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.