I know none of this will help you find him. I just wanted you to know it. Mike has his own life now, and I have mine, but he’ll always be special to me. When you talked about him last night, I could see what he means to you, and without even talking to him, I know how much you must mean to him, because Mike is a fiercely loyal person. He’s very lucky to have you. I know you’re going to find him, and when you do, I want you to give him the message I’ve enclosed.

Sinclair

After I read the letter, I felt strangely light, the way I did when I’d received an unexpected kindness. I picked up the little envelope from the seat next to me.

Open it. That was my first instinct; this was an investigation and every piece of information counted.

Don’t be ridiculous. I realized the next moment that the idea of Sinclair sealing up important information in an envelope like some kind of test was obviously ludicrous. She wasn’t going to play games with her brother’s well-being at stake.

The sealed note was a gesture of faith, twofold: it said she trusted that I would find her brother, and that she knew I wasn’t going to open and read a personal message to him without his permission. It was a kind, subtle, clever gesture. I slipped it into the pocket of my leather jacket.

Genevieve, Shiloh, now Sinclair… if there was a God, it occurred to me to wonder why He chose to surround me with people so much more intelligent than I was, and then to make so much of what was happening to us depend on me.

Perhaps because of the dream I’d had that morning, the first place I went back in Minneapolis was to headquarters. I wanted to walk its corridors in the sane and normal light of day and reclaim them as my territory. And to check in with Vang in person, see if he’d heard anything he might not have thought important enough to call me about.

But when I got downtown, Vang was out. I checked my voice mail at my desk. There were no messages. But I hadn’t yet returned Genevieve’s call.

“What’s going on?” I asked when she picked up. “You called me earlier today.”

“It’s him,” Genevieve said without preamble. “That bastard Shorty. He’s got the luck of Satan himself, the goddamned prick.”

This was amazing language, coming from Genevieve. “What happened?” I asked.

“He stole that old man’s truck, but he’s not going to get busted,” Genevieve said.

“Wait,” I said. “Back up, okay? What old man’s truck?”

“Everyone thought there was an old guy missing,” Genevieve said. “They found his pickup smashed up by the side of the county road outside Blue Earth, and they thought he must have walked away from the accident disoriented.”

“Yeah, I remember that from the news,” I said.

“The old guy turned up two days ago. He was in Louisiana visiting a friend, and his truck was stolen from the Amtrak parking lot while he was gone. So they dusted it for prints, and guess whose name came up?”

“Royce Stewart.”

“Damn straight,” Genevieve said. “They got partials off the door. But he fed them this bullshit story. He said that he just stumbled across the wrecked truck on the way home from town. He’d been drinking in town, of course. As always.”

“Mmm,” I said.

“He said he checked the truck out up close, to make sure no one was hurt inside it. When no one was there, he said he figured everything was cool and went on home. A real saint, is our Shorty.”

“Does he have an alibi for when the pickup was stolen?”

“They don’t know exactly when the truck was taken,” Genevieve said. “Because the old man who owned it left it parked in the Amtrak lot. So that muddies things for the cops. But it’s just the sort of thing he’d do. He didn’t have a ride, he saw one he liked, he stole it. And he’s going to get away with it.”

“Is that the only reason you called me?”

“Isn’t it enough?” she demanded. “Why can’t anybody but me see what this guy is?”

“I know what he is, too, Gen,” I said. “But there’s nothing we can do. His time will come.”

There was silence on the line, and I knew my answer didn’t satisfy her.

Then she said, “Should I ask how the search for Shiloh is going?”

“No,” I said.

I sat at my desk for a moment after we’d hung up. I thought of people I’d met, relatives of the permanently missing. They checked in with Genevieve or me at increasingly infrequent intervals. They tried to interest reporters in “anniversary” stories. Waited for someone out there to drop the dime on a cellmate or an ex-boyfriend. Holding out hope for little more than that someday there would be a proper funeral, a gravestone to visit.

How soon would those days come for me?

I had learned nothing, virtually nothing, in five days of investigating Shiloh’s disappearance. I couldn’t think of a single case I’d made less progress on.

On the ground-floor hallway, a sign shaped like an arrow caught my eye. BLOOD DRIVE TODAY, it read.

Shiloh was O negative. He always gave religiously.

Ryan Crane, a records clerk I knew, rounded the corner and approached. He had a bright pink stretch bandage on the crook of his elbow; he’d donated.

“Going to let ’em stick a needle in you, Detective Pribek?” he asked cheerfully.

“I hadn’t thought about it,” I said, caught flat-footed. “I just came down to-”

“Oh, hell, I forgot,” Crane said. “Have you heard anything about your husband?”

“No,” I said. “Nothing. I’m still working on it.”

He nodded and looked sympathetic. He was 22 at the most-I’d never asked-but I knew he was married with two kids.

Crane moved on, but I didn’t continue on my way to the parking ramp.

I had A positive blood, which was common, but not as useful as Shiloh’s. But Shiloh wasn’t here to give any blood at all, and that fact was nagging at me, like it fell to me now to act for him.

Besides, the Northeast reinterviews were going to be a tired round on a cold trail. They weren’t urgent.

The blood-bank people had set up in the largest of the conference rooms available. There were four reclining chairs, with rolling stands next to them from which hung plastic bags, some filling with blood, others empty.

All the chairs were occupied. That didn’t surprise me. I’d heard the lectures before, when I was in uniform. Despite the fact that most cops got through their careers without serious injury, sergeants and captains liked to lecture uniforms about how the blood they donated could easily save the life of a fellow officer injured in the line of duty.

While I waited for a chair to open up, a white-coated phlebotomist read me a list of improbable conditions that would disqualify me: Did I or anyone in my family have Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease? Had I ever paid for sex with drugs or accepted drugs for sex? Had I had sex with anyone who’d lived in Africa since 1977?

She rewarded all my “no” answers by stabbing me in the finger with a tiny lancet.

“Go ahead and take that chair,” she said. “I’ll get back to you when your hematocrit is done.”

I lay back next to a grizzled parole officer with whom I had a slight acquaintance.

“How are you?” he asked.

“Full of blood,” I said lightly. For all that I hate doctors’ offices and exam rooms, needles have never bothered me, particularly in blood drives at work, a place where I feel most at ease.

“Take this,” the young white-coated woman said, returning to my side.

She gave me a white rubber ball. “We’ll get you started. Make a fist and squeeze.”

I did, raising a vein. She painted the inside of my elbow with antiseptic, put a strap on my upper arm, and then I felt the bite of the needle. She taped it down. A clamp on the line kept the tube clear.

“Keep squeezing the ball,” she advised. “Not too hard, not too soft. This should take about ten minutes.”