The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  “Where have you been?” he asked. “I thought you were going to be out for an hour or so.”

  “I was at the airport,” I said. “And then at the hospitals.”

  I didn’t tell him all of it. I’d also been calling and faxing cab companies, asking them to check their records to see if they’d sent a driver to our address. From Norwest, I asked for paperwork on our account, a record of recent activity; I’d requested phone records from Qwest.

  I looked up at Vang. “I’m having a sort of personal emergency. I’m looking for my husband.”

  “I thought he was supposed to go work for the Bureau,” Vang said. “Did he change his mind?”

  “No,” I said, watching my document inch out the other end of the fax machine. “But he never got there.”

  “Really?” Vang said, frowning. “You mean he didn’t get to the Academy, or he didn’t get to Virginia?” His words were measured, and his demeanor calm, but I could almost see a dozen questions jockeying for position in his mind. It was only natural. It’s not every day a coworker tells you their spouse is missing.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “He never got on the plane, but his things are gone.” I considered Shiloh missing since two thirty-five on Sunday, the time of the flight he’d apparently planned to be on and wasn’t. “I’m going to file a report, make it official.”

  Vang hesitated. “In terms of department regulations, I’m not sure you’re supposed to be involved.” He seemed to have moved on to points of procedure; those unspoken questions were apparently going to remain unspoken.

  “I know,” I said. “But with Genevieve gone, I’m the only one around here who regularly works major missing-persons cases,” I said. Then I backtracked from my own dire words. “I’m not saying this is major. I’m saying that I can’t come back to work until I’ve heard from him.”

  “I understand,” Vang said. “Anything I can do?”

  “I’m going to be getting some faxes, in response to my requests,” I said. “You can call me and let me know what they say; that’d really help.”

  “Where will you be?” he asked.

  “Home,” I said. “A search of the house is where I’d start if this were any other case.”

  “… say analysts from Piper Jaffray. WMNN news time, twelve twenty-eight. More after this.”

  I turned the volume down on the radio and stuck the nose of the Nova out of the parking garage ramp, into the traffic.

  It wasn’t exactly true, what I’d told Vang. A search wasn’t where I’d usually start. I’d start by talking to the people closest to him.

  Like his wife. Right. I pulled out onto the road.

  Other than me, who were those closest to Shiloh? His family was in Utah. He hadn’t spoken to any of them in years.

  He’d gotten along well with his old lieutenant, Radich, who still ran the interagency narcotics task force on which Shiloh had served. And then, of course, he’d known Genevieve longer than I had, but I knew they hadn’t seen each other recently.

  He’d had no partner, working alone on cold cases. Before that he’d worked mostly alone in narcotics, undercover, paired sporadically with MPD guys or Hennepin County deputies. Like me, he played basketball with a loose and ever-changing coalition of cops and courthouse people, but never seemed to forge serious friendships there. And Shiloh didn’t drink, so he didn’t go for beers with the guys.

  Sometimes I forgot what a private man shared my bed.

  As I parked the Nova where Shiloh’s old Pontiac used to sit, I thought what bad luck it was that Shiloh had sold his car last week. Until the day that we were all tattooed with clearly visible ID numbers on our skin-and I sometimes thought that day was coming-vehicle license plates served to identify us. Missing-persons reports went out with license numbers on them, and everywhere cops in patrol cars would be ready to spot the car and plates. It’s a much more difficult task to find an adult who doesn’t have a car.

  Although the top of the driveway was much closer to the back door of the house, the one that led past the washing machine into the kitchen, this time I went into the house through the front door. I wanted to stand in the entryway where Shiloh’s keys were missing from the hook.

  Keys and jacket and boots. That’s what had suggested to me on Sunday that Shiloh had simply left for the airport. And he had, hadn’t he?

  There was a simple sign I hadn’t checked yet.

  As a patrol officer, I’d occasionally collar people for minor crimes and then let them off, if I felt it was warranted. When I did, I had a standard line. “The next time I see you (working this street corner/with a spray-paint can in your hand/et cetera), have your toothbrush with you.”

