The 37th Hour (34 page)

“Vincent,” I said.

“Sarah,” Genevieve’s ex-husband said. His heavy-lidded gaze had weight: I felt it deep in my spine.

Genevieve appeared in the light spilling from behind him. I noticed anew how much her once-short hair had grown: It was chin-length now, long enough to swing a little when she moved and shine when it caught the light, and she’d tucked it behind her ear on the right side, revealing the subtle silver flash of a small earring.

“Come on in, Sarah,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.”

“That’d be good.” It was a cold evening, but still it hadn’t snowed. Gusts of sharp wind chased the few remaining fallen leaves around the sidewalks and streets.

“Take a break, sit with us awhile, Vincent,” Genevieve suggested.

“No, I’m fine. I’m going to keep working.” He moved to the stairs as I followed them in.

In the kitchen, I asked Genevieve, “What’s he doing here?”

“He’s cleaning out Kamareia’s room,” she said.

That answer didn’t clear things up, but I sensed that it was a preface and waited for the rest to come out.

Genevieve took a package of ground coffee from the door of her freezer and spooned it into a paper filter. “We’re working on clearing out the whole house, actually. I made my resignation final at work.”

“You did?” My voice was higher than usual.

“When Vincent goes back to Paris, I’m going with him.” She lifted a diffident shoulder, poured water into the coffeemaker.

“You’re kidding.”

“No.” She turned to face me.

“Why?”

Genevieve shook her head. “I can’t live here anymore,” she said. “Not in this house, not even in St. Paul. I can learn to live without Kamareia, but not here.”

My only partner as a detective. My partner of two years and friend for much longer than that. All those cold mornings we’d fantasized about running away to some faraway paradise, like San Francisco or New Orleans. Now Genevieve was really doing it. She was going farther than even we’d imagined. Permanently. Without me.

You can’t go,
I thought, like a child.

“You want a splash in that? Vince brought these from the flight.” She held up a single-ounce bottle of Bailey’s; another one sat on the counter nearby, next to an equally small bottle of gin.

The first time I’d ever been to Genevieve’s home was after work on a midwinter night, and she’d done almost exactly the same thing; she’d made us coffee. Then she’d said, “You’re off duty, you want me to make that special for you?” and had poured some expensive white-chocolate liqueur into both mine and hers. I remembered how pleased her generosity had made me, how disarming it had been to be in the home of someone who had a big kitchen and a liquor cabinet instead of a studio apartment and Budweiser in the refrigerator.

I doubted she knew how much she’d meant to me even back then.

“This thing with Vincent,” I said, “isn’t it kind of sudden?”

“Sudden and long overdue. There was a reason why I never remarried or even dated.” Her voice was happy, a joyful knell for our partnership. She took two heavy glass mugs down from the cupboard and poured out the coffee. She laced one of them with the first bottle of liqueur and pushed it in my direction. “He had business in Chicago and came up here afterward, and we both sort of realized . . . you know.”

I was glad for her newfound happiness, but her behavior was a little too upbeat. Maybe she was laying Kamareia’s mem-ory to rest at last, but Royce Stewart’s death was something else again. That memory was still raw and bloody, and Genevieve was trying to bury it in a hasty, unmarked grave she would never visit in her mind. She was simply turning her back on her actions, and maybe that was the best way to deal with it. Maybe she’d been right the first time. Maybe closure was overrated.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” Genevieve looked closely at me, then came to my side. “I didn’t even ask about Shiloh. How is he?”

She’d misread my unvoiced thoughts. I took a sip of the coffee. “It’s hard to say,” I explained. “He wants to plead guilty and do his time; his lawyer’s trying to talk him out of it. She thinks that, procedurally, she can poke holes in the way his confession was obtained, make something of the head injury and how it might have affected him. Get enough to throw the case out.”

“Do you think Shiloh will go along with that?”

I turned to give her what was probably a dry, deadened look. “No,” I said. “He won’t. He wants to . . .” I had to search for the right word. “. . . atone for what he did.” It was such a gentle word,
atone
. To put it more honestly, Shiloh wanted to punish himself: for giving in to murderous impulses, yet failing to avenge Kamareia; for ruining his career and putting me through a week of anguish and uncertainty.

