Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

Genevieve, I’m so sorry. I was trying to do the right thing.

“No, I didn’t.”

Dying declarations are notoriously tricky. They rely on the understanding that someone who knows she is dying has no reason to lie. For this reason, the paramount issue in court tends to be whether the dying person in fact believed he or she was dying.

On the stand, Kowalski had made it clear to the judge that Kamareia did not see me as a criminal investigator, hence Kowalski’s insistence on calling me “Ms. Pribek,” instead of using my rank. More importantly, Kowalski established that I had led Kamareia to believe she would not die of her wounds.

Kilander had told me about dying declarations once, long before Kamareia’s death. It wasn’t as if I’d never heard about the legal aspects of point-of-death accusations; they simply had not crossed my mind, not even remotely, that day when I’d been watching a young woman die.

Jackie Kowalski was right about one thing-I had gotten into that ambulance as a friend. I had tried to be a good friend to Kamareia, to do what her mother would have done, to comfort and reassure her. All these things compromised Kamareia’s accusation, and in doing so jeopardized a case that was shaky in its other aspects.

Despite the rape, there had been no semen recovered, an occurrence more common than many people realized. Maybe Shorty wore a condom, maybe he simply didn’t ejaculate. It was an academic point to me. I considered Kamareia’s murder a hate crime in its simplest definition: the result of hatred. As far as I could see, Stewart had raped Kamareia because it was just another way of beating her.

But the end result was that there was no DNA to recover. Other hair and fiber evidence wasn’t useful, because Stewart had been all over the house, working, for two weeks. And Kamareia’s fingernail scrapings yielded nothing useful. She’d clearly been too stunned, attacked too abruptly, to put up a good fight.

The whole case revolved around Kamareia’s point-of-death accusation. When the judge threw out Kamareia’s statement, the rest of the case collapsed like a house of cards. The judge found insufficient grounds to go to trial, and the worst that happened to Royce Stewart in the Cities was that he lost his driver’s license in an unrelated DWI.

“Sarah?”

The courtroom door had swung open almost soundlessly. Jane O’Malley was looking at me. “Are you ready?”

“Yes,” I said.

While O’Malley had said the people’s testimony had been moving faster than expected that day, it took time for me to recount my part of the story. It was after five when I returned. Vang was still at his desk, and once again on the phone. He must have been on hold, because he slid the lower end of the receiver away from his mouth and said, “Your husband was here, looking for you.”

“Shiloh was here?” I repeated, stupidly. “Is he-”

But Vang had snapped his attention back to his phone conversation.

“Hello, Commander Erickson, this is-”

I tuned him out. Shiloh had obviously been and gone, and even though my day was over and I’d be home soon, I was oddly disappointed at having missed him. Up until two weeks ago, Shiloh had been a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department. While we hadn’t technically worked together, our jobs used to overlap at times. Now I never ran into him downtown anymore, and I missed it.

It was something I’d have to get used to. Shiloh was leaving next week for his FBI training at Quantico, which would last for four months.

I glanced down, making one last check for messages. There were none, so I set the phone to go to voice mail on one ring and picked up my bag. I gave Vang a little finger wave on my way out, which he acknowledged with a nod.

My 1970 Nova was the first car I’d ever bought. Some of the guys at work winced to see it; I knew they were imagining the restoration work they’d do on it, if it were theirs. Its gunmetal gray paint had faded without the regular waxing a car aficionado would have given it, and thin cracks ran through the dashboard. Yet it was surprisingly reliable, and I was perversely attached to it. Every winter I imagined trading it in for something more surefooted on the snow and ice, an SUV or 4WD truck like many of my fellow officers drove. But now it was fall again-October-and I still hadn’t given serious consideration to placing an ad.

I didn’t go straight home. The Nova’s fuel gauge needle had slipped below the quarter-tank mark, and I filled it at the cheapest gas station I knew, then took my boots to a repair shop. They were going to need professional attention if they were going to survive their unexpected soaking in the Mississippi. My errands cost me more than a half hour before I turned onto the quiet street in Northeast Minneapolis where Shiloh and I lived.

Nordeast, as locals still sometimes called it, used to be a heavily Eastern European part of town; it had grown more integrated through the years. Bisected by the railroad, it was a place of weather-beaten old houses with big screened porches, light industrial businesses, and corner bars whose signs advertised meat raffles and pulltabs. I’d immediately liked it here, liked Shiloh’s old house with the rumbling trains that ran behind the narrow backyard and the dreamy, undersea quality it had in the summer from the dappling of sun and shade created by the overhanging elms. But I also knew that in this neighborhood Shiloh had taken a switchblade knife away from an 11-year-old kid, and last Halloween someone had scrawled anti-police slurs in red chalk on our driveway. It was a city neighborhood, no mistake.

Old Mrs. Muzio, our next-door neighbor, was coming out of her house with her old wolfhound-mix dog, Snoopy. I considered waving, but it was often necessary to stand right in front of Nedda Muzio to get her attention, so instead I cruised past her place to ours. Shiloh’s old Pontiac Catalina was absent from the driveway, so I pulled in to occupy that place.

Perhaps he’d taken his car to the shop. Like the Nova, it was a first car, never replaced. More out of laziness than sentimentality, Shiloh maintained. It was a 1968 model and heir to all the problems older cars had-most recently, the timing was off. From time to time Shiloh mentioned selling it and buying something more reliable, but he hadn’t yet.

I went in through the back of the house. The kitchen door didn’t, technically, open directly onto the kitchen but onto an entryway with a perennially dirty linoleum floor and a washer and dryer on the right. I tossed my plastic bag onto the surface of the dryer and decided to wash my clothes then and there.

I had thrown them into the drum of the washing machine, and was just about to pour in a half measure of detergent when I saw someone watching me, an outline against the white of the opposite wall.

Startled, I jumped; my gun hand in particular leapt into the air, spilling some of the laundry powder from the cup I held. Then I realized who it was and turned to face Shiloh directly.

“Holy shit,” I said. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.” I took a steadying breath. “I thought you weren’t home, your car-”

I broke off, unnerved suddenly.

Although he was over six feet tall, my husband had never been the most intimidating physical presence among the cops he’d worked with; he had a long and lean frame. His features helped to make up for that. Shiloh had a face I thought of as Eurasian, with pale skin but strong and sharp bones. Most unusual were his eyes: they had a slight epicanthic fold, as if generations ago his forebears had lived on the steppes. The eyes made him hard to read. But right now I thought I saw disapproval in them.

“What’s wrong?” I said.