I grinned savagely and handed the phone to my chief interrogator. “It’s Conrad Rawlings, your Fourth District commander.”

The officer frowned, thinking I was yanking his chain, but when he heard Conrad on the other end of the line he changed comically, sitting up at attention, giving an abbreviated account of their arrival. Judging from the officer’s broken sentences, Conrad kept interrupting with demands to know why it had taken them so long to get to the Czernins’, and what they had found when they searched the house. The officer got up to confer with another man, and reported that the house was empty.

I heard Conrad’s voice scratchily through the mouthpiece; the officer said to me, “He wants to know what you know about the perp.”

“Not much: he hangs out at a bar called Cocodrilo on Ninety-first Street, but I don’t know where he lives. He rides with a cousin whose first name is Diego.” I described Freddy’s sullen, pretty-boy looks.

The officer relayed this information, listened some more to Conrad, then asked if I knew why Pacheco had broken in.

I shrugged elaborately. “He’s a punk—the pastor at Mount Ararat calls him a chavo banda who does petty crime for a fee. In fact, the pastor may know where he lives.”

I wasn’t going to go through all the stuff about the frog, the fire at Fly the Flag, and Freddy’s demand for a recording, not through an interpreter. Finally, Conrad and the officer finished, and the officer turned me back over to his commander.

“So take me through it, Ms. W. This chavo of yours, how do you know he set the fire?”

“He confessed it. In my hearing, while I had him cornered here—before Sandra Czernin acted like a horse’s patootie and got between him and me. Whereupon he seized her and held her as a hostage. But I don’t know what he wanted in her house. Bron Czernin made a device that Freddy used in setting the fire—Freddy had drawn a picture of it for him, and the picture was here in the house. He looked at the picture, but that wasn’t what he wanted—it’s still here.” True, it was in my pocket, but Conrad didn’t need to know that.

“While I was getting the kid out of the house, Freddy tore the house apart. I don’t think he found what he was looking for. He drives around with his cousin in a Dodge pickup. The first letters on the plate are ‘VBC’—I didn’t catch the rest of it. That is my whole story. Can I go home now?”

“Yeah, and try to stay there. Even if we don’t respond as fast as citizens want, we do get there—”