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wingtips that had no business up here.
    “Gene Rockfelder, Region 5, Vallejo.” He didn’t offer Roski his hand. “Walter, they say you’re very good. We’d like you to turn your attention over here.”
    “Nothing else on my plate just now,” Roski replied tightly. The man using his first name already made him clench his teeth.
    Roski followed him on foot in silence for over a minute. What he saw on the gravel wash was immediately self-evident and pained him deeply. The fire shelter had been knifed open to get a body out. The area should have been a safe zone. It was heavily graveled, and had probably been relatively clear of brush. But he saw that the gully heading down would have made quite a chimney.
    “What we need you to look at is a breach in the shelter. We think something ignited inside. The man should have known better. He had more than fifty jumps.”
    “How many jumps you got?” Nothing was as infuriating as an office-bound cocksucker dissing a real firefighter.
    The short man turned and stared hard at him. “Say what?”
    “Thank you for your assistance, sir. I’ll check the scene out.”
    Roski squatted down and studied what he could see of the tent floor, without touching anything. He’d seen a burned-out fire shelter only once before, but not as peeled back as this, and this was the new-generation design. He wondered if it might have an undiscovered flaw. With a ballpoint pen, he lifted a little flap of fabric. Yes, the inner foil and PVC appeared to have burned away before the outer Kevlar and foil.
    All of a sudden, the red blob of a laser pointer was orbiting an irregular object on the shelter floor. “Right there, Walter.” The light circled a mangled lump, like something rescued from the seabed.
    “Don’t do that,” Roski said irritably.
    “What?”
    “You heard me. I know my job. It’s amazing for a rube like me who’s way out in the counties, but true.”
    “Nothing intended, Walter.”
    Roski stood back up in a true rage, not sure what was eating him really, but unable to stop. “Report me for insolence, Tiny Tim. I love getting flak.”
    “You must be on edge today. I’ll let this go.”
    “You’re just a buzzing noise in my head. Go away.”
    “Weeping Jesus.”
    “But first, have your Fed pals yellow tape this area before they square-dance all over it. I’ll be back soon. Right now I’m staring a torcher square in the eye down at the heel of the fire. If you know what ‘heel’ means.”
    “Enjoy your short, unhappy tenure, cuz.”
    *
    “We don’t go to live in Ming-huong, no way,” Mrs. Qui Roh told him with animation. “Sorry—that’s Vietnamese for Chinatown. Chinatown all crammed full and mostly old Kuomintang people from 1950. You know, Chiang Kai-shek people. Monterey Park good for all Asians. We got one cousin live here before we come from camp in Galang Island—1987. We was boat people from Vietnam many years. Oh, that horrible camp, mister.” She shook her head as if trying to clear it of all memories. “Bad soldiers. Beat men and take girls. We not speak of it no more.”
    Her husband, Mr. Quan Roh, sat in a low, stiff chair in the corner of the room, turned half away from the discussion as if frozen in a kind of disdain for the world he was trapped in. Roh’s bustling and portly wife had been left to answer Jack Liffey’s questions alone with her broken English. The house in the low hills overlooking Monterey Park was an amalgam of Asia and America, soft sofas and low black lacquer tables, big Chinese jars and IKEA bookcases.
    “I really only need to know about your daughter,” Jack Liffey said gently, sipping at a delicate, handleless cup of tea. “I hear Sabine is a very smart girl. Is she named after someone in the family?” He was very careful to use the present tense.
    The woman waved both hands at him in horror. “No, no, Mr. Liff. Chinese people not do that. That big insult. Everybody got own name. Some people even got style name