The day Genevieve’s only child died, the two of us had enjoyed a particularly good day at work, a productive day. I remember that we were both in good spirits.
I’d given her a ride to work that morning, since her car was in the shop, and I was taking her home as well. Since I had to drive her there, Genevieve had said, I might as well stay for dinner. And Shiloh, we reasoned, might as well come with us. Shiloh had been buried in the analysis of evidence that back then nobody had believed was the trail of Annelise Eliot. He was reluctant to stop and go with us, but Genevieve and I had worn him down. Genevieve had been particularly winning in her pleas. She was worried about him and how hard he’d been working.
It was February, one of those days in which the Cities were swaddled in a low-hanging layer of cloud that actually made for more warmth than a bright, clear day. Earlier, fresh snow had fallen, covering up the soot-stained ridges that lined the streets from the first weeks of winter onward.
Only the last of the day’s business for Gen and me had been something of a waste of time: A missing-child report. We’d driven out to a small condominium complex in Edina to meet a young father whose six-year-old son had failed to come home on the big yellow bus.
The young man-“Call me Tom”-was a relative rarity, a divorced father who’d gotten custody of his child. “It’s been tough,” he said, leading us inside his condo, where boxes were stacked up in the living room.
“Did you just move here?” I asked him, but even as I did I sensed that these weren’t moving boxes; they were all uniform in size and shape.
“Nah,” he said. “Those are juicers. I sell them, and a herbal health and diet supplement, from here at home,” he said. “And I just got my fitness-trainer credential, so I’ve been trying to build up a clientele base. Things have been pretty hectic.”
It made sense. Tom had a compact but obviously well-built frame, and his brown gaze was intense but not personal, in the practiced way of a salesman.
Sometimes you just get the feeling, whatever the external circumstances of a disappearance, that nothing is seriously wrong. As Genevieve and I began our interviewing, I started getting that feeling right away.
Naturally, the ex-wife had been of most interest to us; abduction by noncustodial parents is far more common than stranger abduction. “Nah,” Tom said, shaking his head emphatically. “I already talked to Denise at work. Kinda freaked her out, but I told her to stay put for now, that I’d already called you guys.” He frowned. “She wouldn’t just up and take him, believe me. She can hardly be persuaded to spend enough time with Jordy as it is,” he said. “She’s got a new boyfriend, and besides, she’s an antiques freak. Half the time I pick Jordy up on Saturdays, he’s spent his day walking around behind her in stores, looking at Tiffany lampshades and delft tiles. Is that how you entertain a six-year-old?”
I didn’t know how to answer that, so I said, “What about other relatives?”
“What about them? You mean, would they take Jordy?” Tom looked puzzled. “I can’t imagine it. My family’s all in Wisconsin, and Denise’s-” He broke off. “Oh, no.”
Genevieve and I looked at each other. Eureka.
“What is it?” Gen said, cuing him.
“Oh, no,” he said again, reddening. I suspected the heat in his face wasn’t embarrassment but anger. “Hold on,” he said, jumping up and going to the phone.
Tom dialed and spoke to an unknown party on the other end. It was clear within a minute that Jordy was safe and sound. “Is he there? He is?” Tom said. “I’ll come get him.”
I looked at Genevieve and spoke quietly. “What do you think?” I asked. “Wife’s sister?”
She shook her head. “Mother-in-law. I’d almost guarantee it.”
We got most of the story in overheard, and increasingly vitriolic, sound bites.
“Well, you didn’t even tell me. God, I was worried as… No, I didn’t. I said I didn’t need you to take him for a haircut. No, I did not agree, I did not… You’re twisting what I said in order to… His hair is not… That’s how they all wear… You’re not listening!”
After a moment even unshakable Genevieve looked up at the opposite corner of the room and rubbed the side of her nose with one finger, the embarrassed way people do when they’re hearing a conversation they’d rather not. I stood up, in hopes of illustrating to Tom that Genevieve and I needed to leave, now that the situation had obviously resolved itself.
“Look, I gotta go,” Tom said. “I’ll come get him. No, I’ll come. Just stay there.”
He hung up and walked back to us, shaking his head darkly. “Denise’s mother,” he said. “I can’t believe it. No, I can believe it. It just kills her that I got custody. She can’t handle it.”
