Morrell limped out of Mr. Contreras’s apartment with me. “I’m going to catch a cab home right now so I can look at some things before Rawlings’s detective arrives. You going to be okay?”

I nodded. “Desk work is all I’m good for today. Are Marcena’s parents flying in?”

“The Foreign Office is trying to find them-they’re inveterate trekkers, and right now they’re in a remote part of India.” He smoothed the hair out of my eyes and kissed me. “We had a dinner date last night, darling, but you stood me up. Should I trust you with a second chance?”

Conrad came out at that moment, and, against my will, I felt my cheeks grow hot.

31 The Walking Wounded

My office had a forlorn, abandoned feeling to it, as if no one had been inside it for months. My footsteps echoed off the floor and seemed to bounce around the walls and ceilings. Although I’d stopped by two days ago, I wasn’t really working here these days-I was just dropping in between treks through swamps.

My lease partner, Tessa, who’s a sculptor, was vacationing in Australia. I dropped her mail on her drafting table. Her work space was meticulously tidy, every tool hung on a Peg-Board, drawings put in neatly labeled drawers, her blowtorch and sheets of metal carefully covered with drop cloths. Quite a contrast to my own side of the building, with files on the edges of tables and office supplies that seem to migrate at will.

In a way, my space is too big, the ceilings too high, the way they can be in these old warehouses. I’d had fake ceilings put in in places, but the windows were around the perimeter at the top; I hadn’t had the money to tear down a wall to let in outside light. I did put up partitions to make the area more human in scale, with my desk in one, my supplies and printers in another, and a bed for when I needed to crash away from home in a third, but the big room at the west end was where I did most of my actual work.

There’s a little alcove with the couch and some arm-chairs to have casual meetings with clients, a setup with a screen for more formal presentations, a long table where I map out work in progress, a desk for my assistant, if I ever get off my butt and find a full-time person. I looked at the stacks of paper on the long table and decided I wasn’t ready to face them yet.

I walked down to the corner to drop my peacoat at the cleaners. Ruby Choi, who has cleaned spaghetti sauce off silk shirts and tar out of wool slacks for me, looked at it dubiously. “This coat has been through too much. I try, I do my best, but I promise nothing. You take better care of your clothes, you make my job much easier, Vic.”

“Yeah, that’s what the doctor said about my body, which, believe me, looks a lot worse than the coat.”

On my way back up Oakton, I stopped for a cappuccino and bought myself a large bunch of flowers, big red spiky things that stood out even in my warehouse. Welcome back, V. I., we missed you!

The fax from Sanford Rieff at Cheviot Labs was waiting for me, as he’d promised. He’d looked at the little froggy soap dish from its bulging eyes to its stubby feet. It had been made in China, surprise, out of a pewter alloy whose rough surface didn’t hold fingerprints well. Underneath the smoke stains, Sanford could still detect oil from human fingers; perhaps it would be possible to get a DNA sample, although he wasn’t optimistic.

The soap dish part of the frog was the back, which was hollowed out and had a hole in it for drainage. Someone had put a rubber plug in the hole and then poured nitric acid into the dish. The acid had burned out the plug, but traces of it remained, melted into the sides of the drainage hole.

“Nitric acid dissolves soap,” Sanford concluded, “so there was no soap residue in the bowl of the dish, but I took some samples from the sides; whoever used it for its intended purpose used a heavy-scented rose soap, probably Adorée, a cheap brand sold in most drugstore chains and discount stores. I have the frog secure in a specimen box. Let me know if you want it returned or if we should store it until it’s needed as evidence.”

I stared at the fax, willing it to mean something more than it did. What was it doing at Fly the Flag. Why did it have nitric acid in it? Maybe acid was used somehow in the manufacture of flags. Maybe they dissolved glue with it, or something, and tried to use the froggy as a container, but the acid burned out the rubber plug.

My precious clue didn’t seem to mean much, but I still went to my desk and typed up labels for a set of files: Fly the Flag, Arson, By-Smart, Billy, and put Rieff’s lab report in the Fly the Flag folder. That was productive. Standing at my worktable, I shut my eyes, trying to visualize the back of the plant, where the fire had started. I’d been inside only twice, very briefly both times. The mechanicals were down there, the drying room, the storage area for fabrics. I made a rough sketch; I couldn’t remember enough detail, but I was pretty sure the heart of the fire was in the drying room, not the fabric storage area.

R-A-T-S, I slowly wrote. Glue. Everything that had been done to the plant had slowed down production, not put them out of business. Was the arson a final act, because Zamar hadn’t heeded the warnings? Or had this been intended as another warning, but one that went out of control? The punk I’d surprised at Fly the Flag two weeks ago, that chavo banda Andrés had driven from his construction site, he held the key to this. I needed to find him. And it wouldn’t hurt to get some corroboration of what had happened at the fire.

I tried Sanford Rieff again out at Cheviot Labs. This time I reached him at his desk. When I’d thanked him for the report, and told him to log the frog into their safe, I asked if he had an electrical engineer, or arson expert, who could meet me at Fly the Flag sometime soon.

“I’d like an expert to look at the wires with me to see if it’s possible to tell where or how the fire started. The police aren’t putting real resources into this.”

And why should I, for even less money than the cops? I imagined the conversation with my accountant. Because my professional pride was wounded: I’d been watching when the factory went up in flames. What should I have seen if I’d been paying closer attention?

Of course, Cheviot had just the expert I needed; he’d get her to give me a call to set up an appointment. Just so I knew, the company billed her time at two hundred dollars an hour. That was good to know: it was good to know I was sinking thousands of dollars into an investigation I hadn’t been hired to take on while I abandoned the business that made money for me.

If I didn’t finish three background checks for Darraugh Graham, my most important client, I’d be living on cat food in an alley pretty soon, and not the good stuff, either. I tapped my teeth with my pencil, trying to figure out how to juggle it all, then remembered Amy Blount. She’d earned a Ph.D. in economic history a year or so ago; while she looked for a full-time academic appointment, she sometimes did research projects for me, among other odd jobs she found. Fortunately enough, she was free, and willing, to pull things together in my office for a few days. We agreed to meet at nine in the morning to go over my caseload.

I walked aimlessly around the big room. Who had been gunning for Marcena, and why? Was it because of her that Bron had been killed or because of Bron that she’d been attacked? When we were talking to Conrad, Morrell had said she’d had a couple of meetings with Buffalo Bill Bysen since our initial prayer meeting two weeks ago. She’d presumably used her father’s imaginary war experience as her entrée, but maybe they’d touched on something relevant. Buffalo Bill had crashed my apartment, and the Mt. Ararat church service; I could drive out to Rolling Meadows and tackle him unawares.