World of Trouble (The Last Policeman #3)(47)

I guide her instead into a description of the sorts of activities that she and her new housemates got up to: throwing more parties, giving more speeches, printing pamphlets to convince more people that the government was playing false about the asteroid threat. That’s as much as Jean will say, but presumably this upper-midwestern branch then progressed to the same second-order mischief as Nico and her pals in New England: committing street-corner vandalism; amassing small arms and hauling them around in duffel bags; eventually escalating to targeted trespassing on military bases, like the escapade that got Nico’s husband, Derek, pinched at the New Hampshire National Guard station.

The one thing that troubles me is the geographic reach of the organization. When Nico told me that there was a “Midwest branch” of this collective, I wrote it off as more tough talk, more BS; Nico having been fooled or trying to fool me. But here’s Jean confirming she was recruited into this gang at a basement house party at the University of Michigan, many months and miles away from when Nico came in, in central New Hampshire. It’s another aspect of this thing that speaks to a certain level of capability, a scale of operations that sits uneasily with my mental picture of Nico and some goofball pals playing at revolution in a Concord vintage store.

I don’t know what to do with this kind of information. I don’t know where to put it.

“Jean,” I say abruptly, “we need to skip ahead.”

“What?”

“Eventually a plan emerged, to track down a former United States Space Command scientist named Hans-Michael Parry, who claimed to be in possession of a plan to blow the asteroid off course. Right?”

“Right,” she says, startled. I press on. “Your group or an affiliated group was going to find Parry and free him, get him to England where he could orchestrate a standoff burst. Right?”

A stunned pause, then a quiet “Right.” She brings her pinky finger up to the corner of her mouth and gnaws at the nail, like a nervous child.

“And then he was found, right? In Gary, Indiana? And everyone was going meet down here in Rotary and await his arrival.”

“It was all so stupid.” This is the second time she’s said it, and now her eyes are flashing anger at all of this stupidity. “We sat here. Waiting and waiting, just—waiting.”

She stops there, and I watch her hand rise mechanically back to her neck, her wound, her fingers twitching along the edges of the bandage. It’s like she senses it, that we are getting nearer to the heart of this conversation, to the events of Wednesday, September 26—the mud, the knives, the violence in the woods beside the station—and the nearness of it draws her and repels her, like a black hole.

I force myself to go nice and slow, get there in time. I ask her about the people she was here with, and she does, debuting more silly code names: there was not only Delighted, there was Alice, who at some point became Sailor; there was “this real smiley kid, very young, called Kingfisher.” There was a girl named Surprise and a man called Little Man, who was “super big, actually,” so that was kind of a joke. Ha-ha. They all came down via a long zigzagging van ride from Michigan, detouring to pick up a couple of people in Kalamazoo, detouring again for a ton of packing crates from a warehouse in Wauseon, west of Toledo.

I lean forward.

“And what was in those crates?”

“I don’t know, actually. I didn’t—I never saw. He said—no peeking.”

“Who did?”

No answer. She really won’t say his name; she won’t even let herself think it. I watch it appear and linger on her face, again, her palpable terror of this man, this leader. “Never mind,” I say, “go on,” and she does. She and her bunch were joined by the other group, the group that included Nico, in late July. People came and went. As she describes the atmosphere on the lawn of the police station these last couple months, awaiting this elusive scientist, Jean’s face brightens, her body visibly unclenches. It’s like she’s talking about a garden party, like some sort of asteroid-conspiracy day camp: everybody hanging out, smoking, cooking hot dogs, flirting.

One guy in particular, she says offhandedly, was “totally in love” with Nico.

“Oh,” I say, suddenly changing my mind, suddenly wishing I had my notebook, some notebook, something. “What guy?”

“Tick,” she says.

“Tick.” Strange looking. Nervous disposition. “Did she reciprocate?”

“Ugh. No.” Jean makes a face, breathes out a tiny gale of fluttery sorority-sister laughter. “No interest. He looked like a—a horse, really. Plus he was sort of with this other girl, Valentine. But he would always make these jokes about Nico.”

“Valentine?”

“That’s her code name. Whatever. She’s so pretty. Black girl, really tall.”

Atlee saw her. I know of her already, and now I can put a name on the description. It’s so odd, to start to feel like I know these people, this world, the last one my sister lived in before she died.

“What kind of jokes did Tick make?”

“Oh, my God. I mean. Adam and Eve? Like, you know. If the plan didn’t work. If we had to go under. He and Nico were going to be like Adam and Eve. It was—gross.”

“Gross,” I say. I squeeze my eyes shut to capture the information, keep everything on file. “Hey, here’s a question for you. Did Nico have one of these code names?”