The 37th Hour (28 page)

“What’s Michael like now?”

I drank again, the action giving me time to theorize.

“Hard to summarize,” I said. “Painfully honest.”

There was a warm feeling spreading through the pit of my stomach. Back in the days when I really drank, it would have taken a lot more gin before I’d have felt its effects. I sipped from the mug again and began to push the floor lightly with my feet, rocking Hope and myself.

“How long have you been married?”

Ligieia, while translating, stood up to pour more gin into my cup. I let her.

“Only two months,” I said. “Not long.”

“Before that, how long did you know him?”

“About five years,” I said. “We weren’t together for all of it, though. We split up for a while.”

Maybe the gin was doing it to me, but I’d lost the party-line feeling of being a degree removed from Sinclair. Particularly if I kept my eyes down on Hope, who’d fallen asleep, Ligieia’s words seamlessly became Sinclair’s voice.

“Why?”

“Shiloh and I had hit a wall.” I spoke slowly, thinking. “It was professional, in a way. We weren’t equals on the job, and that bothered me. When I was young I got angry easily. I was angry at him a lot of the time and I couldn’t even explain why.”
I’m drunk already, I should stop right here.
I didn’t. “And besides that, he was so far away sometimes, and when I was young I grabbed at things I thought I needed, and I got scared when I felt there was a piece of him I was never going to have.”

It was like I’d stepped barefoot on a shard of grief I hadn’t seen before me. I put my face down in my hands as much as I could without waking Hope.

Sinclair came and stood before me and did something odd and lovely: she put her hand on my forehead like I might have a fever, then ran the same hand back over my hair.

“I miss him,” I said quietly, and Sinclair nodded.

This time when she spoke to me, her lips moved as well as her hands, and I swear I understood even before Ligieia translated.

“Tell me something about Mike. Anything.”

So I poured myself more gin and told her how Shiloh caught Annelise Eliot.

chapter 18

Early in Shiloh’s cold-case days,
he’d gone on a fairly routine errand, out to Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis where several churches jointly ran a hospice. There a middle-aged man dying of AIDS needed to be reinterviewed, before his memories of an old crime winked out along with the sputtering candle of his existence. Shiloh sat by his bed, listened, took notes. And after the dying man slept, Rev. Aileen Lennox, who helped run the hospice, offered Shiloh what she self-deprecatingly called “the nickel tour.”

He walked with the tall, plainly dressed woman and listened as she described with quiet pride the facility that had only been remodeled a year earlier as a way station for the dying. She pointed out the comforting, intimate touches; she spoke of the companies and individuals who’d donated time and money. And as she did, Shiloh felt something akin to hair rising on the back of his neck.

She was, at that time, twelve years older than when she’d disappeared. Her high cheekbones had taken on softening flesh, there were crow’s-feet around the glacial blue eyes, and her once-streaked blond hair was now dyed a lightless dun color. But Shiloh had seen it in her eyes, her bone structure, her carriage. Aileen Lennox was Annelise Eliot.

“I heard Montana in her voice,” Shiloh told me that night, “but when I asked her about it, she said she’d never lived there.”

“Bullshit,” I told him. “You can’t hear a Montana accent.”

“Yes, I can,” Shiloh had said.

Annelise Eliot had grown up there, a timber heiress, daughter of a land baron with logging operations and paper mills and extensive landholdings. Her name, with its European connotations, suggested an aristocrat, perhaps a touch neurasthenic, with a tracery of blue veins under paper-white narcissus skin. Little could be further from the truth. Anni, as she’d been known before notoriety fixed her in the public’s mind as Annelise, had been tall, full-bodied, and strong. And if her fair hair was expensively streaked with paler blond salon highlights, well, her fingernails were also often a little dirty from caring for her horses herself.

From a young age, Anni had had fast Appaloosas that she barrel-raced in rodeos. After the age of 16, she’d owned a faster Mustang, and when her red 1966 coupe sped down the road, the radar guns of local deputies seemed stricken with an odd malfunction. Likewise, the stories about the Eliot summer place in Flathead Lake—excessive underage drinking, strip poker, and wild stunts—remained just that, stories about Anni and her friends told with almost wistful envy by adults grown too old and sensible for that sort of behavior. She was a tomboy with a charmed life.

