There’s nothing of Briggs in situ as Ruthie discovered him because when the rescue squad arrived the first thing they did was pull him out of the water. That was about the extent of any heroic measures because it was quickly apparent that he was dead. In the pictures I’m looking at he’s faceup on the deck near the wooden side of the Endless Pool.

I recognize the outdoor furniture, the back of his Bethesda house and the yard, and it pains me to be so familiar with what I’m looking at, to think of all the stories. He’s wearing what he called his dogaflage, the baggy swim trunks his skilled-seamstress wife made for him a few years ago as a surprise. The green-and-brown camouflage pattern includes the cartoon dog from Family Guy, and Briggs had multiple pairs that traveled wherever he went.

It’s awful to see his strong vibrant face slack and suffused a deep purplish red with barely open eyes, and I can make out the impression left in his skin by the goggles he was wearing when he died. There’s foam protruding from his lips, and Mahant asks me about it.

“That’s what you see in drownings, right?”

“Sometimes.” I have to watch every word I say with bureaucrats like him.

I don’t want to read my casual comments in a report or hear them on the news. Already I can tell he’s not going to grasp much of what I talk about while he believes he knows more than I do about everything. Picturing him and his subordinates in certain areas of the CFC is worse than a bull in a china shop. They can do real damage that can’t be fixed.

“But you don’t just drown in a pool not much bigger than a hot tub,” Mahant says. “It’s what? Four feet deep? So obviously something happened.”

“You can drown in a puddle or a bowl of soup. But yes, something happened,” I agree with his banal assessment as his eyes glance at me in the mirror.

“And the sudsy stuff coming out of his mouth is from breathing, meaning he didn’t die instantly.”

“Almost nobody does,” I reply. “Unless you’re decapitated or blown to smithereens your brain takes a moment to shut everything down. That doesn’t mean he was conscious as he took an agonal breath or two and aspirated water. If that’s what happened, it could explain external foam in the mouth or nostrils.”

“You’re telling me if your heart stopped you could still breathe? Like for how long and how many breaths?”

“I don’t know. It would be a little difficult to research something like that,” I reply, and Wyeth smiles and stifles a laugh.