[b]Pope:[/b]

He laughs in surprise, his extreme expressions magnify his shock in that moment, and he wipes an eye. “Forgive me. You just sounded like an undercover Fed.” It’s not an accusation, he doesn’t think you might be one, he just thinks that it’s [i]very funny[/i]. 

… Probably.

[b]White:[/b]

The bags also contained the tossed papers from Rudy’s desk, the storage brick from his desktop, a laptop, stuff like that. The brick and the laptop are totalled by the fall, but the paper is pretty resilient to that kind of thing.

White might want to get somewhere clear before going through it. Already there’s the sound of fire engine and police sirens as the smoke starts to belch out in clumps from the broken window Red came out of. 

The bootprints don’t lead out of the building, at all. They go down into the apartment directly below Rudy’s, and then the thermal vision is obscured. News reports will reveal this is where the fire started, and that it traveled up into Rudy’s suite. Privacy laws prevent tenancy records being easily accessible (keyword; easily) but what you [i]can[/i] check readily is real-estate listings.

The apartment hasn’t been listed for years. Decades, maybe. Possibly for as long as Rudy himself lived there. 

Whoever did it makes it out of the building with the rest of the legitimate tenants, hidden in the crowd of people wearing their freshly changed-into civilian clothes as their wetworks uniform - uniforms? - go up in flames with the rest of the evidence.

You still learned something here, and got a lead out of this. This means it wasn’t Chase Black, and it wasn’t a contractor. This was someone’s long-standing contingency plan.