The Halloran rooming house is still smoking when Investigator Edda Voss arrives at dawn. Eight survivors sit on the curb under scratchy blankets, faces black with soot. The landlord's ledger lists nine tenants, nine rent stubs, nine keys collected every New Year. Edda counts the survivors twice. Eight. So where is the ninth tenant, and which clue does she chase first?

Edda steps over the warm threshold and into the burned house. The fire crew waves her back, but she pushes upstairs to room 9. The door is locked. She tries each of the eight keys the landlord saved. None of them fit. The ninth key is gone.

Edda kicks the door hard, twice, and it bursts open. Room 9 is barely touched by the fire. The bed is made. There's a thick layer of dust on everything, except for one clean square on the desk, where something was just taken away.

Edda lifts the edge of the clean square and finds a photo slid under the desk pad, missed by whoever grabbed the rest. A young woman, laughing, arms around all eight survivors when they were younger. On the back, in pen: 'Dahlia, the night before.'

Edda turns the photo over to the survivors. 'Tell me what happened to her, or I arrest all eight of you for the fire.' They cave. Dahlia was their friend, dead of a fever eleven years ago. Too poor to bury her right, they hid her and kept her room a shrine. The fire was just an old wire, no killer at all.