Part 26 (2/2)

You dunce.

The motive was staring me in the face the whole time, not just money but what you can get for it. What you can get for money, even now. Especially now. And here's this funny-looking kid, the wide smile, a princeling, the boy I first saw the second day of my investigation, tromping across a lawn of unbroken snow.

I saw it in Littlejohn's eyes when he was hollering affectionately up the stairs, telling his boy to go ahead and get ready, boasting quietly about what a whiz he is out there on the ice.

Let's say, in our present unfortunate circ.u.mstances, I was the father of a child; what would I not do to s.h.i.+eld that child, to whatever degree I could, from the coming calamity? Depending on where that thing comes down, the world is either ending or descending into darkness, and here is a man who would do anything-who has done awful things-to prolong and protect the life of his child should the latter eventuality arise. To mitigate the hazards of October and after.

And no, Sophia wouldn't have called the police if she had found out, but she would have taken him, taken the boy and gone away, or at least that's what Erik Littlejohn was afraid of-that the mother would not have understood what the father was doing, how important it was, how it had to be done, and she would have s.n.a.t.c.hed him away. And then what would have become of him-and her-in the aftermath?

And tears are welling up and falling from the boy's eyes, and tears are falling from Littlejohn's eyes, and I wish I could say, being a professional detective in the middle of an extraordinarily difficult arrest, that I maintain my composure and focus, but they are, they are, tears are rolling down my face like the flood.

”Give me the gun, young man,” I say. ”You should give the gun to me. I'm a policeman.”

He does. He walks over, and he puts it in my hand.

The little chapel in the bas.e.m.e.nt is stacked with boxes.

They are labeled as containing medical supplies, and, in fact, some of them do: three boxes of syringes, six score to a box, two boxes of protective face masks, a small box of iodine pills and saline solution. IV bags, drip chambers. Tourniquets. Thermometers.

There are pills, too, the same variety I found at the doghouse. Stored here till he had enough to be worth smuggling them out of the hospital and to Toussaint's.

There is food. Five boxes of canned goods: chipped beef and baked beans and chunky soup. Cans like this disappeared many months ago from the supermarket, and you can find them on the black market if you've got the money, but no one has the money. Not even cops. I lift a can of Del Monte pineapple chunks and feel its familiar weight in my hand, comforting and nostalgic.

Most of the boxes, however, are full of guns.

Three Mossberg 817 Bolt Action hunting rifles with twenty-one-inch barrels.

A single Thompson M1 submachine gun, with ten boxes of .45 caliber bullets, fifty bullets in a box.

A Marlin .30-06 with a scope on the top.

Eleven Ruger LCP .380s, little ten-ounce conceal-carry automatic handguns, plenty of ammunition for these, too.

Thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars' worth of guns.

He was just getting ready. Getting ready for afterward. Although, when you look at it from inside this cramped room with the cross on the door, full of boxes of guns and canned foods and pills and syringes, you start to think: well, afterward has started already.

In one long box, of the kind that might have been used to package and s.h.i.+p a vanity mirror or a large picture frame, lies an oversized cross-bow, with ten aluminum bolts tied in a neat bundle at the bottom of the box.

We're in the unit, the suspect is in the backseat, we're on the way back to headquarters. It's a ten-minute drive, but that's time enough. Time enough to know whether I've got the rest of the story straight, or don't I.

Instead of waiting for him to tell me, I tell him, my gaze flicking back and forth to the rear-view mirror, watching Erik Littlejohn's eyes to see if I'm right.

But I am-I know I'm right.

May I please speak to Ms. Naomi Eddes?

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.”

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