That’s what he said, that gentle and mellifluous voice, a voice she didn’t recognize. It must have been strange, much like the time I called her from Peter Zell’s phone. Now here was a strange voice calling from J. T. Toussaint’s phone. A number she knew by heart, the number she’d been calling for a few months now, every time she needed to get high, to get lost.
And now the strange voice on the other end began to give her instructions.
Call that cop, said the voice—call your new friend, the detective. Gently remind him of what he’s overlooked. Suggest to him that this sordid drug-murder case is about something else entirely.
And boy, did it work. Holy moly. My face burns at the thought of it. My lips curl back in self-disgust.
Insurable interest. False claims. It sounded like just the sort of thing that someone gets killed for, and I dove right in. I was a kid playing a game, overheated, ready to jump for the brightly colored ring dangled in front of me. The dumb detective pacing in excited circles around his house, a fool, a puppy. Insurance fraud! A-ha! That must be it. I need to see what he’s working on!
Littlejohn isn’t saying anything. He’s done. He’s living in the future. Surrounded by death. But I know that I’m right.
Kyle has remained at the hospital, sitting in the lobby with Dr. Fenton, of all people, awaiting Sophia Littlejohn, who is now hearing the news, who is about to begin the hardest months of her life. Like everybody else, but worse.
I don’t need to ask anymore, I’ve really got the whole picture, but I can’t help it, it can’t be helped. “The next day, you came to Merrimack Life and Fire, and you waited, right?”
I linger at a red light at Warren Street. I could blow the light, of course, I have a dangerous suspect in custody, a murderer, but I wait, my hands at ten and two.
“Answer me, please, sir. The next day, you came to her office, and you waited?”
“Yes.” A whisper.
“Louder, please.”
“Yes.”
“You waited in the hallway, outside her cubicle.”
“In a closet.”
My hands tighten on the wheel, my knuckles white, practically glowing white. McConnell looking at me from the shotgun seat, looking uneasy.
“In a closet. And then when she was alone, Gompers drunk in his office, the rest of them at the Barley House, you showed her the gun, you marched her into the storeroom. Made it look like she was digging for files, too, just to—to what? Turn the screw one more time, for me, make sure I thought what you wanted me to think?”
“Yes, and…”
“Yes?”
McConnell, I notice, has placed one of her hands over mine, on the wheel, to make sure I don’t run off the road.
“She would have told you. Eventually.”
Palace, she said, sat on the bed. Something.
“I had to,” moans Littlejohn, fresh tears in his eye. “I had to kill her.”
“No one has to kill anyone.”
“Well, soon,” he says, looking out the window, staring out. “Soon, they will.”
“I told you something was fucked.”
McGully, in Adult Crimes, sitting on the floor with his back against the wall. Culverson sits on the opposite side of the room, somehow radiating dignity and poise though he is cross-legged, pant legs hitched up slightly.
“Where is everything?” I say.
The desks are gone. The computers are gone, the phones, the trash cans. Our tall bank of filing cabinets is gone from its space beside the window and has left behind an irregular pattern of rectangular indentations in the floor. Cigarette butts litter the ancient pale blue carpeting like dead bugs.
“I told you,” says McGully again, his voice a chilling echo in the hollowed-out room.
Littlejohn is outside, still cuffed in the backseat of the Impala, being babysat by Officer McConnell with a reluctant assist from Ritchie Michelson, until we do the official booking. I came into the station alone, ran upstairs to get Culverson. I want us to process the perp together—his murder, my murder. Teammates.
McGully finishes the cigarette he’s working on, twists it out between his fingers, and flicks the dead butt into the center of the room to join the others.
“They know,” says Culverson quietly. “Somebody knows something.”
“What?” asks McGully.
But Culverson doesn’t answer, and then Chief Ordler comes in.
“Hey, guys,” he says. The chief is in street clothes, and he looks tired. McGully and Culverson look up at him warily from their respective squats; I straighten up, bring my heels together and stand there expectantly, I am conscious of the fact that I have a suspected double-murderer downstairs in a parked unit, but strangely, after all this, it feels like it doesn’t matter anymore.
“Guys, as of this morning, the Concord Police Department has been federalized.”
Nobody says anything. Ordler’s got a binder under his right arm, the seal of the Justice Department stamped on the side.
“Federalized? What does that mean?” I ask.
Culverson shakes his head, slowly gets up, lays a steadying hand on my shoulder. McGully stays where he is, tugs out a fresh cigarette and lights it.
“What does that mean?” I ask again. Ordler looks at the floor, keeps talking.
“They’re overhauling everything, putting even more kids on the street, and they say I can keep most of my patrol officers, if I want and they want, but all under Justice Department jurisdiction.”
“But what does it mean?” I ask a third time, meaning, for us? What does it mean for us? The answer is obvious. I’m standing in an empty room.
“They’re shutting down the investigative units. Basically—”
I shake Culverson’s hand off my shoulder, drop my face down into my hands, look up again at Chief Ordler, shaking my head.
“—basically the feeling is that an investigative force is relatively unnecessary, given the current environment.”
He goes on for a while—it all gets lost for me, after that, but he goes on—and then at some point he stops talking and asks if there are any questions. We just look at him, and he mumbles something else, and then he turns and leaves.
I notice for the first time that our radiator has been shut off, and the room is cold.
“They know,” Culverson says again, and we both pivot our heads toward him, like marionettes.
“They’re not supposed to know for more than a week yet,” I say. “April 9, I thought.”
He shakes his head. “Somebody knows early.”
“What?” says McGully, and Culverson says, “Somebody knows where the damn thing is going to come down.”
I open the front shotgun-seat door of the Impala, and McConnell says, “Hey. What’s the story?” and I don’t say anything for a long time, I just stand there with one hand on the roof of the car, looking in at her, craning my neck to look at the prisoner in the backseat, slouched down, staring up. Michelson is sitting on the hood, smoking a butt, like my sister did that day in the parking lot.
“Henry? What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. “Nothing. Let’s go ahead and take him in.”
McConnell and Michelson and I remove the suspect from the backseat and stand him up in the garage. There’s a little crowd watching us, Brush Cuts and a few of the vets, Halburton, the old mechanic who’s still kicking around the garage. We pull Littlejohn from the car in his handcuffs, in his sharp leather jacket. A concrete stairwell leads from this area directly down to the basement, to Booking, to be used in exactly this circumstance: the perp is brought in, in a squad car, and handed directly to the duty officers to be taken down for processing.