After a forced but polite goodbye, and a less opulent elevator ride to the underbelly of the Morales Building, I was on my own. I could have poked around the tunnels, kitchens, laundry, and maintenance rooms, but it wouldn’t have helped find Ethan. The space was unrefined, with whitewashed walls, garish light fixtures, and lots of exposed ducts, wires, and pipes, but it was far from the sort of dungeon a kidnapper would lock their victim in. The place buzzed like a hive of bees, cooking, cleaning, and doing repairs for the hundreds of white-collar criminals on the floors above them.

I found my way to the residents’ parking structure and from there to the street. My heart fluttered when I saw a piece of paper flapping under Dolores’s windshield wiper, but the ticket was the one I had put there.

I took a second to jot down a few things between weak attempts to start Dolores. I copied the message to Fosse from the rubbing to my notepad, then scribbled some notes about Virginia wanting to return to the spotlight, the disdain the other women felt toward her, and their upcoming election night soirée.

I had learned almost nothing about Douglas other than confirming his lack of parental oversight. With parents like his, it was no wonder Douglas was rebelling. No matter how aggressively he acted out, Cynthia hardly reacted. Sure, she said she was worried about him, but I’d seen enough smut films to recognize her brand of acting. It had taken her a minute to even register what malfeasance I was talking about, and in the end she had brushed it off with a shrug and an implied mumble of, “Boys will be boys.”

I filled a whole page with babble. None of it was going to pull me out of the morass of this case on its own, but if I grabbed the right bit, it might keep me floating until something better came along. I could have tried to get Douglas alone and use his parents’ insouciance to get him to open up. With Fosse out to get me, the only thing cornering a kid would help me find was my way back into a jail cell.

I focused on what I had learned about Virginia. A less cynical man might not have thought anything of what Cynthia and Barb had said. They were cruel and there was definitely some personal shit clouding their vision, but that bulb of hatred must have grown around a seed of truth. It at least got me to consider things from their perspective.

I saw Virginia as a sad, lonely woman. She had been at the peak of her career, but one mistake had sent her tumbling down to the bottom. Maybe she held out hope that jazz would make a comeback and Peter would shoot up the charts and onto every late night talk show in Russel Sanders’s web of stations. Or Maybe she lost herself in the role of being a mother. Now she saw Ethan growing up, getting into big-boy trouble and starting his career, and something had snapped.

Her split with Peter could have been the trigger, or it could have been one of the first pins to fall. What if she kidnapped her own son? What if she was after the support, trying to cheat her way back into the limelight after Heifer turned her down?

She might have planned for a quick effort to find him, then a few weepy interviews to springboard herself back into the public consciousness, but things hadn’t gone to plan. Al got killed and the act became real. Maybe her accomplice wanted more money. Maybe Ethan fought back and dug himself a hole. Maybe the kidnapper had to bump Ethan off so he wouldn’t squeal about who popped Al.

There were lots of maybes, but they were all built on the testimony of a few day-drunk housewives. Virginia would be pissed enough if I showed up after her telling me to drop the case. If I burst in making wild accusations, she might put a bullet in me herself.

I needed something else to go on. At the very least, a second opinion. Barb’s loose tongue helped me out there. I knew Virginia had met with Howard Heifer within the last couple months. Heifer thought himself more dangerous than he was, but he also had connections. He could have shared some of those with Virginia, and they could have worked up a plan together.

My mind latched onto the theory of Virginia working with Heifer. I couldn’t entertain any other idea. It was a bad place to be when on a case, but damned if it didn’t feel good to have a lead, illusory though it may be.

A bit of percussive maintenance inside the cab convinced Dolores to give up her stubborn grip on the parking spot and join the rest of the herd mooing through the city. The traffic had flowed like molasses earlier, but now it was downright glacial.

Club Callout was on the east side of town. Heifer chose the location on the same principle Adora had planted her office on Masthead Ave a few blocks over. It squeezed in close to downtown, hoping to become part of it as the sprawl developed. Unfortunately for Adora, the city had grown in every direction but towards her. Club Callout at least had the benefit of other establishments banding together to take a swing at creating a new hub for nightlife culture.

The club was a freestanding black box with a roughly square footprint. The windows were tinted and the doors were shut. A sign at the front said the line started at seven and the doors opened at eight. I couldn’t imagine anyone waiting outside in this dreary weather to get in, but next Tuesday would probably be even colder. I knew people would be willing to wait far longer no matter the weather.

