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ago while working an undercover job at a Canadian tobacco plant. They were sending millions of cigarettes to the U.S., knowing they’d be smuggled back into Canada through a Native reserve, all in an effort to undermine a government tax increase that was cutting into their lung-blackening, cancer-causing profits. For my trouble, I got shot in the arm. MacAdam, then an Ontario Provincial Police officer, was also shot saving my life and ended up paralyzed from the waist down. Just after New Year’s he told me he was moving to Toronto, where programs, services and life in general were more accessible than in rural Trenton, and I hired him to help run our agency, World Repairs. With all my absences from the office, we needed someone to hold the fort. I also needed to help Colin in any way I could. Guilt attaches to Jews like barnacles and it had been my mistake that led to him being shot. But it was proving to be a good hire. He had been taking computer courses throughout his recovery and learned quickly how to search and maintain our databases. He had terrific contacts at the OPP and, through them, with officers in other forces,which helped us track down witnesses and defendants in our cases.
    “I’ve prepared your package,” Colin said. Seeing his upper body only, his wasted legs hidden by the desk, you’d think he was a gymnast or hockey player. His arms were big and well defined; his neck muscles formed a neat pyramid under his shirt.
    “You have thirty laser copies of David Fine’s most recent picture,” he said.
    “Ron Fine postered the area when he was down there,” I said. “No leads came from it.”
    “You’ll have better luck. You also have a sheet with contact info for Detective Gianelli in Brookline, for Dr. Charles Stayner, David’s boss at the hospital, and his roommate, Sheldon Paull.”
    “Email Sheldon and see if he can meet me at the apartment at lunchtime,” I said.
    “Got it. How long do you think you’ll be gone?”
    “A few days at least. Maybe a week. Where am I staying again?”
    “Jenn recommended the Sam Adams House on Commonwealth Avenue. All its contact info is in an email I forwarded to you.”
    “Great. Where is Jenn, anyway? I wanted to say goodbye.”
    “She should be in by now. She’s being deposed on the stuntman this morning, nine-thirty to noon at the mediation centre, but she said she’d stop by here first.”
    The stuntman was a beauty of a case we had just finished. Stefan Skrt, credited as Steve Skerritt, had been one of the best in the industry, but when he’d gotten too old to get insured anymore, he put his long-honed skills to work against the insurers. He found he could earn a handsome living getting hit by cars, which he did several times. Then he went for the prize,the big daddy, a Toronto Transit Commission bus that sent him on one of the most terrific pratfalls ever witnessed by a vehicle full of stunned commuters. They gasped in horror as the poor man was catapulted into the air by the force of the turning bus and was saved only by the fact that he landed in a pile of garbage and recycling on the curb outside a small apartment complex. A number of green plastic trash bags, a mattress and some corrugated cardboard broke his fall. Here was a chance to earn a settlement to last him the rest of his life. Everyone hated the TTC. Everyone had been subjected to the surliness of its drivers, or had seen viral video of ticket takers asleep in their booths or drivers texting while barrelling down Eglinton. The driver of the bus that hit the stuntman had that day’s tabloid on his lap as he made his sweeping turn. Half the riders would probably testify he was reading as he drove. Skerritt would have gotten away with millions had it gone to civil court. But it went to criminal court instead when we proved he was a fraud. We tracked all his previous cases, the ones against individual drivers as he honed his new craft with less dramatic accidents, earning high-five-