It may be blasphemy to say it here in Texas, but if William Travis and his men had defended the Alamo the way Bree defended Alice that day, General Santa Anna would have scooted back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. I’m telling you, Bree was a sight to behold: half naked in her skimpy pink sundress, her hair teased seven ways from Sunday, purple-painted toenails peeping from three-inch high strappy silver sandals, and a look in her eyes that could have brought a grown man to his knees.

If, that is, that grown man had been anyone other than Detective Cal McCormack. He’d heard the call come in over the scanner, that twenty-six-year-old doctoral student Bryan Campbell had been bludgeoned to death, apparently with an industrial-sized stapler, but he wasn’t on the case. The victim, Bryan, was Cal’s nephew, his older sister Marla’s boy.

Cal and I go way back, back to summer games of kickball and capture-the-flag. We weren’t close anymore, but I knew Cal McCormack as well as anyone. Laid-back, laconic, law- abiding Cal. That afternoon in Sinclair Hall, though, I saw a side of Cal McCormack I’d never seen before.

He was incandescent with fury.

"What the hell happened here?" he bellowed, towering over Alice as she huddled in the shelter of her mother’s arms.

Bree angled her body between Alice and the colossal cowboy and raised her chin to stare him in the eye. "Don’t you take that tone with my child, Cal McCormack."

The Cal I knew would be chastened by a southern woman asserting her motherly credentials, would have tipped his hat (metaphorically speaking) and begged pardon. But this new Cal spun like a force of nature.

"Back off, Bree," he barked. "Your child is covered in Bryan’s blood, and she’s going to tell me why." He took another ominous step, crowding Bree and Alice against the wall. "Now."

I recognized the mulish expression on my cousin’s face. Irresistible force had met immovable object, and nothing good could come from that.