The thrill they got from going into a booth and punching their ballots next to Regis’s name must have been similar to the high one got from a strip club. You pay the girls; they dance for you, trick you into thinking they’ve got the hots for you.

It was the same deal with Regis. He got his donations, made his promises, did the debates and talk shows and TV commercials. Only difference with Regis is the people who slipped their ballots into his proverbial G-string really did get fucked in the end.

There were a few upscale pubs open, but I didn’t have the pocket change to pay their egregious hipness upcharge. A greasy burger was the same just about anywhere you got it. I went to a dive a few blocks over for some cheap slop, then killed time sipping rotgut at the bar.

When I returned to Club Callout, it had changed considerably. Colorful lights escaped the club through cracked windows and more flashed every time the door opened. There was no line, but there were a few loose groups of men milling about near the entrance. A moose stood in front of the door with his beefy arms over his beefy chest, his massive antlers like crossed halberds.

Some of the men finished their cigarettes, stamped them out, and approached the entrance. The bouncer squared his shoulders to them and held out a hand. None of the men quibbled about the cover. The bouncer stuffed the bills in the pocket of his waistcoat and bumped his head toward the door, pointing with his horns.

Bottom-of-the-line sports cars had eaten up the street parking. They were the kind of cars where the manufacturer put the engine of a family-friendly minivan into a two-door coupe and slapped a few meaningless letters under the superfluous spoiler. They weren’t practical or fast, but they were flashy and, thanks to tweaks made to the exhaust, they were loud—perfect for the kind of person who would spend their Sunday night at a place like Club Callout.

I could have squeezed Dolores in somewhere, but she would have stood out among those twenty-thousand dollar compensators. As per usual, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I wouldn’t let myself be surprised by another visit from the ominous black Cadillac.

I pulled around the building. I didn’t have money to throw away on the cover and wanted to limit the time I spent with the lascivious louts who frequented a place like Club Callout.

I waited with the lights off, watching Club Callout’s back door until it opened, then got out, stifling Dolores’s squawking as well as I could. I dodged around the idle town cars in the lot and watched the scrawny bear who had opened the door hurl a full garbage bag into a dumpster. When it settled, the kid brushed his hands off on his grease-stained smock and looked both ways.

He missed me creeping up between the cars and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarette. When he got it lit, I smelled marijuana.

I let him take and release a full drag before I stepped into the stoop’s wan light. His spine went ramrod straight, and the spliff disappeared behind his back. My trench coat had him spooked, but he relaxed a little when I gave him a nod instead of a violent reprimand.

At first he was just relieved I wasn’t police, but his face lit up when he realized who I was.

“Didn’t I tell you kids to stay off drugs?” I kept my voice gruff to mimic the way I talked in the ads, but my affect was flat. I couldn’t quite pull off jocular. The least I could do was strip my words of malice.

The kid sheepishly pulled his joint back out, watching it with growing concern.

“It isn’t laced,” I said. “I’m really here, and I don’t give a shit about you smoking weed. Doesn’t seem like anyone does these days.”

The kid let out a heavy sigh of relief.

“Your boss around?”

“Steve?” the kid said. “I guess. I think he’s in his office.”

“I meant Heifer. He in?”

“Usually is. He’ll be up top. Likes to hang out there with a couple of girls.”

“Thanks.” I started for the back door. The kid’s mouth came open. A noise escaped his throat, but he cut it off quickly. He should have told me I wasn’t allowed to go in there, but he didn’t have the heart. He took another hit and his eyes bugged out, his head swaying from side to side as he tried to come to terms with what had just happened.

The music was a low thump in the shadowy back rooms, a persistent beat on top of which the medley of crashing dishes, sizzling pans, and cursing cooks layered themselves. The walls were painted as black as the exterior and there were only a few small bulbs to light the hallway. It wasn’t up to health and safety codes, but Heifer didn’t seem the type to play by the books.

I found a stairwell after poking around a few dark doorways. The hall on the second floor was like a college dormitory, with a row of tightly packed rooms on either side of the aisle, twelve in total. Colored light seeped from under doors and through half-open cracks. The thin single-ply panels did a poor job of muffling the rustling and grunting on the other side.

A puma stumbled out of a door in front of me, his coat hooked over his shoulder and a dazed smile on his face. A woman’s painted fingernails brushed his arm as he left and he giggled to himself until he saw me. His face got serious in a hurry, and he tucked his head low to scurry toward the bright lights of the club’s main room ahead.

I spooked him, but I wasn’t half as ominous as the other man he had to skirt past, a wildebeest more burly than the moose out front. He was ready to put me on my ass if I so much as hinted I might want a peek at who was inside getting a private dance from one of Heifer’s girls.

