Jodi Compton - Sympathy Between Humans

“What do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Just ask around, check out the story with your informants,” Prewitt told me.

“Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”

He left with a little tilt of his chin that said, Carry on.

I slid open my lowest desk drawer and found an envelope toward the back. Inside it was a motley assortment of pieces of paper, the names and phone numbers of my informants. Now I shuffled through them, thinking of where to start. Prewitt hadn’t said anything to suggest the unlicensed doctor was urgent. Nor had he even sounded hopeful that I was going to find anything. For that very reason, I wanted to start working on this right away. I was going to find this guy, and faster than Prewitt expected, too. I was going to show him my stuff.

Someone cleared her throat before me. “Sarah?”

It was Tyesha, one of our nonuniformed support staff, standing in front of my desk. She was five-two and still thin at 30 despite having three children. She greeted people at the front desk, answered the phone, and generally directed traffic.

“What’s up?” I said.

“There’s a young woman here who wants to talk about her brother being missing,” Tyesha said.

“Has she filed a report?” I asked.

“She says she has, but that it’s a little more complicated than that,” Tyesha explained. “She’d like to talk to someone about it.”

“Okay,” I said. “Send her back.”

Tyesha returned a moment later with a woman even shorter than she, about five-one, with a fragile, slender build. She wore what I took for office clothes, a shimmering lavender silk shirt over black trousers and low-heeled black shoes. She had long blond hair, blue eyes, milk-white skin. “This is Detective Sarah Pribek,” Tyesha said. “Sarah, this is…” She stopped, in the manner of someone who’s either forgotten a name or how to pronounce it. “I’m sorry,” she said to the visitor.

“Don’t be,” the young woman said. “It’s Marlinchen.”

“Nice to meet you, Marlinchen,” I said. “Please, have a seat.”

She did, and Tyesha left us together.

“Spell your name for me, will you?” I asked her.

The young woman reached for the yellow sticky pad on my desk and turned it around to face her. Taking a pen from her backpack, she wrote quickly, then pulled off the top sheet.

Marlinchen Hennessy, it said. She’d added her phone number underneath.

“Is this a Swedish name?” I asked.

“ ‘Marlinchen’ is German,” she said. “Technically, it’s pronounced Mar- leen -chen, but everyone gives it an Americanized pronunciation: Mar- lin -chen.” It had the sound of a speech she’d given many times before. “The last name, Hennessy, is Irish, of course. My brothers all have traditional Celtic names. My twin brother’s name is Aidan.” Her voice dropped a little lower. “He’s the one I’m here about.”

“Tell me about that,” I said. “You said that you filed a report already?”

Marlinchen Hennessy nodded. “I reported Aidan missing in Georgia. That’s where he’s been living for the past five years. He-”

I held up a hand to stop her. “Wait. He lives in Georgia and that’s where he’s missing from, but you want Hennepin County to look into it?”

She nodded quickly. “Aidan’s from here, and has connections here. He could be headed back this way, and I thought that might make it pertinent to you, here in Hennepin County.”

I frowned. “ ‘Headed back this way’? In other words, you think he’s traveling of his own volition?”

“That’s what they think down in Georgia,” Marlinchen said.

“If that’s true,” I said, “then there’s nothing to investigate. Adults are free to move about without checking in with relatives.”

“Aidan’s not 18 yet,” she said quietly.

“But you said he’s your twin,” I said.

“I’m 17,” she said.

I hoped my surprise didn’t show on my face. I’d taken her for 20, 21. “Okay,” I said, thinking, “this raises another issue entirely. What are your parents doing about all this?”

“My mother is dead,” Marlinchen told me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. Then, just as she was about to speak again, I asked, “How long ago?”

“Ten years,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, then realized I’d just said that a moment earlier.

Marlinchen Hennessy moved on. “My father is Hugh Hennessy, the writer.” She looked for recognition in my face. “He wrote The Channel ?” she prompted.

“That sounds familiar,” I said, “but we’re getting off the point. Where is your father today?”

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“What I’m wondering is why he’s sent his 17-year-old daughter to deal with the Sheriff’s Department instead of coming himself,” I explained.

“He doesn’t know about Aidan,” Marlinchen said quickly. “He’s up north, in a cabin he owns near Tait Lake. It’s kind of remote, and it doesn’t have a phone.”

Her eyes had an odd glitter to them. It looked like alarm, but I didn’t understand its source.

“Dad goes there to write,” she said. “When his work isn’t going well, he needs lots of quiet and solitude. But he didn’t start going up there until I was old enough to take care of my three younger brothers. He’s very responsible.”

She’d veered off into a defense of her father’s parenting methods, for no reason I could ascertain. I tried to bring her back on course.

“But there’s someone who can go get him, right?” I said. “A neighbor, a ranger, somebody like that? I’m just saying that this is something Aidan’s father should know about.”

That remark didn’t quite have the calming effect I’d planned.

“I don’t understand why there’s this emphasis on my father!” Marlinchen said, her voice rising. “He’s not a policeman. He’s not going to find Aidan. That’s the job of the police, and they’re not doing anything as far as I can tell!”

I tapped the end of a pencil against my desk. “If this is the quality of cooperation you’re giving the police in Georgia,” I said, “it’s hard for me to imagine what they could do for you.”

“I shouldn’t have come,” Marlinchen said quickly, jumping to her feet.

“Wait,” I said placatingly, but she was already nearly running for the exit. Everyone working around me stopped to watch her flight.

“Wait,” I said more loudly, standing. But she was gone.

“She’s fleeing the interview! She’s fleeing the interview!” a deputy said, mimicking Frances McDormand’s broad Minnesotan accent in Fargo . The other deputies laughed.

“Thanks,” I said. “If you enjoyed the show, my monkey will be around shortly with a tin cup.”

With no wayto follow up on that resounding success, I drove to South Minneapolis to talk to my first informant about Prewitt’s medical-fraud case.

When Shiloh had gotten accepted to the FBI Academy and quit the MPD, he’d had a kind of fire sale, giving me some useful phone numbers, from his contacts with federal agencies to street-level informants. Like Lydia Neely, who he knew from his early career in Narcotics. Lydia had been arrested while driving over the county line with a lot of British Columbian marijuana in the trunk of her car. Several officers had been in on the bust, as is typical of Narcotics cases, but it was Shiloh who’d taken an interest in Lydia ’s situation. He was the one who’d found out that she had no priors and was muling for a boyfriend who subscribed to the theory that women are less likely to be stopped by drug agents. Had someone not informed on Lydia, the boyfriend would have been right.