The 37th Hour (5 page)

Perhaps he’d taken his car to the shop. Like the Nova, it was a first car, never replaced. More out of laziness than sentimentality, Shiloh maintained. It was a 1968 model and heir to all the problems older cars had—most recently, the timing was off. From time to time Shiloh mentioned selling it and buying something more reliable, but he hadn’t yet.

I went in through the back of the house. The kitchen door didn’t, technically, open directly onto the kitchen but onto an entryway with a perennially dirty linoleum floor and a washer and dryer on the right. I tossed my plastic bag onto the surface of the dryer and decided to wash my clothes then and there.

I had thrown them into the drum of the washing machine, and was just about to pour in a half measure of detergent when I saw someone watching me, an outline against the white of the opposite wall.

Startled, I jumped; my gun hand in particular leapt into the air, spilling some of the laundry powder from the cup I held. Then I realized who it was and turned to face Shiloh directly.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” I took a steadying breath. “I thought you weren’t home, your car—”

I broke off, unnerved suddenly.

Although he was over six feet tall, my husband had never been the most intimidating physical presence among the cops he’d worked with; he had a long and lean frame. His features helped to make up for that. Shiloh had a face I thought of as Eurasian, with pale skin but strong and sharp bones. Most unusual were his eyes: they had a slight epicanthic fold, as if generations ago his forebears had lived on the steppes. The eyes made him hard to read. But right now I thought I saw disapproval in them.

“What’s wrong?” I said.

Shiloh shook his head slowly, definitely a rebuke. “You dumb shit,” he said quietly.

“What are you talking about?” I said, but he just kept giving me his level, reproving look.

Shiloh and I had never worked any cases together, so I’d never got a chance to see his interrogation technique. I thought I might be seeing it now.

“Do you know how many people die in that river every year?” he asked finally.

“Oh,” I said. “Vang told you?” My voice was a little high. The anger of people who rarely get angry is deeply unnerving. “I’m fine,” I said.

“What were you thinking?” he said.

“You would have done the same thing,” I said.

He didn’t deny it. “I didn’t first learn to swim at age twenty-three.”

“I was twenty-two,” I said.

“That’s not the point.”

I turned my back on him and swept the spilled laundry powder into the machine. Cranked the dial over to the warm-water setting, heard the muffled hiss as the cycle started.

Shiloh came up behind me and laid his hands on my hips. “I almost had a heart attack when Vang told me,” he said softly.

Forgiven, I felt a relieved, retroactive urge to apologize. Instead, I said, “I could’ve used you out there today.” He’d had experience with suicidal people; more than experience, a good track record. “She was my first jumper.”

I’d given him an opening to say,
And nearly your last,
but he seemed to have forgotten the issue. He leaned closer to my ear and said instead, “I can smell the river in your hair.” Then he lifted the half ponytail up and kissed the nape of my neck.

I knew what that gesture meant.

In our bedroom afterward, Shiloh was so quiet I thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep. I lifted my head off his chest and looked at his face; his eyes were closed.

Then he stroked my back with one hand, still not opening his eyes. If I hadn’t known him better I would have thought that was the way he took everything: languid and easy.

I knew better. I’d been observing Mike Shiloh for years, at both long and close range. Sometimes I thought that Shiloh deliberately took the course of most resistance, refusing to ever take the easy road.

Shiloh’s career had taken a more circuitous path than mine. When I’d met him, he’d been an undercover narcotics officer. Later, he’d applied for special training as a hostage negotiator. He wasn’t chosen for negotiation training. Instead, he’d been given an assignment he didn’t ask for or want, a role adjunct to Homicide. Shiloh became a cold-case detective.

Cold-case reviewers are something of a luxury. In good economic times, with budget surpluses and falling homicide rates, many metro police departments could afford to assign detectives to analyze and reinvestigate old unsolved cases, usually homicides. In many ways it was an ideal job for Shiloh, who liked intractable intellectual puzzles. He understood, however, that his assignment to cold-case, noticeably lacking a partner, was a thinly veiled criticism.

Shiloh was seventeen when he left his Utah home without finishing high school. He’d been on a logging crew in Montana when he did his first law-enforcement work as part of a sheriff’s search-and-rescue unit.

