The 37th Hour (12 page)

A criminal record would have killed Shiloh’s chances with the FBI, and he’d passed their rigorous screening. He associated with criminals only as a detective who had the usual relationships with informants.

Enemies? I suppose Annelise Eliot, whom he’d caught after thirteen years of life as a fugitive, had reason to hate him. But everything I’d heard about the case suggested she’d directed her hostility to larger and more political targets, like the lawyers in California building their careers on her prosecution, whom she denounced in the media while proclaiming her innocence.

No one, that I could see, would benefit from Shiloh’s death.

The house wasn’t a plausible site for some kind of violent event. I’d already searched it and it was in order.

I chewed the end of my pencil.

Maybe I was going at this the wrong way. I was thinking of Shiloh impersonally, as a case. But I knew him, maybe better than anyone. It was, in a perverse way, an ideal situation.

What had he done, the day and a half that I’d been gone? He was leaving for Virginia soon. He’d packed, to be sure. Maybe run a load of laundry beforehand. And he’d gone out to get food, probably, because we tended to restock the refrigerator on a basis closer to daily than to weekly.

Shiloh habitually ran every day, so he’d probably gone out for one of the long runs he liked when I wasn’t at his side to quit after four miles. And what else? Maybe he’d read, maybe watched some basketball. He might have slept early, on a quiet Saturday night without his wife around.

It was a safe, sane, and boring course of events. None of those activities seemed to allow for Shiloh to simply disappear. Except . . .

A long-distance run had been, nominally, the most dangerous part of the routine I’d reconstructed for Saturday and Sunday. Mostly, people who ran never encountered more than an obnoxious dog, but there were exceptions. Runners took paths through quiet and dark places, away from city lights. Occasionally paramedics carried them from state parks and nature trails minus their cash, with head traumas or stab wounds. Shiloh, six-foot-two, young, and athletic, was the least likely of marks for a mugger, but it had been a theory that at least made some sense.

I went back to Shiloh’s valise and opened it. Thumbing through the clothes, I saw the gray-green of his Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, the one he favored for running and basketball games. Squashed against the frame, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to keep the soles from rubbing against the clothes, were Shiloh’s running shoes. He only had one pair.

Here were his running shoes; gone were his heavy-soled boots and his jacket. I felt a small twinge of satisfaction. This was progress.

Shiloh had gone somewhere on foot. Not running, not the airport, either. An errand. He’d gone out somewhere, casually dressed, and hadn’t come back.

The phone rang.

“It’s me,” Vang said. “Some faxes came in for you from Virginia-area hospitals. No one fitting your husband’s description has been admitted in the last seventy-two hours.”

“I know,” I said.

Genevieve, in my earliest days as a detective, told me: “When you’ve got a missing-persons case you think is really legit, one that you’ve got a bad feeling about, the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours are key. Work it hard and work it fast.” Usually, cases like those were the disappearances of children. Other times the missing persons were women who turned up missing against a backdrop of suspicious circumstances: evidence of a break-in or a struggle, a chorus of friends witnessing to a creepy ex-boyfriend hanging around, a recently obtained restraining order.

No such events surrounded Shiloh’s disappearance. In this case, I’d spent most of the thirty-six hours not realizing he was missing.

Even so, I was going to do now what I should have done then: I was going to work all the angles I could think of in the next twenty-four hours.

I needed to talk to people in our neighborhood. Most of them were working people, though, and wouldn’t be home in the middle of the afternoon. And some, our less immediate neighbors, would need a picture of Shiloh to prompt them.

There was one person, however, who knew Shiloh by sight and was almost always in.

The widow Muzio probably saw Shiloh more than any of our other neighbors. She thought the world of him, mostly because Shiloh looked after her. He did this because Nedda Muzio lived alone, and she was getting senile.

Mrs. Muzio had an aged, sweet-tempered dog with the rangy build and curly hair of a wolfhound, with maybe some shepherd in her blood, too.

This dog, who had the unlikely name of Snoopy, used to escape from Mrs. Muzio’s backyard through a misaligned and unlockable gate. On a regular basis, Shiloh used to hear Mrs. Muzio yelling ineffectually for Snoopy. He’d track the dog down at whichever neighbor’s trash can she was eating out of and bring her home.

