The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  “Pribek!” I looked up to see Det. John Vang, my sometime partner in Genevieve’s absence. “I heard something pretty strange about you this morning.”

  Vang was a year younger than me, only recently promoted from patrol. Technically, I was training him, a situation I didn’t feel entirely comfortable with. It didn’t seem so long ago to me that I was trailing behind Genevieve, letting her take the lead on investigations… I glanced toward her desk. It wasn’t exactly cleaned out, but Vang used it now.

  He had put up two framed photographs on her desktop. One was a picture of his wife and nine-month-old baby, a close shot with the infant in arms; the second showed just the baby girl at a playground. She was in a kind of swing, a sling that held her at an angle with her head and chest forward, her arms waving in the air. I was sure that she felt she was flying when that picture was snapped.

  One day, while Vang had been out, I had tipped the photo so I could see it from my desk. When the miseries of the Ellie Bernhardts of the world piled up on my desk, I liked to look up and see the flying-baby photo.

  “If what you heard was about me and the river, it was true,” I said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I didn’t say it was smart, just that it was true.”

  I moved my hand, self-consciously, to my hair. At the hospital I’d pulled it back in a ponytail that I’d doubled back up onto itself, so that it hung in a heavy but not-very-long loop on my neck. Touching it now, my hair felt not quite dry: It wasn’t damp but, rather, cool to the touch.

  After my report was finished, it was time to request a new pager. The old one had been in my jacket, and my jacket was now in the river. I was grateful that my billfold and my cell phone had been elsewhere during the morning’s insanity.

  Before I could go on that errand, my phone rang. It was Jane O’Malley, a Hennepin County prosecutor.

  “Come on up,” she said. “The testimony’s been going faster than we expected. We’re probably going to get to you today.”

  O’Malley was prosecuting a case that told a common, sad story: a young person with an ex-boyfriend who just couldn’t let go. But this was an old story with a twist: The missing person had been a young man. He’d left the Gay 90s, a nightspot popular with both gays and straight people, by himself and sober after dancing with friends. That was the last anyone had ever seen him.

  Genevieve and I had investigated the case. Later, as the ex-boyfriend’s evasions and quasi-alibis grew increasingly thin, we’d been joined by a detective from Minneapolis Homicide. We never found the victim or his body, just a lot of his blood and one of his earrings in the trunk of the car his ex had reported stolen the following day and not disposed of very well.

  As I crossed the atrium of the Hennepin County Government Center to the elevators, a familiar voice hailed me.

  “Detective Pribek!”

  Christian Kilander fell into step beside me. He was a Hennepin County prosecutor, imposingly tall and fiercely competitive both in the courtroom and on the basketball courts where I sometimes went up against him in pickup games.

  If Genevieve’s voice was suede, his was something lighter yet, like chamois. And nearly always arch, a quality that made his everyday speech sound teasing and flirtatious and his cross-examinations sound ironic and disbelieving.

  Basically, I liked Kilander, but an encounter with him was never to be taken lightly.

  “It’s nice to see you on dry land,” he said. “As usual, your innovative policing techniques leave us all in awe.”

  “All?” I said, lengthening my stride to match his. “I only see one of you. Do you have fleas?”

  He laughed immediately and generously, defusing the joke. “How is the little girl?” he asked as we came to the elevator bank.

  “She’s recovering,” I said. A pair of double doors slid open to our left and we followed a pair of clerks into the car. As we did, I reflected that I’d probably heard the last of Ellie Bernhardt. I had done what I could for her; the rest of her troubles would be someone else’s to help her with, not mine. Whether those efforts were successful or not, I’d probably never know. That was the reality of being a cop. Those officers who didn’t like it quit to get degrees in social work.

  The clerks got off the elevator at the fifth floor. I rubbed my left ear.

  “You have water in your ear, don’t you?” Kilander said as we began ascending again.

  “Yes,” I admitted. Even though I knew it was a harmless condition, I wasn’t used to it. The slight crackling of water in that ear was disconcerting.

