The 37th Hour (33 page)

“Does it comfort you at all?” Genevieve asked.

“Does what comfort me?”

“Knowing that Shiloh couldn’t go through with running Shorty down,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does. But it’s weird, too. Everything I used to know, or thought I knew, was wrong.”

I paused, thinking that it was going to be hard to explain what I’d just said, and that Gen was going to want an explanation for a cryptic statement like that.

But Genevieve’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and steady. She was asleep.

Everything I knew was wrong.

Around the department I’d had a reputation as impulsive, a
wide-open girl,
as Kilander had put it. It was me who’d jumped into the Mississippi after a kid. Genevieve had a reputation for patience, for getting even hardened perps to unburden themselves to her in interrogation rooms.

Of the three of us, Genevieve and Shiloh and me, it was me who I would have voted the most likely to give in to the dictates of a murderous shadow self. After that I would have said Shiloh, and gentle Genevieve last.

But it was Genevieve who had put a wallpaper blade into the throat of an unarmed man, and later all but whistled as she torched the crime scene. It had been Shiloh who had laid plans for murder, acting on an anger I’d never seen building inside him. And yet, at the final moment, he hadn’t been able to carry out his plans. It had been me who’d sat with a dying man, an inveterate hater of both women and cops, and coaxed him to tell me what I needed to know. It was me who’d prayed in Salt Lake City with Shiloh’s sister.

I looked over at Genevieve. She was a murderer now, but she slept in a peace that passed all understanding.

Sleep did not come so easily to me. I was still awake when the first rays of sunlight stole under the sheer white curtains of the Lowes’ guest room, and the rooster in their henhouse crowed.

Genevieve stirred and opened her eyes. When she saw me, she said “Sarah?” as if she’d forgotten the events of last night altogether.

Then she reached across to my bed. I gave her my hand and she squeezed it.

We got up when we heard Deborah and Doug moving around outside our door. There were mild exclamations of surprise at my presence.

“Sarah had some business down this way,” Gen said. “She called kind of late. You probably didn’t hear the phone. I got it on the first ring.”

“Oh,” Doug said, rubbing his jaw, and if he or Deborah had questions about the vague and brief explanation, they didn’t voice them.

“Are you two hungry? There’s coffee on, too,” Deb said.

“I could use some coffee,” I said, and I realized that I could probably eat a little bit, too.

About fifteen minutes later, the four of us were sitting around the Lowes’ kitchen table, having linguica and eggs and coffee. As near as I can reconstruct, that’s where I was when Shiloh walked into the police station in Mason City, Iowa, and turned himself in for the murder of Royce Stewart.

chapter 22

Memory plays tricks,
the police psychologist who interviewed Shiloh said. Shiloh’s belief that he’d killed Royce Stewart was a product of retrograde amnesia. Like many crash victims, he couldn’t remember the moments surrounding the wreck. But in his case, his mind had supplied the details, details that turned out not to be true. Shiloh had unintentionally seen to that.

In preparation for Stewart’s murder, Shiloh had gone over and over the scenario, rehearsing it mentally, steeling himself to go through with it. In the violence of the accident, somehow, imagination became memory.

“I saw it in my mind,” Shiloh told me. “When I thought about it, I could see him go down. I felt the impact when the truck hit him. It was so real.”

Shiloh couldn’t clearly remember all the time between the wreck and his visit to the police station. He knew he had a head injury and a fever, but did not seek medical help. He was paranoid, convinced the police were looking for him, a misconception supported by the fact that a helicopter was crisscrossing the skies, looking for the presumed-missing Thomas Hall.

He went deeper into the countryside, irrationally moving south, not back up toward the Cities where he had people who might have sheltered him.

One morning, after a particularly long sleep, he woke up feeling more clearheaded and knew he had to give himself up.

It took a while, though, before all the parties involved sorted out the details.

At 7:20
A.M.
, the desk sergeant in Mason City was enjoying a Sunday-morning cup of coffee and the last forty minutes of his watch when Shiloh walked in and made his confession.

