“Not directly, but they have moral culpability.” Out came his pad. “Name of the victim?”

“Vincent Edward Burghout, known as Van. Seventeen when he burned to death inside an unfinished mansion in Bellevue, Washington. By now, you’ve probably heard of Bellevue because it’s where high-tech zillionaires are building castles. Back then, that had just started and it was basically a nice, low-crime suburb of Seattle. One of the first techie-monarchs to see the potential of lakeside living bought ten acres and started building a twenty-thousand-square-foot monstrosity. It had gotten as far as the framing the night Van Burghout sneaked in and set several fires. He destroyed a good part of it but also immolated himself. We—my predecessors—found his technique especially interesting. Have you ever heard of vegan Jell-O?”

“Sounds disgustingly healthy.”

“Not if you’re made of wood,” said Lindstrom. “Or flesh and bones. It’s basically homemade napalm—soap and petroleum triggered by a delayed ignition device. Any idiot can get the recipe off the Internet or in one of those treasonous loony-tracts put out by the paranoid press. Fortunately, few idiots actually go as far as to whip the stuff up, but over the years we have had incidents and the mortality rate is high, often to the perpetrators. You’re talking a highly incendiary concoction and if your timer’s off, you’re toast. Or in Van Burgh-out’s case, crumbs. There was nothing left of the kid, they I.D.’d him because he’d gotten teeth knocked out playing basketball and part of an upper bridge survived the blast.”

She fooled with the tube of lip balm. “Mr. High-Tech collected insurance, donated the land to the city for a park, moved to Oregon, and built an even bigger monstrosity on a thousand acres.”

“Everyone walks away happy,” said Milo. “Except Van’s parents.”

“Who pointed fingers at Van’s friends. Maybe because they couldn’t accept their son being a solo pyromaniac. But that doesn’t make them wrong.”

I said, “Van was the victim of bad influences?”

“Exactly, but like I said, there was logic to that. Van’s grades were barely passing and the local law got a clear picture of him as impressionable. But they got nowhere and called the Bureau in. That’s how the Bureau came to acquaint itself with Desmond Backer and Doreen Fredd and their pals.”

“How many pals?”

“The Burghouts gave the locals four names in addition to Van: Backer, Fredd, a boy named Dwayne Parris, a girl named Kathy Vanderveldt. We tried to talk to them, as well as to their teachers and friends.”

“Tried?”

“These were middle-class kids with oodles of parental and community support, so we got no direct access, everything was filtered through lawyers. We’re talking upstanding folk, well respected in their community, claiming their kids were angels.”

I said, “Doreen’s parents stepped forward?”