“It’s not him,” I said.
“You see something?”
“Shiloh has a scar on his palm,” I said, pointing. “This guy doesn’t have it.”
“I see,” Rossella said.
He pulled the sheet down, over the body.
“Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Shiloh,” Rossella said. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have put you through this.” Then he smiled.
On the way to the elevator my knees were shaking, just a little.
When I got home, there was a strange car parked outside the house, a dark late-model sedan of a make I didn’t recognize. A man stood at the door, made a silhouette by the brightness of the motion-sensor floodlight his approach had switched on.
I pulled the car up short, halfway up the driveway, and jumped out.
He turned and stepped down, onto the sidewalk, and his features became clear to me. It was Lieutenant Radich, supervising detective on the interagency narcotics task force.
“Lieutenant Radich? What’s going on?” I asked. I slammed the car door and started across the lawn, not going around to the front walk like I usually would have.
I must have spoken more sharply than I realized, because he shook his head and lifted the white bag in his hand like a flag of surrender.
“Just a visit,” he said. “I was picking up some food after working late and thought you might be hungry.”
When had I last eaten? I’d made coffee when I’d gotten up in the morning. Down at the station, more coffee. I had no memory of a meal.
“I am,” I said. “Come on in.”
I’d met Shiloh during his undercover narcotics days, and Radich had been his lieutenant back then. But I knew him best from pickup basketball games. He wasn’t as frequent a player as Shiloh or I, but very competitive. At 50, he had a perpetually tired face and Mediterranean coloring, a streak of gray in his black hair.
“I got your message,” he said as I turned on lights in the living room and the kitchen. “I left word on your voice mail at work, but I guess I should have tried you here instead. I haven’t seen Mike. Haven’t talked to him in, maybe, three weeks.”
“That’s what I would have guessed,” I said.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Do you want a beer?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said.
I took one of the two Heinekens out of its place in the refrigerator door and opened it. I went to the cupboard to find Radich a glass.
“No need,” he said. He took the cold bottle from my hand and took two deep swallows. Pleasure registered on his tired face, and I was suddenly glad for hospitality beer in the kitchen of two people who no longer drank. “Long day?” I said.
“Not as long as yours, I imagine,” he said. He set the bottle down on the kitchen table and started unpacking his deli bag. “Sit down and eat.”
He’d brought two sandwiches and a container of potato salad. I brought plates and spoons over, poured myself a glass of milk. I was afraid if I had Coke at this hour, as tired as I was, my hands would start shaking.
We ate in near-silence. When I picked up the sandwich he’d bought for me, the bread was warm, and the cheese on the edges was melted. Radich had brought me a hot meal. My hands quivered, and I realized for the first time why religious people gave thanks before eating.
Radich probably wasn’t ravenous, like me, but he settled down to the business of eating as wordlessly as I did. I was almost through with my sandwich before he spoke.
“What do you know?” he asked, looking levelly at me over his beer.
“Nearly nothing,” I told him. “I don’t know where he is, I don’t know why he’s there. I don’t know of anybody who would know anything. If Shiloh weren’t my husband, and I were investigating this case, I’d be hammering away at me, interviewing and reinterviewing. Because I’m the one who lived with him, I’m the one who knew him best, and… and…”
A strange thing happened then. I just heard myself say knew him best, and suddenly the rest of the sentence got away from me. I had no idea what I was supposed to say next.
Radich put his hand on my shoulder.
“I’m okay,” I said. I swallowed a little milk. “And no one else seems to know anything.” I was relieved finally to have remembered what I was going to say.
“Enemies?” Radich asked.
I shrugged. “Well, every cop has to worry a little bit about retribution,” I said. “But we’re both careful. Unlisted and unpublished. He gave informants his cell-phone number only.”
Radich nodded slowly, thinking. “What have you done so far?”
“Less than I thought I’d get done in one day,” I said. “I’m putting together the paper trail. Interviewing neighbors. And”- I disliked even saying it-“I just went to the morgue.”
On the other side of the kitchen wall, a noise like earthbound thunder boomed, a sequential reverberation. Radich looked up.
“What the hell was that?” he said.
“A train,” I said. “They’re putting a freight together up at the yards. When they hook cars up, you can hear the impact travel down the rest of the train. Like vertebrae of a spine.”
“You get used to that?”
“It doesn’t happen all that often,” I said. “But the trains run right past our backyard several times a day. More than several. I’m used to it, and Shiloh even likes it, he says.”
“Were you in the morgue looking at an unidentified body?” he asked, returning to the subject at hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “It wasn’t him.”
Radich drank the last of the Heineken before he spoke again. “Why’d they call you? They couldn’t fingerprint?”
“I guess not,” I said. “This forensic assistant said the fingerprints were-” I stopped to retrieve the exact word from my memory. “He said something about the fingerprints not being useful.”
“Why not?”
“I… I don’t know.” It had seemed reasonable at the time. I hadn’t questioned Rossella, I suppose, because I’d been so damn afraid that this was it, the end, that I hadn’t been thinking logically. “He said something about exposure or the body being outside.”
Radich shook his head, slowly. “I know forensics isn’t your line, it’s not mine, either, but I do know that they can almost always print. Sometimes in real hot, dry conditions the skin gets unprintable, I’ve heard of that.”
“Well, that wasn’t the case here,” I said slowly, seeing the right hand again as I checked for the scar Annelise Eliot had left there.
“Tough on you, to have to go down there for nothing,” Radich said, dismissing the issue. He started packing up the trash into the deli bag.
“I’ll clean up,” I said, waving him off. “I really appreciate the dinner.”
Radich stood. “I know you’ve got my phone number downtown,” he said, taking a pen from his jacket, “but I don’t think you’ve got my home number.” He cast a glance around the table, saw the pale peach take-out menu of the deli he’d gotten the sandwiches from, and wrote on the margin of it. When he handed the menu to me, there were two numbers on it. “Home and cell,” he said. “If you need anything, any help… or more food”-his mouth quirked slightly at the corner, not quite smiling, like he was worried even a small joke wasn’t right given the circumstances-“you call me.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Really, thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say.
“Hang in there, kid.”
“I’m trying,” I said.
“We all feel for you.”
His black eyes were warm with compassion. Radich had been a cop too long to suggest that everything was going to be all right.
chapter 10
I went by work the following morning. Vang was already in.
“Any news, Pribek?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “It’s making me kind of crazy. Nobody knows anything. Nobody’s seen him.”