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“No. I’ll do it. Call Mateus for me.”
    When I said that all of our part-time employees were children, I didn’t lie. But occasionally, when we needed muscle, we hired free agents on a one-job basis. I had a feeling none of them would touch any job involving Pierce with a ten-foot pole, but it was worth a try.
    “How much should I offer?” Bern said into my ear.
    “Ten grand.” It was about three times what we normally offered. It was also the entirety of our rainy day fund. We could take a loan if we had to.
    “We can’t pay that much.”
    “We can if we apprehend Pierce. Tell him payment on delivery.”
    The phone clicked as Bern put me on hold. I walked to my car.
    Where the hell would I even start?
    Another click. “He laughed.”
    In his place I’d laugh too. “Try the Cowboy.”
    Click. Click. “No. And that’s a quote.”
    “Asli? Bump it up to fifteen.” Asli was expensive as hell, but she was worth every penny, and I haven’t known her to back down.
    I reached my Mazda and leaned against the grill.
    “She says she’s busy with something else.”
    Argh. These were my top three. Why did I have this vision of all of our freelancers running away from us like a pack of scared rabbits? “Okay. Start running the background on Pierce, please.”
    I hung up. The panic that first welled inside me in Augustine’s office crested and drowned me. I let it pull me under.
    If we failed, MII would call in the loan and take everything. We would literally walk out of our home with nothing but a black plastic bag filled with clothes and whatever toiletries each of us could carry. Grandma would have no place to run her business. I would have no business at all. I could start over, but it would take time and money. I built on the name and foundation that my parents had created. Personal referrals accounted for 90 percent of our jobs. We would be on the street, all seven of us. We would lose our health insurance. We would still have our other debts. Our savings might put a roof over our heads and food in our mouths for a month or two, but then what?
    Bern would drop out. There was no way he wouldn’t. He would drop out and take any job he could get, whatever would buy us another week in a cheap motel or another meal. I saw his future, and it was going up in flames.
    And my sisters . . . We’d just gotten back to normal after the chaos of dad’s illness. We’d just stabilized. The therapy worked, everyone was back on track, and the kids finally had some routine. If this happened . . . It felt like someone had taken an ice-cold knife and stabbed it into my stomach to gut me.
    No. This wouldn’t be happening. They would not do this to my family. They would not take everything I’d worked so hard to build. No. Just no.
    I breathed in and out, exhaling anger.
    Think. It’s a skiptrace. I had done skiptraces. This wasn’t my first rodeo.
    Private investigators tended to specialize. Some developed financial profiles and dealt with asset searches. Some took surveillance cases. Others performed background checks. We did a little bit of everything, and I had done my fair share of skiptracing. This was just another skiptrace. Except if I found him, he would sear the flesh off my bones. And the family might still end up on the street, when MII took our house. At least they would get the business name back.
    This probably wasn’t the most productive line of thinking.
    This mess, as my father used to say, was way above my pay grade. I wasn’t even sure where to start. I could go to First National and look at the burned-out wreck. I had handled exactly four arson cases before, all in connection with insurance, and I knew the scene really wouldn’t tell me anything. I didn’t need to determine if Pierce committed the arson. I just had to find him.
    Pierce had killed a cop and hurt his family. Right now every cop in the Houston metro area was champing at the bit, hoping to put a bullet in Pierce’s handsome head. I bet