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liar.”
    “He’s what, ten, fifteen years older than she was? And she must have met a lot of men,” said Wager. “A lot of men every night.”
    “Yeah, I understand that. But this doesn’t look like a jealousy killing. Rape his own wife? Shoot her in the back of the head? And carry a picture like that! What kind of husband carries around that kind of picture of his wife?” Before Wager could reply, Max answered his own question. “Maybe he wants to brag about what he’s got: money, new car, sexy wife. Things he never thought he’d have.”
    “Maybe he wants to show how jealous he’s not,” said Wager.
    Max thought that one over and came up with some of the sociology crap that always irritated Wager. “That’s convoluted psychology, partner. But it could be, I suppose. A defense mechanism that he doesn’t even recognize.” He gazed at the dim shine of the gold leaf on the state capitol dome, no longer illuminated in an effort to save energy. “Leave it to a Mex like you to come up with the jealousy motive. But still, it doesn’t look like a jealousy killing.”
    That was true, but it was the truth of experience, not some half-baked college-class theory. Most jealousy killings came during a fight. First a few drinks to loosen up the bitter questions and the short, defensive answers; a few more drinks and a sneering exchange to blame each other and to hurt as deeply as possible; a few more drinks as dinner’s forgotten in the circle of endless quarreling, and then the explosion. The shot, the butcher knife, the head clubbed against a doorframe. And then the fear. The frantic effort to make it look like something or someone else: she ran off; a burglar broke in and shot him. Those were the easy ones. A homicide cop could almost have fun cracking a suspect like that.
    “He didn’t seem very shook up over her murder,” said Wager.
    “He said he knew something had happened. After the second day, he said he knew she was dead.” Axton thought back over the man’s statement. “It’s like that sometimes—you know bad news is coming and you get ready for it. He had five days to get used to the idea.”
    “What’s his alibi?”
    “He was home waiting for her.”
    “Alone?”
    “C’mon, Gabe. What the hell else would he be doing at two in the morning?”
    “Coming from another woman’s house, wise-ass. Or,” he added, “following his wife after work.”
    Axton whistled a tune softly between his teeth, a habit he had when mulling something over. There had been that note of evasiveness in some of Sheldon’s answers. True, that wasn’t unusual—a lot of honest citizens had a lot of things they didn’t want cops to pick up on. And they had nothing to do with a homicide. But neither Wager nor Axton liked to see evasiveness, not in a murder case, not from a man who said he wanted so badly to have his wife’s killer caught.
    “Maybe he planned it. Maybe he threw her into the flowers to make it look like a garden-variety rape and murder,” said Wager.
    “‘Garden variety,’ ha.” Axton half-smiled and the green of a traffic light glimmered over his teeth. “Have all you Mexicans got such twisty minds?”
    As usual, Wager hadn’t intended the pun. “It runs in the family. My cousin’s a Jesuit.”
    “At least your family’s got somebody to be proud of.”
    They were, too. More of his cousin than of Wager, who was not only a cop but one who had divorced his Catholic wife. And who was now running around with an Italian woman who had no religion at all and who didn’t care if she slept with a man she wasn’t married to. “It’s because he’s a coyote,” said the more rabid cousins on his mother’s side of the family. “Aunt Ynez shouldn’t have married his father—she shouldn’t have married outside the people; that’s what’s wrong with him.” Cousin Gabe the mixed-breed—half-Anglo, half-Hispano; neither dog nor wolf: a coyote.
    Wager steered the white sedan through the tangle of