Port Mortuary (2010)

“Plus, I think everybody was a little preoccupied with some guy dropping dead,” Marino states the obvious.

I look out at military housing on a poorly lit road, at aircraft that are bright and big like planets in the overcast dark. I can’t make sense of what I’m being told. I’m surprised the greyhound didn’t stay close to his master. Maybe the dog panicked or there’s some other reason no one noticed him.

“The dog’s bound to show up,” Marino goes on. “No way people in an area like that are going to ignore a greyhound wandering around by itself. My guess is one of the neighbors or a student has it. Unless it’s possible the guy was whacked and the killer took the dog.”

“Why?” I puzzle.

“Like you’ve been saying, we need to keep an open mind,” he answers. “How do we know that whoever did it wasn’t watching nearby? And then at an opportune moment, took off with the dog, acting like it belonged to him?”

“But why?”

“It could be evidence that would lead to the killer for some reason,” he suggests. “Maybe lead to an identification. A game. A thrill. A souvenir. Who the hell knows? But you’ll notice from the video clips at one point the leash was taken off him, and guess what? It hasn’t showed up. It didn’t come in with the headphones or the body.”

The dog’s name is Sock. On the iPad’s display, the man is walking and clucking his tongue, telling Sock it’s time to go. “Let’s go, Sock,” he coaxes in a pleasant baritone voice. “Come on, you lazy doggie, it’s time for a walk and a shit.” I detect a slight accent, possibly British or Australian. It could be South African, which would be weird, a weird coincidence, and I need to get South Africa off my mind. Focus on what’s before you, I tell myself as Sock jumps off the couch, and I notice he has no collar. Sock— a male, I assume, based on the name—is thin, and his ribs show slightly, which is typical for greyhounds, and he is mature, possibly old, and one of his ears is ragged as if once torn. A rescue retired from the racetrack, I feel sure, and I wonder if he has a microchip. If so and if we can find him, we can trace where he’s from and possibly who adopted him.

A pair of hands enters the frame as the man bends over to loop a red slip lead around Sock’s long, tapered neck, and I notice a silver metal watch with a tachymeter on the bezel and catch the flash of yellow gold, a signet ring, possibly a college ring. If the ring came in with the body, it might be helpful, because it might be engraved. The hands are delicate, with tapered fingers and light-brown skin, and I get a glimpse of a dark-green jacket and baggy black cargo pants and the toe of a scuffed brown hiking boot.

The camera fixes on the wall over the couch, on wormy chestnut paneling and the bottom of a metal picture frame, and then a poster or a print rises into view as the man stands up, and I get a close look at the reproduction of a drawing that is familiar. I recognize da Vinci’s sixteenth-century sketch of a winged flapping device, a flying machine, and I think back a number of years— when was it exactly? The summer before 9/11. I took Lucy to an exhibition at London’s Courtauld Gallery, “Leonardo the Inventor,” and we spent many entranced hours listening to lectures by some of the most eminent scientists in the world while studying da Vinci’s conceptual drawings of water, land, and war machines: his aerial screw, scuba gear, and parachute, his giant crossbow, self-propelled cart, and robotic knight.

The great Renaissance genius believed that art is science and science is art, and the solutions to all problems can be found in nature if one is meticulous and observant, if one faithfully seeks truth. I have tried to teach my niece these lessons most of her life. I have repeatedly told her we are instructed by what is around us if we are humble and quiet and have courage. The man I am watching on the small device I hold in my hands has the answers I need. Talk to me. Tell me. Who are you, and what happened?

He is walking toward the door that is deadbolted with the slide lock pulled across, and the perspective abruptly shifts, the camera angle changes, and I wonder if he has adjusted the position of the headphones. Maybe he didn’t have them completely over his ears and now he’s about to turn on music as he heads out. He walks past something mechanical and crude-looking, like a grotesque sculpture made of metal scrap. I pause on the image but can’t get a good look at whatever it is, and I decide that when I have the luxury of time I’ll replay the clips as often as I want and study every detail carefully, or if need be, get Lucy to forensically enhance the images. But right now I must accompany the man and his dog to the wooded estate not even a block from Benton’s and my house. I must witness what happened. In several minutes he will die. Show me and I’ll figure it out. I’ll learn the truth. Let me take care of you.

