“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.”

“So you went down there.”

“To talk to Shorty, yes.” My ear was pulsing steadily with my heartbeat, which was going a little faster than usual.

“How did you know he would be at the bar?” Diaz asked.

“I didn’t know for- Ow! God.”

Now it had done something new. There had been a popping sensation, followed by a crackle of something like static. I’d heard people talk about their ears popping during the ascent and descent of airplanes, but I didn’t think this was the same thing. Instead I imagined blisters had risen on my eardrum like bubbles, and one of them bursting.

“Your ear?” Diaz asked.

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing the outer shell ineffectually.

“We’ll try to wrap this up fairly quickly,” Diaz assured me. “You were saying?”

“I was saying that I didn’t know for sure he’d be at the bar, but I’d heard he spent a lot of time there.”

“And luckily for you, he was,” Diaz commented. “What did you discuss with him?”

“I wanted to know what he knew about Shiloh ’s disappearance,” I said. “He refused to talk to me.”

“And then what did you do?” Diaz asked.

“I drove partway home,” I said. “My partner, Genevieve, was living in Mankato with her sister and brother-in-law, and I knew I could sleep there.”

In second grade we’d studied the ear. I tried not to remember the illustration of the eardrum, tried not to imagine my own as a swollen, dark-pink balloon of fluid, getting more distended by the hour.

“You didn’t go to Stewart’s house before you left Blue Earth?”

This was a potential trap. So far I’d been telling the truth, albeit with omissions. I hadn’t needed to lie. This was where I had to step off the trail.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

“ Minneapolis to Blue Earth is nearly a three-hour drive,” Diaz said. “So you drove all that way, found Stewart at the bar, and when he refused to talk about your husband, you just got back in the car and left? Seems to me like you gave up kind of easily.”

My ear crackled again, making a rushing noise like static. “Shorty told me he knew, and I quote, ‘jack shit.’ I couldn’t prove otherwise. There wasn’t a lot I could do after that.”