"When does the show start?" he asked.

She didn't look over. "He didn't make it, you know."

"I know."

"Died at two-thirty this morning. Not of the burns, though. Those were kind of an afterthought. He'd sucked in enough hot gases and smoke to drop a rhino."

"Assuming a rhino would have the bad luck to get caught in a house fire."

"Van Adder's dying to call it an accident. The arson guys are waiting till they clear their paperwork to agree." She watched a while longer, weighing something. "You find anything out this week?"

"Not a thing. I took your advice and went back to interviewing PTA presidents. Was I wrong?"

A sigh, heartfelt. "Ah, hell, who knows? He came to see me."

"Victor?"

She nodded, one ringless hand rubbing the back of her bare neck. "Wanted to know if I'd seen something... heard something at the horse show. The one thing he didn't want to know was what the shooter looked like. Don't you find that interesting?"

"Is that why you're here?" he asked. "Trying to make sense of this?"

"Nope. Trying to decide what to do about it."

"Do? What do you mean?"

For a second she didn't move. Then she sighed and straightened. "Do you still like what you do?"

This was beginning to give Murphy a headache. "Not really."

She didn't seem to expect more. "That's what I figured."

"How about you?"

That actually made her smile, and the smile was real. "Love it. Shit, I scarf it up like peanut butter and chocolate. Dive in face first and paddle around like an idiot. I swear to God, I can almost come just with the sound of a fire engine." She kept staring at the house, as if it were a threat to her. "I've been trying to think of what else I could do that would make me this happy, and I just can't."

"But that might happen?"

Again, she decided not to answer him. Not exactly. "You can have that appointment with my father if you want," she said. "I'm going to be taking him to Restcrest, where he'll be safe. Where he will, God willing and the fates be with us, be happy. After almost two years of actively beating my head against the wall, I finally have some semblance of stability for myself, my daughter, and my father. I felt so damn good last night."

"And?"

"And then Victor Adkins comes in my door in end-stage life impairment. So, tell me what you see in that house."

Murphy looked. "The house."

"Yep."

"Secondhand furniture. Lots of fireman damage. No reason to be surprised that Victor didn't get out of that alive."

"The curtain rods," she said without pointing. "Tell me how they look to you."

Murphy felt that first flutter of disquiet. Old warning bells that should have gone off the minute he'd stepped into this yard. "The curtain rods?" he echoed, finally turning to look.

He found them right where they should have been, above three of the windows, one with shreds of an awful brown-plaid curtain dangling from it. As for the rods, there was nothing noteworthy about them. They were singed and sooty, but basically intact. "They look fine. Why?"

"See what I mean?"

"No."

She waved a hand in the direction of the rods. "A little lesson I learned at death investigator's camp. Fires go up."

"I learned that one in Boy Scouts."

She nodded, not particularly insulted. "And since a fire goes straight up across the ceiling and then works its way back down the wall with a usual temperature variance of almost a thousand degrees between top and bottom, it follows that a curtain rod would get hot before the curtains that hang down from it, right?"

Murphy kept looking. He even pulled out a cigarette to help him think. "Okay."

She nodded. "And if the rod heated up before the curtains caught fire, the weight of the curtains would have pulled the rod down so that as it heated up to the point of being malleable, it would bow in the center. Especially those curtains. I checked. Victor had heavy curtains everywhere to keep out light so he could sleep during the day."

Murphy stopped halfway through his first drag of smoke, now sure he felt bad. "All the rods are perfectly straight."

"Which means that there were no curtains left to pull them down by the time they heated up."

"The curtains burned first," Murphy finished, "because an accelerant was used across the floor."

"You should go into forensics, Murphy. You're a natural."

"The arson guys said it was badly stored kerosene."

"They used the words 'spontaneous combustion,'" she said. "Problem is, hydrocarbons are completely incapable of spontaneous combustion. Absolutely, positively. Common mistake to make, evidently. Not such a common mistake, however, is ignoring the smell of kerosene in the front hallway when it supposedly combusted in the garage. Can I have a cigarette?"

"You smoke?"

"Only when I'm not going to be home. My dad can smell it on me at twenty feet and it makes him nuts."

Murphy pulled out his pack and shook one out for her. Oddly enough, she looked like a furtive high schooler when she lit it. It made Murphy think of the first time he'd moved away from home and the bottle of bourbon he'd gone through in two days just because he could.

"So, what are you going to do?" he asked her.

"I don't know. What are you gonna do?"

Finally, Murphy laughed. "We do seem to be the only two gunslingers left in Dodge."

She took a second to inhale her cigarette, eyes closed, entire body wrapped around it as if making it a high-contact sport. Murphy watched her and wished for the first time in a very long time that he had the energy left to court that kind of disaster. But he was much too old and she still loved the sound of sirens.

"You and I seem to be holding up both ends of this problem," she said, straightening, with a half-finished cigarette between her first two fingers. "Somebody calls you about some murders that I'm supposed to know something about, and we get threatened. We see the shooting that Victor comes asking us about, and then Victor gets ashed. I just want you to know right now that if anything happens to me, I'm signing responsibility for my father and my six-year-old over to you."

"She's six?"

"And she has an imaginary playmate and a pet chameleon. Do you like tea parties?"

"I get the message."

"Still..." She sighed again.

Murphy ground out his cigarette butt on the table and field-stripped it. "It is a question," he admitted. "And questions make me curious."

"Curious is a good word."

"And you must have it worse than I do. You're trained to act."

"There is that."

"And you still like to act."

She just grinned, which made Murphy taste ashes in his mouth.

They sat for a while longer, and Murphy wondered why he was doing this. Why he was going to get involved. He didn't want the story. He didn't want Sherilee to find out what he was digging into and expect him to investigate everything that made her mad. He didn't want the hassle and pressure, just to find out once again that nobody really wanted to know about what he'd unearthed.

Because they wouldn't. Nobody did, really. Bad news upset people and good news bored them. Scandals just demanded attention, and nobody had any left after a hard day in the rat race and a harder night on the river-boats.