by Jodi Compton
Sympathy Between Humans
Jodi Compton
Sarah Pribek, a Minneapolis missing persons detective, is under suspicion. Investigated but not yet charged in the arson murder of the man who raped and killed her best friend's daughter, she's protecting the identity of the real perpetrator, even though a zealous prosecutor is closing in and threatening to indict her. With her husband in jail in Wisconsin for a crime related to the same case (only alluded to briefly here, but fully explicated in The 37th Hour, the first in the series featuring Pribek), the detective finds herself involved in two other assignments where the line between justice and the law is also murky. When the eldest daughter of reclusive novelist Hugh Hennessy enlists her aid in finding the twin brother mysteriously sent away by her father several years earlier, Sarah agrees to investigate, even though there's no indication that Aidan Hennessy left his last foster home except of his own volition, and as far as Sarah can detrermine, the 17-year-old has committed no crimes. When the elder Hennessy is felled by a stroke, Sarah finds herself appointed as temporary guardian of his children, at least until Marlinchen, the daughter, comes of age and can be appoointed their guardian and Hugh's conservator. And the more time Sarah spends with the family, the more certain she is that Aidan isn't who he and his siblings think he is, although she's reluctant to add to the family's travails by seeking the evidence to support her hunch.
She's just as hesitant to make an arrest in her other case-that of a charismatic quadriplegic suspected of practicing medicine illegally. Sarah's relationship with Cisco Ruiz is a complex one, and in the telling of it, Compton brings into sharp relief the moral quandaries that challenge her protagonist. This is a well-plotted mystery with characters who resonate in the reader's consciousness long after the last page is turned, intelligently plotted and deftly crfafted. -Jane Adams
Jodi Compton
Sympathy Between Humans
The second book in the Sarah Pribek series, 2005
1
It was late afternoon on Spain ’s Atlantic coast, the sun turning golden in the lower layers of atmosphere over the water. At the ocean’s edge ran a seawall, not a barrier of rocks but a solid stone wall that broke the gentle surf. A section had been cut away to let water feed into a bathing pool, a dark-watered rectangle about half the size of a swimming pool, submerged stone benches cut all around the sides.
It was like something an ancient Roman city builder might have created, both simple and decadent. Egalitarian, as well. There were no fences, and locals seemed as welcome to come here as the well-heeled vacationers. Sunbathers came in to cool off, and children swam, darting across and back from one bench to another, like birds changing roosts in an aviary.
Genevieve Brown had brought me here, Gen who’d once been my partner in the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. On the job she’d been measured and cautious, and I’d expected the same from her here. But she’d taken the lead, stepping down onto a bench and immediately from there into the center of the pool, tucking her knees to let the water cradle her cupped body as her dark, shoulder-length hair made a cloud around her head.
Now Genevieve sat next to me on one of the benches, her face tipped up into the sun. Her skin seemed already to be turning a warm, creamy brown. Genevieve was of southern European extraction, and while she’d never been a sun worshipper, her skin would tan in the weakest early-spring rays.
“This is nice,” I said, raising my face into the late-afternoon sunlight. Already the salt water was drying on my face, tightening the skin. I wondered if my face would have a faint salt glaze, a shimmer under light, if I decided not to rinse in fresh water afterward.
“You’re overdue for some good times,” Genevieve said. “Last year was… difficult.”
It was an understatement. Last spring Genevieve’s daughter had been murdered, and last fall I lost my husband to prison. At the end of that extraordinarily bad year, Genevieve had quit the Sheriff’s Department, reconciled with her estranged husband, Vincent, and gone to live in his adopted home of Paris.
We’d talked about me coming to visit, of course, almost from her first transatlantic call in December. Five months had passed, though, before I did. Five months of snow and subzero temperatures, of heating my car’s engine with an extension cord and myself with bad squad-room coffee, of the double shifts and extra assignments I’d volunteered for. Then I’d taken Gen up on this invitation, to meet her down the coast.
“Have you heard anything about the Royce Stewart investigation?” Gen asked, her voice casual. It was the first she’d mentioned it.
“I heard a little about it early on, in December,” I said, “but then nothing happened. I think it’s stalled.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I’m happy for you.”
I hadn’t told Genevieve about the investigation into Stewart’s death, much less that I’d been suspected of the murder. That was curious. If I hadn’t told her, who had? She’d said she wasn’t in touch with anyone else from her old life in Minnesota.
“Who told you I was under suspicion?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Gen said. “It just stands to reason.”
A small drop of seawater fell from my wet hair onto my shoulder. “Why does it stand to reason?” I asked.
“Because you killed him,” she said.
I looked quickly at the trio of women sitting at the other end of the bathing pool, but they gave no sign they’d heard.
Quietly, I said, “Is that supposed to be some kind of a joke? I didn’t kill Royce Stewart. You did.”
“No, Sarah,” Genevieve said softly. “It was you, remember? I would never do something like that.” Her eyes darkened with pity and concern.
“This isn’t funny,” I said, my voice low and stiff. But I knew this wasn’t some mean-spirited joke on her part. Her tone communicated nothing but compassion. It said that her heart was breaking for her friend and partner.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but someday, everyone’s going to know what you did.”
