I could lock Victor France up for six months on Title VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.
Six months is hard time, when it’s all the time you’ve got left.
“You know, a lot of cops are quitting,” says France. “Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.
No one is really sure—even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendments and codicils—not a hundred percent sure what the “Preparation” parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they’ll start handing out umbrellas.
“Yeah?”
“Oh—I’m sorry. Is this—is this Belknap and Rose?”
“Yeah.”
“I have a request for you.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what’s left, I’m here most days.”
“No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?”
“What?”
“If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I’m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL.”
“Is this a joke?
“No, sir.”
“I mean, are you joking?”
“No, sir.”
“All right, buddy.”
“I’m investigating a suspicious death, and the information might be material.”
“Alllll right, buddy.”
“Hello?”
Peter Zell’s townhouse, 14 Matthew Street Extension, is a new building, cheap construction, with just four small rooms: living room and kitchen on the first floor, bedroom and bathroom upstairs. I linger on the threshold, recalling the relevant text from Criminal Investigation advising me to work slowly, divide the house into a grid, take each quadrant in its turn. Then the thought of the Farley and Leonard—my reflexive reliance on it—reminds me of Naomi Eddes: it sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something. I shake that off, run a hand over my mustache, and step inside.
“Okay, Mr. Zell,” I say to the empty house. “Let’s have a look.”
The first quadrant gives me precious little to work with. A thin beige carpet, an old coffee table with ring-shaped stains. A small but serviceable flat-screen TV, wires snaking up from a DVD player, a vase of chrysanthemums that turn out, on close inspection, to be made of fabric and wire.
Most of Zell’s bookshelf space is given over to his professional interests: math, advanced math, ratios and probabilities, a thick history of actuarial accounting, binders from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the National Institutes of Health. Then he’s got one shelf where all the personal stuff sits, as if quarantined, all the nerdy sci-fi and fantasy stuff, Battlestar Galactica: The Complete Series, vintage D&D rule-books, a book on the mythological and philosophical underpinnings of Star Wars. A small armada of spaceship miniatures is suspended from wires in the doorway to the kitchen, and I duck to avoid them.
In the pantry are nine boxes of cereal, carefully alphabetized: Alpha-Bits, Cap’n Crunch, Cheerios, and so on. There is one empty slot in the neat row, like a missing tooth between the Frosted Flakes and the Golden Grahams, and my mind automatically fills in the missing box: Fruity Pebbles. A stray candy-pink grain confirms my hypothesis.
“I like you, Peter Zell,” I say, carefully closing the pantry door. “You, I like.”
Also in the kitchen, in an otherwise empty drawer beside the sink, is a pad of plain white paper, with writing on the top sheet that says, Dear Sophia.
My heart catches on a beat, and I breathe and I pick up the pad, flip it over, rifle through the pages, but that’s all there is, one sheet of paper with the two words, Dear Sophia. The handwriting is precise, careful, and you can tell, you can feel that this was not a casual note Zell was writing, but an important document, or was meant to be.
I tell myself to remain calm, because it could after all be nothing, though my mind is blazing with it, thinking that whether it’s the start of an aborted suicide note or not, it is definitely something.
I tuck the pad into the pocket of my blazer, walk up the stairs, thinking, who is Sophia?
The bedroom is like the living room, sterile and unornamented, the bed haphazardly made. A single framed print hangs over the bed, a signed still from the original Planet of the Apes film. In the closet hang three suits, all in dull shades of brown, and two threadbare brown belts. In a small, chipped-wood night table beside the bed, in the second drawer down, is a shoebox, wrapped tightly in duct tape, with the number 12.375 written on the outside in the same precise handwriting.
“Twelve point three seven five,” I murmur. And then, “What is this?”
I tuck the shoebox box under my arm and stand up, take a look at the one photograph in the room: it’s a small print in a cheap frame, a school picture of a boy, maybe ten or eleven years old, thin yellow flyaway hair, gawky grin. I tug it from the frame and flip it over, find careful handwriting on the back. Kyle, February 10. Last year. Before.
I use the CB to raise Trish McConnell.
“Hey,” I say, “it’s me. Were you able to locate the victim’s family?”
“Yes, indeed.”
Zell’s mother is dead, as it turns out, buried here in Concord, up at Blossom Hill. The father is living at Pleasant View Retirement, suffering the opening phases of dementia. The person to whom McConnell delivered the bad news is Peter’s older sister, who works as a midwife at a private clinic near Concord Hospital. Married, one child, a son. Her name is Sophia.
On my way out, I stop again on the threshold of Peter Zell’s house, awkwardly carrying the shoebox and the photograph and the white notepad, feeling the weight of the case and balancing it against an ancient memory: a policeman standing in the doorway of my childhood home on Rockland Road, hatless and somber, calling, “Anybody home?” into the morning darkness.
Me standing at the top of the stairs, in a Red Sox jersey, or it might have been a pajama top, thinking my sister is probably still asleep, hoping so anyway. I’ve already got a pretty good idea what the policeman’s there to say.
“Let me guess, Detective,” says Denny Dotseth, “We’ve got another 10-54S.”
“Not a new one, actually. I wanted to touch base with you about Peter Zell.”
I’m easing the Impala down Broadway, hands at ten and two. There’s a New Hampshire state trooper parked at Broadway and Stone, engine on, the blue lights slowly rotating on the roof, a machine gun clutched in his hand. I nod slightly, raise two fingers off the wheel, and he nods back.
“Who’s Peter Zell?” says Dotseth.
“The man from this morning, sir.”
“Oh, right. Hey, you hear they named the big day? When we’ll know where she comes down, I mean. April 9.”
“Yep. I heard.”