He filled us in on the details: he and his mother-in-law had recently had a debate about young Jordy’s hairstyle. From this debate, she had apparently incorrectly inferred that she had permission to drive up from Burnsville, where she lived, pick Jordy up after school, and take him to the barber. “I told her no, flat out, but of course she says I said yes,” Tom said.
I say that Tom told both Genevieve and me this story, but his behavior was interesting to observe. He’d started out by directing his comments to me. Maybe it was because I was closer to his age, maybe it was because I was more visibly the regular visitor to a gym and therefore some kind of kindred spirit, maybe it was simply my ringless finger. But as I gave no encouragement to his airing of grievances, he correctly began identifying Genevieve as the more sympathetic pair of ears, probably because she was at least nodding in the right places. Gradually his attention and eye contact shifted. It was to Genevieve that he told the backstory: a history of meddling by the former mother-in-law, unwanted advice, veiled jabs at his child-rearing skills.
Finally, when his attention seemed solely on my partner, I drifted out of his line of sight and looked out the window at the parking lot, where a trio of warmly dressed kids were practicing free throws on one of those freestanding basketball hoops with a weighted base you can buy at sporting-goods stores. They were sure going to learn an unpleasant lesson, I thought, when they started playing on a court with a regulation-height hoop.
“Gen, we really should go,” I said.
But Genevieve was a soft touch. “Listen,” she told Tom kindly, “I know you wouldn’t want to press any sort of charges, but it might be good if my partner and I had a talk with your mother-in-law about the seriousness of taking someone else’s child without explicit prior permission.”
Behind Tom’s back, I scowled at Genevieve and shook my head. Genevieve ignored me, but fortunately, her offer wasn’t accepted.
“Nah,” Tom said, shaking his head. “It won’t help. She’ll just insist I gave her permission. She’ll even tell you that she specified that she’d do it today and that I agreed. Thanks for the offer, though.”
I was relieved, but Tom wasn’t quite through with us yet. On our way out, he tried to sell Genevieve a home juice machine. Genevieve declined, but Tom pressed a card with his phone number on it into Gen’s hand, “in case you change your mind.”
As soon as Genevieve started the car, I said, “What did you think you were doing back there, volunteering the two of us to drive down to Burnsville to listen to the other end of that extremely tedious family squabble?”
Genevieve was unfazed. “It might have been interesting. Aren’t you the least bit curious about whether the grandmother was an old battle-ax, as described? What if we found her to be gracious and reasonable and entirely in the right?” She accelerated slightly to merge with the traffic on the road.
“You mean, like the gracious, reasonable people we always deal with on the job?” I said. “Even if she was, I still don’t think driving down to Burnsville would have been the best use of the county’s time.”
“It would have been proactive policing,” Genevieve said, adopting a pedantic tone. “Would you rather have to straighten things out again, the next time grand-mère decides to borrow Jordy again without asking?”
I had no answer for that, and we fell silent for the rest of the trip.
But when we were back at our desks downtown, Genevieve said, “Hey, what were you laughing about back there?”
“At Tom’s place? I didn’t laugh,” I said. “I thought I kept a very straight face when he finally realized where his kid was.”
Genevieve rolled a leaking pen against a piece of scratch paper and then, dissatisfied, capped it and threw it in the trash. “Not then. A couple of minutes before that, when we were in his kitchen. I looked over at you and I could see you were trying really hard not to laugh at something. I had to distract the guy so he wouldn’t see.”
I thought. “Oh, that,” I said. “You didn’t see the sign on the refrigerator?”
“What sign?”
“He had a sign on his refrigerator, for those herbal weight-loss supplements, that said: ‘I lost 60 pounds. Ask me how!’ ” I was almost laughing now, remembering it. “That cheery little sign was right in my line of sight, and I couldn’t help it, I kept thinking of his kid.”
Genevieve looked blank.
“A six-year-old weighs about that much. I lost 60 pounds.”
Understanding, Genevieve shook her head. “Your sympathy really bleeds sometimes. For all you knew, his son could have been picked up by a pedophile and-”
“Bullshit. You knew as well as I did from the moment we walked into his apartment that his son was fine. For a couple of minutes,” I said, “I seriously suspected the kid was lost among all those boxes of juice machines in the living room.”
Genevieve gave me her serene smile. “You’re just upset that he didn’t like you well enough to try to sell you a juice machine.”
