When the author is in Chicago with her husband, the mayor of Denver, they receive the news that two police officers were shot when they were manning the door at a Mexican social club called Salon Ocampo. They had asked a young man to leave, and the authorities believed that man had come back with a weapon. Her husband’s chief of staff calls to say that the suspect might have worked at the Cherry Cricket, owned by her husband’s company, the Wynkoop Brewing Company. The man’s name is Raúl GómezGarcía, and he is an undocumented alien who had been hired after the author’s husband, John, had placed his business into a trust. The police receive the tip that the suspect in the murder of Detective Donnie Young is involved with a woman named Sandra Rivas who had recently delivered a baby named Stacey, and the police get the father’s name from the birth certificate. The police learn from a boarder in Rivas’s house that García has fled to Los Angeles, and officers Martin Virgil and Teresa García go there after him and learn from his mother that he has crossed into Mexico.

Meanwhile, Tom Tancredo goes after John Hickenlooper when it comes out that García had had three run-ins with the police, but no one had twigged onto the fact that he was illegal when he presented a Mexican driver’s license.