You always pay for time off with extra time at work, either before or after. On Monday I went to work early, knowing I’d need time to make up for my personal days.
Vang wasn’t there when I got in, but he’d left reports on the recent disappearances on my desk.
None of them seemed out of the ordinary to me. They could be put in a few general categories: Tired of Being Married, Tired of Living Under My Parents’ Rules, or Too Absentminded to Tell Anyone I’m Leaving Town for a While.
Vang came in with a cup of coffee around nine. “How was your time off?” he asked.
“It was all right,” I said shortly. I hadn’t told him I had gone to see Genevieve. She was living in a kind of departmental limbo, without a set date for her return. Our lieutenant was allowing it because she was a well-liked veteran. But I still didn’t want to draw the department’s attention to her absence and to the question of when she was coming back.
“What’s the big news around here?” I asked.
“There’s not a lot going on,” Vang said. “I got all the paperwork on Mrs. Thorenson. Did you see the report? I left it on your desk.”
“I read it,” I said, moving it to the top of the pile.
Annette Thorenson had gone on a weekend trip upstate with a friend, to a resort south of St. Cloud. She hadn’t come back. Nor had she told her friend anything to imply that she wasn’t going straight home to where she lived in a Lake Harriet town house with a husband and no kids. Mr. Thorenson was beside himself.
“The gasoline card’s been used,” Vang said. “ATMs have been hit four times. Twice moving eastward to Wisconsin. Twice in Madison.”
“And?” I said.
“His friends say the marriage is solid. Her friends all say it’s not. One of them, who’s recently divorced herself, said Annette asked a lot of questions in the key of: ‘What’s it like to get divorced and start over?’ ”
“See? Tired of Being Married,” I said. I’d told him about my categories.
“So I asked if Annette knew anyone in Madison,” Vang went on. “Turns out that’s where she went to school. Lived there a year afterward, working.”
“And she still has friends there?”
“I couldn’t get any names. My guess is there’s an old flame still in town. The problem is, it seems like she’s keeping a low profile now that she’s there. I gave the Madison cops her license number, hoping they’d pick her up and bring her into a station, have her call her husband and tell him flat out what’s going on. But they haven’t seen the car. And she hasn’t used the ATM in the past few days.”
“ ‘I’ll buy, sweetheart,’ ” I said. The old flame was apparently picking up the checks.
“Yeah,” Vang said. “But Mr. Thorenson doesn’t believe any of it. He says someone must be forcing her to drive east and get money out of cash machines. I’ve tried to tell him that everything points to her taking a time-out from her life here, but he’s not convinced. He calls here a lot and the word negligence keeps coming up. He wants to speak to my supervisor.”
“I suspect you have a pink message slip for me.”
“Several.”
“I just need one.”
I called Mr. Thorenson at his office and listened while he recounted his unsatisfying conversations with Vang. He was unhappy when I told him that Vang had done everything I would have.
“It might be time to bring in some private help,” I said. “I can give you the phone numbers of several very competent investigators,” I said.
“At this point, I’m thinking of contacting a lawyer, Miss Pribek,” Thorenson responded, and hung up.
Too bad, I thought. I knew more lawyers than I did PIs; I could have made a referral there, too. Miss Pribek. If that pejorative courtesy title was his idea of subtle psychological warfare, I could see why his wife might have gotten tired of him.
The highlight of the day was a trip across town to examine the clean, empty apartment of a young man with a lot of gambling debts. Another person who’d left town of his own volition, I thought.
“Did you see the vacuum marks on the carpet?” I asked Vang on the way back. “Track-covering. Guilty conscience. People often clean when they’re not planning on coming back.”
“Yeah,” he said. “My wife even cleans house before we go on vacation, so in case we’re in a fatal on the highway, our families won’t come here and see a dirty house. It’s her version of wearing clean underwear.”
We fell silent and I thought about the evening ahead.
If Genevieve had been on the job, she would have suggested we do something after work tonight, my first night without Shiloh around. She would have known that I’d gotten unused to living alone, but she wouldn’t have made a big deal of it.
Maybe it was time for me to get to know my new partner a little better.
“You want to get a cup of coffee after work?” I asked, steering down the spiral ramp at the garage downtown.
Vang looked at me sidewise, maybe surprised. “Thanks,” he said. “But I’ve got to get home for dinner. Some other time, okay?”
“You bet,” I said, sounding old and Minnesotan to myself.
