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be. Okay, so why not just enjoy his relationship with the gorgeous, sexy Kyra and leave marriage out of the equation? That’s what any therapist would want to know. He’d have to think about the answer.
    By the time McCabe passed Washington Avenue, the cold was getting to him. His ears and toes were starting to go numb, and, drunk or not, he was beginning to regret the decision to walk. He figured he was sobering up, but not fast enough. He passed a new place called the Frost Line Café, coffee bar by day, open mike cabaret by night. He stopped and peered through the windows. They were all misted up from the body heat inside.
    He went in and worked his way through the noisy crowd to the bar and ordered a small cup of coffee from a large, heavily pierced young woman wearing so much makeup that she looked to McCabe like a refugee from the set of Ernst Lubitsch’s Gypsy Blood. Probably was. Just couldn’t find her castanets. Incongruously, in spite of the getup, her accent was pure Downeast. She handed him an earthenware mug big enough to double as a soup tureen and pointed to a row of insulated pots on the far side. Told him to help himself. He did, adding a generous dollop of milk to the strong brew. He hadn’t eaten in a while and figured he could use the nutrition.
    On the far side of the room, a tinny-voiced girl singer was belting out her version of the Dixie Chicks’ ‘Not Ready to Make Nice’ to a crowd that seemed more interested in talking than listening. Natalie Maines had nothing to worry about. McCabe was scanning the room for a place to park himself and his mega cup when he felt his cell vibrate. By the time he fished it out from under three layers of wool, the line had gone dead. The call was from Maggie. McCabe was tempted not to call back. It couldn’t be anything good, and he needed to be with Kyra right now. But even as he thought it, he knew it wasn’t an option. If something was going on, he needed to know what it was. He headed for the men’s room, where he figured he could hear Maggie, stay warm, and have some privacy all at the same time. He closed and locked the door. The sound of the Dixie Chick wannabe receded. He punched in Maggie’s number.
    ‘Where are you, McCabe?’
    ‘At the moment? In a men’s room on Congress Street.’
    ‘Fine. Whatever it is you’re doing there, when you finish, would you please get your ass down to the Fish Pier. The far end by the water. Seems we’ve got a little problem.’
    This wasn’t great timing. ‘What kind of problem?’ he asked.
    ‘The murder kind,’ Maggie replied.
    Maggie – Detective Margaret Savage – was McCabe’s number two in the PPD’s Crimes Against People unit. They’d been working cases together ever since Chief Shockley bucked the unions and brought McCabe in from New York four years ago. In spite of a long Portland PD tradition of supervisors supervising and detectives working cases, McCabe liked getting into the weeds, especially when it came to homicide, and Maggie was always his partner of choice.
    ‘Anything I oughta know?’
    ‘I don’t know much myself. A uniform discovered the body during a routine check. No positive ID yet. Young female Caucasian. Stuffed into the trunk of a car, possibly her own, parked illegally on the pier. She’s dead, naked, and frozen solid.’
    The frozen part was no big surprise if she’d been in the trunk a while. Unfortunately, a frozen body meant there’d be no decomposition. No decomposition meant there’d be no way to establish time of death. No time of death meant no way to check alibis. Somebody knocked on the restroom door. ‘Be right out,’ McCabe shouted to the knocker. He faced away from the door and turned on the taps to drown out the sound of his voice. ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Only that the car’s a brand-new BMW convertible. Registered to an Elaine Elizabeth Goff of Portland. A marine insurance guy who works on the pier spotted it yesterday morning, parked where it