The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton Page B

so.”
    “I was at the airport,” I said. “And then at the hospitals.”
    I didn’t tell him all of it. I’d also been calling and faxing cab companies, asking them to check their records to see if they’d sent a driver to our address. From Norwest, I asked for paperwork on our account, a record of recent activity; I’d requested phone records from Qwest.
    I looked up at Vang. “I’m having a sort of personal emergency. I’m looking for my husband.”
    “I thought he was supposed to go work for the Bureau,” Vang said. “Did he change his mind?”
    “No,” I said, watching my document inch out the other end of the fax machine. “But he never got there.”
    “Really?” Vang said, frowning. “You mean he didn’t get to the Academy, or he didn’t get to Virginia?” His words were measured, and his demeanor calm, but I could almost see a dozen questions jockeying for position in his mind. It was only natural. It’s not every day a coworker tells you their spouse is missing.
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “He never got on the plane, but his things are gone.” I considered Shiloh missing since two thirty-five on Sunday, the time of the flight he’d apparently planned to be on and wasn’t. “I’m going to file a report, make it official.”
    Vang hesitated. “In terms of department regulations, I’m not sure you’re supposed to be involved.” He seemed to have moved on to points of procedure; those unspoken questions were apparently going to remain unspoken.
    “I know,” I said. “But with Genevieve gone, I’m the only one around here who regularly works major missing-persons cases,” I said. Then I backtracked from my own dire words. “I’m not saying this is major. I’m saying that I can’t come back to work until I’ve heard from him.”
    “I understand,” Vang said. “Anything I can do?”
    “I’m going to be getting some faxes, in response to my requests,” I said. “You can call me and let me know what they say; that’d really help.”
    “Where will you be?” he asked.
    “Home,” I said. “A search of the house is where I’d start if this were any other case.”
     
    “. . . say analysts from Piper Jaffray. WMNN news time, twelve twenty-eight. More after this.”
    I turned the volume down on the radio and stuck the nose of the Nova out of the parking garage ramp, into the traffic.
    It wasn’t exactly true, what I’d told Vang. A search wasn’t where I’d usually start. I’d start by talking to the people closest to him.
    Like his wife. Right. I pulled out onto the road.
    Other than me, who were those closest to Shiloh? His family was in Utah. He hadn’t spoken to any of them in years.
    He’d gotten along well with his old lieutenant, Radich, who still ran the interagency narcotics task force on which Shiloh had served. And then, of course, he’d known Genevieve longer than I had, but I knew they hadn’t seen each other recently.
    He’d had no partner, working alone on cold cases. Before that he’d worked mostly alone in narcotics, undercover, paired sporadically with MPD guys or Hennepin County deputies. Like me, he played basketball with a loose and ever-changing coalition of cops and courthouse people, but never seemed to forge serious friendships there. And Shiloh didn’t drink, so he didn’t go for beers with the guys.
    Sometimes I forgot what a private man shared my bed.
    As I parked the Nova where Shiloh’s old Pontiac used to sit, I thought what bad luck it was that Shiloh had sold his car last week. Until the day that we were all tattooed with clearly visible ID numbers on our skin—and I sometimes thought that day was coming—vehicle license plates served to identify us. Missing-persons reports went out with license numbers on them, and everywhere cops in patrol cars would be ready to spot the car and plates. It’s a much more difficult task to find an adult who doesn’t have a car.
    Although the top of the driveway was much closer to the