The 37th Hour (9 page)

Vang came in with a cup of coffee around nine. “How was your time off?” he asked.

“It was all right,” I said shortly. I hadn’t told him I had gone to see Genevieve. She was living in a kind of departmental limbo, without a set date for her return. Our lieutenant was allowing it because she was a well-liked veteran. But I still didn’t want to draw the department’s attention to her absence and to the question of when she was coming back.

“What’s the big news around here?” I asked.

“There’s not a lot going on,” Vang said. “I got all the paperwork on Mrs. Thorenson. Did you see the report? I left it on your desk.”

“I read it,” I said, moving it to the top of the pile.

Annette Thorenson had gone on a weekend trip upstate with a friend, to a resort south of St. Cloud. She hadn’t come back. Nor had she told her friend anything to imply that she wasn’t going straight home to where she lived in a Lake Harriet town house with a husband and no kids. Mr. Thorenson was beside himself.

“The gasoline card’s been used,” Vang said. “ATMs have been hit four times. Twice moving eastward to Wisconsin. Twice in Madison.”

“And?” I said.

“His friends say the marriage is solid. Her friends all say it’s not. One of them, who’s recently divorced herself, said Annette asked a lot of questions in the key of: ‘What’s it like to get divorced and start over?’ ”

“See? Tired of Being Married,” I said. I’d told him about my categories.

“So I asked if Annette knew anyone in Madison,” Vang went on. “Turns out that’s where she went to school. Lived there a year afterward, working.”

“And she still has friends there?”

“I couldn’t get any names. My guess is there’s an old flame still in town. The problem is, it seems like she’s keeping a low profile now that she’s there. I gave the Madison cops her license number, hoping they’d pick her up and bring her into a station, have her call her husband and tell him flat out what’s going on. But they haven’t seen the car. And she hasn’t used the ATM in the past few days.”

“ ‘I’ll buy, sweetheart,’ ” I said. The old flame was apparently picking up the checks.

“Yeah,” Vang said. “But Mr. Thorenson doesn’t believe any of it. He says someone must be forcing her to drive east and get money out of cash machines. I’ve tried to tell him that everything points to her taking a time-out from her life here, but he’s not convinced. He calls here a lot and the word
negligence
keeps coming up. He wants to speak to my supervisor.”

“I suspect you have a pink message slip for me.”

“Several.”

“I just need one.”

I called Mr. Thorenson at his office and listened while he recounted his unsatisfying conversations with Vang. He was unhappy when I told him that Vang had done everything I would have.

“It might be time to bring in some private help,” I said. “I can give you the phone numbers of several very competent investigators,” I said.

“At this point, I’m thinking of contacting a lawyer, Miss Pribek,” Thorenson responded, and hung up.

Too bad, I thought. I knew more lawyers than I did PIs; I could have made a referral there, too.
Miss Pribek.
If that pejorative courtesy title was his idea of subtle psychological warfare, I could see why his wife might have gotten tired of him.

The highlight of the day was a trip across town to examine the clean, empty apartment of a young man with a lot of gambling debts. Another person who’d left town of his own volition, I thought.

“Did you see the vacuum marks on the carpet?” I asked Vang on the way back. “Track-covering. Guilty conscience. People often clean when they’re not planning on coming back.”

“Yeah,” he said. “My wife even cleans house before we go on vacation, so in case we’re in a fatal on the highway, our families won’t come here and see a dirty house. It’s her version of wearing clean underwear.”

We fell silent and I thought about the evening ahead.

If Genevieve had been on the job, she would have suggested we do something after work tonight, my first night without Shiloh around. She would have known that I’d gotten unused to living alone, but she wouldn’t have made a big deal of it.

Maybe it was time for me to get to know my new partner a little better.

“You want to get a cup of coffee after work?” I asked, steering down the spiral ramp at the garage downtown.

Vang looked at me sidewise, maybe surprised. “Thanks,” he said. “But I’ve got to get home for dinner. Some other time, okay?”

“You bet,” I said, sounding old and Minnesotan to myself.

