Sympathy Between Humans

by Jodi Compton

  My surprise distracted me from the pain in my ear. It was the stranger who I’d seen twice now: first watching me on my vice detail, then with Kilander on the street corner. Up close, he had a lean, tired face, yet a fairly young one too, despite the threads of gray at his temples. I didn’t revise my estimate of his age: about 35.

  “Detective Sarah Pribek,” Prewitt said, “this is Gray Diaz, from the Faribault County district attorney’s office.”

  Faribault County . Blue Earth.

  Diaz came out from around his chair and offered me his hand. “Detective Pribek,” he said.

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said.

  He let go of my hand and nodded to Prewitt. “Thanks, Will,” he said. Prewitt withdrew.

  “Please, have a seat,” Diaz said.

  We did. I hoped, but doubted, that I looked better than I felt.

  “Are you a prosecutor?” I asked.

  “I’m a DA’s investigator,” Diaz said. “I’ve been with Faribault County for about six weeks.”

  “Do you like it down there?” I asked.

  “Well, it’s fairly quiet,” Diaz said. “That’s why I started reading some old files.”

  A little drop of sweat crawled between my shoulder blades, down toward the small of my back.

  Diaz set a thick manila folder on the table before him. “This is a case that was forwarded to our office about three months ago, before I came on board. It was a joint investigation by the Sheriff’s and Fire departments,” he said.

  “Royce Stewart,” I said. There was no point in waiting for him to say the name.

  “Yes,” he said, and there might have been a faint note of surprise in his voice at my forthrightness. “The file definitely caught my attention. Naturally, given your familiarity with the people and events in the case, I wanted to talk to you.” He tapped a fingernail against the file. “I thought we could start by just reviewing the known facts. You can correct me if you think I’ve got anything wrong.”

  Diaz opened his file and ran down Royce Stewart’s life in the dry, telegrammatic fragments of an official record.

  “Royce Stewart was 25 years old at the time of his death,” he began. “Lived most of his life in Faribault County, arrests and convictions there for indecent exposure and lewd conduct; a juvenile arrest for looking in the windows of a woman’s home late at night, charges dropped. At 24, he moved to the Twin Cities, where he had a conviction for DWI, and much more significant, was arrested and charged with the rape and murder of Kamareia Brown, the daughter of Detective Genevieve Brown of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. Your partner.” Diaz paused, sipping from a glass of water at his side. “The case was dismissed for technical reasons, and Stewart returned to Blue Earth.

  “In October, firefighters are called out to the property on which Stewart lived. The outbuilding that he lived in is ablaze, and his body is found in it the next day.” Diaz turned a page, although I was sure the details of the case were already locked into his memory. “A little over eight hours after the fire, former MPD detective Michael Shiloh turns himself in to police in Mason City, Iowa, and confesses to Stewart’s murder. The strange thing is that Shiloh asserts he killed Stewart a week earlier, by running him down in a stolen truck on the highway outside Blue Earth.

  “An investigation bears out the fact that Shiloh stole the truck, but rather than running Stewart down, he was in a one-vehicle wreck due to ice on the road. In the accident, he sustained a serious head injury that confused his memories and impaired his judgment. Fearing arrest for his ‘crime,’ he traveled south on foot, avoiding contact with other people, and finally, in Mason City, Iowa, turned himself in. His belief that he killed Stewart, according to a psychologist, was due partly to the head injury and partly to his persistent prior visualization of carrying out the crime. Michael Shiloh did not contest the charge of auto theft and is currently incarcerated in Wisconsin.” Diaz drank a little more water. “It’s quite a story.”

  “You said you wanted me to point out anything incorrect in your file,” I said. “There are two things you didn’t include.”

  Diaz lifted a courteous eyebrow. “Please.”

  “ Shiloh didn’t fail to kill Shorty, he decided not to. Even if it was at the last minute.”

  Diaz nodded, seeming to take it seriously. “And you know this how?”

  “ Shiloh told me,” I said.

