Freelance Chicago journalist Cat Marsala is looking forward to a much needed rest and a bit of chit-chat with her Shakespeare-quoting parrot, Long John Silver, when she hears the message on her answering machine: "Chief of Detectives Harold McCoo needs help." Almost any other request might be put off to a more convenient time, but in the ten years of their friendship, McCoo has never asked Cat for any help for himself. Even now, it's his secretary, Bramble, who puts out the SOS. Cat knows that whatever has happened must be bad. It is bad. Responding to a domestic violence call, Officer Shelly Daniello discovers her own brother-in-law stabbing her sister, and when he threatens to knife them both, she shoots to kill. A clear case of self-defense, it would seem. But the dead husband is another Chicago cop, Ben Jurack. The burn pattern on his shirt indicates he was shot point blank, but Daniello insists she was four feet away. Her sister's little girl was apparently in the room when it all happened, but Daniello says she wasn't. And where was Daniello's partner during all this? In an election year, the police department's upper echelon is in flux, and the media frenzy that follows the shooting raises a big question: Is Daniello being protected because she's a cop or persecuted because she's a woman? Either way, McCoo is the loser. As is Shelly Daniello, who may have been falsely accused. Probing the discrepancies that arise from reports of the shooting, Cat begins to fit the pieces together. She also interviews the five deputy chiefs of police. Someone is leaking sensitive material to the press, perhaps in an effort to make McCoo's office look bad and keep him from running for superintendent. McCoo assures Cat that all five deputies are his friends. But are they? Cat's investigation has hardly begun when a bomb blast in McCoo's office changes the rules. Now she's fighting not only for her friend's reputation but for something even more valuable.