Mrs. Muzio was always effusive in her joy at Snoopy’s return, partly because she blamed Snoopy’s disappearances on “rascals” who stole her. These same rascals stole her Social Security check from the mailbox, when Mrs. Muzio lost track of the date and didn’t realize the first of the month wasn’t coming for another week. They broke into her house and turned the faucet on, stole food from her cupboard, looked in the windows at night. Shiloh used to go over and patiently reason with her, but he never really made a dent in what he’d called her delusional structure. Fixing her broken gate, which he did one Saturday afternoon and which kept Snoopy inside, was a more concrete help.

When I’d first moved in with Shiloh, Mrs. Muzio had cast a forbidding eye on me. Her paranoia had marked me as an instant enemy. “Why you steal?” she’d yell when Snoopy went missing, or she’d shout
“Strega!”
when she saw me.
Witch,
she was saying; I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary. Shiloh, amused, told me about the warnings she’d whisper to him about
that woman,
afraid for his well-being.

Then, for no reason that I could see, maybe just the wind blowing north-northwest, she stopped. Mrs. Muzio warmed to me. I was no longer
strega.
I wasn’t even just Shiloh’s girlfriend to her; I was
fidanzata,
his fiancée.

As I approached her house, I looked with worry at her front walk. It needed tending. The concrete was breaking up, tectonic plates rising and falling under the forces of Minnesota summers and winters. She could easily trip someday, coming or going. Maybe I’d mention this to Shiloh when I saw him again.

I knocked on the door, pounding with the side of my fist instead of my knuckles. It wasn’t rudeness; Mrs. Muzio was hard-of-hearing.

“Hello, Mrs. Muzio, can I come in?” I asked when she appeared in the doorway.

Five-foot-two and stooped, she turned a benign, blank face up to me.

“You know who I am, right?” I prompted her.

“The
fidanzata,
” she said, her face creasing into a smile.

“Not anymore. We’re married,” I explained. She didn’t respond.

“Can I come in?” I repeated, wiping my boots on her mat as an illustration and a cue.

I liked the inside of Mrs. Muzio’s home. She cooked a lot, scratch meals with her garden vegetables, and as a result her home smelled of Italian cooking instead of the must of age that hung in the homes of many people in their eighties.

In the kitchen, she made coffee. I stood on her cracked, pale-pink linoleum and watched. She hadn’t understood me when I’d told her that Shiloh and I had married. It didn’t really matter, yet if I couldn’t communicate that concept clearly to her, how well would this whole interview go? Could I make her understand anything?

I caught her eye. “I’m not Shiloh’s
fidanzata
anymore. We’re married.” She looked at me with incomprehension. I held up my hand, showing her the ring. “Married. See?”

Understanding dawned and she smiled. “That’s lovely,” she said. Her accent made it
thatsa lovely,
the speech of a B-movie Italian widow. She poured the coffee and we settled at her kitchen table.

“How’s Snoopy?” I asked.

“Snoopy?” she repeated. She nodded toward the back door, near which I saw gray-muzzled Snoopy sleeping near her empty food bowl. “Snoopy is-a . . .” she considered, “old. Like me.” She laughed at herself, her eyes flashing.

Unexpectedly I saw a young girl six decades ago in Sicily, with dark eyes and a ready laugh and a strong body. I’d never seen her before in this widow’s stooped form and that made me ashamed of myself.

“Listen, Mrs. Muzio,” I said. “I need to talk to you. My husband, you know, Mike?” I paused.

“Mike?” she said.

“Right.” I nodded affirmatively. “Have you seen him recently?”

“He fixed the gate,” she said.

“That was months ago,” I said. “Just this week, have you seen Mike? When was the last time you saw Mike?” I kept trying to hit the key words hard.

“I see him walking down the street,” she said.

“What day?”

She squinted like she was making out Shiloh’s form. “Yesterday?” she suggested.

“I don’t think it was yesterday,” I said. “Can you think of something else that happened on the same day that would narrow it down?”

“The governor was talking on the radio.”

“About what?”

She shook her head. “He was talking on the radio. He sounded angry.”

