Ben Winters - The Last Policeman

“Nothing. Oh, unless he popped someone in Louisiana. New Orleans is cut off from the grid.” Wilentz stands, stretches, adds the crumpled candy wrapper to the pile on the desk. “Kind of thinking of going down there, myself. Wild times down there. All kinda sex stuff going on, I hear.”

I head back up the stairs with a one-page printout of J. T. Toussaint’s criminal history, or lack thereof. If he’s the kind of guy who goes around killing people and stringing them up in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, he only recently elected to become so.

Upstairs, at my desk, I get back on the landline and try Sophia Littlejohn again, and I am again treated to the bland peppy tones of the Concord Midwifery receptionist. No, Ms. Littlejohn is out; no, she doesn’t know where; no, she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.

“Could you tell her to call Detective Palace, at the Concord PD?” I say, and then I add, impulsively, “Tell her I’m her friend. Tell her I want to help.”

The receptionist pauses for a moment and then says, “Oooo-kay” drawing out that first syllable like she doesn’t really know what I’m talking about. I can’t blame her, because I don’t entirely know what I’m talking about, either. I take the tissue I’ve been holding up to my head and throw it in the garbage. I’m feeling restless and dissatisfied, staring at J. T. Toussaint’s clean record, thinking about the whole house, the dog, the roof, the lawn. The other thing is, I have a fairly clear memory of carefully latching my snow chains yesterday morning, checking their slack, as is my habit, once a week.

“Hey, Palace, come over here and look at this.”

It’s Andreas, at his computer. “Are you watching this on dial-up?”

“No,” he says. “This is on my hard drive. I downloaded it the last time we were online.”

“Oh,” I say, “All right, well…” But it’s too late, I’ve walked across the room to his desk and now I’m standing beside him, and he’s got one hand clutched at my elbow, the other hand pointed at the screen.

“Look,” says Detective Andreas, breathing rapidly. “Look at this with me.”

“Andreas, come on. I’m working on a case.”

“I know, but look, Hank.”

“I’ve seen it before.”

Everyone has seen it. A few days after Tolkin, after the CBS special, the final determination, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA released a short video to promote public understanding of what’s going on. It’s a simple Java animation, in which crude pixelated avatars of the relevant celestial bodies wing their way around the Sun: Earth, Venus, Mars, and, of course, the star of the show, good old 2011GV 1. The planets and the infamous minor planetoid, all cruising around the Sun at their varying speeds in their varying ellipses, clicking forward, frame by frame, each instant on screen representing two weeks of real time.

“Just wait a second,” says Andreas, loosening his grip but not letting go, leaning forward even farther on his desk. His cheeks are flushed. He’s staring at the screen with an awestruck expression, wide-eyed, like a kid gazing into the aquarium glass.

I stand there behind him, watching in spite of myself, watching Maia make her wicked way around the Sun. The video is eerily entrancing, like an art film, an installation in a gallery: bright colors, repetitive motion, simple action, irresistible. In the outer reaches of its orbit, 2011GV 1moves slowly, methodically, just sort of chugging along in the sky, much slower on its track than Earth on hers. But then, in the last few seconds, Maia speeds up, like the second hand of a clock suddenly swooping from four to six. In proper obedience to Kepler’s Second Law, the asteroid gobbles up the last few million miles of space in the last two months, catches up with the unsuspecting Earth, and then… bam!

The video freezes on the last frame, dated October 3, the day of impact. Bam! In spite of myself, my stomach lurches at the sight of it, and I turn away.

“Great,” I mutter. “Thanks for sharing.” Like I told the guy, I’ve seen it before.

“Wait, wait.”

Andreas drags the scroll bar back, to a few seconds before impact, moment number 2:39.14, then lets it play again; the planets jerk forward two frames, and then he pauses it again. “There? You see it?”

“See what?”

He rewinds it again, plays it again. I’m thinking about Peter Zell, thinking about him watching this—surely he saw the video, probably dozens of times, and maybe he took it apart, frame by frame, as Andreas is doing. The detective lets go of my arm, pushes his face all the way forward, until his nose is almost brushing against the cold plastic of the monitor.

“Right there: the asteroid joggles only slightly to the left. If you read Borstner—have you read Borstner?”

“No.”

“Oh, Hank.” He looks around at me, like I’m the crazy one, then he turns back to the screen. “He’s a blogger, or he was, now he’s got this newsletter. A friend of mine out in Phoenix, he called me last night, gave me the whole rundown, told me to watch the video again, to stop it right…” He clicks Pause, 2:39.14. “Right there. Look. Okay? See?” He plays it again, pauses it again, plays it again. “What Borstner points out, here, if you compare this video, I mean.”

“Andreas.”

“If you compare it with other asteroid-path projections, there are anomalies.”

“Detective Andreas, no one doctored the film.”

“No, no, not the film. Of course no one doctored the film .” He cranes his head around again, squints at me, and I catch a quick whiff of something on his breath, vodka, maybe, and I step back. “Not the film, Palace, the ephemeris .”

“Andreas.” I’m fighting a powerful urge, at this point, simply to yank his computer free from the wall and throw it across the room.

I have a murder to solve for God’s sake. A man is dead.

“See—there—see,” he’s saying. “See where she almost strays, but then sort of veers back? If you compare it to Apophis or to 1979 XB. If you—see—Borstner’s theory is that an error was made, a fundamental early error in the, the, calculus, you know, the math of the thing. And just starting with the discovery itself, which, you must know, was totally unprecedented. A seventy-five-year orbit, that’s off the charts, right?” He’s talking quicker and quicker, his words spilling out, slipping over one another. “And Borstner has tried to contact JPL, he’s tried to contact the DOD, explain to them what, what’s, you know—and he’s just been rebuffed. He’s been ignored, Palace. Totally ignored!”

“Detective Andreas,” I say firmly, and instead of smashing his computer I just lean forward next to him, wrinkling my nose at his stink of stale liquor and sweaty desperation, and turn off the monitor.

He lifts his head to me, eyes wide. “Palace?”

“Andreas, are you working on any interesting cases?”

He blinks, baffled. The word cases is from a foreign language he used to know, a long time ago.

“Cases?”

“Yeah. Cases.”

We stare at each other, the radiator making its indistinct gurglings from the corner, and then Culverson comes in.

“Why, Detective Palace.” He’s standing in the doorway, three-piece suit, Windsor knot, a warm grin. “Just the man I was looking for.”

I’m glad to turn away from Andreas, and he from me; he fumbles for the button to turn his monitor on again. Culverson is waving me over with a small slip of yellow paper. “You doing okay, son?”

“Yeah. I ran into a tree. What’s up?”

“I found that kid.”

“What kid?”

“The kid you were looking for.”