Whatever its roots, sutma has proved resilient, impressively so in an age where other animist elements have ceded dominance to monotheistic religions. In contrast with Western norms advocating quick burial, and the Hindu belief in purification through immolation, sutma insists upon unfettered exposure to the elements of any organic material construed as being linked to maliciousness, insincerity, or sinfulness, in order for the sinner to gain access to the afterlife. Though not practiced as extensively as it was by Sranilese island tribes, when the merest accusation of immorality could lead to prolonged, often demeaning public postmortem displays, sutma occasionally emerges when a violent crime has taken place, most commonly in remote villages, when inhabitants seek out the comfort of maranandi muru, The Old Way.

Milo saved, printed. Sighed. “Teddy kills a girl in that house so the sultan sees that goddamn pile of wood as sinful organic material.”

I said, “He’s making sure his brother reaches the afterlife.”

“Teddy met up with some family justice?”

“Justice in this world, compassion for the next.”

He looked up Professor MacElway’s Yale extension, talked briefly and amicably to a startled scholar of emergent and divergent cultural forces.

MacElway confirmed it: In some animist cultures, murderers’ huts were left “fallow.”

Milo said, “Guess the sultan’s a traditionalist. So where do Backer and Doreen figure in, to the tune of fifty G’s?”

“What if Backer and Doreen were paid by someone to burn the place down in order to jeopardize Teddy’s celestial journey? They couldn’t get to him directly because he’s either dead or under royal protection back home in Sranil. But knowledge of sutma would present a partial alternative.”

“Keep the bastard out of heaven. Someone who believes in the old ways?”

“Or doesn’t, but knows the royal family does. With no ability to exact physical revenge, keeping Teddy in perpetual limbo could be a potent psychological second choice. And it would explain why Doreen hacked into Masterson’s file.”

“Pinpointing Teddy’s real estate so he can dangle over the pits of hell forever. That’s the case, they’d have to know something about Sranilese culture.”

“Didn’t take you long to get the basic facts.”

“The information age … okay, let’s go with this for argument’s sake: Someone pays Backer and Doreen fifty G’s to whip up some vegan Jell-O. Then why didn’t they just do the job? Why keep visiting and using it as a love-nest?”

“That could’ve started as scoping out the job,” I said. “Figuring out where to stick the explosives, time their escape. But once there, they decided to mix business with pleasure. Because that was Backer’s thing: love under the stars in the company of plywood and drywall and rebar. That might go back to his adolescence. If he started early as a teenage firebug, sex and kaboom could’ve formed an interesting mix.”