“What?” Kletty yells back.

“They got to be scaring the shit out of the turtle, and they’re gonna blow the hell out of everything with their damn rotorwash!” Marino bellows. “They’re too fucking low!”

He opens the scene cases, and I climb up to have a word with Klemens, the commander of the marine unit, which is stationed at Burroughs Wharf, not far from the Coast Guard base and the New England Aquarium. At the top of the ladder a second firefighter whose name I can’t recall offers me his hand and I steady myself on the upper deck as it dips and rises in the heaving bay.

“It’s only going to get rougher, I’m afraid,” says the fireman, thickly built, with white hair clipped close to his scalp, a tattoo of a bear on his bulging left calf. “The sooner we get this done the better.”

Both men wear summer uniforms of navy cargo shorts and T-shirts, their portable radios slung over their shoulders. On a strap around Klemens’s neck is a remote steering station, what looks like a high-tech PlayStation console, that he can use from any area of the boat to steer its four jet engines when they’re running.

“I’m Jack.” The fireman with the bear tattoo reminds me we’ve met before. “The Sweet Marita, the trawler that burned up near Devils Back last year? A bad one.”

“Yes, it was.” A liquefied petroleum gas leak caused an explosion, and three people died. “How’s it going?” I ask Klemens.

“Too much of a carnival for my taste,” he says, and I do my best to ignore the uncanny sense of familiarity he always makes me feel.

Tall and rawboned, with sharp features, vivid blue eyes, and a mop of sandy hair, he looks exactly the way I imagine my father would have, had he lived to see his forties. When Klemens and I work cases together, I have to resist openly staring at him as if the most dominant figure from my childhood has come back from the dead.

“I’m afraid we’re attracting quite a crowd, Doc, and I know you don’t like that.” Klemens looks up, shielding his eyes with his hand. “Not a damn thing I can do about it, but at least this jerk’s backing off, so maybe we can hear again.”

We watch the helicopter ascend vertically, leveling off at about a thousand feet, and I wonder if the Coast Guard radioed the television news pilot and told him to gain altitude immediately. Or do we have the fire department to thank for it?

“Much better,” I agree. “But I wish it would buzz off.”

“It won’t.” The fireman named Jack scans the water with field glasses. “One hell of a story. Like capturing Nessie, and the media doesn’t even know the half of it yet.”

“What does the media know, exactly?” I ask him.

“Well, they know we’re out here, obviously, and the sooner we get this big boy back in the water, the better.”