Everybody with secrets, squirreled away.
“He sees me, I’m holding a duffel bag for God’s sake, and I just said, ‘please, please, please don’t tell your sister.’ But I knew—I knew he—” He stops himself, brings a hand to his mouth.
“You knew you had to kill him.”
He moves his head very slightly up and down.
He was right: Peter would have told Sophia. In fact, he had called her for that purpose the next day, Sunday, March 18, and again on Monday, but she didn’t answer. He sat down to write her a letter, but couldn’t find the words.
So, on Monday night, Erik Littlejohn went to see Distant Pale Glimmers at the Red River, where he knew he would find his brother-in-law, the quiet insurance man. And there he is with their mutual friend J. T. Toussaint, and after the movie Peter tells J. T. to take off, he wants to walk home—Littlejohn caught a break on that one—because now Peter is alone. And what do you know, here’s Erik, and Erik says, let’s have a beer, let’s catch up—let’s make amends before everything happens.
And they’re drinking their beers, and from his pocket he takes a small vial, and when Peter has passed out he drags him from the theater, nobody notices, nobody cares, he takes him to the McDonald’s to hang him in the bathroom.
McConnell puts the suspect in the handcuffs and I guide him by the bicep to the elevator, Fenton trailing behind us, and we ascend in silence: coroner, murderer, cop, cop.
“Holy crap,” says Fenton, and McConnell says, “I know.”
I don’t say anything. Littlejohn doesn’t say anything.
The elevator stops and the doors open onto the lobby and it’s crowded and among the crowd is a preadolescent boy, waiting there on one of the sofas, and Littlejohn’s whole body goes tense, and mine does, too.
He had told Fenton that he could come down to the morgue to help with a body at 9:30, but he had a visitor coming at 10.
Kyle looks up, stands up, stares, wide-eyed and baffled, his father in handcuffs, and Littlejohn can’t take it, he hurls his body out of the elevator, and I’m holding fast to his arm, and the force of his body in motion pulls me forward, too, both of us together. We land on the floor and go into a roll.
McConnell and Fenton spill out of the elevator, the lobby is full of people, doctors and volunteers, dodging out of the way and hollering as Littlejohn and I go end over end. Littlejohn bangs his forehead up and slams it into mine just as I’m drawing for my sidearm, and the force of the impact sends an explosion of pain into my wounded eye, throws a sky full of stars up in front of the other one. I slump down on top of him, he’s wriggling underneath me, McConnell is shouting, “Freeze!” and then someone is yelling, too, a small scared voice saying, “Stop, stop.” I look up, my vision is wavering back into place, and I say, “Okay.” He’s got my sidearm, the kid has got it, the service-issue SIG 229, pointed right at my face.
“Son,” says McConnell, and she’s got her gun out, but she doesn’t know what to do with it. She aims it, uncertainly, at Kyle, then at Littlejohn and me, slumped together on the floor, and then back at the boy.
“Let him—” Kyle sniffs, whimpers, and I’m seeing myself, I can’t help it, of course, I was eleven once. “Let him go.”
God.
God, Palace.
You dunce.
The motive was staring me in the face the whole time, not just money but what you can get for it. What you can get for money, even now. Especially now. And here’s this funny-looking kid, the wide smile, a princeling, the boy I first saw the second day of my investigation, tromping across a lawn of unbroken snow.
I saw it in Littlejohn’s eyes when he was hollering affectionately up the stairs, telling his boy to go ahead and get ready, boasting quietly about what a whiz he is out there on the ice.
Let’s say, in our present unfortunate circumstances, I was the father of a child; what would I not do to shield that child, to whatever degree I could, from the coming calamity? Depending on where that thing comes down, the world is either ending or descending into darkness, and here is a man who would do anything—who has done awful things—to prolong and protect the life of his child should the latter eventuality arise. To mitigate the hazards of October and after.
And no, Sophia wouldn’t have called the police if she had found out, but she would have taken him, taken the boy and gone away, or at least that’s what Erik Littlejohn was afraid of—that the mother would not have understood what the father was doing, how important it was, how it had to be done, and she would have snatched him away. And then what would have become of him—and her—in the aftermath?
And tears are welling up and falling from the boy’s eyes, and tears are falling from Littlejohn’s eyes, and I wish I could say, being a professional detective in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult arrest, that I maintain my composure and focus, but they are, they are, tears are rolling down my face like the flood.
“Give me the gun, young man,” I say. “You should give the gun to me. I’m a policeman.”
He does. He walks over, and he puts it in my hand.
The little chapel in the basement is stacked with boxes.
They are labeled as containing medical supplies, and, in fact, some of them do: three boxes of syringes, six score to a box, two boxes of protective face masks, a small box of iodine pills and saline solution. IV bags, drip chambers. Tourniquets. Thermometers.
There are pills, too, the same variety I found at the doghouse. Stored here till he had enough to be worth smuggling them out of the hospital and to Toussaint’s.
There is food. Five boxes of canned goods: chipped beef and baked beans and chunky soup. Cans like this disappeared many months ago from the supermarket, and you can find them on the black market if you’ve got the money, but no one has the money. Not even cops. I lift a can of Del Monte pineapple chunks and feel its familiar weight in my hand, comforting and nostalgic.
Most of the boxes, however, are full of guns.
Three Mossberg 817 Bolt Action hunting rifles with twenty-one-inch barrels.
A single Thompson M1 submachine gun, with ten boxes of .45 caliber bullets, fifty bullets in a box.
A Marlin .30-06 with a scope on the top.
Eleven Ruger LCP .380s, little ten-ounce conceal-carry automatic handguns, plenty of ammunition for these, too.
Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of guns.
He was just getting ready. Getting ready for afterward. Although, when you look at it from inside this cramped room with the cross on the door, full of boxes of guns and canned foods and pills and syringes, you start to think: well, afterward has started already.
In one long box, of the kind that might have been used to package and ship a vanity mirror or a large picture frame, lies an oversized cross-bow, with ten aluminum bolts tied in a neat bundle at the bottom of the box.
We’re in the unit, the suspect is in the backseat, we’re on the way back to headquarters. It’s a ten-minute drive, but that’s time enough. Time enough to know whether I’ve got the rest of the story straight, or don’t I.
Instead of waiting for him to tell me, I tell him, my gaze flicking back and forth to the rear-view mirror, watching Erik Littlejohn’s eyes to see if I’m right.
But I am—I know I’m right.
May I please speak to Ms. Naomi Eddes?