The man and the dog go down four flights of stairs in a poorly lit stairwell, and footsteps sound light and quick against uncarpeted wood, and the two of them emerge on a loud, busy street. The sun is low, and patches of snow are crusty on top with black dirt, reminding me of crushed Oreo cookies, and whenever the man glances down, I see wet pavers and asphalt, and the sand and salt from snow removal. Cars and people move jerkily and lurch as he turns his head, scanning as he walks, and music plays in the background, Annie Lennox on satellite radio, and I hear only what is audible outside the headphones, what is being picked up by the mike inside the top of the headband. The man must have the volume turned up high, and that’s not good, because he might not hear someone come up behind him. If he’s worried about his security, so worried that he double-locks his apartment door and carries a gun, why isn’t he worried about not hearing what is going on around him?

But people are foolish these days. Even reasonably cautious people multitask ridiculously. They text-message and check e-mail while driving or operating other dangerous machinery or while crossing a busy street. They talk on their cell phones while riding bicycles and while Rollerblading, and even while flying. How often do I tell Lucy not to answer the helicopter phone; doesn’t matter that it’s Bluetooth-enabled and hands-free. I see what the man sees and recognize where he’s walking, on Concord Avenue, moving at a good clip with Sock, past redbrick apartment buildings and the Harvard Police Department, and the dark-red awning of the Sheraton Commander Hotel across the street from the Cambridge Common. He lives very near the Common, in an older apartment building that has at least four floors.

I wonder why he doesn’t take Sock into the Common. It’s a popular park for dogs, but he and his greyhound continue past statues and cannons, lampposts, bare oak trees, benches, and cars parked at meters lining the street. A yellow Lab chases a fat squirrel, and Annie Lennox sings “No more I-love-yous… I used to have demons in my room at night… “ I am the man’s eyes and ears at the time the headphones are recording, and I have no reason to suspect he knows about the hidden camera and mike or that any such thing is on his mind at all.

I don’t get the sense he has a dark plan or is spying as he walks his dog. Except that he has a Glock semiautomatic pistol and eighteen rounds of nine-millimeter ammunition under his green jacket. Why? Is he on his way to shoot someone, or is the gun for self-protection, and if so, what did he fear? Maybe it was a habit of his, a normal routine to walk around armed. There are people like that, too. People who don’t think twice about it. Why did he grind the serial number off the Glock, or did someone else do it? It enters my mind that the hidden recording devices built into his headphones might be an experiment of his or a research project. Certainly Cambridge and its surrounds are the mecca of technical innovations, which is one of the reasons the DoD, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Harvard, and MIT agreed to establish the CFC on the north bank of the Charles River in a biotech building on Memorial Drive. Maybe the man was a graduate student. Maybe he was a computer scientist or an engineer. I watch what is on the iPad’s display, abrupt, shaky images of Mather Court apartments, a playground, Garden Street, and the tilted, worn headstones of the Old Burying Ground.

In Harvard Square, his attention fixes on the Crimson Corner newsstand, and he seems to think of walking in that direction, perhaps to buy a paper from the overstocked selection that Benton and I love. This is our neighborhood, where we prowl for coffee and ethnic food, and papers and books, ending up with take-out and armloads of wonderful things to read that we pile on the bed on weekends and holidays when I’m home. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal, and if one doesn’t mind news a day or two old, there are fat papers from London, Berlin, and Paris. Sometimes we find La Nazione and L’espresso, and I read to us about Florence and Rome, and we look at ads for villas to rent and fantasize about living like the locals, about exploring ruins and museums, the Italian countryside and the Amalfi Coast.

The man pauses on the crowded sidewalk and seems to change his mind about something. He and Sock trot across the street, on Massachusetts Avenue now, and I know where they are headed, or I think I do. A left on Quincy Street, and they are walking more briskly, and the man has a plastic bag in his hand, as if Sock isn’t going to