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friendliness, but not overly familiar. His shoulders were drooping naturally with fatigue; he didn’t bother to square them up. “You’re Walsh?”
    “You’re Quinn,” Walsh declared flatly as Quinn started to pull his ID from the interior pocket of his suit coat. “Got luggage?”
    “Just what you see.” A bulging garment bag that exceeded regulation carry-on dimensions and a briefcase weighed down with a laptop computer and a ream of paperwork. Walsh made no offer to take either.
    “I appreciate the ride,” Quinn said as they started down the concourse. “It’s the quickest way for me to get right in the game. Eliminates me driving around lost for an hour.”
    “Fine.”
    Fine
. Not a great start, but there it was. He’d work the guy around as they went. The important thing here was to hit the ground running. The case was the priority. Always the case. One after another, on top of another, with another and another around the bend … The fatigue shuddered down through him, giving his stomach a kick as it went.
    They walked in silence to the main terminal, took the elevator up one floor, and crossed over the street to the parking ramp where Walsh had left his Taurus parked illegally in a handicapped slot. Quinn dumped his stuff in the trunk and sat back for the ride out to the highway. Cigarette smoke had permeated the car’s interior and gave the beige upholstery the same gray cast as the car’s driver.
    Walsh reached for a pack of Chesterfields as they hit state highway five. He hooked his lip over the cigarette and pulled it out of the pack. “You mind?”
    He flicked a lighter without waiting for a reply.
    Quinn cracked the window a slit. “It’s your car.”
    “For seven more months.” He lit up, sucked in a lungful of tar and nicotine, and stifled a cough. “Christ, I can’t shake this damn cold.”
    “Filthy weather,” Quinn offered. Or lung cancer.
    The sky seemed to press down over Minneapolis like an anvil. Rain and forty-three degrees. All vegetation had gone dormant or had died and would stay that way until spring—which he suspected was a depressingly long way off in this place. At least in Virginia there were signs of life by March.
    “Could be worse,” Walsh said. “Could be a goddamn blizzard. Had one here on Halloween a few years back. What a mess. Must have been ten feet of snow that winter and it wasn’t gone till May. I hate this place.”
    Quinn didn’t ask why he stayed. He didn’t want to hear the common litany against the Bureau or the common complaints of the unhappily married man with in-laws in the vicinity, or any other reason a man like Walsh hated his life. He had his own problems—which Vince Walsh would not want to hear about either. “There’s no such place as Utopia, Vince.”
    “Yeah, well, Scottsdale comes close enough. I never want to be cold again as long as I live. Come June, I’m out of here. Out of this place. Out of this thankless job.”
    He glanced at Quinn with suspicion, as if he figured him for some Bureau stoolie who would be on the phone to the special agent in charge the second he was left alone.
    “The job can wear on a man,” Quinn commiserated. “The politics is what gets to me,” he said, picking the hot nerve with unerring accuracy. “Working in the field, you get it from both ends—the locals
and
the Bureau.”
    “That’s a fact. I wish to hell I could have blown out of here for good yesterday. This case is gonna be nothing but one kick in the ass after another.”
    “Has that started already?”
    “You’re here, aren’t you?”
    Walsh picked up a file folder from the seat between them and handed it over. “The crime scene photos. Knock yourself out.”
    Quinn took the file without taking his dark eyes off Walsh. “You have a problem with me being here, Vince?” he asked bluntly, softening the question with an expression that was part I’m-your-buddy smile, part confusion that he didn’t feel. He’d been in this