I found pictures of Dornick, looking alert and combat ready, with everyone from Chicago’s mayor to the president of Colombia. I saw Dornick demonstrate the use of Tasers to women at a domestic-violence shelter and read articles about contracts he’d received from San Diego, Waco, and Phoenix to conduct special border-patrol training sessions. I couldn’t find information about his life as a policeman, but he’d left the force some fifteen years ago.

Alito looked more like the average cop. Forty years on the force, retired to a small lake in northern Illinois. The little bit of press he’d gathered showed a mixed picture. He’d been cited for bravery during a hostage crisis involving armed robbers at a strip mall on Roosevelt Road. Then, six months later, he was accused of using excessive force at the same incident, for killing both robbers, as the situation unraveled. He’d injured one of the hostages, which was why he’d been cen sured, and an unnamed coworker quoted him as saying, “She’s lucky to be alive, and they’re better off dead, so what’s the beef?”

Since a lot of the citizenry agreed that a dead armed robber saved the city the expense of a trial, the letters to the editor were predictably pro-Alito, with a segue into the importance of every American being fully armed at all times.

I stared blankly at the computer for a few minutes, then pulled up a map of Alito’s home. He lived just a mile south of the Wisconsin border, near one of the little lakes that dot the hills northwest of Chicago. A lot of Chicagoans have weekend homes up there. Some, like Alito, retire to live there year-round.

According to MapQuest, the sixty-mile trip from Western and North to Lake Catherine should take about eighty minutes, but they were assuming you were driving at three in the morning during a rare period when neither the Kennedy nor the Edens was under construction. I reached the north shore of Lake Catherine two and a half hours after leaving my office.

It’s true the birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and the air was clearer than on Milwaukee Avenue, but my mood was much grumpier, and I was desperate for a bathroom. That involved back-tracking to the nearest service station, where I spent a little fortune filling my Mustang, used the mercifully clean washroom, and bought a chili dog to tide me over. I’d been so intent on my searches that I’d forgotten lunch, a major violation of the Warshawski family motto: “Never skip a meal.”