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Concord, which had never experienced serious narcotics crime in the past. The federal government, after some tacking back and forth in the summer and fall, late last year resolved on a firm and uncompromising law-and-order stance. The IPSS Act incorporated provisions stripping the right of habeas corpus and other due-process protections from anyone accused of importing, processing, growing, or distributing controlled substances of all kinds.
    These measures were deemed necessary “in the interest of controlling violence, promoting stability, and encouraging productive economic activity in the time remaining before impact.”
    Personally, I do know the full text of the legislation.
    The car is off and the wipers are still, and I’m watching as gray blobs of snow build up in uneven slopes on the windshield.
    “All right, man, all right,” he says. “I’ll figure out who juiced the truck. Give me a week.”
    “I wish I could, Victor. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
    “Tomorrow?” He heaves an extravagant sigh. “Asshole.”
    The irony is, pot is the one exception. The use of marijuana has been decriminalized, in a so-far-unsuccessful effort to dampen demand for the harder and more societally destabilizing drugs. And the amount of marijuana I found on Victor France’s person was five grams, small enough that it could easily have been for his personal use, except that the way I discovered it was that he tried to sell it to me as I was walking home from the Somerset Diner on a Saturday afternoon. Whether to make an arrest, under those ambiguous circumstances, is at the discretion of the officer, and I have decided in France’s case not to exercise that discretion—conditionally.
    I could lock Victor France up for six months on Title VI, and he knows it, and so at last he emits a long, agitated noise, a sigh filled with gravel.
    Six months is hard time, when it’s all the time you’ve got left.
    “You know, a lot of cops are quitting,” says France. “Moving to Jamaica and so forth. Did you ever think about that, Palace?”
    “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
    I hang up and put the phone in the glove box and start the car.
    No one is really sure—even those of us who have read the eight-hundred-page law from beginning to end, scored it and underlined it, done our best to keep current with the various amendmentsand codicils—not a hundred percent sure what the “Preparation” parts of IPSS are supposed to be, exactly. McGully likes to say that sometime around late September they’ll start handing out umbrellas.
    * * *
    “Yeah?”
    “Oh—I’m sorry. Is this—is this Belknap and Rose?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I have a request for you.”
    “Don’t get your hopes up. Not a lot left in here. We been looted twice, and our wholesalers are basically AWOL. Want to come in and see what’s left, I’m here most days.”
    “No, excuse me, my name is Detective Henry Palace, with the Concord Police Department. Do you have copies of your register receipts from the last three months?”
    “What?”
    “If you do, I wonder if I could come down there and see them. I’m looking for the purchaser of one house-label belt, in black, size XXL.”
    “Is this a joke?
    “No, sir.”
    “I mean, are you joking?”
    “No, sir.”
    “All right, buddy.”
    “I’m investigating a suspicious death, and the information might be material.”
    “
Alllll
right, buddy.”
    “Hello?”
    * * *
    Peter Zell’s townhouse, 14 Matthew Street Extension, is a new building, cheap construction, with just four small rooms: living room and kitchen on the first floor, bedroom and bathroom upstairs. I linger on the threshold, recalling the relevant text from
Criminal Investigation
advising me to work slowly, divide the house into a grid, take each quadrant in its turn. Then the thought of the Farley and Leonard—my reflexive reliance on it—reminds me of Naomi Eddes:
it sounds like you’re quoting from a textbook or something
. I shake that off,