I kept my head up high and my back straight as I walked past him, but didn’t meet his eye even when he shifted. I felt the heat of his glare on my back, but the flashbulb blaze of the main room overpowered it soon.

The hallway lead to a tiered mezzanine with a big hole in the middle, looking down on an open floor. Below, tables and chairs were grouped around a central stage that had a runway leading under the mezzanine. Men in the middle of the ring pushed themselves up against the elevated platform, waving dollar bills at a gazelle dressed in a loose net of strings knotted into the parody of a bikini.

She gyrated her hips and raised her hands above her head, her body on full display. She grabbed onto a pole thrust through the heart of the club and pulled herself up on it. Her legs spread wide as she inverted herself, then came together high above her head, her ankles wrapping around the pole. She spun slowly, held only by her feet and the friction of her considerable, but well-oiled ass cheeks gripping the pole.

The pole at the center drew the most attention, but when my eyes and sensibilities had some time to adjust, I saw a lot more in the same vein. The club was a veritable garden of earthly delights. Women—and even a few men—in varying states of undress danced in cages disbursed throughout the main floor, but four hung like low chandeliers in the space over the pit so they were on the same plane as the lowest tier of the mezzanine.

More attractive young people in skimpy clothing wove through the crowd carrying trays of alcohol to fuel the bacchanal. It was hard for some of the drunken perverts to tell the difference between the servers and the dancers. All were subject to cat-calls and propositions, but some men were too delirious to see the borders of what was acceptable behavior. The dancers had become adept at dodging and deflecting, but not all the servers were so well trained.

A fresh-faced rabbit carrying a tray of beer bottles squeezed through an aisle on the mezzanine, making for one of several bars on the upper level. She jumped when a prehensile tail snuck around her and brushed her exposed midriff. The glasses rattled on her tray, and the snickering spider monkey’s friend, a lizard so slimy he looked like he’d taken a dip in the vat of baby oil they have backstage for the dancers, took her reaction as an invitation to put his hands on her.

She squirmed, but it only incited him further. Dimples appeared on her arm where the man’s grip tightened and he reeled her in.

I hadn’t come to make a scene, and I didn’t want to get thrown out before I talked to Heifer. I was as far from a hero as you got in the real world, but nobody else in that pit of hedonism seemed likely to do anything. The pressure to help doubled when the girl got loose and the lizard took another swipe.

I started toward her despite myself, but a shadow moved in before I got there. An alligator in a flat black suit and matching turtle-neck appeared beside the man, separating him from the woman he had been groping. She scurried away and the two creeps quivered under the imperious figure of the bouncer. He leaned low and spoke in a voice that sent shockwaves across the two blank faces.

The lizard didn’t laugh when the alligator grabbed his upper arm, but neither did he resist as he was dragged to his feet and escorted away. Just as no one else had noticed the server getting assaulted, the alligator’s delicate handling ensured no one noticed the offenders getting kicked out. Maybe they’d have fewer offenders if they did make a show out of it, but of course the staff didn’t want to shatter the illusion.

I watched the girl return to the bar and shake the disgust off before she grabbed a new order and ran it out. The shunned men disappeared into the shadows the alligator had emerged from, leaving no evidence other than a few half-empty beer bottles.

The rest of the club bled back into my perception. I felt myself mired in its many-colored haze and the pounding beat of the drum machine. A much younger, less jaded man could get lost in the fantasy.

Before it carried me away, I heard my name drift in over the music. I looked around, and my attuned ears picked up on its source when it repeated. It had come from Howard Heifer himself. The brown and white bull wore his signature red smoking jacket and was wedged into a booth with four women, each a few years away from some serious back problems. For now, they worked that extra mass to their advantage, becoming liquid and pushing in close to Heifer. I recognized the fox to his left as the woman from the cover of the magazine Officer Joel Marley had been flipping through in front of the holding cells.

With so much eye-candy around, I was surprised Heifer spotted me. I guess even his old, cataract-riddled eyes still had 20/20 vision for celebrities.

He dismissed his harem once he had my attention, making space for me at his table. Despite his assurances that they could come right back, each went out of their way to say goodbye to him with a peck on the cheek or an adventurous pat under the table.

Heifer smiled dumbly as he insisted they give us just a minute. I noticed the way the girls’ grins and moony eyes withered the second their backs were turned. Their shoulders came forward, and their stomachs bulged back out. They were vultures, circling to make sure Heifer remembered to put them in his will for when his horny little heart gave out.

