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against the receding pollution, a lone night heron looking a little lost in the crotch of a maple tree. College freshmen learned to sail in the tricky, skyscraper-skewed winds, their sunny sails dazzling against the blue-black water. A women’s scull surged downriver in eight-oared spurts, Harvard colors on the crew shirts. A State Police launch drew alongside a Miami Vice motorboat, checking some kind of paperwork.
    After two miles, I tinned back at the Western Avenue bridge, using the pace to force my thoughts toward managing my breathing, a deep breath drawn in for six strides, then blown out with three short bursts to follow. Six-three, six-three, over and over. It bought me fifteen minutes of focused, empty peace.
    Warming down against the trunk of a poplar at the Fairfield ramp, I noticed a golden retriever swimming along ne opposite shore of the lagoon. On the grassy perimeter, two terriers, a cairn and a Scottie, scampered point and drag to the retriever. An older woman waved leashes at the dogs, whistling for them. The terriers responded but the retriever didn’t, just plugging along in the water, jaws open, drinking in the day—and I hoped not too much of the lagoon water.
    Finishing my stretching, I walked back over the ramp, looking forward to a little professional deception to get my mind off my own reality for a while.

    “Let me get this straight,” said the young woman at the copy center, twisting a hank of frosted hair around her index finger. “You want me to type this up like a questionnaire?”
    “Word process it,” I said.
    “All’s we do anymore. We just say ‘type’ because it’s easier, you know?”
    Elbows on the counter, I nodded as a disheartened yuppie asked a male near an enormous Xerox machine to print his resume on “the ivory stock again, same as last time.” My helper read my writing, twisting a different hank of hair. Either she’d been awfully active that way or she’d had a perm recently. “Now, you want lines next to the questions?”
    “Lines?” I said.
    “Yeah, like for the people to write on. Their answers, I mean.”
    “No. Just some vertical spaces between the questions.”
    “Even the simple ones, like MAIDEN NAME and EDUCATION, that stuff?”
    “Yes.”
    A frown. “Gonna make it more than a page.”
    “That’s okay.”
    “We get paid by the page here, typing and copying both.”
    “I understand.”
    “I took a course in school, too, on public-opinion polling? Lots of people, they won’t fill out forms longer than one page.”
    “I’ll risk it.”
    “Your call.” She walked toward a desktop computer, a third hank twisting around her finger.

    Carrying the duplicated questionnaires back to my condo, I put them in a portfolio with some of my business cards. Then I brought the portfolio and a camera down to my silver Prelude, the last year of the original model, but still holding up pretty well. The camera could be hidden nicely under an old newspaper on the passenger’s seat.
    Driving south out of the city, I refined my strategy. A pretty simple one, actually. Olga Evorova wanted me to investigate Andrew Dees as discreetly as possible, and that would require a credible cover story. So, first stop, Hendrix Property Management in Marshfield , to lay a little groundwork for the story: that I’d been hired by an undisclosed condo complex to check out potential management companies for it, Hendrix being on my “shopping list.” After Marshfield , I’d continue on to Plymouth Mills, interviewing Dees and his neighbors at Plymouth Willows. Ostensibly about Hendrix, but really using the questionnaires to profile everybody’s background equally, so Dees wouldn’t suspect he alone was my target.
    The more I thought about the cover story, the more I liked it.
    It took me thirty minutes to reach the Route 128 split. Once on Route 3 toward Cape Cod, the traffic began to thin, becoming downright manageable by the time I passed Weymouth . Another nine miles