  “I should point out that nobody can independently verify that,” Diaz said. “You’re depending on your husband’s word.”

  I wasn’t. Royce Stewart had told me so. Just before he died.

  “But that’s immaterial to the subject at hand, which is Stewart’s death,” Diaz said. “There wasn’t a lot of doubt in investigators’ minds that Stewart’s place was deliberately set on fire, or that he was already dead when the place burned. The file wasn’t set aside for lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. The problem was lack of evidence pointing to an identifiable suspect. As soon as I read this file, I thought my colleagues had been too hasty in dismissing the obvious person.”

  I stayed quiet.

  “They’d discounted a man who’d already admitted to going to Blue Earth intending to kill Royce Stewart. Who wasn’t alibied the night Royce Stewart died.”

  “ Shiloh is your suspect?” I asked him.

  “Your husband is definitely a person of interest,” Diaz said.

  Person of interest is to suspect what tropical storm is to hurricane.

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “The evidence rules him out.”

  Notwithstanding that I knew for a fact Shiloh hadn’t killed Stewart, I was also familiar with all the evidence that had told investigators he couldn’t have done so. Shiloh’s injuries, the wrecked truck, the seven-day gap between his aborted attempt to kill Stewart and Stewart’s actual death… all these things supported the assertion that Shiloh had not had anything to do with Stewart’s murder.

  “Are you sure?” Diaz said. “There was a nine-hour window between Stewart’s murder and Shiloh’s appearance in Mason City. That’s ample time to travel less than a hundred miles.”

  “On foot?” I said.

  “No, by car or truck. Just because no one has come forward to say they picked him up hitchhiking doesn’t mean no one did.”

  “There may be a nine-hour window that night,” I said, “but there’s also a seven-day window between Shiloh’s try at running Royce Stewart down and the time that he showed up in Mason City. It’s hard to make a case that-” I fell silent, understanding something.

  “You were saying?” Diaz prompted.

  I didn’t answer right away. This man was playing a game, and while I should have known better, I’d started playing it with him. “Have you spoken to Shiloh yet, at the prison?” I asked.

  Diaz said, “I’m not prepared to share all the details of the investigation right now.”

  “You haven’t,” I said, “because Shiloh isn’t your person of interest. I am. You’re deflecting my attention by pretending that Shiloh is your suspect. You want me to jump to his defense and argue the points of the case with you, until I give up some detail I couldn’t have known unless I killed Shorty.” That had been Stewart’s nickname, codified on the vanity license plate of his car. “That’s the second detail you left out of your story. You left out any reference to me being in the area and talking to Stewart the night he died. If you talked to the people at the bar, you know I was there,” I said. “That makes me an obvious suspect. But instead of approaching me directly, you’re pretending you want to talk to me as a ‘fellow investigator.’ ”

  This was a tactic that even worked on street criminals. When talking to a suspect with priors, sometimes detectives will ask him to speculate on how a crime might have been carried out, what he might have done if he had committed the act. If it works, the criminal will drop his guard and spill a critical detail that he shouldn’t have known.

  “Let me answer the question you’re not asking,” I sai
d. “I did not kill Royce Stewart. I was down there, in Blue Earth. I was at the bar. I spoke to him. But I didn’t kill him.”

  “Detective Pribek,” Diaz said, “I’m not here to offend you. I’m here to do a job.”

  He was right; I’d spoken more freely than I’d intended. The pain in my ear was fraying my nerves.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that. I’ve had a cold, and my ear is really bothering me. Can you give me a minute to get some aspirin?”

  “Actually,” Diaz said, “I’d like us to keep going with this now that we’re on a roll.”

  Another key point in interrogation: once things start heating up, don’t give your suspect time to regroup.

  “Let’s talk about the night you went to Blue Earth,” Diaz said. “What led you to go there?”

