This is a law-abiding woman, they pointed out. More than law-abiding: a philanthropist, a clergywoman. This couldn’t be Annelise Eliot, they said. Everyone knew where Annelise was. She was living with other American expatriates in Switzerland. Or maybe in Cozumel, where her parents’ U.S. dollars went a long way. She certainly wasn’t in Minnesota, a cold midwestern state where she knew no one, a minister at a nondenominational New Age church, feeding the homeless and tending the dying.
And they pointed out that the Eliot case might be a cold case, but it wasn’t a Minnesota cold case. Annelise had lived in Montana and killed in California. Back off, they said. Work your own caseload.
Shiloh had backed down, but only to retrench, looking into the life of Annelise, not Aileen. Shiloh talked to detectives in Montana. He’d begun talking to the FBI agent who’d headed up the Eliot investigation, who was polite but not very interested. And finally, he’d started talking to people who’d known Annelise. Not her close friends, but old acquaintances on the edges of her life.
It took a long time, an investigation crowded into the beginnings and ends of his workdays. But the day came when he had a long, friendly phone conversation with a high-school classmate of Annelise’s. During the course of the woman’s recollections, she suddenly remembered that during freshman-year biology, she and Annelise had been lab partners. They had typed each other’s blood. And oh yeah, they’d fingerprinted each other. She’d never really thought about that before.
His voice calm, his heart slamming, Shiloh asked if she’d kept her old school stuff.
Maybe, she said. My parents are real pack rats.
That spring evening he came home from work a little late. When I met him on the back step, he slid his hands up my rib cage and lifted me up off my feet as an exuberant young father might do with a small child.
Several days later, nearly a year after he’d met Aileen Lennox, Shiloh opened a Federal Express package containing patent fingerprints from Annelise Eliot. They drew a nineteen-point match with ones he’d had a fingerprint technician take months ago from the polite, annoyed letter Lennox had written to him.
Now Special Agent Jay Thompson of the FBI was interested. He flew to Minnesota. I’ll never forget seeing him on our doorstep, a lean, leathery man in his late forties. He looked tired, sly, and happy, all things I’d never seen before on a federal agent’s mien.
“Let’s get her, Mike,” he said.
It wasn’t easy, even then. Thompson flew to Montana, where Annelise’s mother, now a widow, still lived in a graceful old house on forty acres. Thompson and the detective who’d originally headed up the Montana investigation got a warrant to search the Eliot house; several officers went out to help them.
The widow Eliot was as tall as her daughter, and her blond hair was just beginning to be streaked with white. She’d had time to get used to follow-up visits from detectives, particularly the Montana man, Oldham. If she was alarmed that this time they had come with a search warrant-the first search in twelve years-it didn’t show, Thompson later said. She offered the men homemade ginger cookies.
It was a good performance, but she must have known how futile it was. Although there was little in the house to betray her ongoing contact with her daughter-the paperwork on the phone bill, for example, showed no calls to Minnesota-there was a sealed and stamped letter with no return address on the old roll-top desk in the study. It was segregated from the other outgoing mail, as if Mrs. Eliot meant to drop it separately into a public mailbox in town. There was no receiver’s name above the address, but it was going to Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
It was Thompson who’d found the letter, and he knew from that moment he had to move carefully. The letter hadn’t been hidden; he doubted Mrs. Eliot would believe they hadn’t seen it, even should he leave it behind unopened and in the same position on the desk. No matter what, the moment the police left her home, the widow Eliot was going to be on the phone to Minnesota.
No turning back. Thompson opened the letter. The salutation read, Dear Anni.
Thompson slipped the letter into his jacket, found Oldham, and told him to sit down with Annelise’s mother for a reinterview. “Keep her occupied,” he said.
While Oldham accepted ginger cookies and a cup of tea in a first-floor parlor, Thompson returned to the second-floor study and made two quick, quiet, and urgent calls to Minneapolis. The first was to a federal judge; the second was to Shiloh’s cell phone.
“Today’s the day,” he said. “We’re at the house. We got her, and the mother knows. I’m getting you a warrant. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes.” He looked out a wide window to where the Eliot land lay peaceful and white under March snow. “Go get her now, Mike.”
Annelise had never truly believed Shiloh would catch her. When he came to her that afternoon, in her study at the church, she at first thought it was with more futile, probing questions. When Shiloh began to Mirandize her, she finally realized what was happening.
The look in her eyes, Shiloh said, must have been the same one that Marnie Hahn had seen just before she died, a rage born of frustrated, balked entitlement. Annelise Eliot had stared at him like that for a moment. Then she went for the letter opener. Shiloh had barely gotten a deflecting hand up in time.
“Did she really think she could get out of the situation by killing him?” Ligieia asked. Sinclair’s hands hadn’t moved. Ligieia had become interested in the story itself; she was asking out of her own curiosity.
“I’m not sure she was trying to kill him. It was just anger,” I said. “She never really believed Shiloh was going to get any evidence he could use. And I think”-I paused, looking at Sinclair now-“that she really felt she’d paid her debt to society, through all the good she was doing in Minnesota. Maybe she even felt she’d repaid Marnie Hahn’s memory.”
Sinclair was signing. “And when Mike wouldn’t let it go at that,” Ligieia translated, “when she knew he was really going to make her pay, she got angry again. Just like she got angry at Hahn, years ago, the girl who was ruining her life.”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. Sinclair had Shiloh’s broad, contextual intuition. And in addition, I thought, she understood her brother as well. She saw that he’d been angered as a teenager by Marnie Hahn’s cold-blooded murder and had stoked and fed that long-banked anger during a long, seemingly fruitless investigation that had finally caught fire.
And then I told Sinclair and Ligieia the rest, the part that I thought of as the coda to the story.
Marnie Hahn, Shiloh had told me late the night of the arrest, was a poor man’s lamb.
“Mmm, that’s a biblical thing, right?” I asked. The reference itself wasn’t familiar to me, but Shiloh’s way of making allusions was.
“In the Old Testament,” Shiloh said, “King David desires a married woman, Bathsheba, and sleeps with her. And Bathsheba becomes pregnant, and when David realizes there is no covering up for his sin, he sends the husband to the front in the war. He sends the man to certain death. And it works, the man dies.
“To make him understand that his actions were wrong, the prophet Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who has a whole flock of sheep-that’s King David, metaphorically-who kills the only lamb his impoverished neighbor owns rather than give up one from his own flock.”
“Was Marnie the Hahns’ only child?” I asked him.
“Yes,” Shiloh said. “But that’s not really the point. Annelise is an only child, too.” He fell silent for a moment, then explained. “Annelise and Owen had just about everything. Marnie had almost nothing. And what little she had, they took.”
That night, I’d heard in his voice the unflinching right-and-wrong creed of his youth, and I wondered if such a great ideological expanse had, after all, separated Reverend Shiloh and his son.