“Run it by me again?” I said to Sorenson, the watch commander at the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. My bare feet were cold on the kitchen linoleum at home. Minnesota seemed to have plunged ahead into near-winter cold while I had been in the warmth of the West.
“A vice guy brought a hooker in on a soliciting bust. She wants to trade some information, but she says she won’t talk to anyone but Detective Pribek.”
“Information on what?”
“Major felony is all she’ll say.” Sorenson coughed. “I know you’re supposed to be taking some personal time, because of the situation with your husband, but she’s asking for you.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come down.”
I’d expected a skinny drug user scarcely out of her teens, hardly attractive, ready to drop the dime on her pimp for something he’d done. Someone far different waited for me in the interrogation room. Her age was hard to judge. She had the perfect skin and lustrous hair of youth, but her gaze and especially her poise reminded me of an older woman.
She’d shed a fur-lined coat to reveal a white leather dress that bared her arms. The heat in the Third Precinct building was generous, although my feet were still cold.
“I hear you’ve got something to tell me,” I said.
“Got a cigarette?” she said.
I was inclined to say no, to exert some control over this meeting. But looking at her, I got the feeling that she wasn’t nervous at all. She might very well refuse to proceed until she got her cigarette.
In the hall I flagged down the third-watch detective, a born-again Christian I had a casual acquaintance with. “I need a smoke,” I said, and he nodded. “Matches, too.”
The hooker said nothing when I returned with her cigarette. She took the cigarette and matches and lit up, making a prodigious cloud of smoke. Then she took one drag, exhaled, and stubbed out the cigarette.
“Thanks,” she said throatily.
A power trip. Fuck her information. “It’s been real,” I said. “Enjoy your ninety days.”
When I was at the door she said, “Don’t you want to hear about your husband?”
I stopped and turned.
Her hard eyes traveled me like mine did her, from my wool hat and gray T-shirt down to my salt-stained winter boots. I hadn’t bothered changing into my on-the-job clothes, since it was the middle of the night, and if she’d asked for me specifically, she obviously knew who I was.
“I killed him,” she said, and crossed legs encased in hip-high boots.
I took a seat across the table from her. Standing was a position of greater authority, but I wanted to get my hands out of her line of sight in case they started shaking.
“I doubt it,” I said mildly. “Can you prove it?”
“I have ads in the weekly papers. He called me,” she said. “Looking for sex. When I got here tonight, I recognized him from the picture hanging up on the bulletin board.”
“I said proof, not circumstantial details.” Why are my feet still so goddamn cold?
“I can tell you where he’s buried.”
“Bullshit. If you got away with murder you wouldn’t be here confessing.”
“Great in bed, wasn’t he?”
“Knock it off. You read about Shiloh in the Star Tribune and decided to have some fun jerking the cops around with a fake confession.”
“No, I wanted to get a look at you. He told me that you once picked up a rattlesnake and killed it by breaking its neck. Is that true?” she asked.
“Yes.” Now my hands really were shaking. She shouldn’t have known that.
“I asked him why he was out looking for strange pussy with a woman like that at home,” she said. She leaned forward to speak confidentially. “Your husband told me you could never really let go in bed because of what your brother did to you when you were young.”
The slamming of my heart woke me. It took a moment for me to remember where I was. A poster advertising the Ashland Shakespeare Festival brought it back: I was in New Mexico, Saturday morning, in Shiloh’s sister’s home.
I’d slept on the couch in Sinclair’s study, with motley blankets wrapped around me. My feet, bare and escaping the covers, were cold.
Stiff as an old dog that had slept on a hard floor, I threw the blankets back and rose. Limberness returned slowly as I folded the blankets and stacked them as neatly as possible on the couch, placing the pillow on top. Then I bent to gather up my things. As I did, I rooted through my duffel bag to find Shiloh’s Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, suddenly feeling a desire to wear it today.
When I came out into the kitchen wet-haired from the shower, Ligieia was at the table, reading The Merchant of Venice. She looked up at my approach.
“Is Sinclair still here?” I asked Ligieia. Already I sensed that she wasn’t.
“No,” Ligieia confirmed. “She had some errands.”
Reaching into my shoulder bag, I took a piece of paper from the legal pad I’d brought and tore it in half. On the top half I wrote my home phone and work voice-mail numbers and my work e-mail address. “In case she thinks of anything else, you can call me, or she can send me a message,” I explained.
