Evil Breeding

toward Dr. Stanton’s grave. Wagging his tail and tossing me a conspiratorial glance, he almost danced on the ground in front of the stone monument.
    “Happy birthday,” I said. “Thank you for my perfect dog.”
    Then Rowdy and I bolted for the car. After meandering along roads and avenues with names that sounded more suburban than mortuary, we neared the main gate. It’s an area with a lot of foot traffic. People chain their bikes to the bike rack there, and there’s a bus stop nearby. I’d been driving at a respectfully slow speed, but now I slowed to a crawl and watched carefully for pedestrians. I saw one, too, one I recognized almost immediately as the art student from the Gardner museum. I’d last seen him on his knees in prayer before what the papers always called the “controversial” John Singer Sargent portrait of Isabella Stewart Gardner. The thought crossed my mind that today, the art student might have been making a pilgrimage to her grave.
    The incident would have remained just that, incidental, had it not been for the murder. I heard the story the next morning on WBUR, the National Public Radio station in Boston that broadcasts mainly news, commentaries, interviews, call-in shows, and many other features that have nothing to do with dogs, but are nonetheless generously and—in my dog-biased, Dodgian view—unjustly supported by grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. I was idly sipping coffee, glancing through the paper, and listening to NPR out of the comer of my ear when I heard the word Gardner and caught a note of suppressed excitement in the announcer’s voice. The body of an unidentified man had been found only minutes earlier in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge. A local bird-watching group had made the discovery. According to one member of the group, the body had been propped up against the Gardner family vault, the final resting place of Isabella Stewart Gardner.
    During her lifetime, the flamboyant and eccentric Isabella Stewart Gardner was big news in Boston. She persuaded the zookeeper to let her walk a young lion on a leash. Her friends included Anna Pavlova and Nellie Melba. She wore a purple velvet robe copied after one owned by Marie Antoinette. The robbery had reawakened the legend. The Boston papers found frequent excuses for articles about Mrs. Gardner: the anniversary of the theft, the perpetration of a comparable crime anywhere, or the recovery of stolen art in some distant part of the world. The theme of these stories was always the same: We should remain hopeful! The stolen art might yet turn up, and the criminals might yet be identified. Federal and state statutes of limitations had expired, but the U.S. attorney could still charge the robbers if the art had crossed state lines within the past five years; the robbers might yet be punished.
    Although the murder’s only connection with the robbery was the finding of a body at the Gardner vault, a local NPR reporter launched into a mandatory recap of the facts of the heist: thieves disguised as Boston police officers, guards who’d disobeyed orders by opening the museum door, the loss of thirteen pieces, all uninsured, the probable value of the stolen Vermeer and the three Rembrandts, the five-million-dollar reward.
    When I switched from radio to television, a photo of Vermeer’s The Concert filled the screen. It vanished, to be replaced by the John Singer Sargent portrait of Mrs. Gardner. Then a live camera showed a slick-looking male reporter posed in front of a familiar scene: the main gate to Mount Auburn. “We have just been informed that the man whose body was found this morning here at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge has been identified.” He spoke a name that startled me. “Authorities are working on the assumption that this was not, repeat not, a natural death.” After a pause, he added, with a smug note of happy finality, “James Mc-Dougall reporting. Live at Mount Auburn Cemetery!”
    A sudden flash of horror crossed the reporter’s face as his closing words registered. Indeed, live at the cemetery. As Peter Motherway, among others, was not.
     

Chapter Ten
     
    BESIDES BEING MY next-door neighbor and an anomalously beefy long-distance runner, Kevin Dennehy is a Cambridge police lieutenant. With no success, I tried to reach him at headquarters and at home. I toyed with the thought of searching for him at Mount Auburn, but decided that the area around the Gardner vault would be sealed