Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

I stopped in the doorway of the autopsy room. The tables were empty, but near one of them was a gurney with a corpse on it. The body was exposed from foot up to chin level, with the head draped. This was the opposite of procedure in many IDs, in which the body was tastefully draped except for the face and head when family members came down to see it.

Rossella saw where I was looking. “This guy took a shotgun blast to the face,” he explained. “There’re really no features to work with,” he said. “Otherwise I’d just have had you ID using a Polaroid of the face, you probably know that we do that whenever we can. But that won’t work here, and dental records aren’t going to be of much use, either.”

“Fingerprints?” I asked. I was having a little difficulty getting a whole sentence out.

“Not useful, either. Bad prints. We found this guy in the underbrush near the river, out of town a ways. He’d been out awhile, we don’t know how long. He died a couple of days ago, that’s as close as we can narrow it down.”

Rossella looked at me, waiting. I moved to stand next to the gurney. There was a familiar scent on the body that I thought was the scent of the Mississippi.

I can still smell the river in your hair, I heard Shiloh say.

“Mrs. Shiloh?”

I didn’t realize I’d closed my eyes until Rossella said my name and I opened them. “I’m sorry,” I said.

You’re working here, a voice said in my mind, not Shiloh’s now but my own. Do your job. Look at him.

Despite having walked the survivors of murder victims through this, I now found I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I was taking an important test and hadn’t studied at all.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly. “Without facial features, I just don’t know what I’m looking for. I mean, I’m not sure I can rule anything out with certainty.”

The body was about Shiloh’s height, but weight was hard to tell. He was clearly Caucasian, and I didn’t think he’d been heavy in life.

“How tall is he?” I asked.

“Seventy-two inches long.”

“Long?” I said with distaste, before I could stop myself.

“Tall,” Rossella said.

“Shiloh was six-foot-two.”

“Sometimes measurements taken after death are imprecise,” he said. “The limbs aren’t usually straight when rigor mortis sets in. It makes measuring tough.” He paused. “In fact, I had to break some of the fingers to get prints.”

“What?” I said. Even though I didn’t want to, my gaze immediately went to the hands, looking for the bent and distorted fingers. I’d heard people crack their knuckles before, and that was loud enough. How much louder, I wondered, was the sound of breaking bone?

I looked up to see Rossella’s eyes on me.

“It happens,” he said, calmly meeting my gaze. “I thought you’d have heard about it before.”

“No,” I said, trying to regain my mental footing. I looked at the hands again. Both were bare.

“He doesn’t have a wedding ring,” I said.

“It could have been taken, if this was part of a robbery,” Rossella suggested. I stepped in closer to the right hand.

“What is it?” Rossella asked.

The right arm was stiff, of course, and resisted my attempts to turn it over. I ended up sitting on my heels instead, holding up the hand a little so I could see it clearly. When I saw the palm, I drew in a deep breath, relieved.

“It’s not him,” I said.

“You see something?”

“Shiloh has a scar on his palm,” I said, pointing. “This guy doesn’t have it.”

“I see,” Rossella said.

He pulled the sheet down, over the body.

“Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Shiloh,” Rossella said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have put you through this.” Then he smiled.

On the way to the elevator my knees were shaking, just a little.

When I got home, there was a strange car parked outside the house, a dark late-model sedan of a make I didn’t recognize. A man stood at the door, made a silhouette by the brightness of the motion-sensor floodlight his approach had switched on.

I pulled the car up short, halfway up the driveway, and jumped out.

He turned and stepped down, onto the sidewalk, and his features became clear to me. It was Lieutenant Radich, supervising detective on the interagency narcotics task force.

“Lieutenant Radich? What’s going on?” I asked. I slammed the car door and started across the lawn, not going around to the front walk like I usually would have.

I must have spoken more sharply than I realized, because he shook his head and lifted the white bag in his hand like a flag of surrender.

“Just a visit,” he said. “I was picking up some food after working late and thought you might be hungry.”

When had I last eaten? I’d made coffee when I’d gotten up in the morning. Down at the station, more coffee. I had no memory of a meal.

“I am,” I said. “Come on in.”

I’d met Shiloh during his undercover narcotics days, and Radich had been his lieutenant back then. But I knew him best from pickup basketball games. He wasn’t as frequent a player as Shiloh or I, but very competitive. At 50, he had a perpetually tired face and Mediterranean coloring, a streak of gray in his black hair.

“I got your message,” he said as I turned on lights in the living room and the kitchen. “I left word on your voice mail at work, but I guess I should have tried you here instead. I haven’t seen Mike. Haven’t talked to him in, maybe, three weeks.”

“That’s what I would have guessed,” I said.

“Sorry,” he said.

“Do you want a beer?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

I took one of the two Heinekens out of its place in the refrigerator door and opened it. I went to the cupboard to find Radich a glass.

“No need,” he said. He took the cold bottle from my hand and took two deep swallows. Pleasure registered on his tired face, and I was suddenly glad for hospitality beer in the kitchen of two people who no longer drank. “Long day?” I said.

“Not as long as yours, I imagine,” he said. He set the bottle down on the kitchen table and started unpacking his deli bag. “Sit down and eat.”

He’d brought two sandwiches and a container of potato salad. I brought plates and spoons over, poured myself a glass of milk. I was afraid if I had Coke at this hour, as tired as I was, my hands would start shaking.

We ate in near-silence. When I picked up the sandwich he’d bought for me, the bread was warm, and the cheese on the edges was melted. Radich had brought me a hot meal. My hands quivered, and I realized for the first time why religious people gave thanks before eating.

Radich probably wasn’t ravenous, like me, but he settled down to the business of eating as wordlessly as I did. I was almost through with my sandwich before he spoke.

“What do you know?” he asked, looking levelly at me over his beer.

“Nearly nothing,” I told him. “I don’t know where he is, I don’t know why he’s there. I don’t know of anybody who would know anything. If Shiloh weren’t my husband, and I were investigating this case, I’d be hammering away at me, interviewing and reinterviewing. Because I’m the one who lived with him, I’m the one who knew him best, and… and…”

A strange thing happened then. I just heard myself say knew him best, and suddenly the rest of the sentence got away from me. I had no idea what I was supposed to say next.

Radich put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’m okay,” I said. I swallowed a little milk. “And no one else seems to know anything.” I was relieved finally to have remembered what I was going to say.

“Enemies?” Radich asked.

I shrugged. “Well, every cop has to worry a little bit about retribution,” I said. “But we’re both careful. Unlisted and unpublished. He gave informants his cell-phone number only.”