by Jodi Compton
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.
chapter 20
Perhaps because of the dream I’d had that morning, the first place I went back in Minneapolis was to headquarters. I wanted to walk its corridors in the sane and normal light of day and reclaim them as my territory. And to check in with Vang in person, see if he’d heard anything he might not have thought important enough to call me about.
But when I got downtown, Vang was out. I checked my voice mail at my desk. There were no messages. But I hadn’t yet returned Genevieve’s call.
“What’s going on?” I asked when she picked up. “You called me earlier today.”
“It’s him,” Genevieve said without preamble. “That bastard Shorty. He’s got the luck of Satan himself, the goddamned prick.”
This was amazing language, coming from Genevieve. “What happened?” I asked.
“He stole that old man’s truck, but he’s not going to get busted,” Genevieve said.
“Wait,” I said. “Back up, okay? What old man’s truck?”
“Everyone thought there was an old guy missing,” Genevieve said. “They found his pickup smashed up by the side of the county road outside Blue Earth, and they thought he must have walked away from the accident disoriented.”
“Yeah, I remember that from the news,” I said.
“The old guy turned up two days ago. He was in Louisiana visiting a friend, and his truck was stolen from the Amtrak parking lot while he was gone. So they dusted it for prints, and guess whose name came up?”
“Royce Stewart.”
“Damn straight,” Genevieve said. “They got partials off the door. But he fed them this bullshit story. He said that he just stumbled across the wrecked truck on the way home from town. He’d been drinking in town, of course. As always.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“He said he checked the truck out up close, to make sure no one was hurt inside it. When no one was there, he said he figured everything was cool and went on home. A real saint, is our Shorty.”
“Does he have an alibi for when the pickup was stolen?”
“They don’t know exactly when the truck was taken,” Genevieve said. “Because the old man who owned it left it parked in the Amtrak lot. So that muddies things for the cops. But it’s just the sort of thing he’d do. He didn’t have a ride, he saw one he liked, he stole it. And he’s going to get away with it.”
“Is that the only reason you called me?”
“Isn’t it enough?” she demanded. “Why can’t anybody but me see what this guy is?”
“I know what he is, too, Gen,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do. His time will come.”
There was silence on the line, and I knew my answer didn’t satisfy her.
Then she said, “Should I ask how the search for Shiloh is going?”
“No,” I said.
I sat at my desk for a moment after we’d hung up. I thought of people I’d met, relatives of the permanently missing. They checked in with Genevieve or me at increasingly infrequent intervals. They tried to interest reporters in “anniversary” stories. Waited for someone out there to drop the dime on a cellmate or an ex-boyfriend. Holding out hope for little more than that someday there would be a proper funeral, a gravestone to visit.
How soon would those days come for me?
I had learned nothing, virtually nothing, in five days of investigating Shiloh’s disappearance. I couldn’t think of a single case I’d made less progress on.
On the ground-floor hallway, a sign shaped like an arrow caught my eye. BLOOD DRIVE TODAY, it read.
Shiloh was O negative. He always gave religiously.
Ryan Crane, a records clerk I knew, rounded the corner and approached. He had a bright pink stretch bandage on the crook of his elbow; he’d donated.
“Going to let ’em stick a needle in you, Detective Pribek?” he asked cheerfully.
“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said, caught flat-footed. “I just came down to-”
“Oh, hell, I forgot,” Crane said. “Have you heard anything about your husband?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing. I’m still working on it.”
He nodded and looked sympathetic. He was 22 at the most-I’d never asked-but I knew he was married with two kids.
Crane moved on, but I didn’t continue on my way to the parking ramp.
I had A positive blood, which was common, but not as useful as Shiloh’s. But Shiloh wasn’t here to give any blood at all, and that fact was nagging at me, like it fell to me now to act for him.
Besides, the Northeast reinterviews were going to be a tired round on a cold trail. They weren’t urgent.
The blood-bank people had set up in the largest of the conference rooms available. There were four reclining chairs, with rolling stands next to them from which hung plastic bags, some filling with blood, others empty.
All the chairs were occupied. That didn’t surprise me. I’d heard the lectures before, when I was in uniform. Despite the fact that most cops got through their careers without serious injury, sergeants and captains liked to lecture uniforms about how the blood they donated could easily save the life of a fellow officer injured in the line of duty.
While I waited for a chair to open up, a white-coated phlebotomist read me a list of improbable conditions that would disqualify me: Did I or anyone in my family have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? Had I ever paid for sex with drugs or accepted drugs for sex? Had I had sex with anyone who’d lived in Africa since 1977?
She rewarded all my “no” answers by stabbing me in the finger with a tiny lancet.