  The elevator came to a halt at my floor, and in the brief lapse between the car’s full stop and the opening of the door, Kilander gave me a thoughtful look from his six-foot-five height. Then he said, “You’re a wide-open girl, Detective Pribek. You surely are.”

  “Thanks,” I said noncommittally as the door slid open, not sure that it was the answer that was called for. A few years ago I would have bristled at being called a girl and tried in vain to think of a cutting response, which would have come to me about fifteen minutes after Kilander and I parted ways. But I was no longer an insecure rookie, and Kilander had never been a chauvinist, no matter how he appeared at first glance.

  The hallway was empty, and I walked slowly to the doors of the courtroom. I settled my shoulder bag, and then myself, onto a bench. I was to wait for O’Malley to come out and get me. I knew the drill.

  Only once had I been called to testify in a criminal case in a capacity other than my official one, and that hadn’t been here in Minneapolis. It had been in St. Paul, at the pretrial hearing of Royce Stewart, accused killer of Kamareia Brown.

  It was to me that Kamareia had identified him as her attacker, in the back of the ambulance.

  The afternoon she’d died, Kamareia had been home alone. But she’d actually been attacked in the house of some neighbors who had been redoing their interiors. The two painters working there had finished around four in the afternoon, but only one of them was alibied for the time after that.

  The other one was Stewart, a 25-year-old laborer from downstate. His car’s license plate reflected his nickname, SHORTY. He wasn’t that short, actually, about five-nine, with a wiry frame and a shaggy blond ponytail. But Kamareia had called him by his nickname, appropriate or not. She’d never even known his name; she’d only seen the license plate on the car that he drove. Genevieve had told me, a week before Kamareia’s death, that Kam had noticed “Shorty” looking at her, and that it gave her a creepy feeling.

  No one ever figured out how he got her to come over to the neighbors’ property.

  Stewart’s juvenile record was sealed, and since I was not an official part of the investigation and prosecution, I never got to see it. As an adult, he’d been caught furnishing alcohol to minors and exposing himself to teenage girls near a high school. Shorty, by all accounts, liked young girls.

  Jackie Kowalski, the public defender who’d represented Stewart, told me later how Stewart had disclosed to her that he was making support payments for a child by a “black chick I only did one time.”

  Stewart didn’t believe the baby was his. He had believed that the paternity test results were faked by sympathetic hospital staffers, who naturally took the side of a young, unmarried mother against a man. “ ’Cause you know, guys don’t have any rights anymore,” Shorty had explained.

  He’d told Kowalski this story more than once, and she’d realized he felt it was part of his defense. The fact that he was making the support payments, for a half-black child, no less, proved that he was a good guy who wouldn’t have hurt Kamareia, who was biracial.

  Shorty had also suggested to his lawyer that she present the theory that a black man had killed Kamareia with the express plan in mind of having a white guy take the fall for it.

  If only Shorty had taken the stand, he would have repulsed any jury ever impaneled and all but convicted himself.

  But the case never got to a jury, and that was my fault.

>   I was on the stand at the Ramsey County Government Center, during a pretrial hearing. Stewart’s public defender had asked for the case to be thrown out, as Mark Urban, the Ramsey County prosecutor, had predicted she would.

  Urban sat at the table nearest the empty jury box, but it wasn’t him my eyes went to. Christian Kilander was also there, seated in the spectators’ benches. He must have taken the morning off to see me testify. It surprised me, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. Kamareia’s death caused quite a stir among the many people who knew and liked Genevieve.

  Kilander acknowledged my gaze with the slightest of nods, which I couldn’t return, and his face was unusually serious.

  Jackie Kowalski stood in front of me, a slight young woman fresh out of U of M Law School, with light brown hair and an inexpensive catalog suit.

  I more or less knew-Urban had warned me-what she was going to ask me, but it didn’t make things any easier.

  “Detective Pribek-can I call you Ms. Pribek? Since you aren’t involved in this case as an officer of the law.”

