The picture blinked, and now the camera framed a table and an IV stand. Romeo held Rumsfeld in his arms. The sedative had kicked in. He laid the mutt on the table. Ray came into the shot in a white lab coat, carrying an electric razor. Romeo exposed the dog’s neck and Ray shaved off a patch of fur, exposing white flesh. Ray pinched some skin and punctured it with a needle, and over the next few minutes I watched as he drained some blood. Then he hooked a bag of the solution onto the stand and transfused it into the dog.

“We’ll know almost instantly if he can handle it,” said Ray, his voice bouncing off the concrete walls. “The solution makes matching unnecessary, so there shouldn’t be any agglutination, at least in theory.”

The solution flowed into the sleeping dog. I don’t know what I expected—for him to rouse, wolflike, and lunge for throats—but after the transfusion was complete, the vital signs were normal.

“I think we can proceed,” Ray said, and Romeo brought Cheney over.

When both dogs had been transfused, Ray turned to the camera.

“And now we wait,” he said, and the tape shuddered to black.

5.

I stayed up all night watching tapes #2 and #3. The footage was almost heartwarming.

“Off they go,” said Sunshine Ray, and Romeo set the dogs loose in the backyard. The trio galloped over dark-green grass, the camera clumsily seeking them as they pounced, collided, and rolled. Cut to the kitchen, where Romeo doled out rib bones and the dogs held them in their grins, tails erect as they trotted proudly across the tiled floor. Then it was back to the chase, the Florida sun flowing over their coats, before all three got tired at once and there was a long scene of them lazing in the living room, the strains of “Blue Hawaii” on a stereo, eyes fluttering shut.

Once I heard the workers outside, I realized it was morning. I went to bed for a few hours, then felt compelled to go in to the Bystander after lunch. My reporting was meant to be over, and any day now I expected Mort to call me into his office and ask for a draft. I had to show him at least part of something. I told myself I’d work on the story’s cornerstones—the biography of Dr. Kriss, the trial in Retreat, the investors’ tour in Arcade, the Pavel Firea interview—things that wouldn’t be altered by Ray and his dogs no matter what the final tapes revealed.

The story in its final form, in stark Bystander sentences, seemed near to my fingertips, just waiting to meet the keys. But when I got to my desk, I saw a sheet of paper.

CLOSE ENCOUNTER, read the headline. Whitney Chase, Special to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.