Later, we talked in low voices, like college roommates, in the twin beds of the Lowes’ guest room. There I recounted for Genevieve the story that Royce Stewart had told me, how Shiloh had turned away from his murderous course at the last minute.

“Does it comfort you at all?” Genevieve asked.

“Does what comfort me?”

“Knowing that Shiloh couldn’t go through with running Shorty down,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does. But it’s weird, too. Everything I used to know, or thought I knew, was wrong.”

I paused, thinking that it was going to be hard to explain what I’d just said, and that Gen was going to want an explanation for a cryptic statement like that.

But Genevieve’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and steady. She was asleep.

Everything I knew was wrong.

Around the department I’d had a reputation as impulsive, a wide-open girl, as Kilander had put it. It was me who’d jumped into the Mississippi after a kid. Genevieve had a reputation for patience, for getting even hardened perps to unburden themselves to her in interrogation rooms.

Of the three of us, Genevieve and Shiloh and me, it was me who I would have voted the most likely to give in to the dictates of a murderous shadow self. After that I would have said Shiloh, and gentle Genevieve last.

But it was Genevieve who had put a wallpaper blade into the throat of an unarmed man, and later all but whistled as she torched the crime scene. It had been Shiloh who had laid plans for murder, acting on an anger I’d never seen building inside him. And yet, at the final moment, he hadn’t been able to carry out his plans. It had been me who’d sat with a dying man, an inveterate hater of both women and cops, and coaxed him to tell me what I needed to know. It was me who’d prayed in Salt Lake City with Shiloh’s sister.

I looked over at Genevieve. She was a murderer now, but she slept in a peace that passed all understanding.

Sleep did not come so easily to me. I was still awake when the first rays of sunlight stole under the sheer white curtains of the Lowes’ guest room, and the rooster in their henhouse crowed.

Genevieve stirred and opened her eyes. When she saw me, she said “Sarah?” as if she’d forgotten the events of last night altogether.

Then she reached across to my bed. I gave her my hand and she squeezed it.

We got up when we heard Deborah and Doug moving around outside our door. There were mild exclamations of surprise at my presence.

“Sarah had some business down this way,” Gen said. “She called kind of late. You probably didn’t hear the phone. I got it on the first ring.”

“Oh,” Doug said, rubbing his jaw, and if he or Deborah had questions about the vague and brief explanation, they didn’t voice them.

“Are you two hungry? There’s coffee on, too,” Deb said.

“I could use some coffee,” I said, and I realized that I could probably eat a little bit, too.

About fifteen minutes later, the four of us were sitting around the Lowes’ kitchen table, having linguica and eggs and coffee. As near as I can reconstruct, that’s where I was when Shiloh walked into the police station in Mason City, Iowa, and turned himself in for the murder of Royce Stewart.

chapter 22

Memory plays tricks, the police psychologist who interviewed Shiloh said. Shiloh’s belief that he’d killed Royce Stewart was a product of retrograde amnesia. Like many crash victims, he couldn’t remember the moments surrounding the wreck. But in his case, his mind had supplied the details, details that turned out not to be true. Shiloh had unintentionally seen to that.

In preparation for Stewart’s murder, Shiloh had gone over and over the scenario, rehearsing it mentally, steeling himself to go through with it. In the violence of the accident, somehow, imagination became memory.

“I saw it in my mind,” Shiloh told me. “When I thought about it, I could see him go down. I felt the impact when the truck hit him. It was so real.”

Shiloh couldn’t clearly remember all the time between the wreck and his visit to the police station. He knew he had a head injury and a fever, but did not seek medical help. He was paranoid, convinced the police were looking for him, a misconception supported by the fact that a helicopter was crisscrossing the skies, looking for the presumed-missing Thomas Hall.

He went deeper into the countryside, irrationally moving south, not back up toward the Cities where he had people who might have sheltered him.

One morning, after a particularly long sleep, he woke up feeling more clearheaded and knew he had to give himself up.

It took a while, though, before all the parties involved sorted out the details.

At 7:20 A.M., the desk sergeant in Mason City was enjoying a Sunday-morning cup of coffee and the last forty minutes of his watch when Shiloh walked in and made his confession.

What Shiloh actually said was that he was the guy who’d run over Royce Stewart in Blue Earth, Minnesota. The last part of his statement was “Don’t handcuff me. I’m not going to resist and my arm’s probably broken.”

The desk sergeant treated him with the caution due a man who’d identified himself as a murderer. He put Shiloh in a holding cell while he conferred with his supervisor. It was clear to both of them that Shiloh was probably sick as well as injured, and they assigned an officer to take Shiloh to the hospital, where his broken arm was set and he was treated for a head injury and a fever of 103.

Beyond that, the Mason City cops turned the situation over to the Faribault County Sheriff’s Department.

Shiloh’s identity was fairly easily confirmed. He’d had no ID with him when he turned himself in, but just from his name, Faribault County found out that not only did he have no priors and no warrants, but he was a missing person who also happened to be a cop.

The phone rang at Minneapolis police headquarters at 9:45 A.M. About twenty minutes later my voice mailbox taped a message from the daywatch commander on duty at the MPD.

If it hadn’t been the weekend, and the agencies involved had their regular clerical staff, Royce Stewart’s whereabouts might not have baffled everyone so much. Genevieve’s courthouse friend, after all, had known his current address. But when no records showed that Royce Stewart was a murder victim, or even dead, it was a slow process for the local deputies to find out whether he was among the living.

Qwest had no listing for a Royce Stewart.

The Department of Motor Vehicles had an address from the last time he’d had a driver’s license. It turned out to be his mother’s home, outside of Imogene. Contacted by a detective, Mrs. Stewart explained her son’s living arrangements. Royce, always good with tools, had struck a bargain with a couple he knew. He would live, rent-free, in a small outbuilding behind their farmhouse, in exchange for fixing the place up into a livable in-law unit. It was an informal agreement with no paperwork involved.

The outbuilding, in the early stages of renovation, had no phone line. Mrs. Stewart explained that she called her son at the phone in the main house. She only knew the first names of the husband and wife who lived there: John and Ellen. She didn’t have their address.

It took a bit of time on the phone with weekend staff at Qwest before the Faribault deputies could match an address to the phone number Mrs. Stewart had for her son. Then Deputy Jim Brooke drove out to the home of John and Ellen Brewer. Brooke didn’t even get as far as the front door before noticing something was obviously wrong.

He had been told that Royce Stewart lived in an outbuilding, but there wasn’t one as far as he could see. He stood in the Brewers’ driveway and looked, dumbfounded, at a large patch of blackened wreckage, still smoldering.