I ignored them and relayed the night’s events. Halfway through, I was kind of sorry I’d banished the chair to the hall. I really could have used a good sitting down, but Ben was acting snippy and strange, and I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of being right.

“There was blood on the rope. It might have been Darby’s. And the note was written on Spada’s own letterhead. They weren’t meant to make it out of the chop shop. There was no plate on the SUV. If Spada wasn’t driving it, whoever was has reported back to him by now that his little ‘fire trap’ failed. What about the Williams brothers? Did they say anything?”

Marta scrubbed her face with her hands. She’d been on this thing nonstop since the Symonds place and it looked like it. “They’re the dumbest tools I’ve ever seen. It didn’t take long for them to roll over on Leon.”

“Not Spada?”

“They say they never met him. It was Leon who asked them to rough you up. They had no idea what the copies were all about, they didn’t ask. It was just a job, though they did have the impression that Leon was taking directions from somebody higher up the food chain.”

“And Leon?”

“He asked for a lawyer the minute we cuffed him,” Weber said.

“Legal aid?”

“Private.”

I looked at each of them. “Anybody want to guess who’s paying for that?”

Nobody did.

“Well, did you find anything else on Spada? What about an alias? Any connection to Tavroh?”

“We’re working on it,” Marta said.

Ben began to pace the floor, glancing over at me occasionally to give me the stink eye. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, but said nothing. I knew him. He wasn’t happy about the fire, the fact that I almost died in it.

I ran my fingers through my hair. “And the woman from the Symonds place?”

“No ID on her and nothing came back on her prints.”

“She could be a pro,” I said.

Marta consulted the file in her hands. “Well, if so, she must be really good at it. She’s a ghost. I hate ghosts. Whoever she is, though, she hates the ground you walk on. I think she anticipated a much easier time with Symonds. She’ll talk, eventually. She’ll want to make a deal.”

Meanwhile, Spada skates. “I had that note. I had it.”