I stayed late at work, occupying myself with a motley assortment of small tasks that probably could have waited. When I ran out of those, I went to the courts where Hennepin County people regularly played pickup basketball, hoping to get recruited into a game. Shiloh and I had been among the regular players.

But nobody that I recognized was there. Instead, a group of rookies was playing two-on-two. They looked like they could have come straight from the U of M’s women’s team: all female, all tall, three-fourths blonde. They were also evenly matched; there wasn’t room for an extra player, even had we known each other.

A small thing lifted my spirits when I returned home: there was a basket of tomatoes on the stoop. No note, but none was needed. Mrs. Muzio kept a prodigious garden all summer long, and vegetables turned up on our steps regularly. Standing on the kitchen doorstep at the back of the house, I looked over and saw the slow, wild demise of Mrs. Muzio’s kitchen garden: a sunflower in death was half bowed under its own weight; the herbs had flowered and bolted. But the tomato plants were still heavy-laden with the last fruits of the season.

I doubted Mrs. Muzio knew Shiloh was gone. She left tomatoes more often than anything else, because she knew how much Shiloh liked them. Tomato sandwiches were his staple when he was too busy to cook. Often, when he came home on a quick break from work, he’d make one and eat it standing over the sink.

I pushed the strap of my shoulder bag onto a secure spot higher on my shoulder, held the basket in one arm against my ribs, and opened the door with my other hand.

Shiloh had said he’d call to give me a number where he could be reached at Quantico, but I didn’t look at the answering machine right away. First, I put Mrs. Muzio’s tomatoes away in the refrigerator, fixed myself a Coke over ice, went to change out of my work clothes. Only then did I go to the machine to find Shiloh’s message.

There was none. The tiny red eye, often flashing when we’d both been out all day, was dim, unlit.

Well, okay, he’s busy. He’s been traveling, and then getting used to his new surroundings. The phone lines work both ways, you know. Call him instead.

That was going to pose a problem: I still didn’t have a phone number for him.

There was probably a way to get through to the dormitory where the agents-in-training lived. Getting that number wouldn’t be easy, though, at this hour. Dealing with the FBI often meant multiple calls and phone tag, even on official business. Even during office hours. This was only personal business, and it was after hours. In Virginia it was already eight.

I had the phone number of an FBI agent, the one who’d worked closely with Shiloh on the Annelise Eliot case. It might be helpful to call Agent Thompson first, explain the situation, and ask him to run interference for me with his peers.

It took several minutes of hunting around in the disorganized entries in our phone book, but I found Thompson’s phone number. My hand was on the phone when something else came to mind.

Two months ago, Shiloh and I had watched a cable-channel documentary on the making of FBI agents. From it, I’d gotten an idea of what life at Quantico would be like for Shiloh. From the very first day there was a demanding round of training: baseline testing on physical conditioning, classroom instruction on procedure and law and ethics. At night, the agents-in-training lived like college students, studying at small desks with snapshots of spouses and children hanging over them, going to each other’s rooms briefly to talk, decompressing after a hard day.

After years as an outsider, Shiloh was probably in his element at last, surrounded by people as single-minded and driven as he was. He was spending his small amount of free time getting to know others in his agent class, looking at the photos over the desks. Most likely many of them were doing that, getting to know each other, trading stories about the diverse career paths that had led them to Quantico. And I was about to make Shiloh the only one who had to go to the phone to take a call from his needy wife, who was worried because it had been
over twenty-four hours
and he hadn’t called home.

I turned on ESPN and put it out of my mind.

“. . . killed two soldiers at a bus stop last year. No party has claimed responsibility for this year’s bombing. . . . In Blue Earth, the search intensifies for 67-year-old Thomas Hall, the apparent victim of a single-vehicle accident. His truck was found early Sunday outside town, where it had crashed into a tree off the eastbound lane. Search-and-rescue teams are widening the scope of their hunt, but have not been successful in locating Hall. WMNN news time, six fifty-nine.”

It was Tuesday morning, and the clock radio had awakened me, but I wasn’t ready to get out of bed yet. When the phone rang several minutes later, I was still half asleep. I picked it up and had to clear my throat before speaking.

“I woke you up, sorry,” the voice on the other end said.