“Mr. O’Howell!” Heifer said when the girls had all slumped off to wash down the ick with a shot of liquor or maybe something stronger. He tried to meet my eye as I sat down on the recently vacated bench but got distracted by one of the girl’s asses as it bounced away.

When she was out of range, he snapped back to himself and flagged down the server the spider monkey and lizard had been pawing at. “Excuse me, Dana, would you be a dear and bring my friend something to drink?”

“What would you like, sir?” The girl held her serving tray against her body in front of her like a shield, and her ears laid flat behind her bowed head.

“Scotch,” I said when Heifer gestured at me. “Whatever you’ve got.”

“Nonsense!” Heifer said. “Something from the top shelf—only the best for my guests. And a glass for me, too.”

Before I could protest, Heifer shooed Dana away. “Don’t you worry about it. It’s on the house.”

I growled my appreciation. I didn’t like the way it subtly put me in Heifer’s debt. I knew his type and knew a request would follow—a convenient way for me to make things even.

“Hope the doorman didn’t give you too much trouble. You should have told me you were coming; I would have gotten you on the list—VIP!”

“Spur of the moment,” I said. “Didn’t know I was coming until I drove past. I’m actually here to talk to you.”

“Oh, are you now? How fortuitous? Just imagine the kinds of things two icons of Hot Type City’s history can do together. What did you have in mind? Not sure you’re cut out for dancing—no offense—but we can always use guest emcees. Your voice will prick a few ears.”

“I didn’t come to work with you. I came for answers.”

Heifer’s head dipped, his chin going down to his collarbone. He gave me a sad stare from the sunken wastes of his eye sockets. He was shooting for a playful, pouty expression, but it looked like he was having some kind of fit. If I was any less keen a detective, I might have called for an ambulance.

“Just think of the crowds. I’d pay you twenty percent of the cover take for the night. Should be hundreds of dollars. And for what? A couple hours of oggling fine fazangas and badonkers.”

“Not my scene. Besides, didn’t know you were just handing out jobs. Seems your attitude’s changed since Mrs. Calhoun paid you a visit.”

Heifer’s mouth dropped open, and his mouth formed a small o as he wracked the cocaine-shriveled walnut of his brain. “Calhoun? Calhoun?”

“You knew her as Crane. Virginia Crane.”

“Ah, right. Tall dish. Gams for days. I guess I do remember her stopping by.”

“But you didn’t offer her the same job you offered me.”

“What’d’ya want me to say? Job requirements are different for stage talent. Besides, we have a lot of history and not all of it’s good, you know? Might stir up bad memories, but my audience won’t throw a lot of bills to see a forty-year-old woman who had been out of the game for well over a decade strut her stuff. Just seems a little…sad. Especially with the added meat on her bones. A bit more cushion wouldn’t have gone amiss back then, but current fads demand something sleeker.”

I meant to update Heifer on Virginia’s most recent physical transformation, but something caught his attention.

I couldn’t tell if he was drooling or having a heart attack. I looked back to see if I needed to start searching for a defibrillator. The object of his affection was Dana. She had regained some of the confidence stolen by the creeps earlier, and she approached the table with a hip-swaying sashay.

I was more hypnotized by the level surface of the whiskey in the two fluted glasses on her tray. She moved deliberately and compensated with her upper body so the liquor didn’t slosh at all.

When she bent to set the glasses down, Heifer homed in on the girl’s low neckline. With how tight the shirt was, there wasn’t much more to see, but it got Heifer’s old ticker thrumming, and he slavered openly.

Embarrassed to be sitting next to him, I looked over Dana’s back. To my horror, a pair of dark embers met my eye. I reached for my collar, preparing to turn it up before a camera lens blocked out the face, but it wasn’t a paparazzo or unscrupulous reporter trying to scrounge up a scandal. It was the wildebeest who had been guarding one of the back rooms. I was only one stop on his way to survey the space. He was assessing threats for his boss before they made a break for it.

Dana stood back up, holding a tip from Heifer that was almost generous enough to make up for his wandering eyes. By the time her puffy tail bounced away, the peeping wildebeest was gone.

“Hate to see ’em go,” Heifer said. He left dead air, perhaps hoping I would fill in with, “But I love to watch them walk away,” but I staunchly refused.

I took a sip of the whiskey. It was warm and peaty and sweet and briny all at once. After the couple glasses of swill I tossed back while I waited, a taste of the good stuff was almost enough to knock me out of my seat.

