The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton

narrow that down, I would waste crucial time, because I couldn’t effectively deal with both places at once.
    I reached for the phone book and looked up the number for Northwest Airlines.
    “I’m going to need a passenger manifest for your two thirty-five flight to Reagan on Sunday,” I told the ticket agent.
    “What?” she said. “We don’t—”
    “Give that information out, I know. I’m a Hennepin County sheriff’s detective. I know the drill.” I shifted the phone to my other ear, already digging in my desk. “Tell your ticketing supervisor that my name is Detective Sarah Pribek and that I’m going to be down there in about twenty-five minutes with a signed request on stationery with our letterhead.”

 

    chapter 6
    The traffic wasn’t too bad at midmorning. The brightest part of the morning was over and clouds were scudding in from the west. As I turned east on the 494, the familiar red-and-gray bodies of Northwest planes were launching themselves toward the sky ahead of me.
    The ticketing supervisor at Northwest’s offices—Marilyn, as her name tag identified her—led me to a small office not far from the main ticket counter.
    I laid the request letter on her desk and she scanned it quickly, looking from the body of the text up to the letterhead.
    “Can I see your identification?” she asked.
    I took out the leather holder, flipped it open, and let her peer at it.
    “Tell me again what you need?” she asked, sitting down behind her desk.
    “I’m tracking down a passenger who was supposed to be on your two thirty-five P.M. flight to Reagan on Sunday. I’m not sure he was on it.”
    “Sunday?” she said. She rotated her office chair a little and sat forward to open a filing cabinet next to her desk.
    “Name?” she asked, putting the printout on her desk.
    “Michael Shiloh,” I said. “Shiloh with an h. ”
    I’d identified myself to her as Sarah Pribek, and now I opted not to mention that Shiloh was my husband. It seemed best to present myself as an impersonal agent of the law.
    “Yup.” Marilyn interrupted my thoughts. “Got him. Listed on the two thirty-five on Sunday, like you thought.” She paused. “He did not check in for that flight.”
    “He wasn’t on it?”
    “No.”
    “What’s the next flight after that?”
    “Into Reagan or into Dulles? The absolute next flight was a two fifty-five into Dulles.”
    “Can you check that one?”
    “There’re a couple more flights into both airports; I can check all of them for you.” She reached back into the filing cabinet; she’d left the drawer open, and now she walked her fingers over the edges of the documents. Licking her thumb, she culled several of them.
    I leaned against the wall to wait, watching as she read. She shook her head slightly each time she finished with an individual manifest. When she was done she turned her desk chair slightly and faced me again. “He’s not listed on any of them.”
    I nodded.
    “Sometimes people fly into Baltimore,” she said thoughtfully. I shook my head.
    “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. But you’ve been really helpful.”
    I thanked her and took my leave, heading toward the escalator.
    Shiloh could have flown into Baltimore, he could have chosen a different airline, but there was no reason for that. He’d had a ticket. More to the point, if he’d missed Northwest’s 2:35 flight—and that in itself was very unlike him—and caught a later one, he’d have been at Quantico by now. Kim would have heard from him. No matter what had gone wrong with his travel plans, I couldn’t imagine how he could be so late.
    Had I completely ruled out the possibility Shiloh had gotten to Virginia? Not necessarily. It was possible that I was dealing with a situation where two things had gone wrong at once: Shiloh had missed his flight and taken a later one on a different carrier, and then something had happened to him in Virginia. If that was true, and I focused the search for him in