“Oh, no,” I said.

It wasn’t hidden, just sort of pushed out of the way for convenience’s sake. If I’d been looking down last night I’d have seen the dull gleam of light on black leather, just under the bed frame.

I jerked Shiloh’s timeworn hard-shell valise out. It was heavy. Obviously packed. I opened it. The shaving kit was inside the valise, the toothbrush in the kit. Shiloh had been efficient. He’d packed in advance, and then he’d put the valise where it would be out of his way, not underfoot in our narrow bedroom.

On top of the folded clothes was a paperback copy of a classic text on investigation, and inside that, like a bookmark, was a ticket for Northwest’s 2:35 P.M. flight to Washington, D.C.

He’d never even left for the airport. Somehow, that made it real.

chapter 7

I’m not sure how long I sat by the bed, not thinking but just internalizing. Some long moments passed and then I got up and walked back to the kitchen, to stand in the middle of Shiloh’s vacated home and life in Minneapolis.

A missing adult male. What would Genevieve and I look at first?

Money, we’d say. How were his finances? Bad enough to skip town? How was the relationship with the wife? Did he have a girlfriend on the side? Did he have a problem with alcohol or drugs? Could he be involved in criminal activity? Did he have a record? Associate with criminals? Did he have serious enemies? Who would benefit from his murder? Did we have a good idea of the location from which he’d disappeared? If not, what’s the house look like? And where’s the car?

It was a fertile field of questions. The problem was, I could sort through them in about a minute’s time.

Shiloh’s finances were my finances, and I knew they were fine.

The state of our marriage? Interviewing spouses had taught me that no other question was so fraught with the possibility of self-deception.

But Shiloh and I were good. We’d only been married two months. We’d really have had to put a lot of effort into screwing things up in such a short time.

We kept two Heinekens in the refrigerator in case of guests. Those two green bottles were still in their place, untouched. Lapsed though he was from his childhood religion, there were parts of Shiloh’s personality that approached the monastic. Though he drank when I first met him, he’d since completely quit, and as for drugs, I’d never seen him take anything stronger than aspirin.

A criminal record would have killed Shiloh’s chances with the FBI, and he’d passed their rigorous screening. He associated with criminals only as a detective who had the usual relationships with informants.

Enemies? I suppose Annelise Eliot, whom he’d caught after thirteen years of life as a fugitive, had reason to hate him. But everything I’d heard about the case suggested she’d directed her hostility to larger and more political targets, like the lawyers in California building their careers on her prosecution, whom she denounced in the media while proclaiming her innocence.

No one, that I could see, would benefit from Shiloh’s death.

The house wasn’t a plausible site for some kind of violent event. I’d already searched it and it was in order.

I chewed the end of my pencil.

Maybe I was going at this the wrong way. I was thinking of Shiloh impersonally, as a case. But I knew him, maybe better than anyone. It was, in a perverse way, an ideal situation.

What had he done, the day and a half that I’d been gone? He was leaving for Virginia soon. He’d packed, to be sure. Maybe run a load of laundry beforehand. And he’d gone out to get food, probably, because we tended to restock the refrigerator on a basis closer to daily than to weekly.

Shiloh habitually ran every day, so he’d probably gone out for one of the long runs he liked when I wasn’t at his side to quit after four miles. And what else? Maybe he’d read, maybe watched some basketball. He might have slept early, on a quiet Saturday night without his wife around.

It was a safe, sane, and boring course of events. None of those activities seemed to allow for Shiloh to simply disappear. Except…

A long-distance run had been, nominally, the most dangerous part of the routine I’d reconstructed for Saturday and Sunday. Mostly, people who ran never encountered more than an obnoxious dog, but there were exceptions. Runners took paths through quiet and dark places, away from city lights. Occasionally paramedics carried them from state parks and nature trails minus their cash, with head traumas or stab wounds. Shiloh, six-foot-two, young, and athletic, was the least likely of marks for a mugger, but it had been a theory that at least made some sense.

I went back to Shiloh’s valise and opened it. Thumbing through the clothes, I saw the gray-green of his Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, the one he favored for running and basketball games. Squashed against the frame, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag to keep the soles from rubbing against the clothes, were Shiloh’s running shoes. He only had one pair.

Here were his running shoes; gone were his heavy-soled boots and his jacket. I felt a small twinge of satisfaction. This was progress.

Shiloh had gone somewhere on foot. Not running, not the airport, either. An errand. He’d gone out somewhere, casually dressed, and hadn’t come back.

The phone rang.

“It’s me,” Vang said. “Some faxes came in for you from Virginia-area hospitals. No one fitting your husband’s description has been admitted in the last seventy-two hours.”

“I know,” I said.

Genevieve, in my earliest days as a detective, told me: “When you’ve got a missing-persons case you think is really legit, one that you’ve got a bad feeling about, the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours are key. Work it hard and work it fast.” Usually, cases like those were the disappearances of children. Other times the missing persons were women who turned up missing against a backdrop of suspicious circumstances: evidence of a break-in or a struggle, a chorus of friends witnessing to a creepy ex-boyfriend hanging around, a recently obtained restraining order.

No such events surrounded Shiloh’s disappearance. In this case, I’d spent most of the thirty-six hours not realizing he was missing.

Even so, I was going to do now what I should have done then: I was going to work all the angles I could think of in the next twenty-four hours.

I needed to talk to people in our neighborhood. Most of them were working people, though, and wouldn’t be home in the middle of the afternoon. And some, our less immediate neighbors, would need a picture of Shiloh to prompt them.

There was one person, however, who knew Shiloh by sight and was almost always in.

The widow Muzio probably saw Shiloh more than any of our other neighbors. She thought the world of him, mostly because Shiloh looked after her. He did this because Nedda Muzio lived alone, and she was getting senile.

Mrs. Muzio had an aged, sweet-tempered dog with the rangy build and curly hair of a wolfhound, with maybe some shepherd in her blood, too.

This dog, who had the unlikely name of Snoopy, used to escape from Mrs. Muzio’s backyard through a misaligned and unlockable gate. On a regular basis, Shiloh used to hear Mrs. Muzio yelling ineffectually for Snoopy. He’d track the dog down at whichever neighbor’s trash can she was eating out of and bring her home.

Mrs. Muzio was always effusive in her joy at Snoopy’s return, partly because she blamed Snoopy’s disappearances on “rascals” who stole her. These same rascals stole her Social Security check from the mailbox, when Mrs. Muzio lost track of the date and didn’t realize the first of the month wasn’t coming for another week. They broke into her house and turned the faucet on, stole food from her cupboard, looked in the windows at night. Shiloh used to go over and patiently reason with her, but he never really made a dent in what he’d called her delusional structure. Fixing her broken gate, which he did one Saturday afternoon and which kept Snoopy inside, was a more concrete help.