“Maybe the judge will be lenient,” Genevieve suggested. In her own happiness, she sought to hold out hope to me.

“No,” I said again. “He’ll do time.” I couldn’t afford to kid myself.

“What about the two of you?” Genevieve asked. “Have you talked about the future?”

I shook my head. “You’ve never had a real jailhouse conversation, have you?” I asked her. “In the room where wives and girlfriends and relatives have to do it? It doesn’t lend itself much to serious discussions about the future.”

“So what’s going to happen?” Genevieve said, pressing me.

“What’s going to happen? Shiloh’s going to do time,” I told her, again.

“For auto theft,” Genevieve said. “That’s a pretty light sentence. When he gets out, what’s going to happen between the two of you?”

I didn’t have an easy answer for her. Stalling, I looked out the window, at the frozen silver of early-evening moonlight between the branches of neighborhood trees.

As the judge had pointed out at the arraignment, Shiloh would never work in law enforcement again. For all his adult life, he had done virtually nothing else, from the days when he’d searched for lost kids in the rugged Montana terrain until he’d arrested a nationally known fugitive. When, at some point in the future, Shiloh walked out of a prison gate, everything he’d worked for would be gone. I’d still be a cop, and he’d be an ex-convict. Inequities like that had the potential to poison relationships. Slowly. Painfully.

Whenever Shiloh and I spoke, these things hung between us, impossible to forget, but too heavy to be acknowledged.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it,” I said.

My right hand was resting on the countertop, and Genevieve now laid her own hand over it, gently.

“What about you?” she asked me. “Are you okay?”

“I’m not sure I know,” I said honestly.

I
stopped
in at work to tell Vang I’d be back on the job tomorrow, and that Genevieve wouldn’t ever be again.

“I heard,” he said. “News travels fast around here. Which reminds me,” he said, his tone brightening, “they busted the guy who was making those calls to the wives and girlfriends. Remember?”

“Yeah,” I said. “The killed-in-the-line-of-duty calls?”

“Right. Sergeant Rowe told his wife about it. She had a phone jack that lets her tape calls, and she set it up just in case.” He shrugged. “It sounds paranoid, but it paid off. The guy called her and said Rowe had been killed in a shootout. She pretended to freak out, and he stayed on the line for a while, giving her these fake details. Then Rowe brought the tape in and passed it around for people to listen to.”

“And it was someone in the department?”

“No, the medical examiner’s office, actually. None of us even knew this guy, either, his name is—”

“Frank Rossella,” I finished for him.

Vang looked at me, surprised. “How’d you know?”

epilogue

Shiloh was sentenced
to twenty-two months in prison. It was a stiff sentence for a first offense, by Minnesota’s standards. The judge had departed upward, he said, in light of the public trust that Shiloh had borne and failed. The truth, I believed, was that the conspiracy-to-murder charge that Shiloh had escaped, the intent with which Shiloh had stolen the car, was in the back of his mind.

It was clear the court didn’t view Shiloh as a sympathetic figure. However, Shiloh had made cases against a number of serious and violent felons; those men were serving time in all of Minnesota’s prisons. Shiloh’s safety was a concern the judge couldn’t overlook. He referred the matter to the Bureau of Prisons, which arranged to have Shiloh serve his time across the state line, in Wisconsin.

He was transferred immediately after the sentencing; I went to see him about a week later, in early December. The first snow had fallen the night before. The fields and barns of Wisconsin were ridiculously lovely in the fresh whiteness.

I don’t know if it was professional courtesy, but they let me talk to Shiloh in a small, private interview room. He was clean-shaven again, but he’d never regained the weight he’d lost in the countryside. His work shirt hung loose on him.

“How are you?” he asked immediately.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Are they treating you okay at work?”

In truth, I missed Genevieve terribly already, partly because she alone would have treated me normally. Everyone in the department had been shocked to learn what Shiloh had done; they didn’t know what to say when they saw me. Almost to a person, my fellow officers dealt with it by never bringing it up.

