CONKLIN AND I had scrubbed at our faces with damp paper towels, but the stench of fire and death clung to us. Jacobi stood upwind and said, “You two smell like you’ve been wading through a sewer.”

  I thanked him, but my mind was churning.

  Two blocks away, a raging fire was burning the Vetter house to the ground. There might have been evidence inside that house, something that would have tied Hans Vetter and Brett Atkinson to the arson murders.

  Now all of that was gone.

  We stood in front of the house where the dead boy, Brett Atkinson, had lived with his parents. It was a soaring contemporary with cantilevered decks and hundred-mile views. Very, very wealthy people lived here.

  Hawk’s parents, the Atkinsons, hadn’t answered repeated knocks by patrolmen, never returned our calls, and their son’s body was still lying unclaimed in the morgue. A canvass of the neighborhood had confirmed their absence. No one had seen or heard from the Atkinsons in days, and they hadn’t told anyone they were leaving home.

  The engines on the Atkinsons’ cars were cold. There was mail in the mailbox a couple of days old, and the............