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town.” He looked at me with a concerned little furrow between his eyes, and I suddenly understood. “Oh, I see. You’re worried because you think I might be...what did you call it just now? Incompetent?” I stood up. “You don’t have to worry. I knew exactly what I was doing.”
    His eyes sharpened as he rose to his feet along with me, and I saw him wondering precisely what I meant. Did I mean that I knew what I was doing at the bar, or that I knew about Miguel’s crimes all along and only pretended to the court to get myself out of trouble?
    I walked stiffly past him to the door and held it open. “Please excuse me, Connor Todd. I have to ask you to go now.”
    Sighing heavily, he came to the door, but he turned in the doorway to look down at me. “I’ll be back, Gavin. I have more questions and I think we have unfinished business between us.”
    I refused to look at him and he finally turned to leave. After I closed the door behind him, I went back to the sofa and leaned back, closing my eyes. Miguel was dead and was never coming back. I would have liked to have seen his body for myself, just to make sure, but I had to take their word for it.
    Contrary to popular belief, cremated remains are not ashes in the usual sense. After incineration the pieces of bone are swept out and pulverized by a machine to turn them into ashes. The weight of a human male is approximately four to five pounds . Miguel was gone, and his body had been cremated , pulverized, burned so completely, so utterly that nothing was left but bits of white bone and black ash. I hoped that it was true.
    I knew that Connor Todd thought I was aware of where Miguel had hidden the paintings he’d stolen. I was telling the truth when I said I had no idea. Miguel had never told me much about what he was doing. The two insurance detectives were partially right, though. It was true that if a person doesn’t realize what he’s doing is illegal, he can be found guilty only of a “mistake of fact,” as I was, and the court will usually dismiss the case. However, if he intentionally commits the act, it’s a “mistake of law” and those people are almost always found guilty and put in jail. I did the paintings for Miguel, and I knew I was creating perfect copies for him to replace the real art. Ergo …I was actually guilty.
    Two years before, when I first met Miguel, he’d been a successful art dealer and I was an artist, just starting out. My grandfather had arranged for me to show my work to a man who worked for Miguel, a man named Steven Oswald. He told my grandfather I was “brilliant” and “amazing” and a lot of other stuff I knew wasn’t true.
    The fact was that I had long ago realized that my only real talent lay in reproducing what I saw in someone else’s paintings. It was so simple, really. Art to me was an intricate pattern of colors. The reds, the blues, the yellows and greens, and all the secondary colors and the shades in between—I could literally see each one of them in a painting as a separate thing. All objects are made up of patterns of colors, and each color has its own unique shape. I could study a painting and look at it for hours, and I could distinguish each shape that went to make up the whole. Much like pixels in a photograph, I could see these patterns clearly in my head, so that, given a little time, it was simple enough for me to reproduce it.
    Original art, however, was beyond my capabilities. I enjoyed looking at a beautiful scene and painting it, but the work came out mediocre at best. The patterns didn’t reappear for me in nature, only in paintings.
    My ability to copy, though, that was another story, because it was just one of those weird Autism things. Some people said Asperger’s kids couldn’t see the forest for the trees, but I was very damn good at seeing the trees. When I was a little kid, I used to love letting sand from the sandbox run through my fingers. Each grain of sand looked like tiny,