“Well, it’s fairly quiet,” Diaz said. “That’s why I started reading some old files.”
A little drop of sweat crawled between my shoulder blades, down toward the small of my back.
Diaz set a thick manila folder on the table before him. “This is a case that was forwarded to our office about three months ago, before I came on board. It was a joint investigation by the Sheriff’s and Fire departments,” he said.
“Royce Stewart,” I said. There was no point in waiting for him to say the name.
“Yes,” he said, and there might have been a faint note of surprise in his voice at my forthrightness. “The file definitely caught my attention. Naturally, given your familiarity with the people and events in the case, I wanted to talk to you.” He tapped a fingernail against the file. “I thought we could start by just reviewing the known facts. You can correct me if you think I’ve got anything wrong.”
Diaz opened his file and ran down Royce Stewart’s life in the dry, telegrammatic fragments of an official record.
“Royce Stewart was 25 years old at the time of his death,” he began. “Lived most of his life in Faribault County, arrests and convictions there for indecent exposure and lewd conduct; a juvenile arrest for looking in the windows of a woman’s home late at night, charges dropped. At 24, he moved to the Twin Cities, where he had a conviction for DWI, and much more significant, was arrested and charged with the rape and murder of Kamareia Brown, the daughter of Detective Genevieve Brown of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. Your partner.” Diaz paused, sipping from a glass of water at his side. “The case was dismissed for technical reasons, and Stewart returned to Blue Earth.
“In October, firefighters are called out to the property on which Stewart lived. The outbuilding that he lived in is ablaze, and his body is found in it the next day.” Diaz turned a page, although I was sure the details of the case were already locked into his memory. “A little over eight hours after the fire, former MPD detective Michael Shiloh turns himself in to police in Mason City, Iowa, and confesses to Stewart’s murder. The strange thing is that Shiloh asserts he killed Stewart a week earlier, by running him down in a stolen truck on the highway outside Blue Earth.
“An investigation bears out the fact that Shiloh stole the truck, but rather than running Stewart down, he was in a one-vehicle wreck due to ice on the road. In the accident, he sustained a serious head injury that confused his memories and impaired his judgment. Fearing arrest for his ‘crime,’ he traveled south on foot, avoiding contact with other people, and finally, in Mason City, Iowa, turned himself in. His belief that he killed Stewart, according to a psychologist, was due partly to the head injury and partly to his persistent prior visualization of carrying out the crime. Michael Shiloh did not contest the charge of auto theft and is currently incarcerated in Wisconsin.” Diaz drank a little more water. “It’s quite a story.”
“You said you wanted me to point out anything incorrect in your file,” I said. “There are two things you didn’t include.”
Diaz lifted a courteous eyebrow. “Please.”
“ Shiloh didn’t fail to kill Shorty, he decided not to. Even if it was at the last minute.”
Diaz nodded, seeming to take it seriously. “And you know this how?”
“ Shiloh told me,” I said.
“I should point out that nobody can independently verify that,” Diaz said. “You’re depending on your husband’s word.”
I wasn’t. Royce Stewart had told me so. Just before he died.
“But that’s immaterial to the subject at hand, which is Stewart’s death,” Diaz said. “There wasn’t a lot of doubt in investigators’ minds that Stewart’s place was deliberately set on fire, or that he was already dead when the place burned. The file wasn’t set aside for lack of evidence that a crime had been committed. The problem was lack of evidence pointing to an identifiable suspect. As soon as I read this file, I thought my colleagues had been too hasty in dismissing the obvious person.”
I stayed quiet.
“They’d discounted a man who’d already admitted to going to Blue Earth intending to kill Royce Stewart. Who wasn’t alibied the night Royce Stewart died.”
“ Shiloh is your suspect?” I asked him.
“Your husband is definitely a person of interest,” Diaz said.
Person of interest is to suspect what tropical storm is to hurricane.
“That’s impossible,” I said. “The evidence rules him out.”
Notwithstanding that I knew for a fact Shiloh hadn’t killed Stewart, I was also familiar with all the evidence that had told investigators he couldn’t have done so. Shiloh’s injuries, the wrecked truck, the seven-day gap between his aborted attempt to kill Stewart and Stewart’s actual death… all these things supported the assertion that Shiloh had not had anything to do with Stewart’s murder.
“Are you sure?” Diaz said. “There was a nine-hour window between Stewart’s murder and Shiloh’s appearance in Mason City. That’s ample time to travel less than a hundred miles.”
“On foot?” I said.
“No, by car or truck. Just because no one has come forward to say they picked him up hitchhiking doesn’t mean no one did.”
“There may be a nine-hour window that night,” I said, “but there’s also a seven-day window between Shiloh’s try at running Royce Stewart down and the time that he showed up in Mason City. It’s hard to make a case that-” I fell silent, understanding something.
“You were saying?” Diaz prompted.
I didn’t answer right away. This man was playing a game, and while I should have known better, I’d started playing it with him. “Have you spoken to Shiloh yet, at the prison?” I asked.
Diaz said, “I’m not prepared to share all the details of the investigation right now.”
“You haven’t,” I said, “because Shiloh isn’t your person of interest. I am. You’re deflecting my attention by pretending that Shiloh is your suspect. You want me to jump to his defense and argue the points of the case with you, until I give up some detail I couldn’t have known unless I killed Shorty.” That had been Stewart’s nickname, codified on the vanity license plate of his car. “That’s the second detail you left out of your story. You left out any reference to me being in the area and talking to Stewart the night he died. If you talked to the people at the bar, you know I was there,” I said. “That makes me an obvious suspect. But instead of approaching me directly, you’re pretending you want to talk to me as a ‘fellow investigator.’ ”
This was a tactic that even worked on street criminals. When talking to a suspect with priors, sometimes detectives will ask him to speculate on how a crime might have been carried out, what he might have done if he had committed the act. If it works, the criminal will drop his guard and spill a critical detail that he shouldn’t have known.
“Let me answer the question you’re not asking,” I said. “I did not kill Royce Stewart. I was down there, in Blue Earth. I was at the bar. I spoke to him. But I didn’t kill him.”
“Detective Pribek,” Diaz said, “I’m not here to offend you. I’m here to do a job.”
He was right; I’d spoken more freely than I’d intended. The pain in my ear was fraying my nerves.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know that. I’ve had a cold, and my ear is really bothering me. Can you give me a minute to get some aspirin?”
“Actually,” Diaz said, “I’d like us to keep going with this now that we’re on a roll.”
Another key point in interrogation: once things start heating up, don’t give your suspect time to regroup.
“Let’s talk about the night you went to Blue Earth,” Diaz said. “What led you to go there?”
“I had come to understand that Shiloh had stolen and wrecked the truck on the highway. I recognized his motives, that he wanted to run Shorty down, but I knew he’d failed, because Royce Stewart was alive. In fact, Stewart was the suspect in the theft of the truck, because his fingerprints placed him at the scene of the accident. What I didn’t understand was what happened to Shiloh after the wreck.”