Evil Breeding

dog, Rowdy would nonetheless do his best to protect me if he understood that I was under threat. But he wouldn’t understand a gun. And he’d be as vulnerable to bullets as I was.
    From inside the cemetery, I heard a muffled, distant cry. The voice was a woman’s. Was she weeping? Calling out? Pleading for help? All that reached me was a single high-pitched note, all the more heartrending for its brevity. Without hesitation, I reached into my pocket, found a nylon slip collar, and slid it over Rowdy’s head. Transferring the leash to the slip collar, I removed Rowdy’s buckle collar with its jingling tags. After cramming the leather collar into my pocket, I unlooped the chain and eased open the gate as slowly and cautiously as if I’d been afraid of waking the dead. When I’d created an opening just wide enough for Rowdy and me to slip through, I paused for a second. The cry did not repeat itself. I heard no footsteps. Rowdy was silent. I heard no change in his breathing. His white tail was waving lazily over his back. Otherwise, he was almost motionless. Although I could see him only dimly, I felt his eyes on me. Nothing escapes a dog’s keen nose and acute ears. If Rowdy perceived the presence of anyone but me, he showed no sign of it.
    I shortened his leash, gave him a light, bracing pat on the shoulder, then slipped through the barely open gate, Rowdy on my heels. With almost unbearable impatience, I inched the gate shut and replaced the chain as best I could. Now that Rowdy and I were actually on the grounds of Mount Auburn, I understood the folly of my plan for round-the-clock visits. By daylight, Mount Auburn was a visitor’s delight. But in the dark, what lay beneath the sod were not the deep, thick roots of old trees, but the decomposed and decomposing bodies of dead people. The monuments that rose around me, no matter how fanciful, moving, or even amusing by day, were stripped by darkness of their brave effort to make light of death. Simple, grand, angular, reverent, picturesque, all were now tombstones, nothing more.
    Again, there was a soft, muffled cry. It came from somewhere to my right. At what distance? Not close. Not far. A paved road crossed in front of the gate. Another stretched in front of us. Rowdy and I moved straight ahead. In seconds, we reached an intersection, where Rowdy made a quick, eager move away from my left side. I assumed he wanted to take the lead. In a way, he did. It was Rowdy who came upon the uniformed body, Rowdy who sniffed it, Rowdy who raised his great head to me in confident expectation. Rowdy trusted me. He suffered from the humbling illusion that I would know what to do.
     

Chapter Twenty-eight
     
    I’D FINALLY FOUND a Mount Auburn guard. I fumbled at his wrist for a pulse. Finding none, I forced myself to put my fingers on his throat. Although I knew that Peter Motherway had been garroted, I’d avoided dwelling on the details of how he must have died. Consequently, it took me a second to interpret the thin, sickeningly unnatural indentation in the bristly flesh. When I did, my hand sprang away all of its own accord, as if my fingers had brushed a hot iron. The reaction was instantaneous and involuntary. This, I told myself, was an unconditioned reflex, a primitive reaction from deep in the brain. Stimulus: sudden and unexpected physical contact with a dead body. Response: a startle of revulsion. Once my hand had fled, I felt pity. There was something pitiful about the stubble on the man’s neck, about dying while needing a shave. Still, I found myself compulsively rubbing my hand on my sleeve before I reached out to hold Rowdy.
    I knew I had to touch the body again. Were the Mount Auburn guards armed? If this one had carried a weapon, it would be foolish not to take it. But all I found was a walkie-talkie of some sort, a little box clipped to his belt. It felt like a small radio with a series of buttons and a square of plastic mesh that must have covered the speaker. I had no idea how to operate the gadget. Tinkering blindly, I could set off the kind of brassy squawk you hear in police cruisers and taxis; in trying to rouse help, I’d broadcast my presence. In case the guard had dropped a weapon when he’d been attacked, I searched the ground around the body. All I found was a little plastic bottle with the distinctive shape of a nasal-spray dispenser. The poor man had apparently been killed while defending himself against a stuffy nose.
    If the