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If people thought he was Muslim, maybe that has something to do with why he’s been murdered. Especially with Obama coming here and the fact that Nari met him at the White House last year. Since the marathon bombings there’s a lot of sensitivity around here about jihadists, about loser extremists. Maybe we’re dealing with a vigilante who’s taking out people he thinks should die.”
    “Jamal Nari was a Muslim and now suddenly he was a jihadist or extremist Islamist upset about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?”
    He clams up, his jaw muscles clenching.
    “What’s going on with you, Marino?”
    “I’m not objective about it, okay?” he erupts again. “The Nari thing is pushing my wrong buttons and I can’t help it. Because of who and what he was and the fucking reward he got? A trip to the fucking White House? He gonna be on the cover of
Rolling Stone
next?”
    “This isn’t about him, it’s about the bombings. It’s about the murder of an MIT police officer who was minding his own business, sitting in his patrol car on a night when you were on duty. It could have been you.”
    “Asshole terrorists, and if the Bureau had bothered telling us they were in the Cambridge area …? I mean a detail like that and no cop is going to be sitting in his car, a damn sitting duck. I’m not back in policing even six months and something like that goes down. People killed in cold blood and their legs blown off. That’s the world we live in now. I don’t see how you get past it.”
    “We don’t. But I’m asking that you put it on hold right now. Let’s talk about where Jamal Nari lived.”
    “A one-bedroom apartment.” Marino’s Ray-Bans stare rigidly ahead. “They moved in after they got married.”
    “This part of Cambridge is expensive,” I reply.
    “The rent’s three-K. Not a problem for them for some reason. Maybe because after he was suspended from teaching he sued the school for discrimination. Figures, right? I don’t know the settlement but we’ll find out. By all appearances so far he did a little better than your average high school teacher.”
    “This is from Machado?”
    “I get info from a lot of places.”
    “And where was Joanna Cather this morning when her husband died?”
    “New Hampshire, heading to an outlet mall, according to her. She’s on her way here.” Sullen again, he refuses to look at me.
    “Are you aware that by nine A.M. it was already on the Internet that a Cambridge man on Farrar Street possibly had been shot? It was retweeted before the alleged shooting had even occurred.”
    “People are always screwing up the time they think something happened.”
    “Regardless of how people screw up things,” I answer, “you should know exactly what time the nine-one-one call was made.”
     
    “ AT TEN-OH-TWO exactly,” he says. “The lady who noticed his body on the pavement said she’d seen him pull up and start getting groceries out of his car around nine-forty-five. Fifteen minutes later she noticed him down on the pavement at the rear of his car. She figured he had a heart attack.”
    “How did anyone get the information before the police were even called?” I persist.
    “Who told you?”
    “Bryce.”
    “Maybe he’s mixed up. It wouldn’t be a first.”
    “Unfortunately, these days you have to worry about students,” I say as we slow at a four-way intersection. “If you’re a teacher or work in a school you could be targeted by a teenager, by someone even younger. The more it happens the more it will.”
    “This is different from that. I already know it,” he says.
    A jogger goes by in the crosswalk and starts to turn onto Farrar Street but apparently notices the emergency vehicles, the news trucks. He looks up at several helicopters hovering at about a thousand feet. Heading to Scott Street instead he nervously glances back and around as he picks up his pace.
    “Obviously, we need to consider his students and any his wife had contact with,” I add.