“Because I started the fire,” Ridley said. “At the church. I’d wired a remote detonator and I wanted to try it. And my dad kept talking about this old church that nobody used anymore. He said it was in the way, like it would be great if it burned down. I thought it would be cool to do it.” He glanced at me briefly. “Claudia saw me on Canal Street that night. Later she kind of put it together, and she asked me if I had anything to do with burning down the church. I told her the truth. She was so upset. She said homeless people sometimes stayed in the church, that I’d taken away their home.” He rubbed his face with one giant paw. “She said she’d never speak to me, ever, if I did anything like that again. Then she made me give her the remote detonator.”

“Claudia had the detonator?” I looked at Martin. “Was that what you thought Kaylee Quan had taken from the apartment?”

Martin nodded sullenly.

“I don’t get it. Why didn’t Gregory and his friend look for it when they went to the apartment on New Year’s Eve?”

“That’s because my idiot son forgot to tell me he’d handed it over to Claudia,” Martin snapped. “He only told me that part after New Year’s. When that woman called to blackmail me, she said she knew that Ridley had started the fire at the church. I didn’t want to believe it was true. I’d thought the fire was just a happy accident for me. But when I asked Ridley about it, he said, ‘Did Lily tell you?’ I asked how Lily would know about it, and he said Claudia must have told her.”

“I thought maybe you ratted me out to my dad,” Ridley said. “Like that time I wanted to try heroin. Claudia always says secrets are like poison, they kill you sooner or later. I knew she’d tell you sometime.”

“So that’s how you found out that Claudia knew,” I said, staring at Martin. “And that’s why you called me in Spain. To see if I knew, too.”

“I needed to find out whether you were somehow involved, even accidentally,” said Martin. “If you’d known the truth I would have paid Claudia—that woman, whatever her name was—off. But you didn’t know anything about it, so I sent Gregory to have a talk with her instead.”

“A talk? That’s why Gregory took out the surveillance camera? Because he was going to have a talk?” My voice rose in incredulity.

“I did not discuss his methods with him,” Martin answered.

“He went there to murder her, because you told him to.”

“I never once uttered the word murder, or kill, or anything like that,” Martin maintained. “I didn’t order him to do anything except deal with the problem.”