeps pushing, what choice does he have? “No, you are incorrect, that room is out of service. It is locked.”
“Yes,” I say, and Littlejohn jumps, in this instant he knows exactly what’s going on, he looks around the room and I step out of the darkness with my sidearm raised. “And you have the key. Where is the key, please?”
He looks at me, dumbstruck.
“Where is the key, sir?”
“It’s—” he closes his eyes, opens them again, the blood draining from his face, hope dying in his eyes. “It’s in my office.”
“We’ll go there.”
McConnell has drawn her weapon from her black pocketbook. Fenton stays put, her eyes glinting behind her round glasses, enjoying every second.
“Detective.” Littlejohn steps forward, he’s making an effort, his voice trembling, but he’s trying. “Detective, I can’t imagine—”
“Quiet,” I say. “Quiet, please.”
“Yes, but Detective Palace, I don’t know what you’re thinking, but if you… if you think…”
Feigned confusion distrorts his handsome features. It’s there, the truth is there, even in the fact that my name comes so easily to mind: he’s known exactly who I am since the day I caught this case, since I called his wife to arrange an interview, he’s been on to me, tailing me, interposing himself between me and my ongoing investigation. Encouraging Sophia, for example, to evade my questions, selling her on the attenuated notion that it would upset her father. Selling me on how depressed his brother-in-law was. Watching outside the house, waiting, while I interviewed J. T. Toussaint. And then, a Hail Mary, unhooking the chains on my snow tires.
And he was at Toussaint’s again, the house on Bow Bog Road, scrabbling around looking for the leftover merchandise, the phone numbers, client lists. Looking for the same things I was, except he knew what we were looking for and I didn’t, and then I chased him off before he could think to search the doghouse.
But he had one more trick to play, one more way to shove me in the wrong direction. One more brutal trick to play, and it almost worked.
Officer McConnell steps forward, drawing handcuffs from the small pocketbook, and I say, “Wait.”
“What?” she asks.
“I just—” my gun still leveled on Littlejohn. “I’d like to hear the story first.”
“I am sorry, Detective,” he says, “but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I release the safety. I think that if he keeps lying, I might kill him. I might just do it.
But he does, he talks. Slowly, softly, his voice dead and toneless, staring not at me but into the barrel of my firearm, he tells the story. The story that I already know, that I already figured out.
After October, when Sophia discovered that her brother had stolen her prescription pad and was using it to score pain pills—after she confronted him and cut him off—after Peter slipped into the brief painful period of withdrawal, and Sophia thought the whole thing was at an end—after all of that, Erik Littlejohn went to J. T. Toussaint and made him a proposition.
At that time, with Maia in conjunction and the odds of impact hovering at an agonizing fifty percent, the hospital was working at half staff: pharmacists and pharmacists’ assistants were quitting in droves, and new people were being hired, glad for a salary backed by government money. Security was, and remains, all over the map. Some days, armed guards with machine guns; other days, the doors to locked wards propped open with folded-over magazines. Pyxis, the state-of-the-art mechanized pill dispensary, stopped working in September, and the technician assigned by the manufacturer to Concord Hospital could not be located.
The director of Spiritual Services, in this time of desperation and wildness, has remained at his post, a trusted and constant figure, a rock. And he was, as of November, stealing vast quantities of medicine from the hospital pharmacy, from the nurses’ stations, from patients’ bedsides. MS Contin, Oxycontin, oxytocin, Dilaudid, half-empty bags of liquid morphine.
Through all of this, my gun does not waver, pointed at his face: his golden eyes half closed, the mouth set, expressionless.
“I promised Toussaint that I would keep him supplied,” he says. “I told him I would take the risk of procuring the pills, if he would take the risk of selling them. We split the risk, and we split the profit.”
Money, I’m thinking, just stupid money. So small, so squalid, so dull. Two murders, two bodies in the ground, all those people suffering, doing with half doses of their pills, with the world about to end? I gape at the murderer, looking him up and down. Is this a man who does all that for gain? For a gold watch and a new leather jacket?
“But Peter found out,” I say.
“Yes,” Littlejohn whispers, “he did,” and he lowers his head and shakes it slowly, sadly, back and forth, as if remembering some regrettable act of God. Someone had a stroke, someone fell down the stairs. “He—it was last Saturday night—he showed up at J. T.’s house. It was late. I only went there very late.”
I exhale, grit my teeth. No escaping the fact that if Peter was at J. T.’s very late on a Saturday night—a meeting J. T. had not mentioned to me—then he was there for a fix. He had his nightly call with Naomi, his support system who was herself secretly using morphine; he told her he was doing fine, holding up, and then he went to J. T.’s to get high as a satellite; and then his brother-in-law of all people shows up, his brother-in-law who, unbeknownst to him, is delivering a fresh supply.