“Stretch?” says Michelson. “What’s up?”
I’m just standing there, one hand on the suspect’s arm. Someone wolf-whistles at McConnell, she’s still in the skirt and blouse, and she says, “Up yours.”
I’ve used the staircase for pickpockets, once for a suspected arsonist, for countless drunks. Never before for a murderer.
A double-murderer.
I feel nothing, though, I feel numb. My mother would have been proud of me, I think dumbly; Naomi might have been proud of me. Neither is here. In six months none of this will be here, this’ll be ash and a hole.
I start moving again, leading the little group in step toward the staircase. The detective brings in his man. My head hurts.
What happens next, under normal circumstances, is this: The on-duty processing officers take custody of the suspect and walk him down the steps to the basement, where the suspect is fingerprinted and reminded of his rights. Then he would be searched, photographed, the contents of his pockets collected and labeled. His options for legal counsel would be presented to him; someone like Erik Littlejohn, a man of means, would presumably have private counsel he could retain, and he would be afforded an opportunity to make those arrangements.
This top step of this concrete staircase, in other words, is in fact just the next step in a long and complicated journey that begins with the discovery of a corpse on a dirty bathroom floor and ends ultimately at justice. That’s under normal circumstances.
We’re lingering a few steps from the stairhead, Michelson says it again, “Stretch?” and McConnell says, “Palace?”
I don’t know what happens to Littlejohn once I give him over to the two kids, maybe seventeen, eighteen years old, who are waiting with their dull eyes and their hands outstretched to guide my suspect down the stairs.
The due-process rules have been adjusted several times under IPSS and the corresponding state laws, and the truth is I don’t know what’s in the new statutes. What’s in the binder Chief Ordler was holding just now—what other provisions are included along with the suspension of detective-level criminal investigation?
I haven’t confronted the question, in my heart, of what happens next to the alleged murderer once he’s been brought in. Tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t think I ever believed I’d be standing here.
But now—I mean—what’re the options? That is the question.
I’m looking at Erik Littlejohn, and he’s looking at me, and then I say, “I’m sorry,” and I hand him over.
EPILOGUE
I’m rolling on a ten-speed bicycle down the sun-washed sidewalks of New Castle, New Hampshire, in search of Salamander Street. The sun is up there slipping in and out of patchy cloud cover, the breeze is warm and kind and salt-smelling, and I decide, what the heck, and I take a right and coast down a side street toward the water.
New Castle is a small and charming summer town out of season, with the chained-up souvenir shops, the ice-cream-and-fudge place, the post office, the historical society. There’s even a boardwalk, running for a quarter mile or so along the beach, a handful of happy beachgoers out on the dunes. An elderly couple hand in hand, a mom tossing a Nerf football with her son, a teenager sprinting, trying to get a bulky box kite up and off the ground.
A path from the far end of the beach leads back to the town square, where a green lawn surrounds a handsome dark-wood gazebo festooned with bunting and American flags. It looks like there was a small-town celebration last night, and it looks like there’s going to be another one tonight. A couple of locals are wandering into the square, even now, unpacking brass instruments and making small talk, shaking hands. I chain up my ten-speed bike by an overflowing garbage can surrounded by paper plates, uneaten bites of funnel cake drawing happy lines of ants.
There was a parade in Concord last night, also, and there were even fireworks launched from a barge in the Merrimack, bursting majestically and sparkling around the golden dome of the state house. Maia, we now know, is going to land in Indonesia. They can’t or won’t name an impact spot with a hundred percent certainty, but the vicinity is the Indonesian archipelago, just east of the Gulf of Boni. Pakistan, with its eastern border just four thousand kilometers from the impact site, has renewed its promise to blast the rock from the sky, and the United States has renewed its objections.
In America, meanwhile, across the country, parades and fireworks and celebrations. And, at a suburban shopping mall outside Dallas, looting, followed by gunfire, ending in a riot; six people dead. A similar incident in Jacksonville, Florida, and one in Richmond, Indiana. Nineteen people dead at a Home Depot in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Four Salamander Lane does not look like the headquarters of any kind of institute. It’s a little Cape Cod–style single-family residence, old wood painted in blue pastel, close enough to the water that I can smell the salt breeze, here on the front steps.
“Good morning, ma’am,” I say to the tremendously old woman who answers my knock. “My name is Detective Henry Palace.” It’s not, though. “Sorry, my name is Henry Palace. Is this the Open Vista Institute?”
The old woman turns silently and goes into the house, and I follow her, and tell her what I want, and at last she speaks.
“He was an odd duck, wasn’t he?” she says, of Peter Zell. Her voice is strong and clear, surprisingly so.
“I actually never met him.”
“Well, he was.”
“Okay.”
I just figured it couldn’t hurt to find out a little more about this file, this last claims investigation that my insurance man was up to, before he was killed. I’ve had to return my department-issued Impala, so I just biked out here, broke out my mother’s old Schwinn. It took me a little over five hours, including a stop to eat my lunch at an abandoned Dunkin’ Donuts at a highway rest stop.
“An odd duck. And he didn’t need to come here.”
“Why not?”
“Because.” She gestures to the file I brought, which rests on the coffee table between her and me, three pieces of paper in a manila folder: a claim, a policy, a summary of supporting documents. “There was nothing he asked that he couldn’t have asked me on the phone.”
Her name is Veronica Talley, it’s her signature on the files, hers and that of her husband, Bernard, now deceased. Mrs. Talley’s eyes are small and black and beady, like doll’s eyes. The living room is small and tidy, the walls lined with seashells and delicate seaweed still lifes. I am still seeing zero evidence that this is the headquarters of any kind of institute.
“Ma’am, I understand that your husband committed suicide.”
“Yes. He hung himself. In the bathroom. From the thing—” She looks irritated. “The thing? That the water comes out of?”
“The showerhead, ma’am?”
“That’s right. Excuse me. I’m old.”
“I am sorry for your loss.”
“Shouldn’t be. He told me he was going to do it. Told me to go for a walk along the water, talk to the hermit crabs, and when I got back he’d be dead in the bathroom. And that’s how it happened.”
She sniffs, appraises me with her tiny hard eyes. Bernard Talley’s death, I know from having read the papers on the table between us, netted her one million dollars, personally, and an additional three million for the Open Vista Institute, if there is such a thing. Zell had authorized the claim, released the money, after his visit to this place three weeks ago—though he had left the file open, as if he might have been intending to come back, follow up.
“You’re a bit like him, aren’t you?”