At my office, I went through my log of calls from yesterday. A couple of clients I should have been attending to. Three messages from Mr. William, wanting his son, two from Murray Ryerson at the Herald-Star wanting to know if there was an important story about Fly the Flag. Fires in South Chicago are a dime a dozen; the story had rated only a paragraph in the metro sections of the city newspapers, and Murray was the only reporter I knew who’d caught my name in the small print (misspelled and misidentified as “Chicago police sergeant I. V. Warshacky,” but Murray had seen through that easily enough).

I called Morrell first. He and Mr. Contreras had sent out for Thai food for lunch, and had played a little gin. My neighbor had left, but Morrell couldn’t settle down to his writing; maybe he’d done too much the last few days. When I explained that I was going to do a little work at the office, then try to see Lotty, Morrell said he’d be glad to come with me if she was home; he was going a little stir-crazy.

Lotty was in. Unlike Murray, she didn’t scan crime news in the papers, so she was surprised and concerned to hear I’d been injured on the job. “Of course you can come by, my dear. I’m going to the store, but I plan to be home this afternoon. Around three-thirty, then?”

After dictating my notes on my encounter with Sandra and Bron, I talked briefly with Murray: there was no big story down at Fly the Flag, unless you counted the disaster in lives like Rose Dorrado’s. He listened to my passionate description of her life for a few minutes, before interrupting me to say he’d see if he could interest the ChicagoBeat editor in a human interest story down there.

“What about the dead man in the building?” I asked. “Has the ME identified him? Was it Frank Zamar?”

I heard the click of Murray’s fingers on his keyboard. “Yeah, uh, Zamar, that’s right. He had an alarm and a sprinkler system down there. The bomb and arson people are guessing the alarm sounded and he went down to see what the problem was. There’s a big drying room at the back of the plant, big propane-fueled blower. The fabric must have been smoldering and set off the propane just as he got down there—it looked as though he was trying to run away but the fire swallowed him.”

I dropped the phone. I’d been on the outside, playing spy, while Frank Zamar walked into an inferno. I became aware of Murray’s voice coming tinnily from near my right knee. I picked up the receiver.