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head off his chest and looked at his face; his eyes were closed.
    Then he stroked my back with one hand, still not opening his eyes. If I hadn’t known him better I would have thought that was the way he took everything: languid and easy.
    I knew better. I’d been observing Mike Shiloh for years, at both long and close range. Sometimes I thought that Shiloh deliberately took the course of most resistance, refusing to ever take the easy road.
    Shiloh’s career had taken a more circuitous path than mine. When I’d met him, he’d been an undercover narcotics officer. Later, he’d applied for special training as a hostage negotiator. He wasn’t chosen for negotiation training. Instead, he’d been given an assignment he didn’t ask for or want, a role adjunct to Homicide. Shiloh became a cold-case detective.
    Cold-case reviewers are something of a luxury. In good economic times, with budget surpluses and falling homicide rates, many metro police departments could afford to assign detectives to analyze and reinvestigate old unsolved cases, usually homicides. In many ways it was an ideal job for Shiloh, who liked intractable intellectual puzzles. He understood, however, that his assignment to cold-case, noticeably lacking a partner, was a thinly veiled criticism.
    Shiloh was seventeen when he left his Utah home without finishing high school. He’d been on a logging crew in Montana when he did his first law-enforcement work as part of a sheriff’s search-and-rescue unit.
    His career had taken him across the Midwest. From patrol work, he’d gotten into undercover narcotics. Across the upper Plains and Midwest, he’d worked on narcotics squads that always needed an unrecognizable new face to come in and make buys. In cities like Gary, Indiana, and Madison, Wisconsin, he’d often worked alone. Sometimes his colleagues were decent. Other times they were bigoted, or trigger-happy cowboys. His superiors weren’t always better.
    By the time he arrived in Minneapolis to put down semi-permanent roots and get a degree in psychology, Shiloh was a loner who’d learned to trust his own instincts and opinions over those of others.
    Underneath all that, Shiloh was a preacher’s son. In the heart of Utah’s Mormon country, Shiloh’s father had headed a small nondenominational church whose stern creed divided the world into saved and unsaved. And while Shiloh himself hadn’t been inside a church on Sunday morning in perhaps a decade, I thought some of the rigid moralism of his youth lived on inside him, but now fused to a set of attitudes more politically liberal than the ones most cops held.
    In the close and collegial quarters of a metro police department, Shiloh’s opinions didn’t win him a lot of friends. He’d had dustups with prosecutors and supervising detectives whose ideas and tactics he disagreed with. His sympathies raised eyebrows: he was compassionate toward drug users and prostitutes that his peers had no use for, and terse and unfriendly with white-collar informants that his superiors valued. An anonymous wit had once sent ACLU literature to him at work, as if it were a shameful form of pornography.
    I’d argued with him more than once myself, getting angry and defensive when he pressed me on cop values and virtues I didn’t like to question. Those kinds of debates between us were never rancorous, but if we had worked in the same department, it was unlikely we would have been assigned as partners, much less predicted to get married.
    “Nobody ‘gets’ you and Shiloh,” Genevieve had said once. “When I first met you, you said ‘disorientated’ instead of ‘disoriented.’ And Shiloh . . .” She’d paused for thought. “Shiloh once got in an argument with another detective who’d been feeding important information to a TV reporter—I think there was some suspicion this guy was sleeping with her. Anyway, Shiloh called him a ‘goddamned quisling.’ After the two of them left, the rest of us who’d