“There was no soot or burns in his trachea, and no CO. So he was already dead when the fire was set,” she said to me. “I’m sorry, Kay. I . . . Well, I don’t know what to say.”

“How can it be that no one saw him enter the building?” I asked as if I had not comprehended the horror of what she had just said. “Someone forces him inside at gunpoint, maybe, and no one saw a thing?”

“The store closed at five P.M.,” she answered. “There’s no sign of forcible entry and for some reason the burglar alarm hadn’t been set, so it didn’t go off. We’ve had trouble with these places being torched for insurance money. Same Pakistani family always involved one way or another.”

She sipped her coffee.

“Same MO,” she went on. “Small inventory, the fire starts shortly after business hours, and no one in the neighborhood saw a thing.”

“This has nothing to do with insurance money!” I said with sudden rage.

“Of course, it doesn’t,” she quietly answered. “Or at least not directly. But if you want to hear my theory, I’ll tell you.”

“Tell me.”

“Maybe Carrie was the torch . . .”

“Of course!”

“I’m saying she might have conspired with the owner to torch the place for him. He may have even paid her to do it, not having any idea what her real agenda was. Granted, this would have taken some planning.”

“She’s had nothing to do for years but plan.”

My chest tightened again and tears formed a lump in my throat and filled my eyes.

“I’m going home,” I told her. “I’ve got to do something. I can’t stay here.”

“I think you are better off . . .” she started to protest.

“I’ve got to figure out what she will do next,” I said, as if this were possible. “I’ve got to figure out how she’s doing what she’s doing. There’s some master plan, some routine, something more to all this. Did they find any metal shavings?”

“There wasn’t much left. He was in the plenum, the point of origin. There was some kind of big fuel load up there, but we don’t know what, except there were a lot of Styrofoam peanuts floating around. And those things will really burn. No accelerants detected, so far.”

“Teun, the metal shavings from the Shephard case. Let us take them to Richmond so we can compare them with what we’ve got. Your investigators can receipt them to Marino.”

She looked at me with eyes that were skeptical, tired, and sad.

“You need to deal with this, Kay,” she said. “Let us do the rest of it.”

“I am dealing with it, Teun.”

I got up from my chair and looked down at her.

“The only way I can,” I said. “Please.”