I stayed late at work, occupying myself with a motley assortment of small tasks that probably could have waited. When I ran out of those, I went to the courts where Hennepin County people regularly played pickup basketball, hoping to get recruited into a game. Shiloh and I had been among the regular players.
But nobody that I recognized was there. Instead, a group of rookies was playing two-on-two. They looked like they could have come straight from the U of M’s women’s team: all female, all tall, three-fourths blonde. They were also evenly matched; there wasn’t room for an extra player, even had we known each other.
A small thing lifted my spirits when I returned home: there was a basket of tomatoes on the stoop. No note, but none was needed. Mrs. Muzio kept a prodigious garden all summer long, and vegetables turned up on our steps regularly. Standing on the kitchen doorstep at the back of the house, I looked over and saw the slow, wild demise of Mrs. Muzio’s kitchen garden: a sunflower in death was half bowed under its own weight; the herbs had flowered and bolted. But the tomato plants were still heavy-laden with the last fruits of the season.
I doubted Mrs. Muzio knew Shiloh was gone. She left tomatoes more often than anything else, because she knew how much Shiloh liked them. Tomato sandwiches were his staple when he was too busy to cook. Often, when he came home on a quick break from work, he’d make one and eat it standing over the sink.
I pushed the strap of my shoulder bag onto a secure spot higher on my shoulder, held the basket in one arm against my ribs, and opened the door with my other hand.
Shiloh had said he’d call to give me a number where he could be reached at Quantico, but I didn’t look at the answering machine right away. First, I put Mrs. Muzio’s tomatoes away in the refrigerator, fixed myself a Coke over ice, went to change out of my work clothes. Only then did I go to the machine to find Shiloh’s message.
There was none. The tiny red eye, often flashing when we’d both been out all day, was dim, unlit.
Well, okay, he’s busy. He’s been traveling, and then getting used to his new surroundings. The phone lines work both ways, you know. Call him instead.
That was going to pose a problem: I still didn’t have a phone number for him.
There was probably a way to get through to the dormitory where the agents-in-training lived. Getting that number wouldn’t be easy, though, at this hour. Dealing with the FBI often meant multiple calls and phone tag, even on official business. Even during office hours. This was only personal business, and it was after hours. In Virginia it was already eight.
I had the phone number of an FBI agent, the one who’d worked closely with Shiloh on the Annelise Eliot case. It might be helpful to call Agent Thompson first, explain the situation, and ask him to run interference for me with his peers.
It took several minutes of hunting around in the disorganized entries in our phone book, but I found Thompson’s phone number. My hand was on the phone when something else came to mind.
Two months ago, Shiloh and I had watched a cable-channel documentary on the making of FBI agents. From it, I’d gotten an idea of what life at Quantico would be like for Shiloh. From the very first day there was a demanding round of training: baseline testing on physical conditioning, classroom instruction on procedure and law and ethics. At night, the agents-in-training lived like college students, studying at small desks with snapshots of spouses and children hanging over them, going to each other’s rooms briefly to talk, decompressing after a hard day.
After years as an outsider, Shiloh was probably in his element at last, surrounded by people as single-minded and driven as he was. He was spending his small amount of free time getting to know others in his agent class, looking at the photos over the desks. Most likely many of them were doing that, getting to know each other, trading stories about the diverse career paths that had led them to Quantico. And I was about to make Shiloh the only one who had to go to the phone to take a call from his needy wife, who was worried because it had been over twenty-four hours and he hadn’t called home.
I turned on ESPN and put it out of my mind.
“… killed two soldiers at a bus stop last year. No party has claimed responsibility for this year’s bombing… In Blue Earth, the search intensifies for 67-year-old Thomas Hall, the apparent victim of a single-vehicle accident. His truck was found early Sunday outside town, where it had crashed into a tree off the eastbound lane. Search-and-rescue teams are widening the scope of their hunt, but have not been successful in locating Hall. WMNN news time, six fifty-nine.”
It was Tuesday morning, and the clock radio had awakened me, but I wasn’t ready to get out of bed yet. When the phone rang several minutes later, I was still half asleep. I picked it up and had to clear my throat before speaking.
“I woke you up, sorry,” the voice on the other end said.
“Shiloh?” He sounded strange.
Vang laughed. “I really did wake you,” he said. He sounded very chipper. I sat up, a little embarrassed. He went on, “There’s a grave out in Wayzata we’ve got to look at.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s the story?” I asked.
