Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

I replayed the message right away, as though that would make it make more sense. Kim’s words revealed nothing new the second time and I felt the first rustlings of worry in my chest.

Come on, I told myself. You know he’s there. The message is just a bureaucratic mix-up. These are the feds; every ten years they do a census in which they lose several million of us. Just call her; she’ll tell you it was a mistake.

I picked up the phone.

“Good morning,” I said when she answered. “My name is Sarah Pribek. You left a message on my machine, asking about Michael Shiloh, my husband. I guess he was delayed, and I just wanted to make sure he got there.”

“He’s not here,” Kim said flatly.

“Oh,” I said. “Are you sure you would know? I mean-”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure,” she said. “It’s my job to know. Are you saying he’s not in Minneapolis?”

“He’s not here,” I said after a moment. I felt the muscles in my throat work emptily as I swallowed without realizing I was going to do it.

“Sometimes people do back out,” she said. “Usually, they have second thoughts about the gun-carrying part of the job-”

“That wouldn’t be it,” I said. “I have to go.” On that abrupt and artless goodbye, I hung up.

My first thought: he’d been in a serious car accident, maybe on the road from the airport to Quantico. But that wasn’t right. If there’d been an accident, maybe Quantico and Kim wouldn’t necessarily have been notified, but I should have been. Shiloh would have been carrying his Minnesota driver’s license, and his home address was on it. They always notify family. But I’d heard from no one but Kim.

My next call was to Vang. “I’m not going to be in for an hour or so,” I said. “There’s something I need to run down. Sorry.”

“Something on a case?” he asked.

“Something personal,” I said, feeling evasive. “This probably won’t take all that long,” I said apologetically before hanging up.

Shiloh was not at Quantico. What did that mean?

If he’d changed his plans, if he’d decided to withdraw from the Academy, he’d have told me. And he’d have told them. But that didn’t matter, I thought, because he wouldn’t have changed his plans. Shiloh had wanted this. If he wasn’t there, something had gone wrong.

Had he even gotten as far as Virginia?

Whether he was in Minnesota or Virginia seemed to be the first distinction I was going to have to make. If I couldn’t narrow that down, I would waste crucial time, because I couldn’t effectively deal with both places at once.

I reached for the phone book and looked up the number for Northwest Airlines.

“I’m going to need a passenger manifest for your two thirty-five flight to Reagan on Sunday,” I told the ticket agent.

“What?” she said. “We don’t-”

“Give that information out, I know. I’m a Hennepin County sheriff’s detective. I know the drill.” I shifted the phone to my other ear, already digging in my desk. “Tell your ticketing supervisor that my name is Detective Sarah Pribek and that I’m going to be down there in about twenty-five minutes with a signed request on stationery with our letterhead.”

The traffic wasn’t too bad at midmorning. The brightest part of the morning was over and clouds were scudding in from the west. As I turned east on the 494, the familiar red-and-gray bodies of Northwest planes were launching themselves toward the sky ahead of me.

The ticketing supervisor at Northwest’s offices-Marilyn, as her name tag identified her-led me to a small office not far from the main ticket counter.

I laid the request letter on her desk and she scanned it quickly, looking from the body of the text up to the letterhead.

“Can I see your identification?” she asked.

I took out the leather holder, flipped it open, and let her peer at it.

“Tell me again what you need?” she asked, sitting down behind her desk.

“I’m tracking down a passenger who was supposed to be on your two thirty-five P.M. flight to Reagan on Sunday. I’m not sure he was on it.”

“Sunday?” she said. She rotated her office chair a little and sat forward to open a filing cabinet next to her desk.

“Name?” she asked, putting the printout on her desk.

“Michael Shiloh,” I said. “Shiloh with an h.”

I’d identified myself to her as Sarah Pribek, and now I opted not to mention that Shiloh was my husband. It seemed best to present myself as an impersonal agent of the law.

“Yup.” Marilyn interrupted my thoughts. “Got him. Listed on the two thirty-five on Sunday, like you thought.” She paused. “He did not check in for that flight.”

“He wasn’t on it?”

“No.”

“What’s the next flight after that?”

“Into Reagan or into Dulles? The absolute next flight was a two fifty-five into Dulles.”

“Can you check that one?”

“There’re a couple more flights into both airports; I can check all of them for you.” She reached back into the filing cabinet; she’d left the drawer open, and now she walked her fingers over the edges of the documents. Licking her thumb, she culled several of them.

I leaned against the wall to wait, watching as she read. She shook her head slightly each time she finished with an individual manifest. When she was done she turned her desk chair slightly and faced me again. “He’s not listed on any of them.”

I nodded.

“Sometimes people fly into Baltimore,” she said thoughtfully. I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. But you’ve been really helpful.”

I thanked her and took my leave, heading toward the escalator.

Shiloh could have flown into Baltimore, he could have chosen a different airline, but there was no reason for that. He’d had a ticket. More to the point, if he’d missed Northwest’s 2:35 flight-and that in itself was very unlike him-and caught a later one, he’d have been at Quantico by now. Kim would have heard from him. No matter what had gone wrong with his travel plans, I couldn’t imagine how he could be so late.

Had I completely ruled out the possibility Shiloh had gotten to Virginia? Not necessarily. It was possible that I was dealing with a situation where two things had gone wrong at once: Shiloh had missed his flight and taken a later one on a different carrier, and then something had happened to him in Virginia. If that was true, and I focused the search for him in Minnesota, that would be a disaster. It was essential that I narrow down from where Shiloh had disappeared.

Disappeared. I hadn’t meant to think that, and doing so gave a little jolt to my nervous system, followed by a galvanic flush under my skin.

I sat on a bench for a moment and watched the travelers pass by.

Overhead, I saw a security camera discreetly peering down at passing travelers from a crossbeam. If worst came to worst here, I could always review security tapes. Maybe that would end up being the only thing to confirm Shiloh had been here.

Disappeared was fast becoming the operative term, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

About two years ago, an overprotective father from Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, sent his bright eldest daughter off to school at Tulane University in Louisiana. He didn’t want her to drive, he’d said, but she’d won a campus lottery for a parking space outside her dormitory and was thrilled about it. She was not about to be talked out of taking her little Honda.

Still, Dad was unhappy about her driving all the way by herself. He insisted that she call him both nights on the road as soon as she got a motel room, and she agreed to do so. For his peace of mind.

What Daughter didn’t remember was that only a year earlier, her neighborhood had been gerrymandered out of the Cities’ once all-inclusive 612 area code, something that was happening to suburbs of metropolitan areas nationwide as cell phones and the Internet gobbled up available phone numbers. The daughter hadn’t taken notice. She hadn’t spent the night outside the Cities for three years; therefore, she had never called home from far away.