Then I hefted my duffel bag onto my other shoulder. “Thanks for everything. Tell Sinclair I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
Ligieia followed me to the front door. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you going to do now? About your husband?”
“I’m going back to Minneapolis,” I said. “I’ve got some more leads I can follow up there.”
“Well,” she said. “Good luck.”
On the drive back down to Albuquerque, I kept my speed down under the posted limit.
And really, there was no reason to hurry. I would catch the first available flight back to the Cities, but I had little idea what I should do when I got there.
I’d been a cop so long that it was second nature for me to lie when a civilian like Ligieia asked how an investigation was going. No matter how badly an investigation is going, cops simply don’t say they’re at a dead end. They say, Leads are coming in every day, and I can’t comment any further than that.
That was nearly always true, for what it was worth. Missing-persons cases, homicide cases, bank robberies-every serious crime generated leads from the public. A vast percentage of them were worthless, though: visions from psychics, lies from anonymous pranksters, honest citizens who’d seen something that turned out to be nothing.
Vang, though, had promised to follow up on any leads and leave me a message if anything looked promising. So far I’d heard nothing from him.
At a bank of pay phones in the Denver airport, I did the first of my twice-daily message checks. Today, the recorded voice told me I had one message. To my surprise, it was Genevieve. The message was unrevealing.
“It’s me,” her voice said simply. “I guess I’ll call you later.”
I played it again. There was a muted anger in her tone. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted from me. Well, I’d call when I got back to the Cities, I thought. If she had urgent news, surely she would have left details in her message.
On the plane east, I scribbled copious notes-if not particularly articulate ones-in my legal pad. I was trying to identify what came next.
Reinterview all the neighborhood witnesses? Were this some sort of exercise in my police training, that’s the answer I would probably have written down, fairly confidently. Shiloh’s trail seemed to be freshest in our own neighborhood, where he’d bought food at the Conoco the day he disappeared, where Mrs. Muzio had seen him walking and looking “angry” on a day that had most likely been Saturday, the day of his disappearance.
But already I had a hopeless feeling about it. If the most useful information I had was that Shiloh was walking somewhere and looking purposeful on Saturday, then really I had nothing. I understood nothing about how or why Shiloh had disappeared.
Genevieve’s ideas had been the simplest and the most likely. Somehow he’d walked to his death somewhere in the neighborhood. Suicide on a bridge. Murder at the hands of some prostitute or her pimp.
Fucking Genevieve. She’d all but planted in my head the dream I’d had last night. Shiloh and I had always been nothing if not physically compatible; I’d never had any worries on that account. But “strange pussy” had been Genevieve’s phrase, and the prostitute in my dream had quoted her.
Genevieve’s theories of adultery or suicide didn’t square with what I knew of Shiloh. It was disrespectful to his-to him, damn it, not to his memory-to entertain them.
I closed the notepad and slid it back into my shoulder bag. As I did so, I felt my hand brush a rectangle of paper smoother and stiffer than the random papers I’d shoved into my bag for the trip west.
It was a letter-size envelope, and clearly it contained more than one sheet of paper inside; it was nearly pillowy. On the address side, in an unfamiliar hand, was one word: Sarah.
Sinclair, I thought, and opened it to find a small sheaf of pages inside. As I unfolded them, a yet smaller envelope, three-quarters the size of the one I’d just opened, fell out. It was cream-colored, sealed, unmarked.
I set the little envelope on the unoccupied seat next to mine and directed my attention to the typewritten letter before me.
Sarah,
I have a feeling I’m going to be up and out of the house before you get up today. I wish we’d had more time to talk. Thinking about what we talked about, I realize that none of it seemed to be germane to your search for Mike. But I gather from what you said that you feel a need to understand where Mike came from, and maybe I can help with that. I’ve only known you a very short while, but Hope likes you, and I’ve found my daughter to be an excellent judge of character.
I’m not sure I can tell you all that much about life at home while Mike was growing up. I spent a lot of my childhood away at school. Mike and I didn’t get to know each other well until we were both older, when I came home to live. Those days stand out in my memory because they were difficult ones.
When my parents sent me away to school, they did it with misgivings, first because ours was a close-knit family, and also because they worried about me being in a secular environment. To compensate, they sent me away with a Children’s Bible, and when I was older they mailed me books of devotions and daily prayers. When I went home on term breaks, I always went to church with them and prayed with them around the dinner table. But in the end, their fears were well founded.
