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before we make the determination to bring in one of our PIs. We normally like to think there’s some reason to suspect fraud before we send somebody out to make sure. Otherwise, we’d just be fishing on all our claims, and we’d have to go into the investigation business full-time, which we’re not prepared to do. We’re a law firm.”
    I sat with that for a moment. “That answers the general question of why, Amy. But not the ‘Why me?’ part.”
    â€œWell, frankly, don’t be mad if I’m being presumptuous, but you’ve mentioned yourself that you were thinking about going back and looking for work. I thought you might be motivated about this, and besides, it might be good for you. Anyway, in the normal course of things, the firm would be spending a good deal of money over the next couple of weeks doing background on Mayhew’s condition. We eventually might decide to put a tail on him, which will cost the firm more money, regardless of the outcome. But we may not, either. It depends on the preliminary findings.”
    â€œYou want me to check.”
    She paused. “I’ve got to be clear that I’m not officially speaking for the firm, Wyatt. I’m not hiring you or even offering to hire you. I’m saying that in this case I’d be open to doing things a little bit backwards because it might save the firm considerable funds and man hours. If you told me you’d try to discover positive evidence of fraud in Mr. Mayhew’s claim, I could be persuaded to put the preliminary legal steps on hold for a short while.”
    â€œAnd if I found something conclusive?”
    â€œIn that case, we could discuss some kind of reward contingency.”
    â€œI’ll start tomorrow.”
    â€œWow. Great. Just like that? You’re sure?”
    â€œI’m sure.”
    â€œYou won’t change your mind?”
    â€œI won’t.”
    â€œOkay, then.” She paused. “You ought to try to be a little more decisive, you know. Nobody likes a waffler.”
    â€œI’m working on it. Meanwhile,” I said, “tell me what I need to know.”

    I graduated from the University of San Francisco in 1989 and both because I craved life experience and because I didn’t have any better ideas of what I was going to do for the rest of my life, I joined the army to see the world. Shortly thereafter, I got caught up in Desert Storm and sent to Iraq, which wasn’t the part of the world I’d had in mind. As an English major with no job skills except the ability to write in complete sentences with verbs and nouns and other parts of speech in more or less the right order, I got assigned to the criminal investigation division to write up administrative and disciplinary reports.
    Boring as the reports were, my experience with the CID was my first adult exposure to humanity’s dark side. It’s not something the army liked to advertise, but because of the tension, brutality, fatigue, emotion, crowding, and trauma to the human psyche, theaters of war are fertile breeding grounds for serious criminal behavior—predominantly rape and its variants but also murder and mayhem, theft, and general depravity. This is not breaking news, but it was to me. After a while, I got promoted and started to interview suspects, to go out on investigations. For the first time in my life, work was important and exciting—a rush, sometimes with an actual element of danger.
    In my years with the CPS, many of the calls to the homes of abused children provided a similar buzz, and I came to realize that in some sense this feeling was my fix. In the five months since I’d been forced to quit, between my revenge fantasies and my anger issues, I’d given a lot of thought to the kind of professional path I eventually wanted to put myself on if I ever got myself out of the personal Dumpster. And one trait stood out. No matter what the eventual new