“They don’t know yet. A woman called this morning. She lives in the same neighborhood-I mean, the same area-with a released sex offender, a child molester. Last night she saw him out with a flashlight, digging, his car parked nearby.”
“And she knew it was a grave how?”
“Well, she said the hole looked about the right size to be a grave. She didn’t see him put anything in it. He was filling it in, actually. I guess she lives on a hill, has a pretty good view of the area, so she could watch awhile.”
“Is she part of a neighborhood watch?”
“Not officially, but this guy-his name’s Bonney-makes everyone out there nervous. They all got the flyer about him being a released sex offender. This woman woke up at four A.M. worrying about what she’d seen and finally decided to call us. So now we’re digging.”
I sat up, feeling more awake. “We’ve really got a warrant to dig on his property? Probable cause seems pretty weak. Didn’t anyone suggest we just talk to this guy first?”
“They sent a patrolman to do that,” Vang said. “He’s not home, and he’s not at work, either, even though he’s on the schedule. Nobody likes it. But here’s the good part: He didn’t actually dig on his own property. The lot on the other side of his back fence is undeveloped county land. That’s where he was digging.”
“Ah,” I said.
“So, no warrant needed,” Vang confirmed. “Should I pick you up? I’m at home right now, but I could come straight over.”
I pushed the blanket off my legs with my free hand. “Yeah, that’d be good,” I said. “I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Thirty-five minutes later, Vang and I were standing on an acre of peaceful countryside near Wayzata Bay. Despite its proximity to the city, this was a place more rural than suburban in its flavor, with plenty of land between houses; I could see why Vang had called it an “area” rather than a “neighborhood” on the phone.
The crime-scene unit van was parked at the edge of the road, and two officers were digging. Amateur graves are usually shallow, and exhuming them is work too delicate for a backhoe.
Marijuana farmers sometimes cultivate their crop deep in isolated public lands. The obvious advantage is that the growers have to be caught on-site for the crop to be linked to them, as opposed to having the incriminating plant on their own property. If Bonney had in fact killed someone, he had a similar incentive not to bury on his own property. He hadn’t gone very far, but perhaps he’d felt it wiser not to travel with a body in his car.
Vang and I had just finished reading through the new missing-persons reports and be-on-the-lookouts for the last forty-eight hours; in addition, Vang had a printout of Bonney’s criminal record.
“I don’t get a vibe off any of these missing persons,” I said. “All adults or late teens.”
“They don’t seem like Bonney’s type, do they?” Vang agreed.
“No. Besides, you read his record, right? Sexual battery, child molestation. But he’s never killed anyone, or even come close.”
Vang listened but said nothing.
“Sometimes sexual predators progress to worse crimes, like homicide,” I said. “But there just hasn’t been a disappearance in the last forty-eight hours that seems to match up with this guy burying someone in a field near his house.” I watched one of the officers pause and gingerly scrape aside some wet soil. Vang and I were keeping our distance for now, letting them do their work with a minimum of disturbance to the ground and surroundings. “Usually, you’ll have a pretty good idea about these things. You’ll get a call that someone’s found a body and you’ll know right away, ‘We found Jane.’ I don’t get that feeling here.” I sighed. “You know what I think? I think Bonney burned a damn casserole until the pot was beyond salvaging and took the whole mess out and buried it. His neighbor up the hill saw it, lay awake until a little hole became a yawning grave, and called us. Sometimes I think this whole sex-offender thing, with disclosure and flyers and neighborhood meetings, has gotten way out of hand.”
I cut myself off. Shiloh had only been gone two days and already I was channeling him, spreading his unpopular liberal views to my new partner. “If they find something bad, maybe we’ll ask for a warrant for the house,” I said, backpedaling. “If not, let the parole officer make the surprise visits to look for a violation. It’s his job.”
“If I’d known it was going to take this long for them to disinter, I’d have stopped for coffee,” Vang said.
“When they make you go out to the sticks at seven-thirty in the morning on a situation like this,” I agreed, “coffee may be the highlight of the trip.”
In truth, it wasn’t coffee I wished I’d taken time for but a shower. There’s something a shower provides that has very little to do with actual cleanliness. It’s punctuation: without one, traces of yesterday and last night and bed cling to you, no matter how alert you feel, how you’re dressed, or what you’re doing.
The breeze picked up, coming from the direction of the lake. We couldn’t quite see the water from where we were; it was obscured by bare, skinny trees that made up in number what they lacked in individual heft.
