“You’re the challenge, because Carrie’d been locked up for several years by the time you moved here. And now you’re moving to Philly, and Janet’s left here alone. And to be honest, I don’t like that worth a damn, either.”

“Neither of you is listed in the phone book, right?” I asked.

“No way,” Janet said, and she was listlessly picking at her salad.

“What if someone called this building and asked for either of you?”

“They’re not supposed to give out info like that,” Janet said.

“Not supposed to,” Marino sardonically said. “Yeah, I’m sure this joint’s got state-of-the-art security. Must be all kinds of high profile people living here, huh?”

“We can’t sit around worrying about this all of the time,” Lucy said, and she was getting angry. “Can’t we talk about something else?”

“Let’s talk about the Warrenton fire,” I said.

“Let’s do.”

“I’ll be packing in the other room,” Janet appropriately said, since she was FBI and not involved in this case.

I watched her disappear into a bedroom, and then I said, “There were some unusual and disturbing findings during the autopsy. The victim was murdered. She was dead before the fire started, which certainly points at arson. Have we made any further headway on how the fire might have been set?”

“Only through algebra,” Lucy said. “The only hope here is fire modeling, since there’s no physical evidence that points at arson, only circumstantial evidence. I’ve spent a lot of time fooling around with Fire Simulator on my computer, and the predictions keep coming back to the same thing.”

“What the hell is Fire Simulator?” Marino wanted to know.

“One of the routines in FPEtool, the software we use for fire modeling,” Lucy patiently explained. “For example, we’ll assume that flashover is reached at six hundred degrees Celsius—or one thousand, one hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit. So we plug in the data we know, such as the vent opening, area of surface, energy available from the fuel, fire virtual point of origin, room lining materials, wall materials, and so on and so on. And at the end of the day, we should get good predictions as to the suspect, or the fire in question. And guess what? No matter how many algorithms, procedures, or computer programs you try with this one, the answer’s always the same. There’s no logical explanation for how a fire this fast and hot could have started in the master bathroom.”

“And we’re absolutely sure it did,” I said.