  They knew what I meant: that they’d be spending a night in jail next time. Later, as a detective, I used the toothbrush as a litmus test for whether someone was missing voluntarily or against their will. It was a test that crossed boundaries of age, gender, and ethnicity. To a person, almost nobody left home knowing they’d be gone for more than twenty-four hours without grabbing their toothbrush on the way out. Even when they didn’t have time to pack, they had time to retrieve it.

  Thinking of this morning, I saw in my mind’s eye my brush hanging alone in the little rack of the inside door of the medicine chest. A quick trip to the bathroom confirmed this. His wasn’t there. I went back into the bedroom and went to the closet door, opened it, looked up at the high shelf. His valise, too, was gone.

  All signs were pointing toward his having gone to the airport.

  Had he left me a note and I simply hadn’t found it?

  Shiloh had remarked once that our kitchen table was “a filing cabinet waiting to happen.” It was always overloaded with bills, papers, mail, newspapers, newsletters, notes to each other. It was a mess I now needed to sift through.

  The newspapers were local, the Star Tribune and St. Paul’s Pioneer Press. Under that was the newsletter from the police union. A cadge letter from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: Shiloh gave them money from time to time. Here was the paperwork from the phone bill, with toll and long-distance calls itemized. A quick scan revealed all the numbers to be familiar, with none arousing my suspicions. A catalog from a gun dealer. A piece of cop junk mail: “… so revered, it’s used by the Israeli police…” A wrinkled white paper bag from a delicatessen, flat and empty: I remembered it from when I’d brought home dinner late about three weeks ago. A slip of paper with a phone number on it, but this time it was one I recognized: the local FBI field office.

  The last item, the deepest archaeological layer, was two sheets of scratch paper, one with red wax drippings on it. That was from the dinner we’d had on our wedding night, two months ago. Shiloh had dug up a boxy red candle and lit it, an ironically celebratory gesture, with the sheets of paper set underneath to catch the melting wax.

  There was no note.

  I walked back to the entryway, the better to start my search from scratch. Honestly, I did not believe that Shiloh had been injured or killed here. Even so, I had to look around.

  There were no pry marks on the front door. The lock appeared untampered with, and I couldn’t remember feeling anything wrong with it when I’d unlocked it.

  I walked the perimeter of each room, looking at the windows for signs of a break-in. They showed none. The spaces behind the furniture showed nothing but dust bunnies. There was nothing valuable missing. Nothing cheap, either, from what I could tell. The shelves were as laden as ever with Shiloh’s books. I would never be able to tell if any of them was missing. Shiloh’s interests were extremely varied: fiction and nonfiction, Shakespeare, texts on investigation, a Bible, several slender volumes of poetry by authors I’d never heard of: Saunders Lewis, Sinclair Goldman.

  There was nothing resembling dried blood or bloodstains anywhere.

  The bedroom was tidy, although somewhat less so than Shiloh had left it-I hadn’t made the bed this morning when Vang had called me.

  When kids disappear, I l
ook under their beds early on. Children tend to think under the bed is a sly hiding place. Often, the girl’s diary is there. Adults use more care in hiding their valuables.

  Even so, I sat on my heels and flipped up the blanket, which hung long from the rumpled surface of the mattress.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  It wasn’t hidden, just sort of pushed out of the way for convenience’s sake. If I’d been looking down last night I’d have seen the dull gleam of light on black leather, just under the bed frame.

  I jerked Shiloh’s timeworn hard-shell valise out. It was heavy. Obviously packed. I opened it. The shaving kit was inside the valise, the toothbrush in the kit. Shiloh had been efficient. He’d packed in advance, and then he’d put the valise where it would be out of his way, not underfoot in our narrow bedroom.

  On top of the folded clothes was a paperback copy of a classic text on investigation, and inside that, like a bookmark, was a ticket for Northwest’s 2:35 P.M. flight to Washington, D.C.