Trouble finally came to Annelise when she was nineteen. She’d had a boyfriend, Owen Greene, for three years, and they were getting serious—the relationship had survived his decision to go to school in California. Greene was prelaw at UC San Diego, with a 3.9 average, well liked by professors and peers. Then Marnie Hahn, a pretty local girl in her senior year of high school, accused him of raping her after a party in the moneyed La Jolla area.

Hahn, an indifferent student and the employee of a pizza parlor near campus, had gone to the party of her own will. She had been underage and drinking. She was an unlikely girl to bring a rape case against a rich college boy; nevertheless, she stuck to her story.

Whatever Greene told Annelise over the long-distance wires shortly thereafter is unknown, but Annelise flew out to California in a public show of support. During her visit, Hahn turned up dead, bludgeoned with a heavy object never recovered or even quite identified.

Greene was firmly alibied. Annelise, on the other hand, was not. Evidence, circumstantial but inevitable as a snowdrift, began to amass. Witnesses had seen Annelise’s rented car parked outside Marnie’s house. A little of Marnie’s blood, just a trace, was recovered from the driver’s-side floor mat of that same car.

The police moved fast, but the Eliots moved faster. By the time there was enough evidence for an arrest, Annelise was gone.

The parents denied any knowledge of her disappearance. They lawyered up and made public appearances, calling on the police to investigate their daughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping. However they were funneling money to Annelise—and the authorities all believed that they were—it wasn’t traceable.

That was how the matter stood for years, despite the best efforts of the FBI and police in two states. Thousands of leads fizzled. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the case was that no set of fingerprints existed for Annelise. She’d never been arrested, and she was the kind of girl who always had a troupe of friends around her, using her things. There was no way any latent print lifted from any possession of hers could be proven to have been made by Annelise.

Her case had been news across the U.S., but it was particularly big in Montana, where an 18-year-old Shiloh followed it in the newspapers. He’d been employed by one of old man Eliot’s logging crews—the magazine writers who’d done stories on the case had loved that particular detail.

But at first, when Shiloh believed he’d found Annelise Eliot in the Twin Cities, twelve years after her crime, his theory impressed no one. At first, it didn’t even worry Annelise herself.

Like most investigators, he’d made narrowing circles around his target, pulling at the edges of her Aileen Lennox identity, discovering how thin and immaterial it was. As his courteous, relentless probing continued, her nerves began to fray. She tried a high-handed approach first, writing him a letter requesting him to cease his activities. Then she complained of harassment to Shiloh’s superiors, as did some of her parishioners. And Shiloh’s superiors had listened.

This is a law-abiding woman, they pointed out. More than law-abiding: a philanthropist, a clergywoman. This couldn’t be Annelise Eliot, they said. Everyone knew where Annelise was. She was living with other American expatriates in Switzerland. Or maybe in Cozumel, where her parents’ U.S. dollars went a long way. She certainly wasn’t in Minnesota, a cold midwestern state where she knew no one, a minister at a nondenominational New Age church, feeding the homeless and tending the dying.

And they pointed out that the Eliot case might be a cold case, but it wasn’t a
Minnesota
cold case. Annelise had lived in Montana and killed in California. Back off, they said. Work your own caseload.

Shiloh had backed down, but only to retrench, looking into the life of Annelise, not Aileen. Shiloh talked to detectives in Montana. He’d begun talking to the FBI agent who’d headed up the Eliot investigation, who was polite but not very interested. And finally, he’d started talking to people who’d known Annelise. Not her close friends, but old acquaintances on the edges of her life.

It took a long time, an investigation crowded into the beginnings and ends of his workdays. But the day came when he had a long, friendly phone conversation with a high-school classmate of Annelise’s. During the course of the woman’s recollections, she suddenly remembered that during freshman-year biology, she and Annelise had been lab partners. They had typed each other’s blood. And oh yeah, they’d fingerprinted each other. She’d never really thought about that before.

