“I’m going to need a passenger manifest for your two thirty-five flight to Reagan on Sunday,” I told the ticket agent.

“What?” she said. “We don’t-”

“Give that information out, I know. I’m a Hennepin County sheriff’s detective. I know the drill.” I shifted the phone to my other ear, already digging in my desk. “Tell your ticketing supervisor that my name is Detective Sarah Pribek and that I’m going to be down there in about twenty-five minutes with a signed request on stationery with our letterhead.”

The traffic wasn’t too bad at midmorning. The brightest part of the morning was over and clouds were scudding in from the west. As I turned east on the 494, the familiar red-and-gray bodies of Northwest planes were launching themselves toward the sky ahead of me.

The ticketing supervisor at Northwest’s offices-Marilyn, as her name tag identified her-led me to a small office not far from the main ticket counter.

I laid the request letter on her desk and she scanned it quickly, looking from the body of the text up to the letterhead.

“Can I see your identification?” she asked.

I took out the leather holder, flipped it open, and let her peer at it.

“Tell me again what you need?” she asked, sitting down behind her desk.

“I’m tracking down a passenger who was supposed to be on your two thirty-five P.M. flight to Reagan on Sunday. I’m not sure he was on it.”

“Sunday?” she said. She rotated her office chair a little and sat forward to open a filing cabinet next to her desk.

“Name?” she asked, putting the printout on her desk.

“Michael Shiloh,” I said. “Shiloh with an h.”

I’d identified myself to her as Sarah Pribek, and now I opted not to mention that Shiloh was my husband. It seemed best to present myself as an impersonal agent of the law.

“Yup.” Marilyn interrupted my thoughts. “Got him. Listed on the two thirty-five on Sunday, like you thought.” She paused. “He did not check in for that flight.”

“He wasn’t on it?”

“No.”

“What’s the next flight after that?”

“Into Reagan or into Dulles? The absolute next flight was a two fifty-five into Dulles.”

“Can you check that one?”

“There’re a couple more flights into both airports; I can check all of them for you.” She reached back into the filing cabinet; she’d left the drawer open, and now she walked her fingers over the edges of the documents. Licking her thumb, she culled several of them.

I leaned against the wall to wait, watching as she read. She shook her head slightly each time she finished with an individual manifest. When she was done she turned her desk chair slightly and faced me again. “He’s not listed on any of them.”

I nodded.

“Sometimes people fly into Baltimore,” she said thoughtfully. I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “I don’t think so. But you’ve been really helpful.”

I thanked her and took my leave, heading toward the escalator.

Shiloh could have flown into Baltimore, he could have chosen a different airline, but there was no reason for that. He’d had a ticket. More to the point, if he’d missed Northwest’s 2:35 flight-and that in itself was very unlike him-and caught a later one, he’d have been at Quantico by now. Kim would have heard from him. No matter what had gone wrong with his travel plans, I couldn’t imagine how he could be so late.

Had I completely ruled out the possibility Shiloh had gotten to Virginia? Not necessarily. It was possible that I was dealing with a situation where two things had gone wrong at once: Shiloh had missed his flight and taken a later one on a different carrier, and then something had happened to him in Virginia. If that was true, and I focused the search for him in Minnesota, that would be a disaster. It was essential that I narrow down from where Shiloh had disappeared.

Disappeared. I hadn’t meant to think that, and doing so gave a little jolt to my nervous system, followed by a galvanic flush under my skin.

I sat on a bench for a moment and watched the travelers pass by.

Overhead, I saw a security camera discreetly peering down at passing travelers from a crossbeam. If worst came to worst here, I could always review security tapes. Maybe that would end up being the only thing to confirm Shiloh had been here.

Disappeared was fast becoming the operative term, whether I wanted to admit it or not.

About two years ago, an overprotective father from Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, sent his bright eldest daughter off to school at Tulane University in Louisiana. He didn’t want her to drive, he’d said, but she’d won a campus lottery for a parking space outside her dormitory and was thrilled about it. She was not about to be talked out of taking her little Honda.

Still, Dad was unhappy about her driving all the way by herself. He insisted that she call him both nights on the road as soon as she got a motel room, and she agreed to do so. For his peace of mind.

What Daughter didn’t remember was that only a year earlier, her neighborhood had been gerrymandered out of the Cities’ once all-inclusive 612 area code, something that was happening to suburbs of metropolitan areas nationwide as cell phones and the Internet gobbled up available phone numbers. The daughter hadn’t taken notice. She hadn’t spent the night outside the Cities for three years; therefore, she had never called home from far away.

When she tried to call home, her first night on the road, she got a recording saying her call couldn’t be completed as dialed. Baffled, she’d tried again. Then a third time. She had no idea what was going on. She left a message on her father’s voice mail at work, although it was a Saturday night and she knew he wouldn’t get it anytime soon. Then, sensibly, she went out for a meal.

When her father didn’t hear from her, he called us. Genevieve and I were skeptical. She’d been gone only twelve hours. She was 18 years old, off to college, getting her first taste of freedom. We were both certain about what happened: His daughter had forgotten to call.

“She wouldn’t do that,” he insisted. “She promised she’d call. She keeps her promises.”

“I know you don’t want to believe this,” Genevieve had said, “but there’s a perfectly logical explanation. We just don’t know it yet.”

“No,” he’d said. “There isn’t.”

On Sunday afternoon his daughter called. Just outside the Louisiana state line she’d remembered the new area code and pulled over at a rest stop to try calling home again. This time she’d gotten through, embarrassed and laughing. Dad called us, just embarrassed.

There’s a perfectly logical explanation. No, there isn’t. Those two statements made up the yin and yang of most missing-persons cases. I said something like the former to people week in and week out, and they responded with the latter. Sometimes I told them the new-area-code story, as an example of the kinds of innocent things that sometimes kept people from coming home or checking in. Few relatives were comforted by it. They shook their heads, unconvinced. It was a good story, they thought, but it had nothing to do with their situation.

I understood for the first time how they felt. Driving north on the 35W, I kept telling myself that there was a logical explanation for why Shiloh hadn’t turned up at Quantico or called me. And then from the back of my mind, another voice kept saying, No, nothing can explain this.

Around noon, Vang found me at the fax machine at work, sending a request for information to hospitals around the Quantico area. He did a mild take when he saw me.

“Where have you been?” he asked. “I thought you were going to be out for an hour or so.”

“I was at the airport,” I said. “And then at the hospitals.”

I didn’t tell him all of it. I’d also been calling and faxing cab companies, asking them to check their records to see if they’d sent a driver to our address. From Norwest, I asked for paperwork on our account, a record of recent activity; I’d requested phone records from Qwest.