A siren went off beyond the horizon, piercing and almost electronic in its pitch, relentless in its one-note anxiety.
“What’s that noise?” Genevieve said.
***
I opened one eye to see the glowing digits of my clock radio, the source of the electronic wail, then raised my hand and squelched the alarm. It was late afternoon in Minneapolis; I’d been sleeping before my shift. Through the windows of my bedroom, the elms of Northeast Minneapolis cast greenish shadows on the warped wooden floor; they were in the early leaf of spring. It was early May; that much was true.
Also true: Genevieve was in Europe, and my husband, Shiloh, a cop once recruited by the FBI, was in prison. All this is because of what happened last year in Blue Earth. You might have read about it, if you follow the news, but you didn’t read all of it.
At the root of everything that had happened in Blue Earth was a man named Royce Stewart, who’d raped and murdered Genevieve’s daughter, Kamareia, and gotten off on a technicality. Months later, Shiloh had gone to Blue Earth, intending to run down Stewart in a stolen truck. But Shiloh had found himself incapable of murder. It was Genevieve who, in a chance encounter, had stabbed Stewart in the neck and burned down the tiny shack he’d lived in.
It was Shiloh who’d gone to prison, though, for stealing the truck, while Genevieve, her crime unwitnessed by anyone but me, had gone to Europe to start a new life. I didn’t blame her for that. My husband was already behind bars; I didn’t want my old friend there, too.
It wasn’t until Genevieve was virtually on the plane for France that I’d been tipped off that I was a suspect in Stewart’s death. Disturbing as it was, it made sense. I was the one who’d been in Blue Earth, lookin
g for my husband. It was me who had been seen having unfriendly words with Stewart in a bar, just before his death.
Two Faribault County detectives came to the Cities to interview me, recording my carefully rehearsed, evasive answers. They didn’t appear convinced by anything I’d said.
I didn’t tell Genevieve what was happening, because I feared she’d fly home to bail me out by confessing. Nor did I seek Shiloh ’s counsel, because at the prison his mail was almost certainly being monitored, and it was impossible to explain the situation without referring to Genevieve’s guilt.
But a strange thing happened, or rather, didn’t happen. One month passed, then two, but I was never arrested, nor even questioned again. The investigation seemed to have stalled.
Then the Star Tribune ran its investigative piece.
THE SUSPECT’S DEATH, the headline had read, with an extended sub-headline below: Royce Stewart was suspected of killing a Hennepin County detective’s daughter. Seven months later, he died in a suspicious late-night fire. A former MPD cop has confessed to planning his murder, but not to carrying it out. While the case is still technically open, the answers may have gone up in flames.
It was the Star Tribune piece that had mentioned what all the other stories hadn’t:
In an unexplained sidelight, several documents note that Shiloh’s wife, Hennepin County Detective Sarah Pribek, was in Blue Earth the night Stewart died. Faribault County officials have refused to answer questions about whether Pribek is suspected of involvement in the death and the house fire.
Just two sentences, but they acknowledged at last the rumor that had been circulating in Minneapolis ’s law-enforcement community for months. The Monday morning after the article ran, there was a very awkward silence when I arrived at work.
What bothered me most was this, though: after the Strib story ran, I saw something in the eyes of the young male rookies when they looked at me. I saw respect. They believed I’d killed Royce Stewart, and they thought better of me for it.
It would have been an easier burden to bear if it had been shared by my ex-partner and my husband. I didn’t blame them for not being here. Genevieve had been wise to get away, safely out from under the growing cloud of suspicion and speculation. And Shiloh, of course, had been imprisoned; he was not gone by choice. But I felt their absence every day. They were more than my immediate family. They were my history here in Minneapolis. Shiloh and Genevieve had known each other before I’d met either of them. That was why, even when the three of us weren’t together on a daily or even a weekly basis, there had been a web of interconnectedness between us that gave me a sense of stability. Without them, I had lost something deeper than daily companionship, something I felt the lack of in conversations with co-workers that were polite and pleasant and nothing more than that.
As two months turned into three, four, and five, still I wasn’t charged with anything, and I realized that the investigation was stalled, perhaps forever. But I understood something else: if I would never be outright accused of Stewart’s murder, neither would I ever be exonerated. At work I sensed a silent verdict: probably guilty by reason of persistent rumor. My lieutenant did not assign me another partner. The major-crimes and missing-persons work that Gen and I had done dried up, replaced with interim and odd assignments. Like the one I had tonight.
***
“Excuse me, have you seen this boy?”
A middle-aged woman was showing a photograph around on the avenue where I was working. She was flagging down passersby, trying to find someone who’d seen a runaway teenager.
Out of professional interest, I moved to intercept the woman. She registered me coming and turned to make eye contact. Then her face quickly shut down and she turned away. She didn’t see a kind, interested stranger, much less a cop. She saw a hooker.
I couldn’t blame her. It’s what I’d intended.