“Does my voice really sound like your husband’s?” Vang asked, and I remembered how I’d answered the phone.
“Not really, the more I-”
“Hey, look at that,” Vang interrupted.
I broke off and looked at the crime-scene officers. They were carefully lifting something wrapped in a green garbage bag out of the ground.
“It’s definitely not a casserole dish,” I admitted.
“But it looks kind of small to be a person,” Vang said. We were already walking over. “Unless it’s a kid.”
“Or it’s not a whole person,” I said, and Vang winced.
The first officer, Penhall, took his camera and photographed the bagged form where it lay just next to the hole it had been lifted from.
Officer Malik took a penknife and, pulling the bag away from the object inside, slit the bag lengthwise without disturbing the knot at the top.
The first thing I saw as the blade slid through green plastic was tawny blond hair. But what was inside was blond all over: a golden retriever. Some dried blood matted the fur.
“Aw, shit,” Malik said. It was hard to tell if he spoke as a dog lover or a technician who’d just wasted a lot of time.
“Well,” Penhall said, “hold on. This guy killed a neighbor’s dog, that’s pretty serious.” He looked at Vang and me for validation.
“Could you take the wrap all the way off?” I said.
Malik did. I looked at Vang and raised an eyebrow.
“It just looks like a dog that got hit by a car to me,” Vang observed.
Malik was nodding agreement.
“Then why take the trouble to bury it?” Penhall asked.
“Because it’s probably a family pet, belonging to someone around here. And Bonney’s already very unpopular, because he’s a child molester.” I glanced up the hill to the neighbor’s tall and graceful house. Morning sunlight glinted off the floor-to-ceiling windows of what was likely the living room. She and her family had a great view of the lake, as well as of the property of Mr. Bonney, released sex offender. “He doesn’t want to make his reputation any worse than it already is.”
Malik straightened up. “What are you gonna do now?”
“That’s a good question,” I said. “Dogs are property. I guess there’s a property crime here. It’s not missing persons. I think we’re going to drop by the Wayzata police station and let them sort it out.”
As Vang made a U-turn and pointed the car back toward town, he looked hard at Bonney’s place, a single-story dwelling with a sagging porch roof.
“I wonder what we’d find in that house if we went in,” he said.
“A civil suit,” I said, “waiting to happen.”
Vang drove us back to Minneapolis, but not to work. I needed to pick up my own car, and beyond that, I wanted a shower. There was time: our schedules and workdays have to be a little fluid, given the demands of the job. Vang and I had already put in nearly an hour before our day normally started.
“I forgot to mention it yesterday,” Vang said, “but on Sunday night Fielding’s girlfriend got one of those phone calls, like Mann and Juarez’s wives got.”
“Oh yeah?” I knew what he was talking about. Everyone did. Two wives of Hennepin County deputies had received anonymous phone calls lately.
The caller’s voice, in both cases, sounded sincere and regretful. He’d identified himself as ER staff and told Deputy Mann’s wife that her husband had been critically injured in an accident in his squad car.
She’d been distraught, naturally, and wanted more details. The caller had hedged, providing a little more information couched in medical terms. Then he’d been “cut off” before he could say which hospital he was calling from.
Mrs. Mann had called downtown. It took dispatchers a few minutes to locate him, but before too long Mann had called home to reassure his wife that his watch had been completely without incident and he had no idea who would call her with a story like that.
Four weeks later the same thing happened to the wife of Deputy Juarez, except in her case, the caller regretfully said he’d been killed.
The coincidence was too great. A departmental memo was circulated, detailing the “sick joke” being perpetrated and telling officers to warn their families.
When the memo had gone around, a theory began to circulate right behind it, suggesting that the caller could be somebody with the county; somebody who’d gotten access somehow to a departmental phone list. Many cops had unlisted numbers, which helped to protect them from harassment or worse from people they’d arrested and helped build cases against.
“Is Fielding in the white pages?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Vang said, “but they’re saying it doesn’t matter. Because of the Sunshine in Minneapolis site.”
“Oh,” I said, remembering.
The Sunshine site took its name loosely from “sunshine” laws, or freedom-of-information laws that provided access to information on public processes and officials. The site, started by husband-and-wife community activists, was something like a Drudge Report/Smoking Gun for the city. Among the information posted were phone numbers and sometimes home addresses for police officers and sheriff’s deputies, all gleaned incidentally from various reports and court records that had been made public at one time or another. The theory, according to the site’s creators, was that cops would think twice about harassing innocent citizens if they knew their home phone numbers and addresses were on the Web for anyone to retrieve.
