The 37th Hour (30 page)

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.

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.