Ben Winters - The Last Policeman

“Serious crime. Stealing from a corpse.”

“Yes.” she says. “But you gotta do a risk analysis.”

I glance up from the counter, where I’m emptying the Mr. Coffee carafe into our mugs. “Excuse me?”

“Let’s say I’m a regular citizen. I’m not homeless or broke, because here I am at a restaurant on a weekday morning.”

“Okay.”

“I’ve got a job, but it’s a scrub job. If I can pawn a cell phone to a metal bug, someone collecting cadmium, that’s a serious payday. Enough to keep me going for a month or two, maybe even get me out of work for the end of it. So that’s a reward, a significant-percent chance of a significant reward.”

“Sure, sure.” I like the way she’s doing this.

“So I’m standing there at the McDonald’s, cops are on the way,” says McConnell. “I figure I’ve got a ten percent chance of getting caught.”

“With cops descending on the scene? Twenty-five percent chance.”

“One of them is Michelson. Eighteen percent.”

“Fourteen.”

She’s laughing, I’m laughing too, but I’m thinking about my father, and Shakespeare, and J. T. Toussaint: motive reconsidered in the matrix of new times. “But if you get caught, that’s no arraignment, no habeas, that equals one hundred percent chance of dying in jail.”

“Well, I’m young,” she says, still in character. “I’m cocky. I decide I like my odds.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” I say, stirring milk into my coffee. “Who took the phone?”

“It was that kid. The kid at the counter.”

I remember him immediately, the kid she’s talking about: greasy mullet, flipped-up visor, the acne scars, looking back and forth between hated boss and hated cops. The smirk just screaming, I got one over on all you bastards, didn’t I?

“Son of a gun,” I say. “Son of a gun.”

McConnell is beaming. She joined the force in February of last year, so she’d gotten—what?—four months active duty before someone took an axe handle and bashed in the face of the world.

“I radio in to Watch Command I’m leaving my sector—you know, nobody cares all that much—and I head right over to that McDonald’s. I walk in the door, and as soon as that kid sees my face he takes off running. Hurdles the counter, he’s out the door, across the lot, out in the snow, and I’m like, not today, friend. Not today.”

I laugh. “Not today.”

“So I draw my sidearm and I give chase.”

“You do not.”

“I do.”

This is terrific. Officer McConnell is maybe five foot one, 105 pounds, twenty-eight years old, a single mother of two. Now she’s on her feet, gesturing, pacing around my kitchen.

“He books it into that little playground there. I mean the guy is zooming like the Road Runner, skidding through the gravel and the slush and everything. I’m yelling, ‘Police, police! Stop, motherfucker!’”

“You do not yell, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’”

“I do. Because you know, Palace, this is it. This is the last chance I get to run after a perp yelling, ‘Stop, motherfucker.’”

McConnell has the kid in cuffs and she leans on him hard, right there in the churned-up snow of the West Street playground, and he spills. He’d pawned the phone to a blue-haired lady named Beverly Markel, who runs a junk shop out of a boarded-up bail bondsman’s next to the county courthouse. Markel is a goldbug, stockpiling coins and bullion, but she has a sideline in pawnbroking. McConnell works the lead: Beverly had sold the phone already, to a fat loon named Konrad, who was collecting lithium-ion cell phone batteries to communicate with the aliens who he thinks are on the way from the Andromeda galaxy to load the human race onto a flotilla of rescue ships. McConnell paid Konrad a visit, and after he was made to understand that she was a visitor not from outer space but from the police department, he grudgingly handed over the phone—still, miraculously, intact.

I reward this dramatic conclusion with a long, low appreciative whistle and a round of applause, while McConnell produces her prize and slides it on the table between us: a slim black smartphone, slick and gleaming. It’s the same make and model as my own, and for a brief, disorienting instant I think it is mine, that somehow Peter Zell died in possession of Detective Henry Palace’s cellular telephone.

“Well, Officer McConnell.” I scoop up the phone and feel its cool flat weight in my palm. It’s like holding one of Zell’s organs, a kidney, a lobe of the brain. “That is one solid piece of police work.”

She looks down at her hands, then back up at me, and that’s it, our business is concluded. We sit there in easy morning silence, two human beings framed by the single window of a small white kitchen, the sun struggling to make itself known outside through the dampening gray of the low-hanging clouds. I’ve got a pretty decent view out here, especially first thing in the morning: a nice little copse of winter pine, the farmland beyond, deer tracks dancing across the snow.

“You’ll make a great detective one day, Officer McConnell.”

“Oh, I know,” she says, flash of a smile, drains her coffee. “I know I will.”

Turning on the phone I am greeted by a home-screen picture of Kyle Littlejohn, Peter Zell’s nephew, in action on the ice, giant hockey mask covering his face, elbows jutted out to either side.

Kid must be terrified , I think, and I close my eyes to the thought, blink it away. Stay on target. Stay focused .

My first observation is that, within the three-month period covered by the list of “recent calls,” there have been two calls placed to the number listed as Sophia Littlejohn’s. One was last Sunday at 9:45 a.m., and it was twelve seconds long: just long enough for him to have gotten her voicemail or, say, for her to have answered, recognized his voice, and hung up. The second call, thirteen seconds, was on Monday, the day of his death, at 11:30 a.m.

I’ve got my blue book out and I’m writing down these observations and reflections, the pencil scritching rapidly, in the background the burbling of my second pot of coffee.

My second observation is that there have been seven conversations within that same three-month period, with the contact listed as “JTT.” Most were on Mondays, in the afternoon, perhaps making arrangements to go see that night’s Distant Pale Glimmers . The final call, incoming, lasting a minute and forty seconds, this past Monday at 1:15.

Interesting—interesting—very interesting. Thank you again, Officer McConnell.

It’s my third observation that really gets my heart pumping, that’s got me sitting here at the table with the phone in my hand, ignoring the eager beeping of the coffeemaker, staring at the screen, my mind rolling and gunning. Because there’s a number with no name assigned to it, to which Peter Zell had placed a twenty-two-second telephone call at ten o’clock on the night of his death.

And a forty-two-second call at exactly ten o’clock the night before that.

I scroll through the list again, my fingers dancing across the screen, faster and faster. Every night, the same number. Ten o’clock. Outgoing call. Call less than a minute long. Every single night.

Peter Zell’s phone is getting service in my house, two bars, the same as me. I call the mystery number and it is picked up after two rings.

“Hello?”

The voice answers as if from within a haze, whispering, confused—which is totally understandable. You don’t get calls every day from a dead man’s cell phone.

But I recognize her right away.

“Ms. Eddes? It’s Detective Henry Palace, from the Concord Police Department. I’m afraid we’re going to need to chat again.”