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as I'd looked forward to going to the Columbus Day
parade, I agreed with Matt that we needed to get to the gas gun lab right away.
I left my Cadillac and rode with him in his unmarked beige Ford. He drove to
within a block of the parade, so at least I heard the band music, smelled the
popcorn, and felt a little vibration from the pounding of hundreds of boots
hitting the pavement at the same time.
    "I could use my light and siren and plow through the
lines— get you really close to the action," Matt offered.
    "I don't think so," I said, afraid he was serious.
    We headed across town just after one o'clock, driving
through older residential sections of Revere that hadn't changed much over the
years, with small shingled houses and well-kept lawns, tiny by the standards of
the newer developments in the western part of the city. Most of these side
streets off Broadway still held enough tall elms and maples to give the city
the look of a fall scene on a postcard.
    Matt wanted one more look around Eric's cubicle before our
scheduled meeting with Doctor Ralph Leder, the project leader for the hydrogen
research. We entered the building, made our way to the basement, and walked
toward the steep ramp that lead down another half level to the gas gun lab. The
crime scene tape was still hanging across the ramp and a uniformed policewoman
was sitting on a chair in the corridor. I remembered reading in the police report
that the security guard had found Eric's body at four in the morning when he
noticed that the ramp door was open.
    "Pretty quiet down here," the policewoman said as
Matt greeted her and unlocked the door. Since she made no attempt to cover a
wide yawn, I figured she knew Matt from the station. Some parts of police work
are more interesting than others, I thought, happy to be involved in a new
puzzle.
    The temperature seemed to drop two degrees with each foot as
Matt and I made our way down, putting this sub-basement at about forty-five
degrees, colder than the air outside. I breathed in the odor of rust and cold
metal and realized I missed walking around in places like this. I missed the
thick logbook that I'd carried around all day and my short white cotton coat,
its pockets cluttered with scraps of paper and small tools.
    The gas gun lab was one enormous room, divided into sections
by a motley selection of drab green felt partitions and black plastic curtains.
To a layperson the multi-million-dollar sixty-foot gas gun at the far end of
the room would be hard to distinguish from the water pipes that lined the
ceiling. Tiny red and green lights from the row of high-voltage power supplies
called attention to the giant piece of equipment resting on brackets above
them.
    The rest of the room in front of the gas gun, uncarpeted and
unpainted, held cubicles with desks and workbenches. There were no windows and
just the one door that led to the ramp and then to the basement corridor. Even
with all the overhead lights on, the room looked overcast, as if it might rain
any minute. It was easy to understand how someone could have entered and left
this isolated area unnoticed.
    Matt took me over to Eric's desk, a few yards in from the
edge of the ramp door, his chair facing the entrance. I remembered that the
newspaper account said the shots were fired from a distance and I asked Matt
about it, since there wasn't what I considered a great distance between Eric's
chair and the door.
    "A distance means more than a foot," Matt said,
and although he was anything but patronizing, I felt like the novice I was. I
made a resolution to check the web for police procedural information before I
asked any more stupid questions.
    I stepped onto the plastic pad under Eric's chair for a
closer look at his computer system.
    "Has anyone tried to pull up the last file Eric was
working on?" I asked.
    "We did boot up the machine, but there wasn't anything
listed with a time for late Monday night or early Tuesday morning."
    I told Matt that Eric was the