Prostitution-decoy work was more commonly done by metro police departments, but there’s often a need for fresh faces, so I was on loan. Tonight I was posted on a heavily trafficked avenue south of downtown Minneapolis, not far from the business district, where undercover officers like me vacuumed up out-of-towners looking for a good time, as well as local salarymen leaving the bars after their end-of-day cocktails.
A civilian might have been surprised at how simply I was dressed. That’s one of the first things you learn: no miniskirt, no high heels, no seamed stockings. Genevieve had explained it to me, years ago.
“Street workers can’t afford to advertise themselves to cops,” she’d said. “Besides, I think a lot of them are just too tired. Psychologically, they can’t bring themselves to treat this like a job.”
So, early this evening, I’d pulled on a pair of jeans and boots, a white V-necked T-shirt, and a cheap reddish imitation-leather coat. The makeup, more than wardrobe, was important. I used a thick, pale concealer stick, not in trouble spots, as prescribed, but all over my face, creating an unhealthy pallor. After that came mascara and eyeliner pencil. “Eyeliner’s the best,” Genevieve had said. “Nothing ejects you from the ranks of the Camry-driving middle classes like eye pencil.”
The number one tip-off out on the street, though, isn’t your clothes or makeup but demeanor. It’s that guarded little bend from the waist that street workers do, looking through car windows. That’s what tells the men who you are.
But tonight, I was having no luck. Men passed on the street in cars, on the sidewalk on foot. They looked at me, some of them, but none stopped, and I didn’t try to stop them. The idea to commit a crime has to originate with the arrestee, not the officer, otherwise it’s entrapment.
At least it was a pleasant night to be outside.
May weather in the Twin Cities is anybody’s guess. It could bring a record heatwave. Or a series of bone-rattling, drenching thunderstorms, the kind that started up in the mornings and worsened as afternoon came on, until they shaped their anger into destructive tornadoes outside the city, on the farmland and the prairie. Conversely, it was possible that a freak storm could blow into Minnesota in the next few days and dump inches of snow on us.
The latest had been two days of storms, rains that were fitful but kept coming back, often torrentially, overloading the gutters and the drains. Tonight was a pleasant exception; the clouds had parted to reveal a polished twilight sky. But the aftereffects of the rain were everywhere: the roads were still dark with it, and the air smelled clean and damp.
A bus swept to the curb, picking up a teenager in a wheelchair. When it wallowed back into traffic and away, I saw that I’d attracted someone’s attention. A late-model, midsize car was pulled to the curb across the street. Mentally, I wrote up the man inside: white, mid-thirties, hair color brown with some gray on the temples, eye color unknown, no distinguishing marks or scars on the face. Clothes I couldn’t see much of, except for the dark knot of a tie against his white shirt.
Something else, too: there was no sexual interest in his eyes. None at all, yet he didn’t break his gaze.
Come on, you need a first arrest of the night. Get him over here and bust him.
I walked a few paces, tried to swing my hips a little. Turned to make eye contact again, sending him an overtly questioning look.
The man pulled into traffic and away.
What was that all about? Lost his nerve, maybe. Dammit.
I paced another five minutes before, at last, a car slid to the curb on my side of the street, a Chevy sedan about fifteen years past its prime. It had, I noticed, Arkansas plates.
I walked to the curb and bent slightly from the waist, looking in through the rolled-down window. The driver who looked back was white, with thick, tawny hair that fell over the top of his squarish black-rim eyeglasses. He was thin in build, save for the beginnings of softness at his middle, and his large hands, on the wheel, were freckled from sun exposure.
Disheartened, I glanced toward the backseat. A half-folded map was trying to accordion out across the top of a duffel bag, and a fishing
rod was propped diagonally from the floor on one side to the rear-window shelf on the other, on which rested a well-worn Houston Astros cap. I knew it.
It was hard to imagine how this out-of-towner had gotten so lost he’d washed up on one of Minneapolis ’s most vice-prone boulevards, but he was here now, and I’d give him the directions he was pulling over for. Well, Lieutenant, I didn’t actually make any vice arrests, but I did help a rube find the Days Inn.
The driver rolled down the passenger-side window, his eyes on mine, seemingly in anticipation of saying something, but then he didn’t speak. The beat of silence stretched out between us, with expectation on both sides, before he finally said, “Well, get in, sugar. Don’t wait for me to ask you.”
If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never have men figured out.
“Why don’t you pull around the corner a minute,” I suggested, recovering from my misconception, “and we can talk.” Going anywhere with a would-be trick is dangerous, and strictly forbidden.
The sedan trundled around the corner to a small parking lot, and I followed. The driver cut the engine, and I slid into the passenger seat.
“How you doing?” he said.
I shrugged, studying him from behind my mask of pallid makeup. His age was hard to judge. Mid-thirties, maybe. I’d read it off his driver’s license when I made the bust.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Sarah,” I said.
“Sarah,” he repeated. “My name’s Gareth. You can call me Gary. Most people do.”
The sound of the Ozarks in his voice was disarming, but I went forward with business. “What’s on your mind tonight, Gary?”
He didn’t take the hint. “I’m staying in town tonight, on my way up north, to do some fishing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw your pole in the back.”