  “You can.”

  “Ms. Pribek, you were at the house shortly after the crime, as you’ve said. And you rode in the ambulance with Miss Brown, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why you and not her mother?”

  “Genevieve was being treated for shock at the scene. She was still distraught when they were taking Kamareia away. I felt someone should go with her who wasn’t so upset that it would increase Kamareia’s distress.”

  “I see. How did it come about that she identified her assailant? Did you ask her?”

  “No, she volunteered the information.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said, ‘It was Shorty. The guy who was always watching me.’ ”

  “And you took this to mean Mr. Stewart?”

  “Yes. It was his nickname.”

  Jackie Kowalski paused. Had we been at trial, before a jury, she most likely would have pursued the matter, trying to poke holes in Kamareia’s tenuous identification-by-nickname. But there was no jury here, only the judge who Kowalski was asking to dismiss the charges. She had a legal point to make, and so she moved on.

  “What else did she tell you about the assault?”

  “She had gone on to say she should have been more careful, or something to that effect. And I said, ‘It’s okay, you couldn’t have known.’ ”

  “Was that the extent of your discussion of the attack?” She knew it was. She’d read the deposition.

  “Yes.”

  “So you never asked her a question.”

  “No.”

  “Did you come to the scene as an officer of the law?”

  “I’m always an officer of the law.”

  “I recognize that,” Kowalski said. “But you were at your partner’s home socially, weren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “The two of you see a lot of each other outside of work, and consider yourselves friends?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you saw a lot of Kamareia Brown in this capacity, as a friend of her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “And so, when Genevieve Brown was too distraught to go along to the hospital with her daughter, you went in her place because you were ‘composed.’ That indicates to me that your purpose was to keep Kamareia Brown calm, to comfort her. Would you agree?”

  “My primary purpose was to make sure Kamareia was not alone at that time.”

  I wasn’t going to make it easy for her.

  “Did you ever remind her of your status as an officer of the law?”

  “Kamareia grew up around-“

  “Please answer the questions I put to you.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Kowalski paused, signaling a change in direction. “Ms. Pribek, the ambulance attendant who was in the back with you and Miss Brown has said in her deposition that you made efforts to comfort Miss Brown. In fact, she said that she heard you say ‘You’ll be all right’ twice. Is that true?”

  This was the question all the others had been leading up to.

  “I don’t remember if I said it twice.”

  “But you know that you said, at least once, ‘You’ll be all right.’ ”

  I met Kilander’s eyes and saw him seeing the case fall apart. He knew what the question meant.

  “Yes.”

  Genevieve, a potential witness, had been barred from attending this hearing, and at the moment I was grateful my partner was not among the spectators.

  “And in general you made comforting statements to Miss Brown, leading her to believe she would survive her injuries.”

  “I don’t feel I was leading her to believe anything.”

  Kowalski raised her eyebrows. “Could you explain, then, what other understanding she could have taken from the statement ‘You’ll be all right’?”

  “Objection,” Urban said. “Counsel is asking the witness to speculate.”

  “I’ll withdraw it,” Kowalski said. “Ms. Pribek, did you say anything to Miss Brown that would indicate to her that her injuries were fatal?”

  Genevieve, I’m so sorry. I was trying to do the right thing.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  Dying declarations are notoriously tricky. They rely on the understanding that someone who knows she is dying has no reason to lie. For this reason, the paramount issue in court tends to be whether the dying person in fact believed he or she was dying.

  On the stand, Kowalski had made it clear to the judge that Kamareia did not see me as a criminal investigator, hence Kowalski’s insistence on calling me “Ms. Pribek,” instead of using my rank. More importantly, Kowalski established that I had led Kamareia to believe she would not die of her wounds.

  Kilander had told me about dying declarations once, long before Kamareia’s death. It wasn’t as if I’d never heard about the legal aspects of point-of-death accusations; they simply had not crossed my mind, not even remotely, that day when I’d been watching a young woman die.

