Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

When she tried to call home, her first night on the road, she got a recording saying her call couldn’t be completed as dialed. Baffled, she’d tried again. Then a third time. She had no idea what was going on. She left a message on her father’s voice mail at work, although it was a Saturday night and she knew he wouldn’t get it anytime soon. Then, sensibly, she went out for a meal.

When her father didn’t hear from her, he called us. Genevieve and I were skeptical. She’d been gone only twelve hours. She was 18 years old, off to college, getting her first taste of freedom. We were both certain about what happened: His daughter had forgotten to call.

“She wouldn’t do that,” he insisted. “She promised she’d call. She keeps her promises.”

“I know you don’t want to believe this,” Genevieve had said, “but there’s a perfectly logical explanation. We just don’t know it yet.”

“No,” he’d said. “There isn’t.”

On Sunday afternoon his daughter called. Just outside the Louisiana state line she’d remembered the new area code and pulled over at a rest stop to try calling home again. This time she’d gotten through, embarrassed and laughing. Dad called us, just embarrassed.

There’s a perfectly logical explanation. No, there isn’t. Those two statements made up the yin and yang of most missing-persons cases. I said something like the former to people week in and week out, and they responded with the latter. Sometimes I told them the new-area-code story, as an example of the kinds of innocent things that sometimes kept people from coming home or checking in. Few relatives were comforted by it. They shook their heads, unconvinced. It was a good story, they thought, but it had nothing to do with their situation.

I understood for the first time how they felt. Driving north on the 35W, I kept telling myself that there was a logical explanation for why Shiloh hadn’t turned up at Quantico or called me. And then from the back of my mind, another voice kept saying, No, nothing can explain this.

Around noon, Vang found me at the fax machine at work, sending a request for information to hospitals around the Quantico area. He did a mild take when he saw me.

“Where have you been?” he asked. “I thought you were going to be out for an hour or so.”

“I was at the airport,” I said. “And then at the hospitals.”

I didn’t tell him all of it. I’d also been calling and faxing cab companies, asking them to check their records to see if they’d sent a driver to our address. From Norwest, I asked for paperwork on our account, a record of recent activity; I’d requested phone records from Qwest.

I looked up at Vang. “I’m having a sort of personal emergency. I’m looking for my husband.”

“I thought he was supposed to go work for the Bureau,” Vang said. “Did he change his mind?”

“No,” I said, watching my document inch out the other end of the fax machine. “But he never got there.”

“Really?” Vang said, frowning. “You mean he didn’t get to the Academy, or he didn’t get to Virginia?” His words were measured, and his demeanor calm, but I could almost see a dozen questions jockeying for position in his mind. It was only natural. It’s not every day a coworker tells you their spouse is missing.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He never got on the plane, but his things are gone.” I considered Shiloh missing since two thirty-five on Sunday, the time of the flight he’d apparently planned to be on and wasn’t. “I’m going to file a report, make it official.”

Vang hesitated. “In terms of department regulations, I’m not sure you’re supposed to be involved.” He seemed to have moved on to points of procedure; those unspoken questions were apparently going to remain unspoken.

“I know,” I said. “But with Genevieve gone, I’m the only one around here who regularly works major missing-persons cases,” I said. Then I backtracked from my own dire words. “I’m not saying this is major. I’m saying that I can’t come back to work until I’ve heard from him.”

“I understand,” Vang said. “Anything I can do?”

“I’m going to be getting some faxes, in response to my requests,” I said. “You can call me and let me know what they say; that’d really help.”

“Where will you be?” he asked.

“Home,” I said. “A search of the house is where I’d start if this were any other case.”

“… say analysts from Piper Jaffray. WMNN news time, twelve twenty-eight. More after this.”

I turned the volume down on the radio and stuck the nose of the Nova out of the parking garage ramp, into the traffic.

It wasn’t exactly true, what I’d told Vang. A search wasn’t where I’d usually start. I’d start by talking to the people closest to him.

Like his wife. Right. I pulled out onto the road.

Other than me, who were those closest to Shiloh? His family was in Utah. He hadn’t spoken to any of them in years.

He’d gotten along well with his old lieutenant, Radich, who still ran the interagency narcotics task force on which Shiloh had served. And then, of course, he’d known Genevieve longer than I had, but I knew they hadn’t seen each other recently.

He’d had no partner, working alone on cold cases. Before that he’d worked mostly alone in narcotics, undercover, paired sporadically with MPD guys or Hennepin County deputies. Like me, he played basketball with a loose and ever-changing coalition of cops and courthouse people, but never seemed to forge serious friendships there. And Shiloh didn’t drink, so he didn’t go for beers with the guys.

Sometimes I forgot what a private man shared my bed.

As I parked the Nova where Shiloh’s old Pontiac used to sit, I thought what bad luck it was that Shiloh had sold his car last week. Until the day that we were all tattooed with clearly visible ID numbers on our skin-and I sometimes thought that day was coming-vehicle license plates served to identify us. Missing-persons reports went out with license numbers on them, and everywhere cops in patrol cars would be ready to spot the car and plates. It’s a much more difficult task to find an adult who doesn’t have a car.

Although the top of the driveway was much closer to the back door of the house, the one that led past the washing machine into the kitchen, this time I went into the house through the front door. I wanted to stand in the entryway where Shiloh’s keys were missing from the hook.

Keys and jacket and boots. That’s what had suggested to me on Sunday that Shiloh had simply left for the airport. And he had, hadn’t he?

There was a simple sign I hadn’t checked yet.

As a patrol officer, I’d occasionally collar people for minor crimes and then let them off, if I felt it was warranted. When I did, I had a standard line. “The next time I see you (working this street corner/with a spray-paint can in your hand/et cetera), have your toothbrush with you.”

They knew what I meant: that they’d be spending a night in jail next time. Later, as a detective, I used the toothbrush as a litmus test for whether someone was missing voluntarily or against their will. It was a test that crossed boundaries of age, gender, and ethnicity. To a person, almost nobody left home knowing they’d be gone for more than twenty-four hours without grabbing their toothbrush on the way out. Even when they didn’t have time to pack, they had time to retrieve it.

Thinking of this morning, I saw in my mind’s eye my brush hanging alone in the little rack of the inside door of the medicine chest. A quick trip to the bathroom confirmed this. His wasn’t there. I went back into the bedroom and went to the closet door, opened it, looked up at the high shelf. His valise, too, was gone.