Heifer drank his with casual disregard. “Ahh… Where were we? Something about collaborating, wasn’t it?”

“Not quite,” I said once my airways had cleared of the peat smoke and alcohol fumes. “We were talking about Virginia. She wasn’t just here about dancing, was she? Word is she was jealous about the reunion.”

“The reunion? Oh, right, during the soft open.” Heifer took another gulp and dabbed at his lip with a silk napkin as he waved me off with the other hand. “That was nothing, just some publicity to get the place going on the right foot. Virginia just wouldn’t have been a good fit. Why are you asking about her, anyway? Did she send you?”

“She doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve been looking for her kid—I’m sure you’ve heard about him.” Heifer rocked his head noncommittally. “I’ve chased some leads to the ground and got nothing. Now I’m looking into what Virginia had been up to before the disappearance. I found out from Cynthia Sanders that she came here. She had some opinions about why Virginia did that, but I’d like to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Do you think Virginia was desperate to recapture her glory days, or was there something else?”

“Sure, who wouldn’t want to get back on top?” Heifer took a sip, then thoroughly—and grotesquely—licked his lips. “But I’m not sure it was her primary motivation. Seems like she was in some dire straits. The way she was talking, she was more interested in the money. Said she’d do anything for it: a shoot for the reunion, dancing on stage—”

Heifer’s eyes shot back to the private rooms.

“How much was she asking for? What got her to come crawling to you after all this time?”

“She never gave me a number. Whatever she wanted was more than I could part with.”

“But you offered the other girls—Barb and Cynthia—jobs. Even let Felicity Fellini tag along, if I’ve got my story straight.”

“I didn’t offer them jobs, per se,” Heifer said. “I traded them a chance to stroke their egos for a bit of free publicity.”

“You said you couldn’t afford Virginia at any price. I take it the free publicity didn’t work out the way you had hoped.”

“The issue I put out with Barb and Cynthia on the cover sold out in a heartbeat. Second printing, not so much. I’ve got a warehouse full of great tits on glossy paper and I can’t move a single one. The public was disappointed with what goods Barb and Cynthia were willing to give up for their return issue.”

“What about here? The club? Looks like you’ve got a crowd.”

“Maybe, but it’s not enough. I meant to generate buzz so I had lines around the block then jack the prices. As soon as I started tweaking the numbers, attendance dropped like a ram’s balls.”

He shook his head sadly, looking out on his domain as if the vibrant mirror-ball powered by pure testosterone and alcohol were on its deathbed. “I got a lot of people to pay. Took out a hefty loan, too.”

“But you didn’t go through the bank, did you?” I said. “Big Ed?”

Heifer bobbled his head. It was about as close as anyone would dare come to admitting a relationship with the mob boss.

I sipped my whiskey, taking it all in. I had come to save Ethan, but Heifer might be in just as much danger. At least he had done it to himself.

“So you’re broke?”

“Not to put too fine a point on it…”

Virginia had come to Heifer for money, but he was more desperate than she was. Maybe they got to talking—to scheming. Heifer could have organized for the kid to get picked up. Virginia had the acting chops to play the grieving mother, especially when everyone expected her to be hysterical. By creating a media frenzy, Virginia could lift herself up into the national spotlight.

She wouldn’t be coy about putting it all on the table when it came time for her, “As Seen on TV,” issue of Barnyard. Probably she’d planned for Heifer to involve himself in catching the bad guy and freeing Ethan—a bit of goodwill for all.

I drank more as my thoughts churned. I had to find some way to imply what I was thinking without saying it outright, which would scare Heifer off. If I could downplay his involvement, maybe he’d come clean about what Virginia had planned and how it had gone awry.

I caught a whiff of smoke as I put my glass down. I was accustomed to the peated smell of the whiskey; this scent was different, more astringent. I thought Heifer had lit up a cigar with some monstrously behind-the-times lighter or a moldy book of matches, but the old bull was staring at the last dregs of whiskey in his glass.

Heifer looked up sharply when I sniffed in earnest. I smelled woodsmoke and oily rags.

“Hope you didn’t cheap out on your fire suppressant system,” I said.

“Huh?”

“Your building’s on fire.” I slammed back the last slug of scotch as I got to my feet. I saw an orange glow and puffy cloud too dark to be cigar smoke at the edge of the balcony.

The gazelle wrapped around the pole looked toward the source of the fire, screamed, and slid back down. At first, the delirious men she ran to reached out or leaned back, ready to touch and be touched. She didn’t stop at the edge of the stage, and when they saw her hobble down on her five-inch heels, they started to take notice of the spreading fire.

