Jodi Compton: The 37th Hour

“Is she-”

“She’s breathing,” the oldest of the crew told me. As if to prove it, the semiconscious Ellie turned to her side and vomited up some river water.

“Jesus,” a young Hispanic deckhand said, watching.

“Are you all right, miss?” the old one asked me. His doubtful eyes were a piercing blue, although the rest of him was grizzled and faded. He looked Scandinavian, like a Minnesotan of old, but I heard Texas in his voice.

“I can’t feel the surface of my skin,” I said, pressing my shaking fingers into my triceps. It was a very disconcerting sensation. I got shakily to my feet, thinking that walking might help.

“I have rye,” he said.

In my first-aid training, our instructor had advised against offering or accepting “field medicaments” in time of trauma: alcohol, cigarettes.

But at that moment I wasn’t thinking about my training, the fact that I’d mostly quit drinking a few years back, or that the water patrol’s boat was on the horizon now, its prow bouncing on the water as it approached. A little rye whiskey sounded eminently reasonable at that moment.

But it was my own weak flesh that saved me from myself. When the riverman put the bottle in my hands, it slipped right through my shaking fingers and shattered on the deck.

Fallout from Ellie Bernhardt’s attempted suicide ate up most of my afternoon.

We were both taken to Hennepin County Medical Center. After they took Ellie away, a middle-aged physician’s assistant looked at me and said, “I’ll have a look at you in the second exam room down the hall.”

“Me?” I said, startled. “I’m fine.”

“Probably,” she said. “But I got to look at your ears and check-”

“My ears feel fine,” I said, ignoring the faint but telltale cool heaviness that meant there was water in one of them. At her skeptical look-medical people take challenges to their authority nearly as badly as cops-I said, “Really. I don’t do exams.”

I meant it. Few things frighten me. Doctors’ offices do. “Just point me toward your showers, all right?” I said.

She gave me the skeptical look a moment more, and then said, “Fine, at this time of year I doubt you’ve even got mild hypothermia.” There was a definite fox-and-grapes sound to her dismissal, as though she hadn’t really wanted to examine me anyway.

In the doctors’ and nurses’ locker room, I took a fifteen-minute shower under very hot water and put on a set of nurse’s scrubs they’d provided me, a flowered top and sea-green pants. My wet clothes I balled up and put in a plastic bag. When I came out, I peered into the examining rooms, looking for Ellie. A young nurse saw me.

“We already took her over to the crisis unit,” she said, meaning the psychiatric ward. “She’s going to be admitted overnight, at least. We gave her a chest X ray to see if she inhaled a lot of water, and it hasn’t come back yet, but I think she’s fine, physically.”

Officer Moore had been dispatched back to headquarters to retrieve the change of clothes I kept in my locker there. Detectives don’t get bled on and vomited on nearly as much as patrol officers do, but we do spend time at crime scenes that are muddy or still smoldering from a suspicious fire, and I’d figured a change of clothes might come in handy sometime. That day had definitely arrived.

When I got out into the waiting room, Moore wasn’t there yet. Ainsley Carter was. She jumped from her seat quickly, but the hug she gave me was very tentative, shoulders only, as though I were sick or injured.

“Do you have children, Detective Pribek?” Ainsley asked me.

“I’m sorry?” I said. I’d expected a question about Ellie’s situation. “No, I don’t.”

“Joe and I have been talking about it,” she said. She twisted her solitaire, the way she had yesterday when talking about her husband’s unwillingness to have Ellie move in with them. “We want kids, but after this, a child seems like”-she shook her head-“a terrifying responsibility.” For the first time I saw the dried trails on her cheeks from the tears I’d heard over the phone.

Officer Moore was coming through the sliding double doors, carrying clothes on a plastic hanger in one hand and boots in her other.

“You’re going to be at the same phone number, the same motel, right?” I asked Ainsley quickly. “I’m going to have to touch base with you later.”

“I’ll be at the same place,” Ainsley said. “And… thank you,” she added quietly.

I met Officer Moore halfway across the room and cleared my throat. “Thanks,” I said awkwardly. I hadn’t been a detective very long, and I felt uncomfortable having a patrolwoman run this kind of errand for me.

“Sure,” she responded as I took my things from her. “You were Genevieve Brown’s partner, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I still am.”

“How is she?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t talked to her recently.”

“Well, a lot of us miss her.”

“She’s coming back,” I told her quickly.

“Really? When?”

I had to backpedal. “She hasn’t mentioned a date yet. I just meant, it’s compassionate leave. She’ll be back.”

Moore shook her head. “Sure, it’ll take time. It was just awful, what happened.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It was.”

Genevieve Brown had been my first friend in the Twin

Cities. I wasn’t surprised that Officer Moore had known her; Genevieve knew everyone.

Her roots were in the Cities, and she’d spent her entire career with the Sheriff’s Department: first on patrol, then in community relations, and now in the detective division. Her real strength was interrogation. Genevieve could talk to anyone.

No criminal ever really feared her: She was short and not imposing, with a low voice soft as suede. She was logical, educated, reasonable; before the perpetrators knew it, they were telling her things they wouldn’t have told the guys. A few of the detectives called her the Human Polygraph.

I’d known her from way back in my patrol days, and had learned a lot from her. I paid her back for her shared wisdom by training with her in the gym, pushing her, keeping her at a physical peak as she went into her late thirties. When I lived alone in a cheap studio in Seven Corners, Genevieve used to invite me to dinner from time to time at her place in St. Paul.

It might have been the happiest day of my life when I got my shield and went to work with her. She was a good teacher and mentor, but more than that, she was fun to work with.

We used to get coffee in the skyways, the interconnected second-story warren of shops, restaurants, and newsstands that served the businesspeople of Minneapolis. She’d stop sometimes in one of the glassed-in passageways, usually on a morning when the weather was at least ten degrees below zero. Holding her paper cup of French roast in both hands, she’d look out at the city beyond, where white steam escaped from every building vent and the sunlight bounced with deceptive brightness off every heap of snow and icy surface.

“Today’s the day, kiddo,” she’d say. “We’re going to turn the radio off and drive south until we get to New Orleans. We’re going to sit in the sun and eat beignets.” Sometimes, for variety, she’d say we were going to San Francisco instead, to drink Irish coffee by the Bay.

But she was never serious. After more than a decade of police work, she still loved the job.

Then her only child, her daughter, Kamareia, was raped and murdered.

I’d known Kamareia since she was a child, from the early days of my career when Genevieve had first begun inviting me home for dinner. Born of Gen’s early, interracial marriage to a law student during her college days, Kamareia had been mature beyond her years, generally supportive of her mother’s demanding job.