The Wrong Man by John Katzenbach Page A

out.”
    “Okay, but—”
    “I have to go. But you understand, in a way, you’re at the same point Scott Freeman was, before things started to get…well, I’m not sure what the right word is. Tense? Difficult? He knew some things, but not very much. Mostly what he had was an absence of information. He believed that Ashley might be at risk, but he didn’t know how, or exactly where or when, or any of the things that we first ask ourselves when we perceive a threat. All Scott Freeman had were several disturbing items to wonder about. He knew it wasn’t the start and he knew it wasn’t the finish. He was like a scientist, thrown into the middle of an equation, trying to guess which way to go in order to find an answer.”
    She paused, and for the first time I felt a bit of the same chill.
    “I have to go,” she said. “We’ll speak again.”
    “But—”
    “Indecision. It’s a simple word. But it leads to evil things, does it not? Of course, so can being foolishly decisive. That’s more or less the dilemma, isn’t it? To act. Or not to act. Always an intriguing question, don’t you think?”

5
    Nameless
    W hen Hope came through the front door of her house, she instinctively clapped her hands twice. She could already hear the sound of her dog’s paws as he rushed from the living room, where he spent much of his time staring out the front picture window, waiting for her to return home. The sounds were utterly familiar to her: first the thud, as he leapt down from the sofa that he wasn’t allowed on when there was an actual human around to tell him no, then the scrabbling noise that his toenails made against the hardwood floor, as he slipped and pushed the Oriental rug out of position, and finally the urgent bounding, as he headed to the vestibule. She knew enough to put down any papers or groceries in anticipation of the greeting.
    There is nothing, she thought, in the entire world that is as emotionally unencumbered as a dog’s greeting. She knelt down and let him cover her face with his tongue, his tail beating a steady tattoo against the wall. It is a truism for dog owners, Hope thought, that regardless of what else is going wrong, the dog always wags its tail when you come through the door. Her dog was of oddly mixed parentage. A vet had suggested to her that he was the clearly illegitimate offspring of a golden retriever and a pit bull, which gave him a shortish, blond coat, a snubby nose, a fierce and unmitigated loyalty minus the nasty aggressiveness, and a degree of intelligence that sometimes astonished even her. She had acquired him from a shelter where he’d been shunted as a puppy, and when she asked the shelter operator what the pup’s name was, she’d been told that he hadn’t been christened, so to speak. So, in a fit of slightly devilish creativity, she’d called him Nameless.
    When he was young, she’d taught him to retrieve wayward soccer balls at the end of practice, a sight that never failed to amuse the girls on whatever team she happened to be coaching. Nameless would patiently wait by the bench, silly grin on his face, until she gave him a hand signal, then would bolt across the pitch, rounding up each ball and pushing it with his nose and forelegs, racing back to where she waited with a mesh bag. She would tell the girls on the team that if they could learn to control the ball at speed the way Nameless did, then they would all be all-Americans.
    He was far too old now, couldn’t see or hear as well, and had a touch of arthritis, and collecting a dozen balls was probably more than he could handle, so he went to practice less often. She did not like to think about his ending; he’d been with her as long as she’d been with Sally Freeman.
    She often thought that if it had not been for Nameless the puppy, she might not have succeeded in her partnership with Sally. It had been the dog who had forced Ashley and her to find a common ground. Dogs, she thought, managed that sort of