'Want one?' He held up a cold biscuit wrapped in waxy paper.

'I don't even want to look at it,' I said ungraciously.

Pete Marino knew how much his rotten health habits worried me and was simply trying to get my attention. He carefully stirred more sugar in the plastic cup of coffee he was floating up and down with the turbulence, using his meaty arm for suspension.

'What about coffee?' he asked me. 'I'm pouring.'

'No thanks. How about an update?' I got to the point as my tension mounted. 'Do we know anything more than we did last night?'

'The fire's still smoldering in places. Mostly in the stables,' he said. 'A lot more horses than we thought. Must be twenty cooked out there, including thoroughbreds, quarter horses, and two foals with racehorse pedigrees. And of course you know about the one that ran the Derby. Talk about the insurance money alone. A so-called witness said you could hear them screaming like humans.'

'What witness?' It was the first I'd heard of it.

'Oh, all kinds of drones have been calling in, saying they saw this and know that. Same old shit that always happens when a case gets a lot of attention. And it don't take an eyewitness to know the horses would have been screaming and trying to kick down their stalls.' His tone turned to flint. 'We're gonna get the son of a bitch who did this. Let's see how he likes it when it's his ass burning.'

'We don't know that there is a son of a bitch, at least not for a fact,' I reminded him. 'No one has said it's arson yet, although I certainly am assuming you and I haven't been invited along for the ride.'

He turned his attention out a window.

'I hate it when it's animals.' He spilled coffee on his knee. 'Shit.' He glared at me as if I were somehow to blame. 'Animals and kids. The thought makes me sick.'

He did not seem to care about the famous man who may have died in the fire, but I knew Marino well enough to understand that he targeted his feelings where he could tolerate them. He did not hate human beings half as much as he led others to believe, and as I envisioned what he had just described, I saw thoroughbreds and foals with terror in their eyes.