“If the reason he’s on the phone with Washington is the Vandersteel case, there’s no way he’s going to tell you,” Marino says as if he knows my husband better than I do. “He could be talking to Interpol, which might explain the call I got—that’s assuming news of the case here has shot up the chain already, and if so I’d like to know how the hell that’s possible. But Benton won’t tell you shit unless it suits his purposes because right now he’s the Feds. And yeah, you’re married to them. Or maybe worse? He is.”

“This is several times now that you’ve mentioned Interpol.” I’m not interested in hearing his disparagements of Benton, the FBI or anything else at the moment. “Why?” I ask.

“They didn’t call you too, did they?” Marino glances at me, his brown eyes glaring and bloodshot.

“No.” I’m mystified. “Why would they and about what?”

MARINO GUNS A RIGHT on Harvard Street, and the route he takes basically will retrace my steps from my earlier ill-fated walk.

Only now it’s completely dark, and the stars and quarter moon are blotted by a hot haze that for days has been filmy over the horizon, intensifying the colors at twilight from pastel tints to wide brushstrokes of gaudy orange, magenta and deep rose.

“Let me start at the beginning and spell it out,” Marino says. “I was actually on my way to the CFC.”

“What for?” I look at his wide-eyed flushed face as he streaks past apartment buildings, a bookshop, a bank, a café and other businesses that form blurred chains of light on either side of the two-lane road.

“Because Lucy and I were trying to see if there’s anything else we could figure out about the bogus nine-one-one call made by someone using voice-changing software,” he says, and that addresses at least some of what I’ve been wondering.

Unsurprisingly, Lucy picked up on the subtle but odd uniformity of what we suspect is an altered voice on the audio clip. She must have said something to Marino and also to Benton.

“She’s in her lab,” Marino says. “Or she was right before I called you.”

“Then what?” I ask him as we speed through the middle of the Harvard campus. “You’re with her at the CFC, and what happened next?”

There are more people out now, on the sidewalks, walking through the Yard. But certainly it’s nothing close to the usual crowds, the typical hustle and bustle of Cambridge, which I’ve always said is a concentrated version of any huge metropolis in the world and all the problems and advantages that go with it.

“Then I get the call from Clay,” Marino says.

“Do I know him?”

“Tom Barclay.”

“The investigator?”

“Yeah.”

“I see,” I reply, and this changes things.