“You’re saying that both Mann and Juarez’s numbers were on the site?” I asked. We were crossing under the railroad tracks in Northeast, approaching my place.
“Juarez is actually in the phone book,” Vang said. “But yeah, all three are on the Web site, too. Nothing’s written in stone, but that’s one way this sicko could have gotten their numbers.”
I shook my head. “That site seemed kind of funny to me at the time,” I told him. “I looked myself up. It said, ‘married to a Minneapolis cop’ next to my name. Shiloh and I laughed about it.”
“Yeah, well, nobody’s laughing about it downtown. Some of the guys are saying this could help get the site shut down, if they can prove it’s helping someone harass women anonymously.”
“Good,” I said as we pulled over to the curb.
“See you in about a half hour,” Vang said.
I enjoyed the shower more for its being belated. I was starting to have a good feeling about today. There was probably just enough time to stop and pick up a bagel. I’d get one for Vang, too, although I didn’t really know his tastes. Genevieve’s I would have known: she almost always chose a sundried-tomato bagel, spreading it with a parsimoniously thin layer of lite cream cheese. Vang, much younger, rail-thin, and male, probably would rather start his day with a doughnut.
Wet-haired, dressed again, with my bag over my shoulder, I headed toward the back door. The sun was spilling through the east-facing kitchen window, and it was so bright that I almost missed the flashing of the message light on the machine. Almost.
“This message is for Michael Shiloh,” an unfamiliar female voice said. “This is Kim in the training unit at Quantico. If you’ve had problems getting here or otherwise been delayed, we need to know. Your class was sworn in today. My number here is…”
I replayed the message right away, as though that would make it make more sense. Kim’s words revealed nothing new the second time and I felt the first rustlings of worry in my chest.
Come on, I told myself. You know he’s there. The message is just a bureaucratic mix-up. These are the feds; every ten years they do a census in which they lose several million of us. Just call her; she’ll tell you it was a mistake.
I picked up the phone.
“Good morning,” I said when she answered. “My name is Sarah Pribek. You left a message on my machine, asking about Michael Shiloh, my husband. I guess he was delayed, and I just wanted to make sure he got there.”
“He’s not here,” Kim said flatly.
“Oh,” I said. “Are you sure you would know? I mean-”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure,” she said. “It’s my job to know. Are you saying he’s not in Minneapolis?”
“He’s not here,” I said after a moment. I felt the muscles in my throat work emptily as I swallowed without realizing I was going to do it.
“Sometimes people do back out,” she said. “Usually, they have second thoughts about the gun-carrying part of the job-”
“That wouldn’t be it,” I said. “I have to go.” On that abrupt and artless goodbye, I hung up.
My first thought: he’d been in a serious car accident, maybe on the road from the airport to Quantico. But that wasn’t right. If there’d been an accident, maybe Quantico and Kim wouldn’t necessarily have been notified, but I should have been. Shiloh would have been carrying his Minnesota driver’s license, and his home address was on it. They always notify family. But I’d heard from no one but Kim.
My next call was to Vang. “I’m not going to be in for an hour or so,” I said. “There’s something I need to run down. Sorry.”
“Something on a case?” he asked.
“Something personal,” I said, feeling evasive. “This probably won’t take all that long,” I said apologetically before hanging up.
Shiloh was not at Quantico. What did that mean?
If he’d changed his plans, if he’d decided to withdraw from the Academy, he’d have told me. And he’d have told them. But that didn’t matter, I thought, because he wouldn’t have changed his plans. Shiloh had wanted this. If he wasn’t there, something had gone wrong.
Had he even gotten as far as Virginia?
Whether he was in Minnesota or Virginia seemed to be the first distinction I was going to have to make. If I couldn’t narrow that down, I would waste crucial time, because I couldn’t effectively deal with both places at once.
I reached for the phone book and looked up the number for Northwest Airlines.
“I’m going to need a passenger manifest for your two thirty-five flight to Reagan on Sunday,” I told the ticket agent.
“What?” she said. “We don’t-”
“Give that information out, I know. I’m a Hennepin County sheriff’s detective. I know the drill.” I shifted the phone to my other ear, already digging in my desk. “Tell your ticketing supervisor that my name is Detective Sarah Pribek and that I’m going to be down there in about twenty-five minutes with a signed request on stationery with our letterhead.”