I had a lot of freedom at school. There was no mandatory church or chapel attendance. I could read whatever I wanted to in the school library. And the other girls came from many different cultures, and we often discussed our religious backgrounds and beliefs. I never questioned the schism between my two worlds. Home was one kind of place, and school was another.
I loved my family, of course, and I was happy to come home full-time when my parents arranged it. But actually being there was a shock. Church services on Sunday morning, youth group on Sunday evening, Bible study on Wednesday night. No television, no secular movies. The most difficult thing, though, was that no one at home could use sign language as well as people at school did. Both my older brothers were rusty, and Naomi and Bethany were too young to be fluent. My parents encouraged me to speak aloud, but I wouldn’t. Some of the girls at school described how other kids made fun of the way deaf people spoke, comparing it to the bleating of sheep or the sounds made by dolphins. So pride made me insist on signing.
A great deal of what I did back then was either rooted in pride or a grab for freedom. Suddenly I was out of my cloistered private school and into the wider world, yet I felt, if anything, more boxed in. By my parents’ rules and my family’s lifestyle. By the averted gazes of hearing kids who were afraid to make eye contact with me for fear that I’d try to communicate with them and they wouldn’t understand. By the unwanted touches and hugs from people in the congregation who thought that being disabled made me “special” and childlike and morally pure. I started to feel panicky, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air.
During this time, there was only one person who made me feel like the person I’d been at school. That was Michael.
By September, I’d been home all summer, but I hadn’t seen him. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in over a year. I’d spent the last term break at the school, and then by the time I got home in June, he was already away on a summer service project to do with the church, building homes on an Indian reservation. We’d just kept missing each other. And he was late coming home in September, too, because he’d broken his arm falling off a roof he was working on. They let him stay where he was and miss the first week of school so he could get the cast taken off instead of traveling with it.
Then one night in the first week of school, I was working on a book report and I got that somebody’s-behind-me feeling-you become fairly good at that when you’re deaf-and I turned around and it was Mike.
For a minute I thought it was one of Adam’s or Bill’s friends. Mike had grown three inches since I’d seen him last; he was taller than me all of a sudden. And when he asked me if what I was reading was any good, I realized he could really, honest-to-God sign, and I was terribly relieved.
After that we spent a great deal of time together. We’d been apart so long, and changed so much in the interim, it was like getting to know a stranger. We used to have these long conversations. Mike knew the Bible incredibly well; he could debate like a seminarian, but when I told him all the things I didn’t understand or couldn’t believe about God and the Bible, he never judged me. I realized that he was losing his faith, too. I never meant to push him in that direction, but I just couldn’t lie about how I felt. I had to have one person with whom I could completely be myself, and that was him. Apostasy was hard for Mike; it’s harder to lose your faith, like him, than to realize you never really had it, like me.
Things with my parents just got worse and worse. I wanted freedom, and I took it in the places young people usually do-in drinking and sex. I’m not entirely proud of how I behaved back then, but I was young. My parents resorted to tighter restrictions, earlier curfews. I started sneaking out of the house, but after I got caught a couple of times, I stopped trying. I knew I just had to wait until I was 18 and could leave, and until then, Mike made living at home bearable. He was the oxygen in the air when I couldn’t breathe.
I know none of this will help you find him. I just wanted you to know it. Mike has his own life now, and I have mine, but he’ll always be special to me. When you talked about him last night, I could see what he means to you, and without even talking to him, I know how much you must mean to him, because Mike is a fiercely loyal person. He’s very lucky to have you. I know you’re going to find him, and when you do, I want you to give him the message I’ve enclosed.
Sinclair
After I read the letter, I felt strangely light, the way I did when I’d received an unexpected kindness. I picked up the little envelope from the seat next to me.
Open it. That was my first instinct; this was an investigation and every piece of information counted.
Don’t be ridiculous. I realized the next moment that the idea of Sinclair sealing up important information in an envelope like some kind of test was obviously ludicrous. She wasn’t going to play games with her brother’s well-being at stake.
The sealed note was a gesture of faith, twofold: it said she trusted that I would find her brother, and that she knew I wasn’t going to open and read a personal message to him without his permission. It was a kind, subtle, clever gesture. I slipped it into the pocket of my leather jacket.
Genevieve, Shiloh, now Sinclair… if there was a God, it occurred to me to wonder why He chose to surround me with people so much more intelligent than I was, and then to make so much of what was happening to us depend on me.