“No,” I said. “I’m sure you’re right.”

Well done, Sarah, I thought, angry with myself. Your husband is missing. What would make you feel better? I know! Screwing up the career of a forensic assistant. At least I hadn’t mentioned Rossella by name.

I stood up, to take my leave. But now it was Prewitt’s turn to prolong our meeting.

“Detective Pribek,” he said, catching my attention as I was at the door. “I’m really not impervious to your pain.” It was what he’d meant to say earlier.

“Thank you, sir,” I said.

Alone in the stairwell, I reviewed the conversation in my mind.

Prewitt had been concerned with how I was going to comport myself while I looked for Shiloh; he was preoccupied with the personnel problem that my absence posed for him. He’d made a small effort to sympathize. I’m not impervious to your pain. Vang hadn’t even said that much when he’d heard.

I appreciated Prewitt’s words. But he had also asked the pertinent questions, made the relevant points. Was Shiloh drinking? he’d asked. How were you getting along? he’d wanted to know. I knew what he was really getting at.

Grown men rarely go missing, as a rule, Genevieve had taught me. I knew from experience that was true. They disappear on purpose, leaving town to escape debts and romantic entanglements gone wrong.

That was the unhappy truth behind Vang’s embarrassed silence, Prewitt’s questions. They both believed Shiloh had left me.

chapter 11

I spent the afternoon in more routine procedures. Looking at paperwork first, sitting on the couch with documents spread out on the low, scuffed coffee table.

Shiloh’s credit-card statement showed only one charge to an airline: $325 to Northwest Airlines. That was accounted for. In the absence of a charge to Amtrak or Greyhound, I went to those terminals in person. No ticket agents recognized the photo of Shiloh.

An investigation, when it is fruitless, makes increasingly wide circles. What cops don’t like to admit is that the outer circle of an investigation can be like the uppermost layer of the earth’s atmosphere. It’s thin and unrewarding. There’s not much out there to run across. Usually. But you ignore it at your peril.

For me, that outer layer was going to be our neighborhood, which I would walk once again. Looking, thinking, retracing the steps Shiloh might have taken. I sensed it was useless even as I took a hooded jacket off the peg in the front hallway and went out the door.

After Shiloh’s sixteen weeks of FBI training, when he’d received his first assignment to a field office, I was going to pack up and join him. It was nearly impossible that he’d be assigned back to Minneapolis. Shiloh had been almost apologetic when he’d told me this.

“Hey,” I’d said, half kidding, “I’m a lowly cop. Who am I to stand in the way of the important work you’ll be doing: catching fugitives, hunting down terrorists-”

“Pretending to be a thirteen-year-old girl on the Internet,” Shiloh had interjected. “I’m serious. New agents rarely get desirable assignments. It’s likely that we’re going to live in an economically depressed second city. You’ll be on a drug or gang task force somewhere, if the local cops are hiring at all.”

“I’ll find something,” I’d said.

“Life there is going to be a lot different than it is here,” he’d insisted. “And you’ve lived in Minnesota a long time.”

“Then it’s time I saw someplace else,” I’d said.

Shiloh had painted a dark, if vague, picture of the city we’d live in after he got his first assignment. But had it been this neighborhood, the one he’d called home for years, that had somehow turned on him? Shiloh had owned no car at the time of his disappearance; Mrs. Muzio had seen him out on foot during the time I’d been downstate. The evidence suggested that whatever had happened to Shiloh had happened here.

The course I was following had taken me across University Avenue, one of the main roads through Northeast. Now I paused and looked down a wide, paved back alley that ran behind a Laundromat and a liquor store. A girl rode past me on a pink bicycle with high handlebars and a banana seat, wobbling slightly as she stood in the pedals to get more speed out of her efforts, taking a shortcut home.

The alleyway, like everywhere else I’d walked, looked wide-open and safe in the light of day. I had difficulty seeing it-or anywhere nearby-as the scene of a violent crime, even at night. Ours was a neighborhood with streetlights and foot traffic. It never got truly dark, truly isolated.

But that was a fallacy a lot of civilians bought into. They believed that total seclusion and darkness were necessary for crimes to be committed. It wasn’t true. Smash-and-grab robberies, assaults, even murders, took place in semipublic places, with people not so far away.

A robbery gone wrong was perhaps the most likely scenario.

Had Shiloh been carrying a serious amount of money with him when he disappeared? It seemed unlikely, and it probably didn’t matter. Money was only a risk when people had reason to believe you had it on you. Shiloh didn’t dress like money, and he knew better than to let people see large bills when he had them. But people got jacked every day, rich or not.

What would Shiloh do then? I couldn’t honestly say. I could imagine a calm and practical Shiloh who’d hand over his money and appease a nervous teenager with a gun or a knife. But I could also imagine a contrary Shiloh who’d resist, the same one who’d refused for months to give up on his theory that Aileen Lennox was Annelise Eliot, the one who’d picked a fruitless argument with Darryl Hawkins.

Either way, he could have gotten killed for his efforts, his ID disappearing along with his money into a stranger’s bloody hands.

So where was the body? I could visualize the rest of it, but I couldn’t see a mugger disposing of the body. He’d just gotten away with robbery and murder. The worst thing he could do was stay with the body a moment longer than he had to. The smartest thing would be to run.

“ ‘Disappeared without a trace’ is a cliché,” Genevieve told me early in my training. “ ‘Nobody disappears without a trace’ is my anti-cliché. It’s the golden rule in Missing Persons.”

The one case that seemed to be proving Genevieve’s saying wrong was the one I was personally involved in. That in itself was suspicious. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Maybe I was too close to it. Was that what another cop would say? What Gen would say?

There were another seven hours left in my thirty-six-hour window, but it didn’t matter to me anymore. There was something I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to wait.

At five Wednesday evening I was at the Lowes’ farm again, outside Mankato.

I could have called Genevieve. Technology has changed a lot of things. You can’t turn on the TV anymore without a wireless company selling you the idea that you can trade stocks and give presentations from the top of a mountain in Tibet. Cops are among the few people who still understand the need for face-to-face communications. I’d strongly felt that this conversation with my partner wasn’t something I could do over the phone.

I needed Genevieve. She’d taught me. I had to believe she could help when I didn’t know what else to do. Eating up Highway 169 at 71 miles per hour, a borderline safe speed in case of patrol cars in the bushes, I’d rehearsed how I would explain things to her.

In the back of my mind was the idea that this would help Genevieve as much as me. She needed to be doing something other than hiding in a century-old farmhouse, grieving for her daughter. She was good at this work; surely it would help.

When Genevieve came to the door, she looked unsurprised, like I lived across town.