When they checked they discovered the pump, the wiring to the lights, everything was fried, and I envision the gray 30-amp breaker subpanel on the back of the house, 50 amp, to the left of the door that led into the kitchen. I tell Benton I’m fairly certain the pool was the only thing on it, and he replies that the breaker was thrown.

Then I ask about the main breaker panel outside the house. Was anything thrown in there, and he says no. This suggests the possibility of a transient high-voltage electrical source that came in contact with Briggs or the pool while he was swimming. And this sounds much too similar to what we’ve been saying about the Vandersteel case.

“Something that was there but isn’t now,” I follow what Benton is considering. “Something like manufactured lightning—or a directed-energy weapon, a DEW in other words.”

“Imagine if the water became electrified, and you have a pacemaker,” Benton adds, and my thumb finds his wedding band, a simple platinum one, as I’m reminded of Marino’s refusal to wear jewelry because it’s dangerous.

I ask if Briggs had on anything else metal. Was there anything on his person or around him that could have completed the circuit if he’d come in contact with an electrical source?

“Just the bracelet,” Benton says. “He wasn’t wearing his wedding band or his dog tags.”

“He wouldn’t have been. He always took them off when he swam. The last time I stayed with them he’d place them in a dish on the kitchen table,” I recall.

“That’s where they are in photographs I’ve seen.”

“Everything seems pretty normal.” I stop again to shake another small rock out of my shoe. “He did what he usually does, and yet you instantly suspect foul play? I don’t care that he’s a three-star general with a top-level security clearance. Even spies can drown or have a heart attack. What did you say that got your employer sufficiently interested to mobilize this fast?”

“Literally all it took was one phone call,” and Benton brings up the one he got from Washington, D.C., as we were leaving the Faculty Club.

IT WASN’T HIS DIRECTOR or the attorney general on the line.

My husband was being spoofed. He says he got the same type of call that Marino had gotten minutes earlier, and I don’t know how Benton found out about that. Possibly Lucy told him. But as I replay what happened as we were leaving our untouched dinners, I realize that Marino was on the phone telling me about Interpol contacting him even as Benton answered his own bogus call.