“Damn straight he didn’t,” I said. “And you know why? People know better than to try that shit with me. What is it with people and these home-sales things?”
“Oh, good,” she said, “we’re off on a rant now.”
“Well, come on,” I complained, “people actually believe the ‘get-rich-working-from-home’ ads in the back of magazines. But who do they end up trying to sell this stuff to? The people around them. Neighbors, family. I mean, is that really salesmanship? What happens when you run out of friends?”
Genevieve gave me a look. “That would take some of us less time than others.”
It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. Then I winced. “Gen, sometimes you are so mean to me, I swear it almost feels good.”
She was unapologetic. “I’m just saying, the home-sales work probably gives a single father like Tom more time to be home with his son,” Genevieve said tolerantly. “Besides, it’s the American dream. Everyone wants to be their own boss.”
“Not me,” I said. “I’m happy with my lot in life: working for you.”
“Oh, please,” Genevieve said. “I do all the heavy lifting in this partnership. Like covering up for you when you’re on the verge of cracking up in the middle of an interview situation in someone’s kitchen.” She turned away from me and typed steadily.
I wasn’t ready to quit provoking her, though. “Genevieve?” I said.
“Yes?” But she didn’t turn around to look at me. At least not right away. But in a moment the silence got to her and she swiveled her chair to look at me. “What?” she said.
“I lost sixty pounds.”
Genevieve turned away again, but too late; her shoulders were shaking. She was laughing. I’d gotten her.
A lot of people would have frowned, I suppose, but cop humor is frequently dark. It doesn’t affect the way you do your job.
“You just wait,” Genevieve said. She was smiling, but she pointed a didactic, warning finger at me. “You wait until you’ve got a kid of your own. Then you’ll understand. You’ll want to go out to Edina and apologize on your hands and knees to that guy.”
We worked awhile in silence. When I heard her roll open her desk drawer, I knew we were done for the day: she was taking out her purse. “You about ready?” she said. We didn’t always leave at the same time, but today, of course, I was driving her home.
“Yeah,” I said, shifting and stretching in my chair.
She closed her desk drawer with the heel of her hand. “As long as you’re driving me home, you want to stay for dinner?” she asked.
“That sounds good,” I said, watching her stand and arrange her bright-red muffler over the nape of her neck, pulling the ends of her short, dark hair out over it. “I end up eating alone a lot these days. Shiloh’s been working late almost every day.” I stood, too.
“That’s no good. Vincent was the same way when he was studying for the bar exam. I never saw him. Sometimes I was afraid Kam was going to start calling any tall black man she saw on the street ‘Daddy,’ ” said Genevieve, pulling her jacket on over the red scarf. “Anyway, let’s pick up Shiloh on the way.”
“He won’t come,” I said as we headed for the elevators. “He’s working on the Eliot thing.”
“Let me handle him,” Genevieve said.
“Oh, right. Amaze me with your Shiloh-handling skills. No”- I took her arm-“we’re not going to the precinct.”
Genevieve looked at me questioningly.
“At this hour, I’ll bet you five bucks he’s up in the law library,” I told her.
And he was, by himself, deep in his work. He looked up at both of us when we came to stand at his side.
“Hey,” I said, laying one hand on the table.
“Hey,” Shiloh said in return. He touched the back of my fingers with his, a gesture no one else in the library could have seen unless they were looking right at table level. “I’ll be home in about an hour and a half,” he said quietly. “Hey, Genevieve, how have you been?”
“I’m good,” she said. “Sarah and I are taking you to St. Paul for dinner at my house.”
“Can’t,” Shiloh said, not elaborating.
“I already lost five dollars to your girlfriend, who bet me you’d be up here,” Genevieve said, even though my offhand remark hadn’t in any way been an actual wager. “So make it worth my while.”
Shiloh glanced up at her, then took out his billfold and laid a five-dollar bill on the table. “Quit while you’re even,” he said, looking back down at his work, as if he expected her to go away.
“Kamareia has something she wants to give to you guys,” Genevieve persisted.
“What?” he asked her.
“A photo, from the Christmas party, of the two of you,” she said.
“Well, I’d hate for you to have to carry that in to work,” Shiloh said. “I know how heavy a Polaroid is.”
Genevieve was silent.
