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right cuz they know: they can do all things through Christ, who strengthens them.”
    “Still,” I said, “it must be so sad and scary for them.”
    “They grew up over at Uncle Christopher’s and Auntie Juliet’s. They swam in the pool. Played Ping-Pong in the backyard. They went to all of Chloe and Cody’s birthdays and”—she squeezed shut her eyes, took a few deep breaths, then whispered—“Thank you, Jesus. Be with me, Lord.”
    “Would you mind if I talked to your kids?”
    “Why you need to talk to
them
?” she asked, eyes narrowed at the snake in the garden.
    “Maybe they heard the Chatmans talking about troubles they were having. Or maybe Cody confided—”
    “He ain’t set
this
fire,” Ruby said, with a shake of her head.
    “
This
fire?” I asked. “What do you mean? What other fires did he set?”
    Ruby licked her upper lip. “Well, there was the Fourth of July—that was just boys bein’ boys. There was firecrackers and leaves in a trash can. And you know, just little…” She swallowed. “He just… He ain’t start
this
fire.” Her eyes darted between me and the Chatman house.
    “He may not have.” I assured her. “He probably didn’t. But I need to know that for sure.
You
want to know that for sure.”
    She closed her eyes again, and her lips worked in silent prayer.
    As I waited for her to finish, the noise in my head competed with the noise of demolition.
    She dabbed at her wet eyes. “I got some oil on Christopher before the nurse kicked me out of his room. I wanted to stay a little longer, though, and hold him up in prayer. Let him know that he ain’t alone. But the Lord will renew his strength. We gon’ get through this.
Together
.”
    She glanced back over her shoulder to the smoldering heap that had been a family’s home just a day ago. “Ain’t nothin’ ever gonna be the same for any of us again. Lord help us all.”

6
    NO SUCH THING AS EASY FOR THE THE MURDER POLICE, ESPECIALLY IN LOS ANGELES. So many beaten, stabbed, and shot-up bodies in this city. Even with three hundred homicides last year, a pretty low rate for a city as big as many sovereign nations, that’s still three hundred bodies, three hundred families, three hundred accordion file folders with cases that had the potential of going unsolved. Unsolved not because we were inept Keystone Kops. But unsolved partly due to barriers around this town. One hundred—that’s how many languages the Department of Motor Vehicles accommodated every year. And those people—the ones whose native tongues included clicks or whose cultures required women silently to accept violence, as well as those homegrown U.S. citizens whose creed was “Fuck the Police from Sea to Shining Sea,” well…
    * * *
    No such thing as easy for the the murder police.
    The Chatman investigation would not be simple—even though I had in hand enough search warrants to gift wrap every item at Walmart.
    “No lie: this will be hard,” I warned my team, now assembled near the porch of the house. “It’s already the hardest scene I’ve ever processed. Still: we got to do this right.” I tried to take a deep breath but failed—felt like village women were doing a grape stomp on my lungs. “Look for any trace evidence like fingerprints and palm prints, especially in those upstairs bedrooms. Look for blood, ripped fingernails, bullet casings, knives,
anything
that will help us figure out what happened to these folks.” I nodded at Arturo Zucca, the lead criminalist and one of the smartest men in the world.
    “Be extra-careful,” Zucca said. “Since everything’s wet and mushy, we’ll be taking longer than usual. You see something that looks organic, give a holler and get the hell out of the way.”
    Detective Luke Gomez, stout and beer-bellied, asked, “We’re taking normal things, too, right? Important-looking papers, receipts, mail—”
    “Photographs, computers?” his partner, Peter “Pepe” Kim, asked as he pushed back