The Last Policeman by Ben H. Winters Read Free Book Online

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 suspendedfrom 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, inthe 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