Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

Beyond that, the Mason City cops turned the situation over to the Faribault County Sheriff’s Department.

Shiloh’s identity was fairly easily confirmed. He’d had no ID with him when he turned himself in, but just from his name, Faribault County found out that not only did he have no priors and no warrants, but he was a missing person who also happened to be a cop.

The phone rang at Minneapolis police headquarters at 9:45 A.M. About twenty minutes later my voice mailbox taped a message from the daywatch commander on duty at the MPD.

If it hadn’t been the weekend, and the agencies involved had their regular clerical staff, Royce Stewart’s whereabouts might not have baffled everyone so much. Genevieve’s courthouse friend, after all, had known his current address. But when no records showed that Royce Stewart was a murder victim, or even dead, it was a slow process for the local deputies to find out whether he was among the living.

Qwest had no listing for a Royce Stewart.

The Department of Motor Vehicles had an address from the last time he’d had a driver’s license. It turned out to be his mother’s home, outside of Imogene. Contacted by a detective, Mrs. Stewart explained her son’s living arrangements. Royce, always good with tools, had struck a bargain with a couple he knew. He would live, rent-free, in a small outbuilding behind their farmhouse, in exchange for fixing the place up into a livable in-law unit. It was an informal agreement with no paperwork involved.

The outbuilding, in the early stages of renovation, had no phone line. Mrs. Stewart explained that she called her son at the phone in the main house. She only knew the first names of the husband and wife who lived there: John and Ellen. She didn’t have their address.

It took a bit of time on the phone with weekend staff at Qwest before the Faribault deputies could match an address to the phone number Mrs. Stewart had for her son. Then Deputy Jim Brooke drove out to the home of John and Ellen Brewer. Brooke didn’t even get as far as the front door before noticing something was obviously wrong.

He had been told that Royce Stewart lived in an outbuilding, but there wasn’t one as far as he could see. He stood in the Brewers’ driveway and looked, dumbfounded, at a large patch of blackened wreckage, still smoldering.

Sometime around the time Deputy Brooke was making his discovery, I was standing around in the Lowes’ guest room, watching Genevieve pack. She’d decided to come back to the Cities with me. Although we had separate cars, I waited to drive with her.

Packing up took her a long time. She’d been downstate for about a month, and her possessions had begun to drift to different places in her sister’s home.

In the hallway outside the guest room, I was pacing a little, but I wasn’t restless. Now that Shiloh was dead-and that was truly what I had come to believe-I wasn’t in any hurry anymore. My state of mind was calm, on the edge of numb.

Even so, I decided to check my messages up in the Cities. It had become a habit. My voice mailbox held one message, from Beth Burke, the daywatch commander in Minneapolis. Before, I would have been curious about what Lieutenant Burke wanted. It was only a sense of duty that made me call down the hall to Genevieve.

“I’m gonna make a toll call up to the Cities. I’ll leave a couple bucks to cover it.” I didn’t expect Gen to respond, and if she did, I didn’t hear it. I was already dialing.

The next few moments probably rank as the most tongue-tied of my life. At first, I thought Lieutenant Burke was telling me that Shiloh had turned up in Iowa and confessed to last night’s murder and arson. I didn’t even understand what was going on well enough to know what lies to tell. I said “What?” a lot and finally resorted to “I don’t care what he’s done or hasn’t done, just tell me where he is.”

When I hung up the phone I yelled for Genevieve.

Around midmorning, fire investigators removed a body from the ash, timber, and water that had once been Shorty’s home. In light of Shiloh’s confession, that was considered suspicious. Two detectives from Faribault County went south to Mason City to talk to Shiloh, beating Genevieve and me there by about thirty minutes.

“Have a seat,” the desk nurse at the hospital said. “The police gave orders when they went in that no other visitors could be admitted until they’re through talking to him.”

“What room is he in?” I asked. “So I’ll know, later.”

“Room 306,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, and instead of returning to the lounge, walked past her desk and into the hall.

“Hey!” Her protest followed me. I held up my shield for the uniform outside the door of 306 and he didn’t try to stop me.

Both detectives looked up as I entered. Only Shiloh looked unsurprised to see me.

“You need a lawyer,” I told him, ignoring his interrogators. My voice sounded hard.

“You can’t be in here,” one of the detectives said sharply. The pair of them resembled each other, both in middle age and white, each a little heavyset. One wore a full mustache, the other was clean-shaven.

“He was in a car wreck,” I said. “He had a concussion. Anything you get today could be inadmissible because of that.”

The other detective stood up to put me outside. “You’ve got to go, babe,” he said.

“I’m his wife.”

“I don’t care.”

“And a cop.”

“I don’t care,” the detective repeated, taking me by the arm.

“No.” Shiloh spoke for the first time, sharply enough that both men looked at him, the one next to me stopping with his hand still under my elbow. “We’re done here.”

“We have more questions-”

“We’re done here,” Shiloh repeated.

They glanced at each other. “You’re getting a lawyer?” the first one asked.

It wasn’t what Shiloh had meant, but it put things in terms they could understand. “Yes. I’m getting a lawyer.”

The seated detective glanced at his partner, and then they packed up their notepads and left. The door swept shut, leaving silence in its wake and Shiloh and me inventorying each other from six feet apart. He was gaunt and unshaven, closely resembling the undercover narcotics officer I’d met in an airport bar years ago. For a long moment, I could think of nothing to say. He broke the silence first.

“I’m sorry,” Shiloh said.

That was when it hit me: this was Shiloh, he really wasn’t dead, I was looking at Shiloh again. I went to the bed, buried myself against his neck and shoulder, and wept.

Shiloh held me so hard it would have hurt me under normal circumstances. I felt the weight he’d lost in the prominent bones, hard against my flesh.

“I’m sorry, baby, I’m so sorry,” he said again and again. He stroked my hair, whispering small endearments and reassurances, holding me as though he were the strong one and I was weak.

Shiloh stayed in the hospital for two days while doctors discerned the extent of his head injury and decided he didn’t need to be under a physician’s care. Then he was taken back to Minnesota and booked into the Faribault County Jail.

While no one could corroborate his location the night of Shorty’s death, Shiloh’s story and the physical evidence that accompanied it-his injuries-were compelling enough to rule out the possibility that he’d gone back to Blue Earth to kill Shorty. Auto theft, on the other hand, was a charge that was going to stick.

At the arraignment, his lawyer made a case for bail, saying that Shiloh was a first offender, and employed in law enforcement with an excellent professional reputation. The judge pointed out that Shiloh was not currently employed in law enforcement, was highly unlikely ever to be working in law enforcement again, and had already proven himself able to evade justice even under difficult circumstances. Bail was denied.