What Shiloh actually said was that he was the guy who’d run over Royce Stewart in Blue Earth, Minnesota. The last part of his statement was “Don’t handcuff me. I’m not going to resist and my arm’s probably broken.”

The desk sergeant treated him with the caution due a man who’d identified himself as a murderer. He put Shiloh in a holding cell while he conferred with his supervisor. It was clear to both of them that Shiloh was probably sick as well as injured, and they assigned an officer to take Shiloh to the hospital, where his broken arm was set and he was treated for a head injury and a fever of 103.

Beyond that, the Mason City cops turned the situation over to the Faribault County Sheriff’s Department.

Shiloh’s identity was fairly easily confirmed. He’d had no ID with him when he turned himself in, but just from his name, Faribault County found out that not only did he have no priors and no warrants, but he was a missing person who also happened to be a cop.

The phone rang at Minneapolis police headquarters at 9:45
A.M.
About twenty minutes later my voice mailbox taped a message from the daywatch commander on duty at the MPD.

If it hadn’t been the weekend, and the agencies involved had their regular clerical staff, Royce Stewart’s whereabouts might not have baffled everyone so much. Genevieve’s courthouse friend, after all, had known his current address. But when no records showed that Royce Stewart was a murder victim, or even dead, it was a slow process for the local deputies to find out whether he was among the living.

Qwest had no listing for a Royce Stewart.

The Department of Motor Vehicles had an address from the last time he’d had a driver’s license. It turned out to be his mother’s home, outside of Imogene. Contacted by a detective, Mrs. Stewart explained her son’s living arrangements. Royce, always good with tools, had struck a bargain with a couple he knew. He would live, rent-free, in a small outbuilding behind their farmhouse, in exchange for fixing the place up into a livable in-law unit. It was an informal agreement with no paperwork involved.

The outbuilding, in the early stages of renovation, had no phone line. Mrs. Stewart explained that she called her son at the phone in the main house. She only knew the first names of the husband and wife who lived there: John and Ellen. She didn’t have their address.

It took a bit of time on the phone with weekend staff at Qwest before the Faribault deputies could match an address to the phone number Mrs. Stewart had for her son. Then Deputy Jim Brooke drove out to the home of John and Ellen Brewer. Brooke didn’t even get as far as the front door before noticing something was obviously wrong.

He had been told that Royce Stewart lived in an outbuilding, but there wasn’t one as far as he could see. He stood in the Brewers’ driveway and looked, dumbfounded, at a large patch of blackened wreckage, still smoldering.

Sometime around the time Deputy Brooke was making his discovery, I was standing around in the Lowes’ guest room, watching Genevieve pack. She’d decided to come back to the Cities with me. Although we had separate cars, I waited to drive with her.

Packing up took her a long time. She’d been downstate for about a month, and her possessions had begun to drift to different places in her sister’s home.

In the hallway outside the guest room, I was pacing a little, but I wasn’t restless. Now that Shiloh was dead—and that was truly what I had come to believe—I wasn’t in any hurry anymore. My state of mind was calm, on the edge of numb.

Even so, I decided to check my messages up in the Cities. It had become a habit. My voice mailbox held one message, from Beth Burke, the daywatch commander in Minneapolis. Before, I would have been curious about what Lieutenant Burke wanted. It was only a sense of duty that made me call down the hall to Genevieve.

“I’m gonna make a toll call up to the Cities. I’ll leave a couple bucks to cover it.” I didn’t expect Gen to respond, and if she did, I didn’t hear it. I was already dialing.

The next few moments probably rank as the most tongue-tied of my life. At first, I thought Lieutenant Burke was telling me that Shiloh had turned up in Iowa and confessed to last night’s murder and arson. I didn’t even understand what was going on well enough to know what lies to tell. I said “What?” a lot and finally resorted to “I don’t care what he’s done or hasn’t done, just tell me where he is.”

When I hung up the phone I yelled for Genevieve.

Around midmorning, fire investigators removed a body from the ash, timber, and water that had once been Shorty’s home. In light of Shiloh’s confession, that was considered suspicious. Two detectives from Faribault County went south to Mason City to talk to Shiloh, beating Genevieve and me there by about thirty minutes.

