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earth if the place hadn’t burned. We can’t move until the fire department catalogs and removes the dozen or so barrels. You’ll be sitting on your thumbs for a while.”
    The work being done down in the basement was hidden, detox tents covering the activities of the specially trained firefighters who were opening the barrels, examining and photographing the contents, and then wrapping the barrels in protective layers for transport. They had set up a well-lit staging area over the pit of chemicals. Reinforced scaffolding provided a scenic view of the dump site below, and a platform that rose and fell—a sort of elevator—carried barrels from the pit below up to the surface, where they were transported to the waiting trucks.
    A worker wearing coveralls that I suspected were made of lead tried to calm our fears. “There’s no evidence of airborne contamination.”
    â€œFan-fuckin’-tastic,” Dave said. “I feel my sperm count dropping already.”
    With the fire marshal handling most of the investigation into the fire’s origin, we had little more to do than maintain the wide perimeter requested by the fire department. We talked about the burnedwoman, still unconscious at St. Peter’s. All the local newscasts had carried her picture, but no real leads had come in.
    â€œWith the van destroyed we ran the partial plate. It didn’t pop in the system,” I said. “It was a rental with Nevada plates, and the big guns—Hertz, National, Avis—none of them report missing fleet.” We stopped talking as a car approached, and I walked forward to intercept the vehicle. The driver’s side window rolled down, and a young woman leaned out, hair pulled into a tight bun and her lips lined a deep brown.
    â€œShe’s the owner,” she said and pointed a blue-tipped nail at the elderly woman in the passenger seat. Small, the woman wore an Irish wool cardigan, cream colored with dark brown buttons, and a blue beret with a Claddagh circlet pinned to it. Elda Harris.
    Everyone called this Bernie Lawler’s factory, but in total he had owned it for only six years. On June 16, 1978 he married nineteen-year-old Luisa Harris and signed the final purchase agreements for the Sleep-Tite Factory, buying it from Luisa’s parents. In August 1984, after Bernie had been convicted of murdering Luisa and Ted, Luisa’s mother won a wrongful death suit and was awarded all of Bernie’s assets, including his home, his boat, and the business. In July 1986, the Sleep-Tite factory went bankrupt and ceased operations, but the land and building remained in Elda’s name, the fire finishing off what rust and decay hadn’t taken care of.
    Elda rolled down the window, and now sat watching the dump truck cart away bricks and beams. She had a halo of fuzzed hair and rheumy eyes, focused but teary. She appeared unaware of me, Dave, or the young woman who’d driven her here, despite the woman’s repeated “Mrs. Harris! Mrs. Harris!”
    Finally, in a voice stronger than I expected from such a frail person, she spoke.
    â€œGood. Good . Now it’s done. Take me home, Caitlin.” She pushed a button, the window slid closed, and the two drove off.
    â€œWe’ll have to interview her soon,” I said.
    â€œYou think she torched the place?” Dave said. “I mean, everyone says she ran it into the ground intentionally. Maybe she burned it down.”
    â€œThat can’t be true,” I said. “Unless she single-handedly orchestrated the fall of the manufacturing sector in the United States, in which case she is a criminal mastermind.”
    â€œYou know, I start to believe you’re a normal person, and then you start talking like you have a master’s degree. Oh wait, you do!”
    â€œOh, give me a break. You majored in sociology, for God’s sake.”
    â€œBut Special Agent Lyons, I didn’t log all those