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overheard the fight all went to the dictionary to find out what a ‘quisling’ was. We all thought it was something dirty.” Genevieve laughed. “Turned out, it means a traitor.”
    “That’s Shiloh for you,” I’d said, “getting in someone’s face and talking over his head at the same time.”
    Nobody could fault the work he did, though. There were those in the department who appreciated the intelligence and the work ethic he brought to the job. But too many others thought it was time for Mike Shiloh to be slapped down, and he was.
    Cold-case work provides few opportunities to shine. There’s lots of fruitless rereading and reinterviewing. Breaks in cases more than a year old tend only to come when a witness comes forward years, even decades, later, after getting religion or being nagged by conscience.
    Shiloh’s career was flatlining at the same time that Genevieve and I were clearing cases at a remarkable rate. “It’s luck,” I told Shiloh then. “It’ll turn.”
    And it had. He’d caught Annelise Eliot, a murderer and fugitive for more than a decade, and an FBI agent had suggested he fill out their application.
    Our own relationship had taken a circuitous course toward marriage, over nearly five years’ time. We certainly weren’t an obvious match, as Genevieve had pointed out, and we’d seen each other, broken up, reconciled, and finally moved in together before marrying only recently. But through it all there was a certain inevitability that drew me to Shiloh. I’d had a hard time explaining it even to Genevieve, who understood the relationship between Shiloh and me better than anyone.
    I’d told her early on that I was seeing him, but told her wasn’t quite the phrase for it; it had been a slip of the tongue.
    Back in the days when I was still on patrol, Genevieve was always on the lookout for a way to help me up the food chain. One evening, when I’d been a guest in her St. Paul home, she’d reflected on one such opportunity.
    “The head of the interagency narcotics squad thinks a lot of you,” she’d told me. She was a short woman, with an apron partially covering the old sweater and jeans she’d changed into to cook. Although she was chopping tomatoes and olives for a pasta dish, she frequently glanced over to where I was sitting at her counter, her hazel eyes lively with thought and speculation. She was big on eye contact; a conversation without it was, for her, like driving without headlights.
    “Have you ever thought about that kind of work?” she asked, looking my way. “Radich’s got two veteran guys, Nelson and Shiloh, who are probably going to want to transfer out someday.”
    “Shiloh hasn’t said anything about it,” I’d said thoughtlessly, and then said to myself, Oh, hell.
    “Why would Shiloh have mentioned it to you?” she’d said. I’d had a very brief assignment with the narcotics squad, but that was long over, and Gen knew it.
    Then she’d understood. “Oh, my God. You’ve got to be kidding me.”
    “We’ve been keeping it under wraps at work,” I’d said tersely, embarrassed at my slip.
    “We’re talking about the same guy, right?” she’d said, teasing me. “Six-two, reddish-brown hair, never says much of anything, regularly hands your ass to you on the basketball court?”
    “That’s not true,” I said.
    “Yes, it is, Sarah. You can’t admit you’re not good enough to guard him.”
    “No, about him not saying much of anything,” I’d said. “He does. He does to me.”
    Her hazel eyes had widened, and a half-cooked tomato slid languidly, unnoticed, off the spatula she was holding. She believed me.
    “I’ll be damned,” she said. “I would never in a hundred years have connected the two of you. You seem so different. Well, on the surface. I guess I don’t know Shiloh that well.” She paused, considering. “So what’s he really like?”
    My first impulse was to make a joke of it, saying, You mean in bed? But I couldn’t, and