  He’d never even left for the airport. Somehow, that made it real.

  chapter 7

  I’m not sure how long I sat by the bed, not thinking but just internalizing. Some long moments passed and then I got up and walked back to the kitchen, to stand in the middle of Shiloh’s vacated home and life in Minneapolis.

  A missing adult male. What would Genevieve and I look at first?

  Money, we’d say. How were his finances? Bad enough to skip town? How was the relationship with the wife? Did he have a girlfriend on the side? Did he have a problem with alcohol or drugs? Could he be involved in criminal activity? Did he have a record? Associate with criminals? Did he have serious enemies? Who would benefit from his murder? Did we have a good idea of the location from which he’d disappeared? If not, what’s the house look like? And where’s the car?

  It was a fertile field of questions. The problem was, I could sort through them in about a minute’s time.

  Shiloh’s finances were my finances, and I knew they were fine.

  The state of our marriage? Interviewing spouses had taught me that no other question was so fraught with the possibility of self-deception.

  But Shiloh and I were good. We’d only been married two months. We’d really have had to put a lot of effort into screwing things up in such a short time.

  We kept two Heinekens in the refrigerator in case of guests. Those two green bottles were still in their place, untouched. Lapsed though he was from his childhood religion, there were parts of Shiloh’s personality that approached the monastic. Though he drank when I first met him, he’d since completely quit, and as for drugs, I’d never seen him take anything stronger than aspirin.

  A criminal record would have killed Shiloh’s chances with the FBI, and he’d passed their rigorous screening. He associated with criminals only as a detective who had the usual relationships with informants.

  Enemies? I suppose Annelise Eliot, whom he’d caught after thirteen years of life as a fugitive, had reason to hate him. But everything I’d heard about the case suggested she’d directed her hostility to larger and more political targets, like the lawyers in California building their careers on her prosecution, whom she denounced in the media while proclaiming her innocence.

  No one, that I could see, would benefit from Shiloh’s death.

  The house wasn’t a plausible site for some kind of violent event. I’d already searched it and it was in order.

  I chewed the end of my pencil.

  Maybe I was going at this the wrong way. I was thinking of Shiloh impersonally, as a case. But I knew him, maybe better than anyone. It was, in a perverse way, an ideal situation.

  What had he done, the day and a half that I’d been gone? He was leaving for Virginia soon. He’d packed, to be sure. Maybe run a load of laundry beforehand. And he’d gone out to get food, probably, because we tended to restock the refrigerator on a basis closer to daily than to weekly.

  Shiloh habitually ran every day, so he’d probably gone out for one of the long runs he liked when I wasn’t at his side to quit after four miles. And what else? Maybe he’d read, maybe watched some basketball. He might have slept early, on a quiet Saturday night without his wife around.

  It was a safe, sane, and boring course of events. None of those activities seemed to allow for Shiloh to simply disappear. Except…

  A long-distance run had been, nominally, the most dangerous part of the routine I’d reconstructed for Saturday and Sunday. Mostly, people who ran never encountered more than an obnoxious dog, but there were exceptions. Runners took paths through quiet and dark places, away from city lights. Occasionally paramedics carried them from state parks and nature trails minus their cash, with head traumas or stab wounds. Shiloh, six-foot-two, young, and athletic, was the least likely of marks for a mugger, but it had been a theory that at least made some sense.

  I went back to Shiloh’s valise and opened it. Thumbing through the clothes, I saw the gray-green of his Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, the one he favored for running and basketball games. Squashed against the frame, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to keep the soles from rubbing against the clothes, were Shiloh’s running shoes. He only had one pair.

  Here were his running shoes; gone were his heavy-soled boots and his jacket. I felt a small twinge of satisfaction. This was progress.

  Shiloh had gone somewhere on foot. Not running, not the airport, either. An errand. He’d gone out somewhere, casually dressed, and hadn’t come back.

  The phone rang.

  “It’s me,” Vang said. “Some faxes came in for you from Virginia-area hospitals. No one fitting your husband’s description has been admitted in the last seventy-two hours.”

  “I know,” I said.