“This is important,” Shiloh said. “And you know I can’t work on it on my own time.”
Genevieve sat on her heels so she could look up at him. “You’re working too hard,” she said softly. “You need to learn to throttle back, Shiloh.”
When he still didn’t respond, she said, “We miss you.”
Shiloh ran a hand through his hair. Then he said, “Who’s cooking, you or Kamareia?”
“Kamareia. It’s your lucky night,” Genevieve said. She knew she’d won.
It was around six-thirty when we pulled into her driveway. Downstairs, the interior of Gen’s house was dim, although a little bit of electric light was falling down the staircase from upstairs, along with the sound of a radio playing.
Genevieve flipped on the lights, illuminating the empty, clean kitchen. Kamareia was nowhere to be seen. Genevieve frowned. “That’s odd, she told me she was going to start dinner around six.” She looked toward the staircase and the sound of the radio. “It sounds like she’s here.”
Her perplexity was understandable: Kamareia was responsible, and she genuinely liked to cook. “It’s okay,” I reassured Genevieve. “We’re not starving. We’ll live.”
Genevieve was looking up the staircase. “Let me see what’s going on,” she said.
I leaned against the railing of the staircase, waiting, as Genevieve went up. I heard her knock on the door frame of her daughter’s room and not find her inside. Her voice, as she went through the other upstairs rooms, took on an increasingly questioning sound, but not quite worried.
“Sarah.” Shiloh’s mild voice caught my attention. I turned to look at him, and he nodded toward the back of the house and the sliding glass door. The door was closed, but beyond that I saw footprints in the fresh snow.
Genevieve’s house shared a kind of open backyard with the neighbors to the south, the Myers. There was no fence, so I could see straight across to the back of their house. And although I couldn’t see their front driveway, the bushes that lined it to the side were visible. Red lights flickered on them in a familiar pattern.
Kamareia, I thought, and knew something was terribly wrong. It never occurred to me that it could have been one of the Myers who had been injured somehow, and Kam had gone over there to give assistance and call 911.
The Myers weren’t at home. As in Genevieve’s house, the entire first floor was darkened, and all the noise and light was coming from the top of the stairs. I went up two steps at a time. On the landing was a two-foot-long section of pipe, splashed with blood. Streaks of blood on the floor, footprints of blood.
Unlike the rest of the house, the bedroom was brightly lit. Electric light immersed the two EMTs, the phone that was tangled on the floor, and Kamareia, naked from the waist down, her thighs and lower legs smeared with red. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Too much. I thought of the pipe outside and knew she’d been beaten with it.
I reversed so fast I nearly skidded on the hardwood floors and plunged back through the doorway. Genevieve was halfway up the stairs with Shiloh behind her. I met Shiloh’s eyes and shook my head quickly, just once, no. He took my meaning right away and caught Genevieve from behind, stopping her.
I went back into the bedroom and knelt next to Kamareia. Her eyes, when I could bear to look at her face, were open, but I don’t know how well she saw me.
“Stay back, please.” The paramedic’s voice was as clipped as her southern accent could allow.
“I’m a friend of the family. Her mother’s here,” I told her. “If you can, get her covered up a little.”
Outside, I heard Genevieve screaming at Shiloh to let her go. She’d seen the pipe and the bloodstains.
“Maybe you should go take care of the mother,” the other EMT, a young man, suggested.
Shiloh was having a hard time with her, to be sure. “Kamareia’s been hurt. I don’t know how bad,” I said sharply from the top of the stairs. “She can hear you. If you want to help, shut up and stay calm.”
Gen kept trying to look past me, through the doorway, but she stopped yelling at Shiloh. He kept his grip on her shoulders anyway.
“That’s good,” I told Genevieve. “You’ve got to be tough for her like you would for anyone else on the job.”
“What happened to her?” Genevieve’s voice was high, foreign to me.
That was when they brought Kamareia out. She was covered with a blanket, but her face said it all anyway. Her nose and mouth, under the oxygen mask, was a delta of drying blood; she’d obviously been hit several times in the face. Her blood was visible on the clothes of the EMTs and it made bright streaks on the pale latex gloves on their hands.
Genevieve broke free of Shiloh’s grasp and touched her daughter’s face, then she put her hand to her own face like she was ready to pass out. Shiloh pulled her back and eased her down to the floor.
