Evil Breeding

128, America’s Technology Highway. Ages ago, Waltham was Watch City, USA, but you’d never call it a Little Switzerland; these days, in downtown Waltham, there’s not much to watch.
    I was listening to “All Things Considered” on National Public Radio. The traffic thickened in the center of town. Soon after we passed City Hall, on the left, then the public library, on the right, an NPR segment ended. The announcement that followed raised my hackles. All I remember about the segment is that it had nothing to do with dogs. What remains clear in my mind is that funding for it had nonetheless been provided by the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation. Ggrrr! Catching Rowdy’s eye in my rearview mirror, I exclaimed, “A gross miscarriage of dog-loving justice! A crime against caninity! By rights, buddy boy, her whole damn eighty-five million should’ve gone to the dogs!”
    During the second my eyes had been off the road, a gigantic refrigerated truck had appeared just in front of the Mercedes. A block or two ahead, on the left, was a big supermarket; the truck would probably turn there to make its delivery. When it did, Jocelyn’s pickup would reappear. In accordance with Massachusetts custom, the teal minivan signaled for a left turn before veering right into the parking lot of a convenience store. Moving ahead, I could see that the tattooed driver of the Mercedes was again using his car phone. He hung up. Then, with no signal, he made an abrupt right turn. While I’d been fuming about NPR and the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, he’d presumably kept his eye on Jocelyn. The gigantic truck hadn’t blocked the view of her pickup after all, I decided. Rather, the driver of the Mercedes must have seen her turn into the parking lot of this fast-food restaurant.
    It was one I’d visited before, mainly because—surprise!— it was near or on the way to various hotbeds of dog activity. Leah and I sometimes took the dogs to obedience matches and breed-handling classes at the nearby Waltham Boys and Girls Club, or followed the scenic Route 117 to dog-training classes and seminars in towns west of 128. Stopping at the fast-food place had become a habit for the usual reason: dogs. It used to be that if you had a dog in the car when you went to the drive-up window, you’d get a free dog biscuit along with your food. Even after the dog treats were discontinued, I kept on stopping there. Ah, the lasting power of intermittent positive reinforcement! Not that the results were all that positive. On the contrary, Rowdy and Kimi learned to expect cookies whenever we went to a drive-through anything, and would rattle their crates and yelp gleefully at ATMs. Little did my trusting dogs suspect that on most days my bank balance wasn’t enough to buy two dog treats.
    The Mercedes parked in a spot right near the restaurant’s main door. The driver got out and entered. I was puzzled. To reach the drive-through window, you had to go around to the back of the building, where you shouted your order through a microphone. Then you continued the circuit of the building and stopped at the window, where you paid, got your food, and failed to get free dog biscuits. When I hadn’t seen the black Ford pickup, I’d thought that Jocelyn must be in back of the building yelling her order into the microphone. So why was the guy going inside the restaurant?
    As it turned out, he entered the restaurant to order and devour enough burgers, fries, ice cream, and cold drinks to fill a large tray. But I’ve jumped ahead. In search of Jocelyn’s truck, I circled the parking lot, looked up and down Main Street and the side streets bordering the fast-food place, and saw no sign of the pickup. Damn! It must have been ahead of that semi after all. Yet the driver of the Mercedes hadn’t followed. Instead, he’d pulled into this fast-food joint. Why? The phone call? Had he received instructions to drop his surveillance? Passed on the task to someone else? Was it possible that he hadn’t been tailing Jocelyn at all?
    It was, I decided, useless for me to try to catch up with her. She had at least a five-minute head start, and I had no idea whether she’d taken Route 117 or Route 20. At Mount Auburn, she’d rejected my offer of sanctuary. Despite that dismissal and despite my increasing doubts about Jocelyn’s innocence, I’d done my best to see that she reached home without falling victim to the kind of fatal assault that had killed her husband. When I got