I left a message on Sister Carolyn’s cellphone to see if she could get any information out of the contractors. She was in a meeting with an INS attorney, but she called back several hours later to say she’d talked to someone from both the wrecking crew and the builder. Both contractors insisted they didn’t know who hired them. They had been promised cash, almost double their usual fees, if they would drop everything and take care of the building.

“They didn’t want to tell me even that much, I guess because they were afraid I might report them to the IRS, but I put on my costume and assured them that all I wanted was information.”

Her costume. Oh, the veil, right. I asked who had given them the money, but she said they claimed it was a middle-aged white man, someone they had never seen before.

“Don’t tell me,” I said drily. “He was wearing a trench coat and a felt fedora.”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Would it make a difference?”

“Yeah. It would be a giveaway that they were lying instead of just a probability.”

“You think they really know who sent them?”

I was sitting at Lotty’s kitchen table, my frustration at my inaction just about at the boiling point. “I don’t know, of course, but my best guess is that they owe someone important a favor or they’re gofers for someone important. Maybe they’re a minority-contracting front, I don’t know. But to drop everything like that, they have to have a pretty good idea who sent them. And then your place being under surveillance, and that police seal on Sister Frankie’s door, didn’t stop them for five seconds.”

When we hung up, I called the detectives from the Bomb and Arson squad who had been over to interrogate me. The Latino cop was in.

“You know your crime scene doesn’t exist anymore?” I said.

“What are you talking about?”

“I just got off the phone with one of the nuns who lives there. A building crew showed up, not anyone the sisters hired, and took down the door, stripped the room. I hope you secured any samples you took. Someone’s going to a lot of trouble to keep that fire from being investigated.”

He didn’t exactly thank me. It was more of a snarl, a demand for Sister Carolyn’s phone number, and a warning that I’d better not be behind any destruction of evidence.

I missed Amy Blount badly. I could have sicced her on the contractors, gotten her to track down the ownership trail. I wondered if I could turn it over to my cousin, see how she would handle a routine search through incorporation records. If she failed, I was no worse off than I was when I started.