“Can you stay and take care of her?” I asked him.
Shiloh had a bit more medical training than I did, from his days in Montana where the small-town cops did all kinds of emergency work, and he nodded. His eyes weren’t on me; they were on Kamareia, being carried away from us.
I caught up with the paramedics outside. “I’ll go with you,” I said abruptly. The young man was in the back with Kamareia already; the woman was just about to close the doors.
She gave me a sharp glance. Under her teased ash-blond hair and plucked eyebrows she had eyes as level and unshakable as any doctor’s. She was entirely in charge here, and no one likes to be told how to do their job.
“I mean, I’d like to go with you,” I amended. “Her mother’s not functioning well enough to do it, but Kam needs someone with her.” I stepped a little closer. “And if you didn’t radio for a crime-scene unit already, you should do it on the way. We’ll need one here.”
She understood then that I was a cop. “I will,” she said. “Get in.”
The Evanses, the neighbors who had Genevieve’s key, were working people. I was fortunate, though: they had a college-age daughter living at home, and she was there when I got to Genevieve’s neighborhood, a peaceful street of tall, narrow homes. “This’ll probably take me fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” I told the Evans girl.
I thought I might have to hunt around, if the shoebox wasn’t in the spot Genevieve had suggested, or the photos weren’t in the shoebox.
I stood for a moment on Genevieve’s front porch, thinking of February, then I slipped the key in and shot the dead bolt back.
Inside, the house had the kind of clean stillness that greets you when you come home after a long absence. Gen had done a housecleaning before she’d left. I could see vacuum marks on the carpet, and a few fresh footprints. Those would be the tracks of the Evans girl, I thought. There were plants on the windowsill and the shelves, still green and full-leaved, and somebody had to be keeping them watered.
The room looked bigger and emptier than I remembered. The last occasion on which I’d spent a lot of time here, there’d been a fat, bushy fir tree in the corner laced with colored lights, a happy and slightly drunk crowd of cops and probation officers around, and Kamareia had been taking pictures.
Upstairs, I flipped on the lights in the room that used to be Kamareia’s. I’d never really been inside, but it was obvious that it was exactly as she’d kept it in life.
The room was done in light shades: a peach down comforter on the twin bed, a blond wood desk. It was Standard Schoolgirl from Dayton-Hudson, except for Tupac Shakur glow-ering down from the wall.
Kamareia had loved poetry, and unlike Shiloh she’d put thought into her bookshelf, organizing from the oldest, The Canterbury Tales, to the newest, a collection by poet Rita Dove. One volume, a collection of Maya Angelou’s work, was vaguely familiar to me. Its cover design was a bright patchwork of color, and I had a vivid, isolated memory of seeing it in Shiloh’s hands.
I sat on my heels and pulled the book off the low bookshelf. Shiloh’s writing was on the inside front cover. TO KAMAREIA THE WORDSMITH, the simple inscription read.
Her backpack from school sat on the floor next to the desk, looking as if it were ready to be picked up and hauled to class. It wasn’t what I had come for, but I sat on my heels next to it to see what was inside: a spiral notebook, a calculus text, Conversations with Amiri Baraka.
They were likely the very things she had carried home from school the day she died; the backpack’s undisturbed contents testified to the abruptness with which Genevieve had closed the door on this room.
Genevieve had known her daughter well. The shoebox was on the top shelf, and inside were several envelopes from the photomat. Each was dated. I found the one marked 12/27.
Inside was a parade of candid shots, some of colleagues and friends of mine, some of strangers. Here was one of me, with Shiloh’s arm around my shoulder, his expression uncharacteristically unguarded.
I took the photo of the two of us, and another of Shiloh standing with Genevieve by the cheerful, squat Christmas tree. It was a good picture, well lit. You could see his face clearly, and almost his whole body; it gave a good impression of his height.
Replacing the photos, I put the shoebox back on its shelf, where Kamareia had kept it. Or as Genevieve had said, keeps. Keeps.
Goddammit, I thought.
I took the stairs two at a time on my way back down. I was ready to be gone.
Darryl Hawkins, his wife, Virginia, and their 11-year-old daughter, Tamara, were the newest additions to our Northeast neighborhood. Darryl, a mail carrier in his late thirties who looked about ten years younger than that, had come across the street early on to admire the Nova. He owned a Mercury Cougar he was fixing up; we’d talked cars for about twenty minutes.