His voice calm, his heart slamming, Shiloh asked if she’d kept her old school stuff.

Maybe, she said. My parents are real pack rats.

That spring evening he came home from work a little late. When I met him on the back step, he slid his hands up my rib cage and lifted me up off my feet as an exuberant young father might do with a small child.

Several days later, nearly a year after he’d met Aileen Lennox, Shiloh opened a Federal Express package containing patent fingerprints from Annelise Eliot. They drew a nineteen-point match with ones he’d had a fingerprint technician take months ago from the polite, annoyed letter Lennox had written to him.

Now Special Agent Jay Thompson of the FBI was interested. He flew to Minnesota. I’ll never forget seeing him on our doorstep, a lean, leathery man in his late forties. He looked tired, sly, and happy, all things I’d never seen before on a federal agent’s mien.

“Let’s get her, Mike,” he said.

It wasn’t easy, even then. Thompson flew to Montana, where Annelise’s mother, now a widow, still lived in a graceful old house on forty acres. Thompson and the detective who’d originally headed up the Montana investigation got a warrant to search the Eliot house; several officers went out to help them.

The widow Eliot was as tall as her daughter, and her blond hair was just beginning to be streaked with white. She’d had time to get used to follow-up visits from detectives, particularly the Montana man, Oldham. If she was alarmed that this time they had come with a search warrant—the first search in twelve years—it didn’t show, Thompson later said. She offered the men homemade ginger cookies.

It was a good performance, but she must have known how futile it was. Although there was little in the house to betray her ongoing contact with her daughter—the paperwork on the phone bill, for example, showed no calls to Minnesota—there was a sealed and stamped letter with no return address on the old roll-top desk in the study. It was segregated from the other outgoing mail, as if Mrs. Eliot meant to drop it separately into a public mailbox in town. There was no receiver’s name above the address, but it was going to Eden Prairie, Minnesota.

It was Thompson who’d found the letter, and he knew from that moment he had to move carefully. The letter hadn’t been hidden; he doubted Mrs. Eliot would believe they hadn’t seen it, even should he leave it behind unopened and in the same position on the desk. No matter what, the moment the police left her home, the widow Eliot was going to be on the phone to Minnesota.

No turning back. Thompson opened the letter. The salutation read,
Dear Anni
.

Thompson slipped the letter into his jacket, found Oldham, and told him to sit down with Annelise’s mother for a reinterview. “Keep her occupied,” he said.

While Oldham accepted ginger cookies and a cup of tea in a first-floor parlor, Thompson returned to the second-floor study and made two quick, quiet, and urgent calls to Minneapolis. The first was to a federal judge; the second was to Shiloh’s cell phone.

“Today’s the day,” he said. “We’re at the house. We got her, and the mother knows. I’m getting you a warrant. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes.” He looked out a wide window to where the Eliot land lay peaceful and white under March snow. “Go get her
now,
Mike.”

Annelise had never truly believed Shiloh would catch her. When he came to her that afternoon, in her study at the church, she at first thought it was with more futile, probing questions. When Shiloh began to Mirandize her, she finally realized what was happening.

The look in her eyes, Shiloh said, must have been the same one that Marnie Hahn had seen just before she died, a rage born of frustrated, balked entitlement. Annelise Eliot had stared at him like that for a moment. Then she went for the letter opener. Shiloh had barely gotten a deflecting hand up in time.

“Did she really think she could get out of the situation by killing him?” Ligieia asked. Sinclair’s hands hadn’t moved. Ligieia had become interested in the story itself; she was asking out of her own curiosity.

“I’m not sure she was trying to kill him. It was just anger,” I said. “She never really believed Shiloh was going to get any evidence he could use. And I think”—I paused, looking at Sinclair now—“that she really felt she’d paid her debt to society, through all the good she was doing in Minnesota. Maybe she even felt she’d repaid Marnie Hahn’s memory.”

Sinclair was signing.
“And when Mike wouldn’t let it go at that,”
Ligieia translated,
“when she knew he was really going to make her pay, she got angry again. Just like she got angry at Hahn, years ago, the girl who was ruining her life.”