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it and dropped it on the table. He hadn't gotten to the murder yet, but he had a pretty good guess what it was going to be. He'd seen murders with scenarios just like this one. Wife abused so long that she decides there's only one way out. Self-protection all mixed up with desperation and rage, leaving behind a corpse that usually looked like bad hamburger and a perpetrator who met the police at the door with a watery smile.
    She had it down, too. The setting, the psychology, the rank smell of futility. He was impressed. No wonder the critics liked her so much. No wonder she'd been lauded in Newsweek and The Trib as the new Chandler.
    Mac pulled his cigarettes back out and lit one up. It was so late by now that the only television on was the cable shopping network. Even so, he had it on. The house he was renting from Judge Axminster was small, boxy, and uninspiring. He'd hung a couple of Chicago posters in the living room and arranged his kids' school pictures on his dresser with the shot they'd taken at Francis's diner the day the other dicks had sent him off. Even so, it wasn't any more a home than the efficiency he'd rented on the South Side after the divorce. A place to hang your hat in between shifts, same kind of living quarters as most of the cops he'd hung around with.
    He rubbed the beer can against his temple, the cool easing the constant burning. Mac hated new places. He'd been born and raised in Chicago, a product of generations of Chicago cops. His father had driven for Mayor Daley and his mother had tatted altercloths for Sacred Heart's. He'd gone on his first drunk over at the old Emerald Isle and been suspended from school for cutting class to attend Cubs games. The last time he'd left home, it had been for Vietnam, and look what a success that had been.
    But when you can't do the job, you don't hang around and attend your own wake. So here he was, five hundred miles away, soothing his shakes with too much beer and too little activity.
    He had no business itching after the C. J. Turner puzzle. After all, it was St. Louis County's call. He hadn't been invited to dance. He knew better than to butt in, especially after getting a load of Sgt. Elise Lawson's voice on the phone. A real little ball-buster, that one. Jayne Wayne with an attitude. She'd come down on him with hobnailed boots if she thought he was even sniffing around her collar.
    It didn't matter a whole lot. He was already interested. After all, it was what he'd done for ten years. He could be the police chief of Pyrite until the day they dropped him six feet under, and he'd still be a Chicago detective. It was what he'd been good at and what he'd missed when he left. And the single factor that had made the difference on his arrest and conviction record had been the fact that his curiosity was insatiable.
    He finished his beer and tossed the can to join the others. The woman in Chris Jackson's book had probably had a kitchen just like this one, he thought morosely. Old and scarred and weary looking. The woman in Chris Jackson's book would have called the cops eight or nine times to get her husband off her, only to change her mind when it came time to press charges. She'd want him stopped, but not jailed. She'd be terrified of him in a rage, but even more terrified of him not there at all. Until that moment when she couldn't take any more. Maybe he'd hit on the kids, or started looking at her little sister. Maybe a friend prodded her to do something about that asshole that made life such hell for her, and he'd found out and beat her all over again, threatening to find her wherever she was and kill her if she left him. Kill her and all the kids. And she'd believe him, because it was probably true. So she'd wait until he was asleep and sneak up on him and pull the trigger, or plunge in the knife so many times he couldn't be recognized, just to make sure he couldn't still get up and hurt her. Just to pay him back for all the pain. Just to finally, finally