Shiloh had noticed something else about our new neighbors: their dog. It looked like a black Lab/Rottweiler mix, and it lived on the end of a chain.
The Hawkinses’ side gate was made of cyclone fencing. We could easily see through it to the backyard, and no matter what time of day or night, the dog was there at the end of its ten feet of chain. It got food and water and was brought inside in bad weather. But I’d never seen it walked, played with, or exercised.
It bothered me, but not as much as it did Shiloh.
“Well, at least he’s not beating the damn dog,” I pointed out. “And he doesn’t beat his wife, like the last guy who lived there.”
“That’s not the way an animal’s supposed to live,” Shiloh said.
“Sometimes you can’t help what other people do.”
Shiloh had let it alone for a while. Then one afternoon I’d seen him sitting in the front windowsill, finishing an apple, watching something across the street. I followed his gaze and saw Darryl Hawkins waxing his dark-blue Cougar.
“You’re thinking about the dog again, aren’t you?” I said.
“He spends hours taking care of that damn car every weekend. The car’s not even alive.”
“Let it go,” I advised.
Instead, Shiloh pitched the apple core into the bushes and swung his legs off the windowsill, jumping down to our front yard.
He was across the street for about fifteen minutes. Neither of them raised their voices; I would have heard it from where I was. But Darryl Hawkins’s posture became rigid early on, and he came to stand very close to Shiloh, and Shiloh held his ground. I saw anger in the line of his back, too. When he came back his eyes were dark.
I didn’t ask what the two of them said to each other, but it put a permanent end to warm relations between our two houses. Virginia Hawkins avoided my eyes, embarrassed, when we passed in the market.
When I returned from St. Paul, the blue Cougar was in the driveway.
Darryl answered the door, still in his USPS uniform.
“How have you been?” I asked.
“All right,” he said. He didn’t smile.
“I could use your help with something,” I told him.
He didn’t invite me in, but he opened the screen door between us so that we were face-to-face.
“You know my husband, Shiloh?” I said.
“Huh,” Darryl said, almost a laugh, but without humor.
“Have you seen him in the last few days?”
“Seen him? What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m looking for him,” I said. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in four days, and to the best of my knowledge no one else has, either.”
Darryl raised his eyebrows. “He gone? That’s something. If it was you who wised up and left him, I could understand that.”
“I didn’t come here to get flattered at Shiloh’s expense,” I said evenly. “And he hasn’t left me, he’s missing. I’m trying to find out when was the last time you saw him, if you saw anything strange going on at our house or in the neighborhood.”
“I ain’t seen nothing in the neighborhood, except the usual.” Darryl leaned against the doorjamb. “Your man? I see him running all the time. I don’t even think about it anymore, so I can’t remember the last time.” He shrugged. “Now that you mention it, I ain’t seen him running in about a week.”
“Okay,” I said. “Will you ask your wife and Tamara if they saw anything, and if they did, will you come over and let me know?”
“Yeah, all right.” He half closed the screen door, then he said, “I didn’t know you two was married.”
“We got married two months ago,” I said.
“Huh,” he said. “Look, if I think of anything else I’ll let you know. Really.”
“I appreciate it,” I said.
The rest of the interviews with our immediate neighbors were as unfruitful. No one could remember specifics, except that they’d seen him running from time to time, and no one had seen him running in the past few days.
I showed the photograph around: to more neighbors, at businesses near our home, to kids on bikes, to adults walking home from work. “He looks familiar,” a few people said, peering at the photo. But no one could remember having seen him specifically on Saturday or Sunday.
Ibrahim lifted a hand in greeting when I pushed open the swinging door to the Conoco. I waited for him to finish with a customer before I told him what I needed.
Ibrahim nodded, eyes narrowing. “Mike was in here a few days ago. Maybe more than a few.” Ibrahim’s English was perfect. Only his accent gave away his childhood home, Alexandria.
“Was it before last Sunday?” I asked.
He rubbed his balding head in thought.
“Try to remember something else that happened the same day, to set it apart,” I suggested.
Recognition sparked in his eyes. “The fuel delivery was late that day. So it was Saturday.”
“Did Shiloh come in before or after the delivery?” I asked.
