I turned my back on him and swept the spilled laundry powder into the machine. Cranked the dial over to the warm-water setting, heard the muffled hiss as the cycle started.
Shiloh came up behind me and laid his hands on my hips. “I almost had a heart attack when Vang told me,” he said softly.
Forgiven, I felt a relieved, retroactive urge to apologize. Instead, I said, “I could’ve used you out there today.” He’d had experience with suicidal people; more than experience, a good track record. “She was my first jumper.”
I’d given him an opening to say, And nearly your last, but he seemed to have forgotten the issue. He leaned closer to my ear and said instead, “I can smell the river in your hair.” Then he lifted the half ponytail up and kissed the nape of my neck.
I knew what that gesture meant.
In our bedroom afterward, Shiloh was so quiet I thought for a moment he’d fallen asleep. I lifted my 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 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?”