R-A-T-S, I slowly wrote. Glue. Everything that had been done to the plant had slowed down production, not put them out of business. Was the arson a final act, because Zamar hadn’t heeded the warnings? Or had this been intended as another warning, but one that went out of control? The punk I’d surprised at Fly the Flag two weeks ago, that chavo banda Andrés had driven from his construction site, he held the key to this. I needed to find him. And it wouldn’t hurt to get some corroboration of what had happened at the fire.

I tried Sanford Rieff again out at Cheviot Labs. This time I reached him at his desk. When I’d thanked him for the report, and told him to log the frog into their safe, I asked if he had an electrical engineer, or arson expert, who could meet me at Fly the Flag sometime soon.

“I’d like an expert to look at the wires with me to see if it’s possible to tell where or how the fire started. The police aren’t putting real resources into this.”

And why should I, for even less money than the cops? I imagined the conversation with my accountant. Because my professional pride was wounded: I’d been watching when the factory went up in flames. What should I have seen if I’d been paying closer attention?

Of course, Cheviot had just the expert I needed; he’d get her to give me a call to set up an appointment. Just so I knew, the company billed her time at two hundred dollars an hour. That was good to know: it was good to know I was sinking thousands of dollars into an investigation I hadn’t been hired to take on while I abandoned the business that made money for me.

If I didn’t finish three background checks for Darraugh Graham, my most important client, I’d be living on cat food in an alley pretty soon, and not the good stuff, either. I tapped my teeth with my pencil, trying to figure out how to juggle it all, then remembered Amy Blount. She’d earned a Ph.D. in economic history a year or so ago; while she looked for a full-time academic appointment, she sometimes did research projects for me, among other odd jobs she found. Fortunately enough, she was free, and willing, to pull things together in my office for a few days. We agreed to meet at nine in the morning to go over my caseload.