“Oh, before,” he said. “Maybe noon, one o’clock. I remember it now. He bought two sandwiches, an apple, and a bottle of water.”
“Did he say anything that stands out to you?”
Ibrahim shook his head. “He asked how I was, I asked after him. That’s all.”
“When you asked him how he was, what did he say?”
Ibrahim frowned. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember.”
“That means he said he was fine, thanks,” I said sourly.
Ibrahim smiled. “You’re a clever woman, Sarah.”
“Not lately,” I said.
When I got in, the message machine light flashed in a single on-and-off pattern. One message.
“Sarah, Ainsley Carter wants you to call her when you get a chance,” Vang’s recorded voice said. “It’s an outstate number that she gave me, looks like she’s back in Bemidji…”
I picked up a pen and quickly copied down the number that he recited.
Ainsley picked up the phone on the fourth ring. “Oh, hi, thank you for calling, Detective Pribek,” she said.
“How’s Ellie?” I asked.
“Much better, it seems,” she said, and I could tell from the lightness of her voice that she wasn’t just trying to put a bright face on things. She sounded genuinely relieved. “The doctors at the crisis unit let her come home with us yesterday. Joe and I said we’d let her stay with us, and the psychiatric evaluation suggested she’d do okay under family supervision. And we’re finding her a therapist in town.”
“That’s good,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
“Nothing,” Ainsley said immediately. “I just wanted to thank you. What you did that day… I was too upset to realize it at the time, but what you did was extraordinary.”
My leap into the river, the minor notoriety around the department it caused, my embarrassment… these seemed like events from a year ago.
“I’m just glad Ellie is getting better,” I said.
“She’s on her way,” Ainsley said. “I really believe that she is. Detective Pribek?”
“I’m here,” I said.
“When I tried to call you at your work number, your partner said you were on leave, and then he wouldn’t say why.”
“Well, I am on leave,” I said.
“It wasn’t because of Ellie, was it?”
“Of course not,” I said. “Why would-”
“What you did was so extreme, I thought maybe you violated procedure and they put you on administrative leave because of it.” Ainsley laughed a little. “At least, that’s what I was afraid of.”
“No, nothing like that,” I said. “This is personal leave, not administrative.”
“Oh, good. Well, I’m glad I got to talk to you. I just felt you should know what happened to Ellie, after what you did for her. You know, to give you a feeling of closure.”
“Thank you,” I said. It was true: on the job you deal with a lot of individuals who aren’t criminals, just people with problems, under pressure they can’t handle. You deliver a lot of people to crisis units for observation, and make referrals to domestic-abuse hotlines and sexual-assault counseling services, and then you never know what happens after that. “A lot of times I don’t get that, you know, closure,” I told her.
After we hung up, I tried to let the good news about Ellie lighten my mood. I felt nothing and instead drifted toward the television, thinking of the evening news, and turned on the TV in the middle of a news story I vaguely remembered from radio broadcasts in the morning.
Early Sunday the highway patrol had been called to investigate a Ford pickup wrapped around a tree outside Blue Earth, the apparent result of an unwitnessed single-vehicle crash. The owner, a man in his sixties, was nowhere to be found and the theory now was that he’d walked away from the wreck disoriented and gone off into the countryside. The story didn’t really merit the time KSTP gave it, being set so far out of the Cities, but the visuals were good: a state police helicopter circling over the skinny trees of autumn, a tracking dog eager on its leash. KSTP showed earlier footage of the truck being towed off. The front-end damage was nasty, but otherwise the truck looked solid and powerful, well maintained in life, its paint still gleaming black where it wasn’t marred by the crash.
KSTP cut to world news and the phone shrilled in the kitchen.
“Is this Sarah Shiloh?” It was a male voice I didn’t recognize, using a name I barely thought of as my own.
“Speaking.”
“This is Frank Rossella, down at the medical examiner’s office? I’m sorry I didn’t get in touch with you during business hours.”
“What is it?” I said.
“There’s a John Doe down here. We think you should take a look at him.”
On my way out to the car, my little speech to Ainsley Carter came back to me: A lot of times you don’t get closure.
As I slid behind the wheel, ready to drive to the medical examiner’s building, a voice in my mind said, Here’s the closure you wanted, Sarah, here’s your closure, here’s your closure…
I drowned it out with the noise of the Nova’s engine.