When I finished the story, Sinclair signed Thank you. For the story, I supposed. I wanted to thank her for letting me tell it. It had restored my lost equilibrium.

She rose and crossed to me again, looking down at her daughter’s flushed, sleeping face. She bent to take Hope into her arms. Standing, she nodded toward the hall in invitation. It was time to sleep. Ligieia had gone ahead of us into the hallway.

Before Sinclair looked away, I spoke without preamble, facing her directly so she could read my lips. “Did you ever know Mike to use drugs?” It was the question I hadn’t asked earlier.

Sinclair furrowed her brow in what seemed to be genuine bafflement, and she shook her head, No.

Just before I slept, I thought I heard the old-fashioned clatter of a typewriter, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to get up and find out, and then the sound was fading to nothing, like the sound of a passing train receding into the distance.

chapter 19

“Run it by me again?” I said to Sorenson, the watch commander at the Third Precinct in Minneapolis. My bare feet were cold on the kitchen linoleum at home. Minnesota seemed to have plunged ahead into near-winter cold while I had been in the warmth of the West.

“A vice guy brought a hooker in on a soliciting bust. She wants to trade some information, but she says she won’t talk to anyone but Detective Pribek.”

“Information on what?”

“Major felony is all she’ll say.” Sorenson coughed. “I know you’re supposed to be taking some personal time, because of the situation with your husband, but she’s asking for you.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’ll come down.”

I’d expected a skinny drug user scarcely out of her teens, hardly attractive, ready to drop the dime on her pimp for something he’d done. Someone far different waited for me in the interrogation room. Her age was hard to judge. She had the perfect skin and lustrous hair of youth, but her gaze and especially her poise reminded me of an older woman.

She’d shed a fur-lined coat to reveal a white leather dress that bared her arms. The heat in the Third Precinct building was generous, although my feet were still cold.

“I hear you’ve got something to tell me,” I said.

“Got a cigarette?” she said.

I was inclined to say no, to exert some control over this meeting. But looking at her, I got the feeling that she wasn’t nervous at all. She might very well refuse to proceed until she got her cigarette.

In the hall I flagged down the third-watch detective, a born-again Christian I had a casual acquaintance with. “I need a smoke,” I said, and he nodded. “Matches, too.”

The hooker said nothing when I returned with her cigarette. She took the cigarette and matches and lit up, making a prodigious cloud of smoke. Then she took one drag, exhaled, and stubbed out the cigarette.

“Thanks,” she said throatily.

A power trip. Fuck her information. “It’s been real,” I said. “Enjoy your ninety days.”

When I was at the door she said, “Don’t you want to hear about your husband?”

I stopped and turned.

Her hard eyes traveled me like mine did her, from my wool hat and gray T-shirt down to my salt-stained winter boots. I hadn’t bothered changing into my on-the-job clothes, since it was the middle of the night, and if she’d asked for me specifically, she obviously knew who I was.

“I killed him,” she said, and crossed legs encased in hip-high boots.

I took a seat across the table from her. Standing was a position of greater authority, but I wanted to get my hands out of her line of sight in case they started shaking.

“I doubt it,” I said mildly. “Can you prove it?”

“I have ads in the weekly papers. He called me,” she said. “Looking for sex. When I got here tonight, I recognized him from the picture hanging up on the bulletin board.”

“I said proof, not circumstantial details.” Why are my feet still so goddamn cold?

“I can tell you where he’s buried.”

“Bullshit. If you got away with murder you wouldn’t be here confessing.”

“Great in bed, wasn’t he?”

“Knock it off. You read about Shiloh in the Star Tribune and decided to have some fun jerking the cops around with a fake confession.”

“No, I wanted to get a look at you. He told me that you once picked up a rattlesnake and killed it by breaking its neck. Is that true?” she asked.

“Yes.” Now my hands really were shaking. She shouldn’t have known that.

“I asked him why he was out looking for strange pussy with a woman like that at home,” she said. She leaned forward to speak confidentially. “Your husband told me you could never really let go in bed because of what your brother did to you when you were young.”

The slamming of my heart woke me. It took a moment for me to remember where I was. A poster advertising the Ashland Shakespeare Festival brought it back: I was in New Mexico, Saturday morning, in Shiloh’s sister’s home.

I’d slept on the couch in Sinclair’s study, with motley blankets wrapped around me. My feet, bare and escaping the covers, were cold.

Stiff as an old dog that had slept on a hard floor, I threw the blankets back and rose. Limberness returned slowly as I folded the blankets and stacked them as neatly as possible on the couch, placing the pillow on top. Then I bent to gather up my things. As I did, I rooted through my duffel bag to find Shiloh’s Kalispell Search and Rescue T-shirt, suddenly feeling a desire to wear it today.

When I came out into the kitchen wet-haired from the shower, Ligieia was at the table, reading The Merchant of Venice. She looked up at my approach.

“Is Sinclair still here?” I asked Ligieia. Already I sensed that she wasn’t.

“No,” Ligieia confirmed. “She had some errands.”

Reaching into my shoulder bag, I took a piece of paper from the legal pad I’d brought and tore it in half. On the top half I wrote my home phone and work voice-mail numbers and my work e-mail address. “In case she thinks of anything else, you can call me, or she can send me a message,” I explained.

Then I hefted my duffel bag onto my other shoulder. “Thanks for everything. Tell Sinclair I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.”

Ligieia followed me to the front door. “If you don’t mind my asking, what are you going to do now? About your husband?”

“I’m going back to Minneapolis,” I said. “I’ve got some more leads I can follow up there.”

“Well,” she said. “Good luck.”

On the drive back down to Albuquerque, I kept my speed down under the posted limit.

And really, there was no reason to hurry. I would catch the first available flight back to the Cities, but I had little idea what I should do when I got there.

I’d been a cop so long that it was second nature for me to lie when a civilian like Ligieia asked how an investigation was going. No matter how badly an investigation is going, cops simply don’t say they’re at a dead end. They say, Leads are coming in every day, and I can’t comment any further than that.

That was nearly always true, for what it was worth. Missing-persons cases, homicide cases, bank robberies-every serious crime generated leads from the public. A vast percentage of them were worthless, though: visions from psychics, lies from anonymous pranksters, honest citizens who’d seen something that turned out to be nothing.

Vang, though, had promised to follow up on any leads and leave me a message if anything looked promising. So far I’d heard nothing from him.

At a bank of pay phones in the Denver airport, I did the first of my twice-daily message checks. Today, the recorded voice told me I had one message. To my surprise, it was Genevieve. The message was unrevealing.