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Cahill’s office. “You find anything useful?”
    â€œYou ask too many questions, Coyne.”
    I shrugged. “I notice that you’re here alone.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œI thought you guys always worked in pairs.”
    He flapped one hand and said nothing.
    â€œSo where’s your partner?” I said.
    â€œHome having breakfast with her husband, probably.”
    â€œYou’re alone on this?”
    â€œWhat’s it look like?”
    â€œIt looks to me,” I said, “like you’re working on your own hunches on your own time. I bet your boss doesn’t even know you’re here.”
    â€œNone of his fucking business what I do on my own time.”
    I nodded. “I’m right, then. This is not an official investigation.”
    â€œNone of your business, either.”
    â€œWell,” I said, “your interest in my client suggests maybe
it is. You want my help, you’ve got to convince me there could be a connection. So what makes you so sure this wasn’t an accident?”
    He blew out a breath. “I just knew the man, that’s all,” he said. “Gordon Cahill was very careful, precise, unexcitable. Plodding, almost. You don’t survive undercover for three years if you’re not. It would be entirely out of character for him to drive recklessly, exceed the speed limit. He’d never drink or do drugs if he was driving. He wouldn’t fall asleep at the wheel. Nothing could make him panic. He just wouldn’t have an accident. Not Gordie.”
    â€œUnless?”
    Horowitz shrugged. “Think about it.”
    â€œUnless someone was chasing him? Is that what you’re thinking? Somebody forced him off the road or something?”
    He waved his hand. “We’ll see what the crime-scene people, forensics, M.E.’s office come up with. You talk to your client. Then we’ll put our heads together.”
    â€œNo promises,” I said. I opened the door and stepped out of Gordon Cahill’s office.
    â€œHey, Coyne,” said Horowitz.
    I stopped. “What?”
    â€œThere’s nothing left of him but a cinder,” he said.
    I looked at him.
    He made an exploding motion with his hands. “It was a fireball. As bad as anything I’ve ever seen.”
    â€œI’ll see what I can do,” I said.
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    I left Horowitz pawing through the papers in the wire basket on Gordon Cahill’s desk. I knew he wouldn’t find anything.
Gordie was way too careful to leave anything useful on top of his desk.
    It was barely a five-minute walk to my own office, and I used the time pondering the possibility that Albert Stoddard had figured out that Gordon Cahill was tailing him and had run him off the road in the Willard Brook State Forest.
    That struck me as even more out of character for Albert than speeding was for Cahill. But I was a notoriously poor judge of character. I generally assumed the best in people. That, I’d learned over the years, was a surefire formula for disappointment.
    Still, I rather liked that about myself. I knew a lot of lawyers, especially, who instinctively assumed everybody lied, cheated, and beat their wives. Mistrust was probably a useful trait for a lawyer, but it was a piss-poor trait for a human being … which shows how much interest I had in being a successful lawyer.
    But then I remembered the last words Cahill had spoken to me on the telephone before we lost our connection. “Those boys,” he had said.
    Boys? Albert?
    If Albert Stoddard was fooling around with boys, if that’s why he was acting weird and furtive, and if Gordon Cahill found out about it, and if Albert knew that Cahill knew …
    Sometimes it was hard to think the best of people.
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    Julie didn’t look up from her computer when I walked into the office. The arch of her neck was decidely hostile.
    I glanced at my watch. “Hey, I’m only twenty minutes