  Genevieve, in my earliest days as a detective, told me: “When you’ve got a missing-persons case you think is really legit, one that you’ve got a bad feeling about, the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours are key. Work it hard and work it fast.” Usually, cases like those were the disappearances of children. Other times the missing persons were women who turned up missing against a backdrop of suspicious circumstances: evidence of a break-in or a struggle, a chorus of friends witnessing to a creepy ex-boyfriend hanging around, a recently obtained restraining order.

  No such events surrounded Shiloh’s disappearance. In this case, I’d spent most of the thirty-six hours not realizing he was missing.

  Even so, I was going to do now what I should have done then: I was going to work all the angles I could think of in the next twenty-four hours.

  I needed to talk to people in our neighborhood. Most of them were working people, though, and wouldn’t be home in the middle of the afternoon. And some, our less immediate neighbors, would need a picture of Shiloh to prompt them.

  There was one person, however, who knew Shiloh by sight and was almost always in.

  The widow Muzio probably saw Shiloh more than any of our other neighbors. She thought the world of him, mostly because Shiloh looked after her. He did this because Nedda Muzio lived alone, and she was getting senile.

  Mrs. Muzio had an aged, sweet-tempered dog with the rangy build and curly hair of a wolfhound, with maybe some shepherd in her blood, too.

  This dog, who had the unlikely name of Snoopy, used to escape from Mrs. Muzio’s backyard through a misaligned and unlockable gate. On a regular basis, Shiloh used to hear Mrs. Muzio yelling ineffectually for Snoopy. He’d track the dog down at whichever neighbor’s trash can she was eating out of and bring her home.

  Mrs. Muzio was always effusive in her joy at Snoopy’s return, partly because she blamed Snoopy’s disappearances on “rascals” who stole her. These same rascals stole her Social Security check from the mailbox, when Mrs. Muzio lost track of the date and didn’t realize the first of the month wasn’t coming for another week. They broke into her house and turned the faucet on, stole food from her cupboard, looked in the windows at night. Shiloh used to go over and patiently reason with her, but he never really made a
dent in what he’d called her delusional structure. Fixing her broken gate, which he did one Saturday afternoon and which kept Snoopy inside, was a more concrete help.

  When I’d first moved in with Shiloh, Mrs. Muzio had cast a forbidding eye on me. Her paranoia had marked me as an instant enemy. “Why you steal?” she’d yell when Snoopy went missing, or she’d shout “Strega!” when she saw me. Witch, she was saying; I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary. Shiloh, amused, told me about the warnings she’d whisper to him about that woman, afraid for his well-being.

  Then, for no reason that I could see, maybe just the wind blowing north-northwest, she stopped. Mrs. Muzio warmed to me. I was no longer strega. I wasn’t even just Shiloh’s girlfriend to her; I was fidanzata, his fiancée.

  As I approached her house, I looked with worry at her front walk. It needed tending. The concrete was breaking up, tectonic plates rising and falling under the forces of Minnesota summers and winters. She could easily trip someday, coming or going. Maybe I’d mention this to Shiloh when I saw him again.

  I knocked on the door, pounding with the side of my fist instead of my knuckles. It wasn’t rudeness; Mrs. Muzio was hard-of-hearing.

  “Hello, Mrs. Muzio, can I come in?” I asked when she appeared in the doorway.

  Five-foot-two and stooped, she turned a benign, blank face up to me.

  “You know who I am, right?” I prompted her.

  “The fidanzata,” she said, her face creasing into a smile.

  “Not anymore. We’re married,” I explained. She didn’t respond.

  “Can I come in?” I repeated, wiping my boots on her mat as an illustration and a cue.

  I liked the inside of Mrs. Muzio’s home. She cooked a lot, scratch meals with her garden vegetables, and as a result her home smelled of Italian cooking instead of the must of age that hung in the homes of many people in their eighties.

  In the kitchen, she made coffee. I stood on her cracked, pale-pink linoleum and watched. She hadn’t understood me when I’d told her that Shiloh and I had married. It didn’t really matter, yet if I couldn’t communicate that concept clearly to her, how well would this whole interview go? Could I make her understand anything?