“Have a seat,” the desk nurse at the hospital said. “The police gave orders when they went in that no other visitors could be admitted until they’re through talking to him.”

“What room is he in?” I asked. “So I’ll know, later.”

“Room 306,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, and instead of returning to the lounge, walked past her desk and into the hall.

“Hey!” Her protest followed me. I held up my shield for the uniform outside the door of 306 and he didn’t try to stop me.

Both detectives looked up as I entered. Only Shiloh looked unsurprised to see me.

“You need a lawyer,” I told him, ignoring his interrogators. My voice sounded hard.

“You can’t be in here,” one of the detectives said sharply. The pair of them resembled each other, both in middle age and white, each a little heavyset. One wore a full mustache, the other was clean-shaven.

“He was in a car wreck,” I said. “He had a concussion. Anything you get today could be inadmissible because of that.”

The other detective stood up to put me outside. “You’ve got to go, babe,” he said.

“I’m his wife.”

“I don’t care.”

“And a cop.”

“I don’t care,” the detective repeated, taking me by the arm.

“No.” Shiloh spoke for the first time, sharply enough that both men looked at him, the one next to me stopping with his hand still under my elbow. “We’re done here.”

“We have more questions—”

“We’re done here,” Shiloh repeated.

They glanced at each other. “You’re getting a lawyer?” the first one asked.

It wasn’t what Shiloh had meant, but it put things in terms they could understand. “Yes. I’m getting a lawyer.”

The seated detective glanced at his partner, and then they packed up their notepads and left. The door swept shut, leaving silence in its wake and Shiloh and me inventorying each other from six feet apart. He was gaunt and unshaven, closely resembling the undercover narcotics officer I’d met in an airport bar years ago. For a long moment, I could think of nothing to say. He broke the silence first.

“I’m sorry,” Shiloh said.

That was when it hit me: this was Shiloh, he really wasn’t dead, I was looking at Shiloh again. I went to the bed, buried myself against his neck and shoulder, and wept.

Shiloh held me so hard it would have hurt me under normal circumstances. I felt the weight he’d lost in the prominent bones, hard against my flesh.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry,” he said again and again. He stroked my hair, whispering small endearments and reassurances, holding me as though he were the strong one and I was weak.

Shiloh stayed in the hospital for two days while doctors discerned the extent of his head injury and decided he didn’t need to be under a physician’s care. Then he was taken back to Minnesota and booked into the Faribault County Jail.

While no one could corroborate his location the night of Shorty’s death, Shiloh’s story and the physical evidence that accompanied it—his injuries—were compelling enough to rule out the possibility that he’d gone back to Blue Earth to kill Shorty. Auto theft, on the other hand, was a charge that was going to stick.

At the arraignment, his lawyer made a case for bail, saying that Shiloh was a first offender, and employed in law enforcement with an excellent professional reputation. The judge pointed out that Shiloh was not currently employed in law enforcement, was highly unlikely ever to be working in law enforcement again, and had already proven himself able to evade justice even under difficult circumstances. Bail was denied.

There was nothing I could do in Faribault County. I drove back up to the Cities to keep from going crazy, then found that a change of location was no antidote for the nervy restlessness that refused to be exhausted by exercise or distracted by television. My first day back I called Utah and left Naomi a message explaining that Shiloh had turned up alive and in reasonably good health. Then I wrote a short note to Sinclair and dropped it into the mail.

Naomi called the next afternoon, wanting details, and I did the best I could to explain my husband and his actions. The conversation wasn’t a short one, and outside, the sky lost its light and deepened in color. After we hung up, I sat on the couch and thought unproductively about the future, and as I couldn’t bring myself to turn on a lamp, twilight fell in our living room as it did outside.

Ten minutes later I was on the 94. I wanted to see how Genevieve was settling in, back in St. Paul. More important, I wanted to know when she’d be ready to go back to work. Myself, I was rather desperate to get to the distractions of the job.

But when I got to Genevieve’s house, it wasn’t she who answered the front door.