For several years afterward, I received mail from all over the world, asking for Sweeney’s contact information. People needed to get in touch, they’d had a similar experience—the light, the eyes, were the same. It was one of my most unwieldy fabrications. But it died down eventually. I’d written that story—all my P-I stories—at a time when things really could disappear. The Internet existed, but it wasn’t like it is today—a dragging weight, an inescapable record—and so even when I crept, I didn’t write with the fear that, years later, my words would crush and destroy me. I thought they’d exist as radio transmissions exist, beaming into space, vanishing into nowhere.

By now I was sedated by beer and could think more clearly about what message Lane, and of course it was Lane, was trying to send. If he simply wanted me fired, he could’ve gone straight to Mort, so why the printout on my desk? It was like he wanted me to tremble at how he could expose me.

I shredded the article into tiny white squares. The waiter swept them into his hand.

“Love letter?”

“My secret admirer.”

“Poor bastard.” He tossed the paper in my empty glass. “Another round?”

I pretended to think.

“Yes.”

6.

I was drunk, but I don’t remember noticing anything unusual when I got home.

I cracked a Miller and decided to watch the rest of Ray’s tapes, hoping to calmly zone out on dogs dashing through a coastal afternoon. But tape #4 opened on a carpeted staircase, the camera bouncing as Ray hurried to the basement. I could see his feet taking the stairs two at a time, and then realized that the strange tone on the tape, pure and sustained, like feedback, wasn’t some defect, it was the wail of an animal.

“It’s about three-thirty a.m.,” Ray narrated, “and we’ve been—” He almost slipped. “Christ, we’ve been woken up by that sound, can you hear it?”

Now he was in the basement, the wail penetrated my eardrum, and the camera fell out of focus as it adjusted to the light of the overhead bulbs. When it zeroed in again, I saw Romeo at the table, restraining one of the charcoal mutts.

“Hold on,” Ray said.

He set the camera on the tripod but didn’t zoom in on the table. Romeo and the dog were just a silhouette.

I checked the date. The animals had been under observation for twenty-two days.

Ray hurriedly prepared a sedative and injected the dog. Then he picked up the camera and we glided toward the table.

“It’s Rumsfeld,” he said, and focused on the dog’s front legs. The fur was gnawed away or stuck with blood to exposed flesh, glistening like raw chicken. “He did this to himself.”