“Go ahead and take that chair,” she said. “I’ll get back to you when your hematocrit is done.”
I lay back next to a grizzled parole officer with whom I had a slight acquaintance.
“How are you?” he asked.
“Full of blood,” I said lightly. For all that I hate doctors’ offices and exam rooms, needles have never bothered me, particularly in blood drives at work, a place where I feel most at ease.
“Take this,” the young white-coated woman said, returning to my side.
She gave me a white rubber ball. “We’ll get you started. Make a fist and squeeze.”
I did, raising a vein. She painted the inside of my elbow with antiseptic, put a strap on my upper arm, and then I felt the bite of the needle. She taped it down. A clamp on the line kept the tube clear.
“Keep squeezing the ball,” she advised. “Not too hard, not too soft. This should take about ten minutes.”
She took the clamp away and
the clear tube turned red, blood racing away from my body as though it were eager to escape.
The parole officer was absorbed in a copy of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. I’d brought nothing to read. I closed my eyes and thought back to my conversation with Genevieve and what she’d said about Shorty. When I thought about it, his alibi sort of made sense.
When someone stole a car, the most likely place to look for a good, usable fingerprint was the rearview mirror. Everyone has to adjust it getting into an unfamiliar car. Even thieves. But Gen had said the police in Blue Earth had only found partials on the door.
I imagined Genevieve saying, So? She’d been my longtime partner in this kind of deduction, and it was natural for me to imagine discussing it with her.
So, I thought, partials on the door are consistent with him checking out a wrecked vehicle, not stealing one. He touched the door going in. He didn’t touch the mirror because he wasn’t going to drive anywhere.
He wore gloves, Gen said succinctly. In my mind I heard the annoyance she would bite back that I was taking Shorty’s part.
Why would he touch the door bare-handed and then carefully put on gloves to adjust the mirror? I thought.
Because he acts on impulse. He doesn’t plan ahead.
Then why would he put on the gloves at all? And if he acts on impulse, why would he go out of his way, to a train station, to steal a truck?
He stole the truck from the Amtrak station because he knew it wouldn’t be missed right away, with the owner out of town.
But that suggests planning ahead, which you said isn’t like him. Plus, what’s he going to do, drive it around for a few days in the same area where it was stolen, where everybody can see him behind the wheel? That doesn’t make any sense. That kind of theft would only make sense if someone were going to use it for a few hours and abandon it.
I opened my eyes, seized by an impossibility.
“No way,” I whispered, sitting up abruptly.
A car is a weapon, Shiloh had said.
The world swam gray before my eyes. When I heard a cry of alarm near me, I thought the same revelation had struck all of us at once. The chair began to tip beneath me.
“Put your feet up.” It wasn’t Genevieve’s voice in my mind anymore; it was a real voice somewhere beyond the fog I was in. “Can you hear me? Move your feet, roll them in circles. Big circles.”
I opened my eyes, or maybe they were already open. Either way, the grayness was abating and I could see my feet. I responded to the command, wriggling them.
“Okay, that’s good. Keep them moving.” The phlebotomist who’d set me up was standing by my side. Another was approaching with a brown paper bag. She opened it with a crisp snap of her arm.
“Here, breathe into this,” the second woman said.
“I’m all right,” I said, trying to sit up again. As soon as I did, I got dizzy.
“Lie back. We’ll tell you when it’s okay to get up. Breathe into this.”
I took the bag from her and did as she said. I needed a moment to think, anyway.
There was nobody I could call yet. There wasn’t anything I could prove. I’d have to do the legwork myself.
Maybe twenty minutes passed before I was allowed to leave. First they let me sit up on the side of the reclining chair, and after a few minutes of that, I was allowed to go to the recovery area, a folding table and chairs with orange juice and Fig Newtons set out. They felt my face and watched me walk, before I was finally released to go down to the parking ramp and my car, a bright green gauze wrap around my arm. I’d given about half the usual allotment of blood.
I felt mostly recovered, just a little tired, when I kicked open the stubborn kitchen door at home, my duffel bag slung over the shoulder of my unpierced arm. I dropped the bag unceremoniously on the kitchen floor. There wasn’t time for unpacking.
At the phone I dialed one of two numbers I’d come to know by heart: the one from the back of Shiloh’s plane ticket. I dialed it with the 507 area code. That number had reached the bar, and at the time I’d figured it didn’t mean anything.
But there had been way too much southern Minnesota karma in my life of late, and none of it had been good.
“Sportsman.” It was my friend Bruce again. Crowd noise in the background.
“This may seem like a stupid question,” I said, trying to sound light and at ease, “but where exactly are you guys?”
“Right on the west edge of town,” Bruce said.