His career had taken him across the Midwest. From patrol work, he’d gotten into undercover narcotics. Across the upper Plains and Midwest, he’d worked on narcotics squads that always needed an unrecognizable new face to come in and make buys. In cities like Gary, Indiana, and Madison, Wisconsin, he’d often worked alone. Sometimes his colleagues were decent. Other times they were bigoted, or trigger-happy cowboys. His superiors weren’t always better.

By the time he arrived in Minneapolis to put down semi-permanent roots and get a degree in psychology, Shiloh was a loner who’d learned to trust his own instincts and opinions over those of others.

Underneath all that, Shiloh was a preacher’s son. In the heart of Utah’s Mormon country, Shiloh’s father had headed a small nondenominational church whose stern creed divided the world into saved and unsaved. And while Shiloh himself hadn’t been inside a church on Sunday morning in perhaps a decade, I thought some of the rigid moralism of his youth lived on inside him, but now fused to a set of attitudes more politically liberal than the ones most cops held.

In the close and collegial quarters of a metro police department, Shiloh’s opinions didn’t win him a lot of friends. He’d had dustups with prosecutors and supervising detectives whose ideas and tactics he disagreed with. His sympathies raised eyebrows: he was compassionate toward drug users and prostitutes that his peers had no use for, and terse and unfriendly with white-collar informants that his superiors valued. An anonymous wit had once sent ACLU literature to him at work, as if it were a shameful form of pornography.

I’d argued with him more than once myself, getting angry and defensive when he pressed me on cop values and virtues I didn’t like to question. Those kinds of debates between us were never rancorous, but if we had worked in the same department, it was unlikely we would have been assigned as partners, much less predicted to get married.

“Nobody ‘gets’ you and Shiloh,” Genevieve had said once. “When I first met you, you said ‘disorientated’ instead of ‘disoriented.’ And Shiloh . . .” She’d paused for thought. “Shiloh once got in an argument with another detective who’d been feeding important information to a TV reporter—I think there was some suspicion this guy was sleeping with her. Anyway, Shiloh called him a ‘goddamned quisling.’ After the two of them left, the rest of us who’d overheard the fight all went to the dictionary to find out what a ‘quisling’ was. We all thought it was something dirty.” Genevieve laughed. “Turned out, it means a traitor.”

“That’s Shiloh for you,” I’d said, “getting in someone’s face and talking over his head at the same time.”

Nobody could fault the work he did, though. There were those in the department who appreciated the intelligence and the work ethic he brought to the job. But too many others thought it was time for Mike Shiloh to be slapped down, and he was.

Cold-case work provides few opportunities to shine. There’s lots of fruitless rereading and reinterviewing. Breaks in cases more than a year old tend only to come when a witness comes forward years, even decades, later, after getting religion or being nagged by conscience.

Shiloh’s career was flatlining at the same time that Genevieve and I were clearing cases at a remarkable rate. “It’s luck,” I told Shiloh then. “It’ll turn.”

And it had. He’d caught Annelise Eliot, a murderer and fugitive for more than a decade, and an FBI agent had suggested he fill out their application.

Our own relationship had taken a circuitous course toward marriage, over nearly five years’ time. We certainly weren’t an obvious match, as Genevieve had pointed out, and we’d seen each other, broken up, reconciled, and finally moved in together before marrying only recently. But through it all there was a certain inevitability that drew me to Shiloh. I’d had a hard time explaining it even to Genevieve, who understood the relationship between Shiloh and me better than anyone.

I’d told her early on that I was seeing him, but
told her
wasn’t quite the phrase for it; it had been a slip of the tongue.

Back in the days when I was still on patrol, Genevieve was always on the lookout for a way to help me up the food chain. One evening, when I’d been a guest in her St. Paul home, she’d reflected on one such opportunity.

“The head of the interagency narcotics squad thinks a lot of you,” she’d told me. She was a short woman, with an apron partially covering the old sweater and jeans she’d changed into to cook. Although she was chopping tomatoes and olives for a pasta dish, she frequently glanced over to where I was sitting at her counter, her hazel eyes lively with thought and speculation. She was big on eye contact; a conversation without it was, for her, like driving without headlights.