  “I had come to understand that Shiloh had stolen and wrecked the truck on the highway. I recognized his motives, that he wanted to run Shorty down, but I knew he’d failed, because Royce Stewart was alive. In fact, Stewart was the suspect in the theft of the truck, because his fingerprints placed him at the scene of the accident. What I didn’t understand was what happened to Shiloh after the wreck.”

  “So you went down there.”

  “To talk to Shorty, yes.” My ear was pulsing steadily with my heartbeat, which was going a little faster than usual.

  “How did you know he would be at the bar?” Diaz asked.

  “I didn’t know for- Ow! God.”

  Now it had done something new. There had been a popping sensation, followed by a crackle of something like static. I’d heard people talk about their ears popping during the ascent and descent of airplanes, but I didn’t think this was the same thing. Instead I imagined blisters had risen on my eardrum like bubbles, and one of them bursting.

  “Your ear?” Diaz asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, rubbing the outer shell ineffectually.

  “We’ll try to wrap this up fairly quickly,” Diaz assured me. “You were saying?”

  “I was saying that I didn’t know for sure he’d be at the bar, but I’d heard he spent a lot of time there.”

  “And luckily for you, he was,” Diaz commented. “What did you discuss with him?”

  “I wanted to know what he knew about Shiloh ’s disappearance,” I said. “He refused to talk to me.”

  “And then what did you do?” Diaz asked.

  “I drove partway home,” I said. “My partner, Genevieve, was living in Mankato with her sister and brother-in-law, and I knew I could sleep there.”

  In second grade we’d studied the ear. I tried not to remember the illustration of the eardrum, tried not to imagine my own as a swollen, dark-pink balloon of fluid, getting more distended by the hour.

  “You didn’t go to Stewart’s house before you left Blue Earth?”

  This was a potential trap. So far I’d been telling the truth, albeit with omissions. I hadn’t needed to lie. This was where I had to step off the trail.

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

  “ Minneapolis to Blue Earth is nearly a three-hour drive,” Diaz said. “So you drove all that way, found Stewart at the bar, and when he refused to talk about your husband, you just got back in the car and left? Seems to me like you gave up kind of easily.”

  My ear crackled again, making a rushing noise like static. “Shorty told me he knew, and I quote, ‘jack shit.’ I couldn’t prove otherwise. There wasn’t a lot I could do after that.”

  “So that’s your story: you drove to Blue Earth, saw Shorty briefly at the bar, and drove to Mankato?” Diaz said.

  “That’s what happened,” I said.

  Most of what I had told Diaz was true. The lie was one of omission. I’d left out Genevieve, who’d followed me to Blue Earth, coming and going unseen like a malevolent shadow.

  Diaz shook his head, as though disappointed in a pupil who isn’t performing up to par. He shuffled papers back into his manila file. “I suppose that’s all, for now.”

  When I stood, a red-gray haze swam up in my vision and my ear throbbed a little harder.

  “Oh, I forgot one thing,” Diaz said. “Is there any reason why someone would have seen you and your car outside Stewart’s home on the night in question?” Diaz asked.

  I was still standing motionless, trying to get my vision to clear. Diaz’s question did not help. Get a grip. Breathe.

  “I’m not the only person who looks like me or drives a 1970 Nova,” I said.

  The reddish haze receded and the colors of the world broke through again.

  “I see,” Diaz said. “Thank you for your help, Detective Pribek.”

  ***

  It’s an investigator’s classic, the is-there-any-reason question. It implied there was an eyewitness, but didn’t actually claim it outright. The interview subject was supposed to fall into the trap and start making facile, blustering excuses, thus confirming what the investigator had only suspected.

  Knowing it was a tactic didn’t stop it from being scary as hell. If Diaz had more evidence, he’d have come out with it, I told myself in the restroom, where I’d just downed two Advil and splashed cold water on my face, being careful not to get any in my ear.

  When I lifted my head to see my reflection in the mirror, my pale face shone from sweat and water. The strands of hair closest to my face were damp. Other than my work clothes and shoulder holster, I looked like a nineteenth-century consumptive in a charity-hospital ward. I stared at my own image and came to grips with the worst realization I’d had all day: I needed to visit a doctor’s office.

