I ’m sitting by the fireplace, as I told him I would be. This is in a café near the Mission District in San Francisco. I spot him straightaway because he looks so jumpy. He’s never talked to a journalist before. We give each other surreptitious nods. He sits down. He’s nice-looking, in his early 50s, with shaggy hair and tinted glasses.

“Don’t screw me over,” he says.

It’s about the first thing he says to me.

He stirs his coffee. “I don’t lead a life of crime, just so you know,” he says. “You probably don’t realize that.”

Then he tells me why he plotted to burn down the apartment building he owned.

The Mission has been a refuge for immigrants and low-income San Franciscans ever since the Spanish founded Mission Dolores in 1776. It’s also been gentrifying for ages—but never like this. The past few years have seen sustained tech-worker colonization. Property prices have skyrocketed, and something strange and terrible has started happening: a spate of mysterious fires. There were 45 of them in 2015 and 2016, displacing 198 people and killing three, including a child. Legal evictions in San Francisco are costly and difficult, and so a lot of locals have started wondering: Could there be a plot by landlord arsonists to clear out the district to make way for the tech people? In June 2016 a local politician, David Campos, went as far as to write in the San Francisco Examiner, “There is nothing I want more [than] to assure my constituents that arson is not a factor in these fires. Unfortunately, at this point, I cannot say this with certainty.”

One of the dead was Mauricio Orellana, a 40-year-old Salvadoran who worked at a moving company. There’s a theory why Orellana didn’t know flames were licking at his door. It’s that he was wearing his new headphones. That’s the last thing his friends remember about him—how happy he was to have saved up for them. Maybe that’s why he was oblivious to the screaming and the running, his neighbors throwing themselves and their dogs out the windows. The fire alarms might have been loud enough for him to hear over his music, but they weren’t working.

So Orellana found himself trapped in his tiny bedroom on the third floor of his apartment building on the corner of Mission and 22nd Streets, a big old wooden structure with a Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen below and rickety staircases and fire escapes above. He died on the evening of January 28, 2015.

When I visited the site of the fire, in December 2016, there was nothing left of the building, only a muddy, waterlogged crater with a vast new luxury-condo development right next door to it. It’s a great modernist slab called the Vida. Two-bedroom apartments there have reportedly gone for $7,499 a month, which isn’t unusually excessive for this city: It’s the most expensive place in the country to rent.

I became aware of a man standing next to me, gazing into the hole, too. He was wearing a waistcoat as flamboyant as a bullfighter’s. With his pencil mustache, he looked like Zorro.

“I used to come here for the Popeyes chicken,” he said. He told me he was Spanish—from the Pyrenees—but he wouldn’t tell me his name. “It was greasy stuff that would certainly kill you, but once a week was okay. On the first floor was a guy who’d sell me gizmos for my PC. He’s gone now, of course, with everybody else.” He paused. “There’s been a lot of fires around here lately. A lot of fires. Very interesting.”

And with that he was gone, like Zorro, and like Latino culture from the Mission.

A short time later, two local activists, Spike Kahn and Gabriel Medina, showed me the neighborhood. Medina works at the Mission Economic Development Agency (MEDA), an advocacy group for the Latino and low-income populations. We passed a store that sold “artisan pizza” and “button-up shirts for the timeless tomboy” and “wood-free ukuleles” and—well, you know.

“This is for the new people,” said Gabriel. We stepped on a paving stone that had a Mexican carving in homage to the district’s heritage.

“There is nothing I want more [than] to assure my constituents that arson is not a factor in these fires. Unfortunately, at this point, I cannot say this with certainty.” —David Campos of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors

“They recognize this is a Mexican neighborhood until someone dangles some money to do a luxury condo and suddenly it’s not so important it’s a Mexican neighborhood,” said Spike. “They like everything about them except for them.”

We headed south and reached another fire-gutted apartment building—the Graywood Hotel. This one was an SRO, a single-room-occupancy building for the transient-homeless population. It burned on June 18, 2016, displacing 77 people. Investigators called it an accident and blamed “discarded smoking materials.” As I stared at the charred walls, a passerby called out to me, “Was it arson or something?” Then he shrugged and answered his own question: “I guess nobody knows.”

When I’d arrived in town, my plan was to solve the mystery once and for all. I wanted to somehow unearth arsonist landlords, persuade them to talk, and unpack with them the thought process that led them to such a catastrophic decision. So far I’d had no luck. When I called David Campos, the local politician who’d written the intriguing San Francisco Examiner op-ed, he retreated from his boldest claims.

“I’m not saying there is arson,” he said. “The fire department tells me there isn’t. They haven’t found evidence of arson.”

“Have you come across any clues?” I asked.

“Nothing’s come up,” he said.

“Are there rumors?”

“There are comments,” he said. “Like with that fire that happened at the car-repair place.”

He meant the Rolling Stock tire-shop fire of November 8, 2015. It destroyed the shop and two adjacent apartment buildings, displacing 21 people. Fire investigators ruled this one an accident as well, most likely started by an electrical fault or, again, discarded smoking materials.

“The owner [James Albera] was sort of, ‘Hey! Now I guess we can go and build condos,’ ” Campos continued. “It was an odd comment that fed into the speculation.”

Later, I found Albera’s verbatim comments to the media: “It’s terrible. It’s been in the family since 1960.” And then, when asked what he planned to do next: “I’d like to go residential, with stores on the bottom.”

I e-mailed Albera several times to ask him about what Campos told me. Personally, I didn’t find his response to the fire suspicious. Even so, he didn’t reply.

The numbers cited by Campos and others—45 fires in two years—also weren’t necessarily as suspicious as they seemed. It turns out that 25 fires a year is about average for the Mission. But there’s a reason that arson is on everyone’s mind: While the number of fires has stayed steady, the value of the real estate in question has not. The 27 fires that burned in the Mission in 2006 caused $2.6 million in damage; the 22 fires in 2015 caused almost $15.6 million in damage.

I later spoke with the former head of the San Francisco Fire Department’s Arson Task Force, John Darmanin. He told me he didn’t know of any cases of arson explicitly tied to landlords wanting to get rich from gentrification but that the arson department was so overloaded and under-resourced that cases “do not get the level of professionalism and investigation that they deserve.” There were fires, he said, that “very well could have been arson, but we just didn’t have the manpower to devote to those cases.” I decided to continue my search.