“I can only imagine his embarrassment and anger,” I add, but that’s not what’s got my attention.

I didn’t think of the teaching labs. It never occurred to me that anybody might be in them with the lights turned off.

“He certainly can be his own worst enemy.” I keep talking while my thoughts course along a different track.

Benton was up there watching, and during certain moments it couldn’t have been more obvious. I didn’t move away. I didn’t try to stop it, because I couldn’t, because I wanted it. I desired him in the midst of what was dead and horrible, when the urgency to feel alive can override what is logical.

“His rages, his insults; he was completely uncooperative,” Benton is saying, and I’m barely listening.

Luke asked me and I thought about it, wondered where and when as I entertained fleeting plans about how to get away with it. I said no and felt yes, what Benton accused me of in Vienna true.

“I had to leave the room at one point so I didn’t lose it with him.” What I hear Benton saying is he left the conference room upstairs.

He’s making sure I know what he did, checking on us from behind the darkened glass of a teaching lab.

“All because he had to start a relationship with a complete stranger in cyberspace, for Christ’s sake,” Benton says.

“Welcome to modern life,” I reply bleakly. “People do it every day.”

“No one I know.”

“Marino’s been as voraciously lonely and as empty as a black hole ever since Doris left, and that was almost longer ago than they were married. He’s had nothing but meaningless encounters ever since, most of them with women who hurt him, take advantage, are a horror show.”

“He’s certainly had his turn at being the horror show, the one doing the hurting,” Benton says, and I don’t argue with him.

I can’t possibly.

“No one I work with meets people on the goddamn Internet.” He makes that point again.

“That’s rather difficult for me to believe.”

“No one I work with is that stupid,” he says. “The Internet’s the new mafia. It’s what the FBI infiltrates undercover and spies on. We don’t go there for our fucking personal lives.”

“Well, Marino can be that stupid,” I reply. “He’s that lonely and misses his wife and misses being a cop and fears getting old and has no insight about any of it.”

I drive slowly along 6th Street, the Cambridge Police Department’s headquarters shrouded by rain, Art Deco lights glowing blue in the fog.

“What I don’t understand is how someone might think anything’s accomplished by making it appear he was tweeting a woman who clearly couldn’t have been alive while it was going on,” I then say.