“Shit!” Heifer said. He knocked over his whiskey glass as he got to his feet.

“Go!” I yelled in Heifer’s face, grabbing him by the lapels to shake the daze from his eyes. I pointed to the cages suspended over the pit in the center of the mezzanine. “You’ve got to get those girls down.”

“But I… Someone will put the fire out…” Heifer said, squinting into the crowd as it started to boil.

“Don’t count on it. If you were worried about your brand before, imagine how it will look if one person dies here. Forget about four.” Heifer didn’t have much of a conscience as far as I could tell, so I stuck with appealing to his reputation.

I gave him a shove toward the stairs and the shouting, and pushed toward the back rooms. The men behind the doors might be too engaged to recognize the screams weren’t those of pleasure coming from their exuberant partners, nor the heat that of blazing passions.

I pounded on each door as I ran, yelling, “Fire!” at the top of my lungs. Doors started opening when I reached the end of the hall. Bleary heads popped out, looked both directions, then startled when they saw the smoke and orange glow coming from the main room.

I was about to throw open the door to the stairs, but smelled a fresh whiff of smoke before I did. I put my hand on the handle, then the panel of the door. Neither felt hot, but I saw a sheet of smoke creeping out from under the door.

“What are you waiting for? Let’s get out of here!” a man behind me yelled.

“No good,” I said, picturing the whoosh that could come with the shifting pressure if I opened the door. The fire in the main room seemed to be moving fast, but we had a head start. “Turn around, make for the front.”

Curious men stumbled, bare-chested, with their shirts held conspicuously in front of their groins to cover rapidly deflating erections. Apart from their naked feet, the girls had gotten back into their skimpy clothes in a hurry—dressing quick was crucial to reducing cycle time.

The girls were the first to see sense and started the other way. The men standing nearby needed to see the orange flickering and the oily blanket of smoke now billowing from under the door before they diverted. I followed the crowd as they ran across the mezzanine.

Fortunately, Heifer—or someone a bit more with it—had heeded my warning and lowered the cages, which sat on the ground with their doors open. Above them, the ceiling was a roiling sea of gray-black smoke, fed by a gaseous cascade from the wall of flames that had once been heavy curtains at the other terminal of the runway.

We made it out to the fresh air—or as fresh as you could find within the jurisdiction of Hot Type City. My coat was heavy with the smell of the fire. Probably the scent would never wash off.

I wandered around the crowd as everyone turned to gawk, basking in the building’s heat—now almost entirely consumed by flames. Heifer had found his women from earlier. The fire had reminded them of their own mortality. More importantly, it had reminded them of Heifer’s. They had no more clothes on than the girls who came out of the back rooms, but they packed their bodies in close to keep Heifer warm.

It took almost ten minutes for the first fire engine to arrive. There wasn’t much for them to save at that point. Heifer hadn’t splurged on fancy things like fire retardant materials.

I waited near Heifer while the crowd dissipated along with the first round of lookie-loos and reporters. None of the men wanted to see their face on the front page of tomorrow’s newspaper.

By the time the flames were down and the firefighters had transitioned to hunting the smoldering bits, it was mainly me and a few of the dancers left. I stuck close to Heifer, so I was around when the fire marshal came to give him the rundown.

“Looks like the fire started backstage,” the groundhog with the badge on his shirt said. “Spread quick across the floor. We got to it as it gnawed on the kitchen, but the main room’s all charred up.”

“That can’t be right,” I said.

“Whassat?” The fire marshal looked over his notes. “No. The open air and lots of flammables let the fire sweep straight through. It was a slower burn the other way. I’m surprised more people didn’t run out the back door. Aside from a smoldering trashcan at the top, the stairwell back there was safe.”

Heifer looked at me with a raised eyebrow from under his security blanket of breasts and hips. I had more questions than answers.

“Any idea what started the fire?” I asked.

The marshal looked at his notepad again and lifted his cap to scratch his forehead. “Not yet. I’m sure we’ll get it figured out when the sun’s up. For all the good it will do.”

Great. Another mystery. Did it have anything to do with me being there, asking about Ethan? Was Big Ed involved? How much did Heifer know?

The marshal snapped his notepad closed after one last glance. “It’s a good thing you were up on your insurance. Should be a tidy payout.”

Heifer didn’t jump into the air and click his heels together, but he did stop shivering. His lips twitched, but he kept the smile down.

Maybe there wasn’t much of a mystery there after all.