I didn’t want to meet Sinclair in a café or diner. If I had to speak to Shiloh’s closest sibling through a translator, at least I didn’t want to do it in a busy public place that wasn’t going to lend itself to a lengthy and comfortable conversation.

The surroundings in which Naomi Wilson and I had talked were ideal. In her own home, we’d had privacy and we’d had time to let the conversation go where it needed to. It probably wasn’t going to be possible to re-create that with Sinclair, no matter what. But I wanted to go to her house, and it wasn’t just so we’d have time and privacy to talk.

All of us have that one place we’d go if our lives fell apart. My conversation with his brother suggested that Shiloh’s place might be wherever his sister Sinclair lived.

Shiloh’s life had not been falling apart. Shiloh’s life had been coming together. His career was taking off, his marriage was young and strong. And yet I had to satisfy myself that he hadn’t, acting under stresses totally unknown to me, sought refuge in this remote corner of the country.

It would seem a strange coincidence, at least to me, if Santa Fe were indeed the place Shiloh had gone to ground. As far as I knew, he’d never been there, while one of my earliest memories was of Santa Fe.

I was perhaps four when Mother had taken me on a trip to the city, for some kind of shopping she couldn’t do in the hinterlands. All I remember of it was that it seemed to be fall or winter. In my snapshot memories I see a cool rainy night and the warm inviting lights of the buildings; I remember eating a creamy soup made of pumpkin or squash in a restaurant and my child’s satisfaction because it was only my mother and me at the table, and I had her all to myself…

The pilot’s voice broke into my thoughts. We were cleared to make a final descent into the Albuquerque area. A stewardess moved smoothly up the aisle on the periphery of my vision, alert for tray tables still down or cell phones in use.

The plane sank down into a layer of cloud smooth as the surface of the ocean. At late twilight, the cloudbank was a very dark gray, night nearly fallen over the city. Droplets of water formed on my window and began to crawl sidewise across the pane. Wrapped in a charcoal mist, for a moment all of us on the plane were nowhere, between worlds.

It was ridiculous and I knew it, the prospect that I might surprise Shiloh at his sister’s home in New Mexico. But I knew why I refused to reject it out of hand. In a weird and backwards way, it was attractive.

I’d once heard a widowed woman say that a month after her husband died in a car wreck, she began to console herself with a fantasy. The fantasy was that her husband wasn’t dead, he’d just left her and was living in another part of the country. At the time, that hadn’t sounded like a very comforting thing to think about late at night, but now I understood. That woman’s love had been unconditional: she’d just wanted her husband to be alive and all right, with or without her.

Of the realistic choices I had to explain Shiloh’s disappearance, this was the only remotely pleasant one.

White runway lights rose to meet the plane.

chapter 17

I merged with a thin crowd of people on the concourse leading to the main terminal. The things I had yet to do tonight made me feel tired already. There was a bank of pay phones right before me, but I already knew I wasn’t going to call Ligieia.

The kinds of city maps given out at car-rental counters weren’t going to be good enough for the directions I needed. It was at a newsstand that I found what I needed, a map that included the whole state of New Mexico.

At the car-rental counter, I added to my paper trail, renting a Honda. I unfolded the state map and pointed to the small town where Bale College was. “How long should it take me to get here?” I asked.

The clerk looked down to see where I was pointing. “An hour,” she said. “Maybe a little more, ’cause it’s getting dark and you’re new to the area.”

“There’s a full tank of gas in this car you’re giving me?”

“Oh, yes, all our cars are filled up. You’re responsible for returning them refilled or you’ll pay a fueling fee-”

“What about a cupholder?” I asked.

“A what?”

“I’m gonna need coffee.”

“I feel you,” she said, a fellow caffeine addict.

But in the end I didn’t want to take the time to stop, so I didn’t walk back to the Starbucks in the main terminal, nor did I pull over anywhere. I just headed out of town.

A light mist fell steadily, and I turned the windshield wipers on to their intermittent setting. I hoped we weren’t going to have a serious rain, because I was planning on letting my lead foot have its way. I was already going to be late enough to be rude; every minute counted.

I kept it at eighty-two as long as I was on the interstate. When the route to Bale College began to take me up into the hills, I eased off the accelerator, but not enough to be going at a legal speed. Then flashing lights turned the raindrops clinging to my rear window into the colors from a red-and-blue kaleidoscope.

I hit my turn signal immediately, telegraphing my intent to be cooperative, and eased onto the shoulder of the road.

The patrol officer who approached the side of my car looked about 20. He was Deputy Johnson by his name tag. “Do you know how fast you were going?” Johnson said.

“Well, I thought forty-five, but you’re probably going to tell me it was more than that,” I said, trying to sound good-natured.

“It was quite a bit more than that,” he said, unsmiling. “I clocked you at fifty-seven.”

“You got me, I guess. I’m in a strange car; sometimes they can fool you,” I said.

“They can’t fool you if you’re watching the speedometer,” he said didactically. “It’s very important that people drive slow in a light rain like this. See, people think a light rain is better than a heavy rain, but there are oils in the asphalt that…”

I’ll pay the fine, I’ll pay it twice, please just stop talking and write the ticket, I thought. But he was a kid; he took his job very seriously.

Deputy Johnson wrapped up his spiel about a minute later and took my ID off to run it through the computer. I began to leaf through my bag for my Hennepin County shield.

He returned and wrote up my ticket. I took it from him.

“Thank you for your courtesy,” he said.

“Hold on a minute, will you? There’s something I need to ask you.” I held out my shield. “I’m with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. That’s Minneapolis and the surrounding area.”

His eyebrows went up, an expression both surprised and defensive.

“I’m not angling for professional courtesy with the ticket. I was speeding; I’ll pay the fine,” I assured him. “I’m here as part of an investigation. I was actually on my way to your department when you pulled me over. I have a phone number here without an address, and I was going to ask someone to get that for me tonight.” I smiled at him to let him know he’d be doing me a favor. “If you could radio this in to your department in advance, maybe they could have it by the time I get there.”

Deputy Johnson furrowed his brow. “You’re from what jurisdiction again?”

“I’m a detective from Hennepin County. I can give you the night number there for the investigation division, if anyone wants to check it out.”

“This is part of an investigation?” he reiterated.

“A missing-persons investigation, yes.”

It was beginning to dawn on Johnson that this was sort of an interesting break from manning the speed trap. “What’s the phone number you’re asking about?” he asked.

I gave him Ligieia’s phone number and he went back to the radio.

“They’re looking it up,” he said when he returned, and gave me directions to the sheriff’s substation. “Come back and talk to me if there’s anything I can do to help you while you’re in town, Detective Pribek,” he said. It sounded as if his job wasn’t keeping him too challenged.