“Have you ever thought about that kind of work?” she asked, looking my way. “Radich’s got two veteran guys, Nelson and Shiloh, who are probably going to want to transfer out someday.”

“Shiloh hasn’t said anything about it,” I’d said thoughtlessly, and then said to myself,
Oh, hell.

“Why would Shiloh have mentioned it to you?” she’d said. I’d had a very brief assignment with the narcotics squad, but that was long over, and Gen knew it.

Then she’d understood. “Oh, my God. You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“We’ve been keeping it under wraps at work,” I’d said tersely, embarrassed at my slip.

“We’re talking about the same guy, right?” she’d said, teasing me. “Six-two, reddish-brown hair, never says much of anything, regularly hands your ass to you on the basketball court?”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Yes, it is, Sarah. You can’t admit you’re not good enough to guard him.”

“No, about him not saying much of anything,” I’d said. “He does. He does to me.”

Her hazel eyes had widened, and a half-cooked tomato slid languidly, unnoticed, off the spatula she was holding. She believed me.

“I’ll be damned,” she said. “I would never in a hundred years have connected the two of you. You seem so different. Well, on the surface. I guess I don’t know Shiloh that well.” She paused, considering. “So what’s he really like?”

My first impulse was to make a joke of it, saying,
You mean in bed?
But I couldn’t, and instead I spoke without premeditation. “Shiloh is a deep river,” I’d said.

It hadn’t been an adequate summary. But what I couldn’t quite explain to Genevieve was that I needed and wanted Shiloh not in spite of the fact that we were so different but because of it. Shiloh wasn’t like me, and he wasn’t like the men I’d usually felt comfortable with.

He didn’t need to be holding my hand or touching me constantly when we were together. He didn’t need me to share all his interests or like the same things he did. And from early on I’d seen that I’d have to stretch myself to keep up with the things he knew and the way he thought.

If I’d met him even a year earlier in my life, those things probably would have been sufficient to scare me off. But instead, I saw in Shiloh the possibility for a kinship based on something much deeper than common interests, something that made those old criteria seem irrelevant, even trite. There were depths in him that unnerved and excited me, made me feel like someone raised on a prairie seeing the ocean for the first time. After I’d met him, the kind of man I’d previously gone out with, that guy with the sidewall haircut and 4WD vehicle, seemed a little less dimensional, a little less attractive, to me.

Now Shiloh stirred and slipped out from under the arm I’d thrown over his chest. I watched as he went to the chest of drawers and dug out a pair of nail clippers.

“You’re going to pare your fingernails? You already got your hair cut today, didn’t you?” I asked, a little accusingly. He knew I missed the longish hair he’d had when I’d first met him. When he kept it short, the sun didn’t have a chance to bring out the lighter russet tones in its dark-auburn color.

He ignored the gentle criticism. “No, I’m going to clip
your
nails,” he said, settling on the edge of the bed and picking up one of my hands.

I pulled it away. “Why?”

“Because,” he said, “you scratched me. I don’t know if they have group showers at Quantico, but I don’t want to turn up there with red marks on my back.” He reclaimed my hand.

“My nails aren’t that long.”

“No, but they’re ragged. Because you bite them.”

“I don’t anymore,” I lied. When I felt the sides of the clipper against the first fingernail, my hand twitched involuntarily.

Shiloh glanced at my face. “Do you trust me to do this?”

“Yes,” I said, not lying this time.

There was a metallic click as the clippers bit through my index fingernail; Shiloh released that finger and moved on to the next. A dissociative feeling ran through my body, a physical memory, and I closed my eyes to isolate it. Of course: In Shiloh’s hands I felt my mother’s touch. She’d been the only person ever to do this for me, back when I was a child. Even then ovarian cancer had been spreading through her insides like blackdamp through a mine.

Shiloh brushed parings from the Indian blanket of our bed onto the floor. I opened my eyes again. “All done,” he said mildly.

“Thanks,” I said. “I guess.” I got off the bed and went to hunt for clothes. “We should start thinking about dinner,” I said, pulling a T-shirt over my head.