“West edge of what town?” I asked.
“Oh, you really don’t know where we are,” he said, sounding surprised but still jocular. “Blue Earth.”
Blue Earth.
“I need directions, then,” I said.
“Where are you coming from?” he asked.
“Uh, Mankato,” I said, stumbling on the lie.
But Bruce didn’t notice the hesitation in my voice. He quickly rattled off the directions for me in a practiced way, then he asked, “Are you coming all the way from Mankato for a drink? Boy, we’re all fun guys to drink with here, but I didn’t know our reputation had got around that far.”
“Is Shorty there?”
A beat passed before he answered me, and his voice was more puzzled now than flirtatious. “No. Who is this?”
I hung up, thinking, I knew it.
Blue Earth would be a long drive, about three hours, but time was on my side. The problem was that Bruce of the Sportsman sounded pretty tight with the “fun guys” at the bar, and he was liable to tell Shorty that a strange woman had called asking about him, and had hung up rather than give her name. He might even remember the call from Sarah Pribek, who’d left her name and number days earlier. Shorty might have a rare wised-up moment and leave.
The Lowes’ number was the second one I’d carved into my memory, and I didn’t have to look it up this time. Deborah answered.
“Hi, Deb, it’s me.” By now she surely recognized my voice. “Can I talk to Genevieve?”
Genevieve came on the line. “What’s going on?” she asked, but her voice was incurious.
“I need something from you.” I didn’t answer her question. “You know Shorty’s address, right?”
“What?” More alert now.
“You’ve been keeping track of this guy for a while. You must have his address. I need it.”
“What’s going on?” she asked again.
“I just need the address.”
“I have to go look for it.” She set the phone down.
The subject of Shorty was the only thing that I’d ever seen rouse Genevieve from her depression, and now, true to form, she was showing signs of interest. When she gave me the address, she’d probably realize I was going down there. She might want to meet up with me, come along.
In a way, I would have liked to have her with me, but it was a bad idea. Maybe I’d need to reason with Shorty, make nice with him. I didn’t think I could do that with a maternal avenging angel riding shotgun.
Genevieve came back on the line and gave me the address. It came as no surprise that he lived on Route 165.
“What’s going on?” Genevieve asked again.
“Maybe nothing,” I said. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Are you going down there? What did he do now?”
“I’ll call you,” I repeated.
“Sarah-”
I hung up on her. I didn’t have time for my twinge of guilt, instead collecting the things I needed: my keys, jacket, my service weapon. I was itching to be on the road. Just like Shiloh had been.
chapter 21
Every time I drove 169 south, and this was my third time in a week, I did it faster than before. It was a testament to the unhappy acceleration of my life in the past seven days. When I reached the Mankato city limits, I saw I’d shaved nearly thirty minutes off my last time. Amazingly, there wasn’t a single speed trap along the way. It wasn’t much longer before I was cruising through the quiet streets of Blue Earth.
Would Sh
orty be at home, or at the bar? People liked to say that barflies were in their favorite watering holes “every night,” but that was usually an exaggeration. For all I knew, Shorty could have stayed at home tonight.
I wouldn’t have long to wait to find out. Already I could see ahead a bright neon duck, flying away from a low building with tinted windows. I didn’t have to cruise past to know I’d found the Sportsman.
If I were smart, if I were careful, I would wait for tomorrow. I would approach Shorty at his job, in the sober light of day, under the full color of my authority. But I’d never been smart, and what I’d painfully learned about being careful was drowned out under the relentless drumbeat of my need to know.
The place wasn’t busy for a Saturday night. The Timberwolves were on the TV, and the jukebox was so low you could actually hear the play-by-play. Shorty was at the bar with two friends. Well, barroom friends at least. They might not even like him in daylight.
I walked directly to him, and virtually everyone in the bar watched me do it.
Shorty had seen me on the stand at his pretrial hearing, where I’d been established as Kamareia’s friend and as the main prosecution witness against him. And of course, Shorty had known I was a cop. Now, when he saw me coming his way, his eyes widened. He looked so alarmed for a moment I thought he might just bolt for the back door.
Then he got control again, remembering that the case against him was dead. His face hardened from alarm into contempt and he didn’t take his eyes off me.
I stopped a foot from his bar stool and said, “I need to talk to you. Outside.”
That was my first mistake, specifying “outside.” He only had to refuse and I would lose face. He looked at his friends and started to smirk. “Uh-uh,” he said.
I looked at his friends, making them for more-or-less law-abiding types. I took my badge out and laid it on the bar, not opening the holder until it was down on the bar. I didn’t want everyone to see me flash it around. But Shorty’s pals saw it and looked back up at me.
