The 37th Hour Read Online Free PDF Page B

Kamareia because it was just another way of beating her.
    But the end result was that there was no DNA to recover. Other hair and fiber evidence wasn’t useful, because Stewart had been all over the house, working, for two weeks. And Kamareia’s fingernail scrapings yielded nothing useful. She’d clearly been too stunned, attacked too abruptly, to put up a good fight.
    The whole case revolved around Kamareia’s point-of-death accusation. When the judge threw out Kamareia’s statement, the rest of the case collapsed like a house of cards. The judge found insufficient grounds to go to trial, and the worst that happened to Royce Stewart in the Cities was that he lost his driver’s license in an unrelated DWI.
    “Sarah?”
    The courtroom door had swung open almost soundlessly. Jane O’Malley was looking at me. “Are you ready?”
    “Yes,” I said.

 

    chapter 3
    While O’Malley had said the people’s testimony had been moving faster than expected that day, it took time for me to recount my part of the story. It was after five when I returned. Vang was still at his desk, and once again on the phone. He must have been on hold, because he slid the lower end of the receiver away from his mouth and said, “Your husband was here, looking for you.”
    “Shiloh was here?” I repeated, stupidly. “Is he—”
    But Vang had snapped his attention back to his phone conversation.
    “Hello, Commander Erickson, this is—”
    I tuned him out. Shiloh had obviously been and gone, and even though my day was over and I’d be home soon, I was oddly disappointed at having missed him. Up until two weeks ago, Shiloh had been a detective with the Minneapolis Police Department. While we hadn’t technically worked together, our jobs used to overlap at times. Now I never ran into him downtown anymore, and I missed it.
    It was something I’d have to get used to. Shiloh was leaving next week for his FBI training at Quantico, which would last for four months.
    I glanced down, making one last check for messages. There were none, so I set the phone to go to voice mail on one ring and picked up my bag. I gave Vang a little finger wave on my way out, which he acknowledged with a nod.
     
    My 1970 Nova was the first car I’d ever bought. Some of the guys at work winced to see it; I knew they were imagining the restoration work they’d do on it, if it were theirs. Its gunmetal gray paint had faded without the regular waxing a car aficionado would have given it, and thin cracks ran through the dashboard. Yet it was surprisingly reliable, and I was perversely attached to it. Every winter I imagined trading it in for something more surefooted on the snow and ice, an SUV or 4WD truck like many of my fellow officers drove. But now it was fall again—October—and I still hadn’t given serious consideration to placing an ad.
    I didn’t go straight home. The Nova’s fuel gauge needle had slipped below the quarter-tank mark, and I filled it at the cheapest gas station I knew, then took my boots to a repair shop. They were going to need professional attention if they were going to survive their unexpected soaking in the Mississippi. My errands cost me more than a half hour before I turned onto the quiet street in Northeast Minneapolis where Shiloh and I lived.
    Nordeast, as locals still sometimes called it, used to be a heavily Eastern European part of town; it had grown more integrated through the years. Bisected by the railroad, it was a place of weather-beaten old houses with big screened porches, light industrial businesses, and corner bars whose signs advertised meat raffles and pulltabs. I’d immediately liked it here, liked Shiloh’s old house with the rumbling trains that ran behind the narrow backyard and the dreamy, undersea quality it had in the summer from the dappling of sun and shade created by the overhanging elms. But I also knew that in this neighborhood Shiloh had taken a switchblade knife away from an 11-year-old kid, and