“Shiloh?” He sounded strange.

Vang laughed. “I really did wake you,” he said. He sounded very chipper. I sat up, a little embarrassed. He went on, “There’s a grave out in Wayzata we’ve got to look at.”

“Oh, yeah? What’s the story?” I asked.

“They don’t know yet. A woman called this morning. She lives in the same neighborhood—I mean, the same area—with a released sex offender, a child molester. Last night she saw him out with a flashlight, digging, his car parked nearby.”

“And she knew it was a grave how?”

“Well, she said the hole looked about the right size to be a grave. She didn’t see him put anything in it. He was filling it in, actually. I guess she lives on a hill, has a pretty good view of the area, so she could watch awhile.”

“Is she part of a neighborhood watch?”

“Not officially, but this guy—his name’s Bonney—makes everyone out there nervous. They all got the flyer about him being a released sex offender. This woman woke up at four
A.M.
worrying about what she’d seen and finally decided to call us. So now we’re digging.”

I sat up, feeling more awake. “We’ve really got a warrant to dig on his property? Probable cause seems pretty weak. Didn’t anyone suggest we just talk to this guy first?”

“They sent a patrolman to do that,” Vang said. “He’s not home, and he’s not at work, either, even though he’s on the schedule. Nobody likes it. But here’s the good part: He didn’t actually dig on his own property. The lot on the other side of his back fence is undeveloped county land. That’s where he was digging.”

“Ah,” I said.

“So, no warrant needed,” Vang confirmed. “Should I pick you up? I’m at home right now, but I could come straight over.”

I pushed the blanket off my legs with my free hand. “Yeah, that’d be good,” I said. “I can be ready in fifteen minutes.”

Thirty-five minutes later, Vang and I were standing on an acre of peaceful countryside near Wayzata Bay. Despite its proximity to the city, this was a place more rural than suburban in its flavor, with plenty of land between houses; I could see why Vang had called it an “area” rather than a “neighborhood” on the phone.

The crime-scene unit van was parked at the edge of the road, and two officers were digging. Amateur graves are usually shallow, and exhuming them is work too delicate for a backhoe.

Marijuana farmers sometimes cultivate their crop deep in isolated public lands. The obvious advantage is that the growers have to be caught on-site for the crop to be linked to them, as opposed to having the incriminating plant on their own property. If Bonney had in fact killed someone, he had a similar incentive not to bury on his own property. He hadn’t gone very far, but perhaps he’d felt it wiser not to travel with a body in his car.

Vang and I had just finished reading through the new missing-persons reports and be-on-the-lookouts for the last forty-eight hours; in addition, Vang had a printout of Bonney’s criminal record.

“I don’t get a vibe off any of these missing persons,” I said. “All adults or late teens.”

“They don’t seem like Bonney’s type, do they?” Vang agreed.

“No. Besides, you read his record, right? Sexual battery, child molestation. But he’s never killed anyone, or even come close.”

Vang listened but said nothing.

“Sometimes sexual predators progress to worse crimes, like homicide,” I said. “But there just hasn’t been a disappearance in the last forty-eight hours that seems to match up with this guy burying someone in a field near his house.” I watched one of the officers pause and gingerly scrape aside some wet soil. Vang and I were keeping our distance for now, letting them do their work with a minimum of disturbance to the ground and surroundings. “Usually, you’ll have a pretty good idea about these things. You’ll get a call that someone’s found a body and you’ll know right away, ‘We found Jane.’ I don’t get that feeling here.” I sighed. “You know what I think? I think Bonney burned a damn casserole until the pot was beyond salvaging and took the whole mess out and buried it. His neighbor up the hill saw it, lay awake until a little hole became a yawning grave, and called us. Sometimes I think this whole sex-offender thing, with disclosure and flyers and neighborhood meetings, has gotten way out of hand.”

I cut myself off. Shiloh had only been gone two days and already I was channeling him, spreading his unpopular liberal views to my new partner. “If they find something bad, maybe we’ll ask for a warrant for the house,” I said, backpedaling. “If not, let the parole officer make the surprise visits to look for a violation. It’s his job.”