  Jackie Kowalski was right about one thing-I had gotten into that ambulance as a friend. I had tried to be a good friend to Kamareia, to do what her mother would have done, to comfort and reassure her. All these things compromised Kamareia’s accusation, and in doing so jeopardized a case that was shaky in its other aspects.

  Despite the rape, there had been no semen recovered, an occurrence more common than many people realized. Maybe Shorty wore a condom, maybe he simply didn’t ejaculate. It was an academic point to me. I considered Kamareia’s murder a hate crime in its simplest definition: the result of hatred. As far as I could see, Stewart had raped Kamareia because it was just another way of beating her.

  But the end result was that there was no DNA to recover. Other hair and fiber evidence wasn’t useful, because Stewart had been all over the house, working, for two weeks. And Kamareia’s fingernail scrapings yielded nothing useful. She’d clearly been too stunned, attacked too abruptly, to put up a good fight.

  The whole case revolved around Kamareia’s point-of-death accusation. When the judge threw out Kamareia’s statement, the rest of the case collapsed like a house of cards. The judge found insufficient grounds to go to trial, and the worst that happened to Royce Stewart in the Cities was that he lost his driver’s license in an unrelated DWI.

  “Sarah?”

  The courtroom door had swung open almost soundlessly. Jane O’Malley was looking at me. “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  chapter 3

  While O’Malley had said the people’s testimony had been moving faster than expected that day, it took time for me to recount my part of the story. It was after five when I returned. Vang was still at his desk, and once again on the phone. He must have been on hold, because he slid the lower end of the receiver away from his mouth and said, “Your husband was here, looking for you.”

  “Shiloh was here?” I repeated, stupidly. “Is he-”

  But Vang had snapped his attention b
ack to his phone conversation.

  “Hello, Commander Erickson, this is-”

  I tuned him out. Shiloh had obviously been and gone, and even though my day was over and I’d be home soon, I was oddly disappointed at having missed him. Up until two weeks ago, Shiloh had been a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department. While we hadn’t technically worked together, our jobs used to overlap at times. Now I never ran into him downtown anymore, and I missed it.

  It was something I’d have to get used to. Shiloh was leaving next week for his FBI training at Quantico, which would last for four months.

  I glanced down, making one last check for messages. There were none, so I set the phone to go to voice mail on one ring and picked up my bag. I gave Vang a little finger wave on my way out, which he acknowledged with a nod.

  My 1970 Nova was the first car I’d ever bought. Some of the guys at work winced to see it; I knew they were imagining the restoration work they’d do on it, if it were theirs. Its gunmetal gray paint had faded without the regular waxing a car aficionado would have given it, and thin cracks ran through the dashboard. Yet it was surprisingly reliable, and I was perversely attached to it. Every winter I imagined trading it in for something more surefooted on the snow and ice, an SUV or 4WD truck like many of my fellow officers drove. But now it was fall again-October-and I still hadn’t given serious consideration to placing an ad.

  I didn’t go straight home. The Nova’s fuel gauge needle had slipped below the quarter-tank mark, and I filled it at the cheapest gas station I knew, then took my boots to a repair shop. They were going to need professional attention if they were going to survive their unexpected soaking in the Mississippi. My errands cost me more than a half hour before I turned onto the quiet street in Northeast Minneapolis where Shiloh and I lived.

  Nordeast, as locals still sometimes called it, used to be a heavily Eastern European part of town; it had grown more integrated through the years. Bisected by the railroad, it was a place of weather-beaten old houses with big screened porches, light industrial businesses, and corner bars whose signs advertised meat raffles and pulltabs. I’d immediately liked it here, liked Shiloh’s old house with the rumbling trains that ran behind the narrow backyard and the dreamy, undersea quality it had in the summer from the dappling of sun and shade created by the overhanging elms. But I also knew that in this neighborhood Shiloh had taken a switchblade knife away from an 11-year-old kid, and last Halloween someone had scrawled anti-police slurs in red chalk on our driveway. It was a city neighborhood, no mistake.