  ***

  Aviation experts will tell you that you’re safer in the air than you are on the ground. Statistics confirm this. But in any airport lounge you’ll see some poor soul sitting in one of the plastic chairs, elbows on knees, hands hanging loose, feet planted, head down. It’s a nearly prayerful position, as though he or she is about to do the most dangerous thing imaginable. And in the mind of an aerophobe, they are.

  Phobias are like that. It doesn’t matter that the fear is irrational. Sometimes the mind’s danger instinct just kicks in for no reason, and it won’t shut off in the face of comforting statistics or personal affirmations. For me, the equivalent of an airport lounge is the waiting room of a doctor’s office. At five minutes before 5 P.M., I went into a walk-in medical clinic, checked in, and assumed the position. My limbs felt heavy and strengthless, like I had water in my fuel line. To my left, a heavyset man in workman’s clothes, a paint-speckled cell phone at his hip, watched traffic through the window.

  The door that led into the inner offices swung open. “Washington?” the nurse said.

  The housepainter rose from the chairs and ambled toward the door. I sighed, reprieved.

  I looked out the window. On the radio, newscasters had been talking about heavy weather coming, and through the plate glass, I could see the yellowish clouds on the horizon. It was still a ways off.

  The door opened again. “Pribek?” the nurse said.

  I didn’t lift my head, looking up instead through the hair that had slid forward across my face. She couldn’t tell I was looking at her.

  For God’s sake, what are you doing? Get up.

  “Sarah Pribek?” the nurse said.

  I got to my feet, weak-legged. I still didn’t make eye contact with the nurse as I turned to the exit door, the one to the outside world. I stepped on the rubber mat, and the door slid pneumatically open. My knees felt as though they would give out underneath me. I was half expecting some apprehension attempt, as if the nurse would say That’s her! and reinforcements would rush out to wrestle me back inside.

  But nothing happened, and I was out into the rays of the late-afternoon sun. My legs regained some of their strength and I began to walk faster, reaching my car.

  I lasted two hours at home, heating towels in the dryer and holding them to my ear. Then I had an idea.

  8

  “This is a different look for you,” Cisco said.

  I’d c
hanged into my oldest jeans, faded almost to velvet, and Shiloh ’s blue-and-orange-striped pullover, and a pair of basketball shoes over thick socks. Cisco was inventorying me through the crack of the door that the chain allowed, and no sooner had he spoken than he seemed to realize that this was not a time for levity. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “Can I come in?”

  The same drill: Cisco shut the door, undid the chain, and rolled back in his wheelchair to let me in. Then he said, “What’s wrong?”

  “My ear is killing me,” I told him. “It started hurting a few days ago, like you said, and hasn’t stopped. The thing is, I’m not sure it was just the cold that did it. I was in a drainage canal last week, I mean over my head. The water was runoff water. It was probably dirty.”

  I was rambling, so afraid he’d send me away without treating me that I was throwing every extraneous bit of information I could at him. “Can you look at it?” I finished.

  “Go ahead and get on the examining table,” he said.

  I did as he said, while he retrieved my notes from his filing cabinet, washed his hands, and took out his equipment. I don’t know why Cisco’s place didn’t scare me the way the clinic had, but here I felt, if not relaxed, at least in control of my fear.

  Like before, Cisco took my blood pressure. “You’re a little elevated,” he said. He put a finger on my wrist, finding the radial pulse, and made a note on his yellow pad, then took an otoscope from his footlocker. “Which ear?” he asked.

  “The left,” I said.

  When he put the small, square end of the instrument into my ear, I jumped a little and flinched. “Easy,” he said.

  I closed my eyes and tried to relax. His breathing fluttered the loose hairs on my shoulder.

  Cisco withdrew the tube and rolled back a little way, and I could see the change that had come over his face. “I seem to remember telling you to go to a clinic if your ear started bothering you,” he said.

  “I know.”