He shook his head. “Early days for forensic results. But fires are tricky. Gasoline could get the job done if the perp was lucky, you know that. So don’t go starting a conspiracy theory, trying to put cops or the FBI in your sights just because some woman from OEM rubbed you the wrong way.”

“Is that why you came up here?” I demanded. “To tell me to pull back from holding the feds accountable? Damn it, Conrad, they’ve been watching the Freedom Center. They could have done something besides watching it all unfold for them on their—”

“Whoa, there, Ms. W.! I’m not here on anybody’s business but my own.”

I looked at him, puzzled. Nothing I’d been working on lately involved South Chicago, but I waited for him to speak. Make the interrogation come to you, don’t race out to meet it. That was advice I’d always given my clients in my public defender days, and it’s the hardest advice to follow.

“You and fire, Ms. W.,” he repeated. “I don’t know if it follows you around or you bring it with you.”

He waited for a while. But when I still didn’t respond, he said, “You were in South Chicago last Saturday.”

In the trauma and drama of the last few days, I’d forgotten taking my cousin around the South Side. “How nice of you to come all the way up here to tell me.”

He smiled briefly, not warmly. “You stopped at a house on Ninety-second and Houston. You wanted to get inside.”

I watched him through my dark glasses.

“Any particular reason?” Conrad asked.

“I am damned tired of cops and feds asking me to justify every step I take. Is this Iran or America? Or isn’t there any difference anymore?”

“They had a fire Sunday night. When we got there, the lady, a Señora Andarra, told us two women had been there, and they said they had grown up in the house and wanted to look around. She was afraid they were from a rival gang to her grandson’s. She was afraid they set the fire to punish her for not letting them into the house.”

“That sounds like me, all right, gangbanger torching an old lady’s house.”

Conrad leaned forward. “You showed me the house once, the place where you grew up, your ma’s tree and everything.”

That was true. In the spring, before I left for Italy, I’d been coaching a basketball team in my old high school, and Conrad and I had occasionally had a drink together after the games. One evening, in a fit of nostalgia, I’d shown him my home, along with the place on the breakwater where Boom-Boom and I used to jump into Lake Calumet, and various other high points of my childhood.