“Sure,” I said.

Shiloh heard the lie. “Really,” he said, “how are things?”

“Everyone’s treating me okay,” I insisted. “I came to talk to you about something else.”

I looked around. As private as the room seemed, I doubted there wasn’t some kind of electronic surveillance in play, and therefore I had to choose my words carefully.

I waited so long that Shiloh spoke again. “Look, Sarah,” he said. “I understand that what I did in Blue Earth might have changed the way you feel about me—”

“No, no,” I said. “It’s not that.”

“Go on,” he prompted me, gently.

“I met her,” I said. “I know why you left home. I know what you were doing on Christmas Eve.”

I’d said the last thing in the world that still had the power to alarm him. In Shiloh’s lynx eyes, in the sharp way they focused in on me, I saw all the confirmation I needed. I hadn’t really been sure, not until that minute.

“She
told
you?” Shiloh said.

I shook my head.

Sinclair hadn’t told me the truth about her troubled relationship with her brother, not with words, anyway. She’d done so with her silences, relating her life story with the most important aspect in the unfilled blanks.

She and Shiloh had been extremely close, yet after leaving his family he hadn’t sought her out in Salt Lake City. He’d fled the other way, north to Montana.

They’d run into each other when she came to Minnesota, and Sinclair had made no mention of a fight or disagreement, yet said they’d never gotten in touch again after she left.

Mike without a last name in the bar at MSP, five years ago, just out of a
very brief, very wrong
affair.

The connection had simply come to me, unwilled, on the flight home. Sinclair had referred to last seeing her brother in Minnesota in winter, just around the time a wreck had taken the lives of the three Carleton students. I wouldn’t have been able to place it, except that I had been one of the patrol officers on the scene, an icy secondary highway outside Minneapolis in frozen late January. That had been only days before I’d learned of my father’s death. Days before my quick trip west, at the end of which I had met Shiloh, drinking and trying to forget a sexual entanglement about which he had shared no details. I had been willing not to ask. In the months and years that followed, I never had.

Small wonder he’d been able to keep his intent to go to Blue Earth a secret from me. Shiloh had learned long ago how to hide his heart. I’d never even known that he knew sign language.

He and Sinclair had both tried very hard to forget; that much was clear. They’d spent their adult lives avoiding each other, an estrangement that had grown to encompass their entire family. Shiloh had brushed aside even Naomi’s innocent, questing attention, when she’d crossed a cardinal, unseen line in suggesting he come home.

Shiloh couldn’t go home, for the same reason he’d been unable to go to his father’s funeral: He couldn’t bear the prospect of looking in his older brothers’ eyes and wondering what they knew, never knowing if they had been told nothing or were feigning ignorance because the truth was too terrible to acknowledge.

He needn’t have worried. Shiloh’s brothers and sisters lived in a fog of self-deception. Naomi never wondered what the Christmas Eve disaster was all about. Bill had possessed all the pieces of the mystery but never quite put them together.
Mike was there and suddenly he wasn’t there,
Bill had said.
My father said God could forgive anything, but not until He is asked.
Bill had never considered the prospect that Mike and Sara were guilty of more than everyday human sins. He never let himself wonder how a single instance of teenage drug experimentation could have permanently ruined his brother Mike’s relationship with the entire family.

I wondered how much it had hurt Shiloh’s father, by all accounts a truly godly man, to lie to his children about what Sara and Mike had really been doing that long-ago Christmas Eve.

Perhaps I would have missed all the signs as well—I had even more reason than they did for self-deception—but for Sinclair’s message.
I am so glad for you and Sarah. Please be happy.
Short as a haiku, both a greeting and a farewell, every word weighted with a lover’s bittersweet kindness and gentle regret, nothing like what a sister should have written.

I’d brought the note with me and handed it silently over to him.

Shiloh studied it longer than the simple text seemed to merit. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low it was barely audible.

“God knows I’ve tried to make sense of it. I never have. Sometimes things just go wrong in your head.”

But he tapped two fingers not against his temple, indicating the mind, but against his chest, indicating the heart.