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 back door of the house, the one that led past the washing machine into the kitchen, this time I went into the house through the front door. I wanted to stand in the entryway where Shiloh’s keys were missing from the hook.

Keys and jacket and boots. That’s what had suggested to me on Sunday that Shiloh had simply left for the airport. And he had, hadn’t he?

There was a simple sign I hadn’t checked yet.

As a patrol officer, I’d occasionally collar people for minor crimes and then let them off, if I felt it was warranted. When I did, I had a standard line. “The next time I see you (working this street corner/with a spray-paint can in your hand/et cetera), have your toothbrush with you.”

They knew what I meant: that they’d be spending a night in jail next time. Later, as a detective, I used the toothbrush as a litmus test for whether someone was missing voluntarily or against their will. It was a test that crossed boundaries of age, gender, and ethnicity. To a person, almost nobody left home knowing they’d be gone for more than twenty-four hours without grabbing their toothbrush on the way out. Even when they didn’t have time to pack, they had time to retrieve it.

Thinking of this morning, I saw in my mind’s eye my brush hanging alone in the little rack of the inside door of the medicine chest. A quick trip to the bathroom confirmed this. His wasn’t there. I went back into the bedroom and went to the closet door, opened it, looked up at the high shelf. His valise, too, was gone.

All signs were pointing toward his having gone to the airport.

Had he left me a note and I simply hadn’t found it?

Shiloh had remarked once that our kitchen table was “a filing cabinet waiting to happen.” It was always overloaded with bills, papers, mail, newspapers, newsletters, notes to each other. It was a mess I now needed to sift through.

The newspapers were local, the Star Tribune and St. Paul’s Pioneer Press. Under that was the newsletter from the police union. A cadge letter from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals: Shiloh gave them money from time to time. Here was the paperwork from the phone bill, with toll and long-distance calls itemized. A quick scan revealed all the numbers to be familiar, with none arousing my suspicions. A catalog from a gun dealer. A piece of cop junk mail: “… so revered, it’s used by the Israeli police…” A wrinkled white paper bag from a delicatessen, flat and empty: I remembered it from when I’d brought home dinner late about three weeks ago. A slip of paper with a phone number on it, but this time it was one I recognized: the local FBI field office.

The last item, the deepest archaeological layer, was two sheets of scratch paper, one with red wax drippings on it. That was from the dinner we’d had on our wedding night, two months ago. Shiloh had dug up a boxy red candle and lit it, an ironically celebratory gesture, with the sheets of paper set underneath to catch the melting wax.

There was no note.

I walked back to the entryway, the better to start my search from scratch. Honestly, I did not believe that Shiloh had been injured or killed here. Even so, I had to look around.

There were no pry marks on the front door. The lock appeared untampered with, and I couldn’t remember feeling anything wrong with it when I’d unlocked it.

I walked the perimeter of each room, looking at the windows for signs of a break-in. They showed none. The spaces behind the furniture showed nothing but dust bunnies. There was nothing valuable missing. Nothing cheap, either, from what I could tell. The shelves were as laden as ever with Shiloh’s books. I would never be able to tell if any of them was missing. Shiloh’s interests were extremely varied: fiction and nonfiction, Shakespeare, texts on investigation, a Bible, several slender volumes of poetry by authors I’d never heard of: Saunders Lewis, Sinclair Goldman.

There was nothing resembling dried blood or bloodstains anywhere.

The bedroom was tidy, although somewhat less so than Shiloh had left it-I hadn’t made the bed this morning when Vang had called me.

When kids disappear, I look under their beds early on. Children tend to think under the bed is a sly hiding place. Often, the girl’s diary is there. Adults use more care in hiding their valuables.

Even so, I sat on my heels and flipped up the blanket, which hung long from the rumpled surface of the mattress.