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.”