“You gonna visit me every day this week?”

“Not every day. But I just-”

“Come on in, come on in.”

“You’re busy.” Phones were ringing. Printers clacking.

“Not too busy for you, sweet thing. We need to get your mind satisfied so you could finally put all this to rest.” He motioned to the same scarred-up wood chair he had before. “I’m having coffee. You gonna be here long enough to have a mug?”

“I could kill for a cup.”

He sighed again. “Not a thing to tell the sheriff, honey.”

She propped a peace offering on his desk. “Cinnamon muffins. Fresh.”

He opened it, smelled. “All right. I admit it. There is good in you.” She got the coffee. He got the muffins. She opened up the satchel and pulled out her faded copy of the police report.

“Not this again,” he said.

“I just have a few more questions.” She leaned over the desk with her copy of the investigation report. It was only three pages, and that included signatures and dates and times and addresses. The actual information related to the investigation was sparse-which was why she’d read and reread it until her eyes crossed. “At the very end of the report, you wrote, ‘no reason to connect this to the other arson fires’. That kept jumping out at me. What other arson fires?”

“You’ve been on the computer again, haven’t you? That, or watching Law and Order reruns. Everybody’s an expert on the law these days.”

“I’m sorry to be such a pain,” she said, real apology in her voice, but not moving until she’d heard an answer. He sighed and eventually got around to responding.

“You know, it’s been twenty years, but if I recall correctly, there’d been a rash of vandalism fires, stretching maybe a year or so, before the one at your place. But there was no relationship, like I wrote. There was no one killed in the other fires, no property damage that remotely compared.”