All Shots

his spleen removed. The motorcycle, by the way, was a Harley. The police recovered it from Appleton Street, where Grant had parked it in a permit-only spot. He obviously wasn’t a Cambridge resident, and he didn’t have a visitor’s permit. You’d think he’d have learned about Cambridge parking, wouldn’t you? Not that it mattered. The police confiscated the Harley before it was ticketed, and dead men aren’t in a position to complain about the draconian nature of Cambridge ticketing and towing. They’re the only ones who aren’t.
    I still didn’t understand the chronology until the next day, Thursday, when I went to Zach Ho’s house for a debriefing with Al Papadopoulos—which is to say, Moses or Adam or, if Gabrielle had anything to do with it, my honorary cousin-to-be. When Zach Ho called to invite me, he didn’t use the word debriefing', rather, he talked about the need to impose rationality on emotionally charged life experiences. He also mentioned trauma and healing. I didn’t mind. I’m used to Rita, who is a clinical psychologist as well as my tenant and friend, and who is always using words like catharsis when all she really means is a good cry. Zach Ho wasn’t a shrink, but he was a doctor and a special doctor at that, one who practiced medicine in the third world as well as in Cambridge and one who worked to prevent war as well as to repair the injuries it caused. I knew about him because I’d used Google and some other Web resources. As I’ve mentioned, a fondness for the Web and for databases was something that Holly the statistician and I had in common. In a way, we’d taken a common approach to researching the identity of the murder victim. The difference was that she’d used databases about human beings, whereas I had delved into a database of Alaskan malamutes. She’d discovered that the victim was actually named Holly Winter. I’d been on the trail of Graham Grant. She’d succeeded where I’d failed, but she’d made the mistake of extrapolating beyond the limits of her data. She, a statistician!
    So, as I was saying, Zach Ho invited me to his house. The invitation did not extend to my dogs, even to Rowdy, who was, after all, a hero. Zach apologized and explained. His worst asthma attacks had all been triggered by dogs. As Mel-lie had failed to mention, whenever he entered her house, he had to take medication beforehand and had to wear a mask while he was there.
    “So that’s why your, uh, house sitter left her dog with Mellie,” I said.
    All he said was yes. The topic of his, uh, house sitter was obviously an awkward one for him.
    When I arrived in the vicinity of Dr. Ho’s house, I took even more care than usual to make sure that I wasn’t parking where the city would tow Steve’s van. Neither side of the street was due for cleaning, and there obviously wasn’t a snow emergency, but around here, you never know what new excuse there’ll be to kidnap your vehicle and hold it for ransom: routinely scheduled aerial photography, a march and rally to protest the presence of Thomas the Tank Engine in a local preschool, anything. I was especially eager to avoid drawing attention to the van because I’d done a temporary and probably illegal repair job on Rowdy’s window, as I thought of it, with plastic and duct tape, and I didn’t want Steve to arrive home to find that his precious rattletrap had been officially declared unfit for the road. It was, in fact, my hope that Rowdy had delivered the coup de grace to the rattletrap and that when Steve discovered that the cost of repairing the window exceeded the value of the van, he’d finally ditch it. But the choice had to be his.
    My previous experience with the interior of Zach Ho’s house had, of course, consisted of peering through a glass door and seeing Holly Winter’s body on the floor of the ransacked kitchen. This time, when I entered through the front door, I felt ridiculously surprised to find myself in the kind of bright, pleasant room that the warm yellow of the exterior and the prosperous neatness of the house and yard should have led me to expect. The fabric blinds visible from the outside let in the late-afternoon light and softened the cold illumination provided by the compact fluorescent bulbs of the lamps. As in Mellie’s house, the living room occupied the front, but Zach Ho’s living room had bare, shiny hardwood floors and two large aquariums with colorful fish. His furniture was simple and modern,