“That was the same day you saw Mike walking?” I asked.

“Yes. Mike is walking in the street. He looks angry. Very serious face.”

“Okay,” I said. “Have you seen anything strange lately? Especially around our house?” I knew I could be opening a Pandora’s box, remembering the omnipresent “rascals,” but Mrs. Muzio shook her head. If her memory was a bit fuzzy, she wasn’t paranoid today.

I stayed another ten minutes to be polite, talking, winding the conversation back to neighborhood goings-on in hopes of jarring loose anything else that might help, but I learned nothing. I stood and set my empty coffee cup in the sink.

“You are leaving now?” she asked me.

“When Mike comes back we’ll drop by for a visit,” I promised.

Outside, a cool wind had picked up, rattling the dry-leaved branches.

Mrs. Muzio thought she had last seen Shiloh out walking and looking “angry.” That was, by her account, the same day that she’d heard the governor talking on the radio and sounding “angry.” Everyone seemed to be angry in Mrs. Muzio’s world. I wondered how much faith I could put in her observations.

Then again, Shiloh, when he was deep in thought, often had a guarded, inward expression that some people might read as anger. Maybe old Mrs. Muzio was right.

She had said she’d seen Shiloh walking. Not out running, not in somebody’s car. That squared with my theory that he’d gone out somewhere in the neighborhood on foot and not come back.

I’d done my hardest interview. It made sense to work from hardest to easiest. That made Darryl Hawkins next. I checked the time on my cell phone. Almost three o’clock; it was still too early. He and his wife wouldn’t be home from work until around five. I needed an errand to take up the interim time.

I still lacked a good picture of my husband. I had only one, and I didn’t think that Shiloh knew I had it.

Annelise Eliot had never really believed she was going to be identified and arrested after over a decade of peaceful life under an assumed name. When Shiloh finally came to her with an arrest warrant, she’d lost control. In an impulse that must have mirrored her thirteen-year-old crime, Annelise grabbed a letter opener off her desk and tried to stab him. He’d gotten a hand up in time, but she’d sliced a deep gash into his palm.

The local media hadn’t been tipped to the arrest, but they were ready the next day for the arraignment at the US courthouse in St. Paul.

The
Star Tribune
and the
Pioneer Press
had run virtually the same photo: Shiloh among a small cadre of uniformed cops, bringing Annelise Eliot in for her first court appearance, a courteous but controlling hand on her arm. The bandage on his hand, from where she’d cut him, was clearly visible.

That image was the quintessential Shiloh to me, and I’d clipped it for that reason. But it wouldn’t work to show to strangers. He’d turned his face away from the photographers, so that he was in profile.

When I got home, I picked up the phone and I dialed a number I’d come to know by heart.

When Deborah put Genevieve on the line, I said, “It’s me. I need to ask you for a strange favor.”

Silence on the other end.

“Are you there?” I asked.

“I’m here,” she said.

“At your Christmas party, Kamareia had a camera.” When the name Kamareia was hard to say, I realized I hadn’t mentioned her directly all during my visit. “She was taking a lot of photos of people, including Shiloh. I need to go to your place and get one of those pictures.”

There was another silence, but this time Genevieve broke it without prompting. “All right.”

“I need to know where they might be,” I added.

“Well,” Genevieve said slowly, “there’s a shoebox she keeps on the shelf in her closet. I’ve seen a lot of photos in there.”

“All right,” I said, “good. But your place is locked, right?”

“Mmm, yes,” Genevieve said. “But the Evanses across the street have my spare key right now.” She seemed to think again. “I’ll call and tell them you’re coming.”

“Thanks, Gen,” I said. Then I asked: “Have you spoken to Shiloh recently?”

“No,” she said. “Not for a long time.”

Time and again, on the job, we’d asked loved ones for recent photos of missing persons. It was perhaps the most crucial item in a search.

Genevieve wasn’t making the connection. She seemed to find nothing strange in the fact that I needed to go to her uninhabited, locked house in search of a recent picture of my husband.

“See you soon,” I said, which probably wasn’t true, and hung up.

chapter 8

The day Genevieve’s only child died,
the two of us had enjoyed a particularly good day at work, a productive day. I remember that we were both in good spirits.