Dog is in the Details

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I called Rick and asked. “Nope, haven’t found it,” Rick said. “The rabbi mentioned it, too.”

  “Do you think whoever killed Joel took the backpack?” I asked.

  “Reasonable guess, since it was a remote area and the rabbi said his brother carried the pack with him everywhere. If we ever come up with a suspect I’ll get a search warrant, but right now I’m low on clues and don’t know where else to go. This is looking more and more like one for the cold case files.”

  I hung up, and since Rochester was restless, I took him out for a walk. Where could Joel’s backpack be? What could he have been carrying that his killer might have wanted to take away? An English translation of the Yad Vashem document? More evidence that related to the boys in the photograph? Or something else entirely? Joel had been looking up the synagogue leadership at his brother’s computer before he ran off—did he have something with him that connected to one of them?

  I could see why Rick was baffled. I was, too. But I kept feeling that everything circled back to something that had happened in Trenton after the Holocaust. There were those two unsolved murders, after all. The Trentonian article I read mentioned only that Rabbi Sapinsky was the second victim. Who was the first?

  I remembered what Rick had said about cold cases. Was it possible that there were records in Trenton of unsolved murders? Would they have been digitized?

  As soon as Rochester and I got back to my office I started searching, and after a couple of false starts I found an article from the Trenton Times a couple of years before. The popularity of TV programs chasing down old homicides had led to pressure for a cold case squad to be formed in the Trenton Police Department, and old records dating back to the 1920s were being digitized.

  My fingers tingled. Had the case file on the rabbi’s murder been among those digitized? How could I find out? My first instinct was to wonder how good the security measures were around that data—could I hack into the database, with the tools I had?

  Rochester nosed me then, and I realized I was standing at the top of a slippery slope. Hack into a police database? That was a sure road back to prison.

  Time to shut down the computer and head home. I locked up my office, raced Rochester to the car, and settled down for the drive along River Road. I had downloaded an app from my insurance company that tracked my driving performance and could result in a lower rate, which meant I had to keep Bluetooth enabled on my cell phone so the app could communicate with a little gadget under my dash. I’d discovered I could play music from my phone through the car’s speakers that way, too, and Rochester and I were enjoying a little Springsteen, the windows open and the music blasting.

  I was startled as Bruce’s voice was interrupted right in the middle of “My Hometown” by the theme from Hawaii Five-O.

  It took me a moment to realize the car was channeling incoming calls, and then another to figure out how to accept the call. “Hello?” I asked a couple of times, before Rick responded.

  “The ME has established that Joel Goldberg died sometime between eleven PM, when Mr. Paca saw him get off the bus, and one AM.”

  “Does that mean that the person in the car Al Paca saw was Joel’s killer?”

  “It’s a hypothesis,” Rick said. “But right now there’s nothing more than coincidence, so I’m not jumping to any conclusions. Paca didn’t notice anything about the car, and without a description or a license plate there’s no way to track it.”

  “But it is a piece of the puzzle.”

  “That it is.”

  I told him about going to Daniel Epstein’s house and the files he’d kept on the death of Rabbi Sapinsky, and what the document Epstein had translated had contained. “Can you ask your friend at the Trenton PD if the file on Rabbi Sapinsky’s murder was digitized?”

  “This is all irrelevant, you know,” Rick said. “I’m trying to solve a murder that happened last week, not sixty years ago.”

  “I think it is relevant,” I said. “I think Joel found something that ties to those old murders. And that information got him killed.”

  “I’ll give it a try but I’m not making any promises,” Rick said.

  He ended the call and it took the Bluetooth a moment to recognize that, so suddenly my car was telling me that if I wanted to make a call I had to hang up and try again.

  “Irrelevant information,” I said to the disembodied voice.

  18 – Unusual Agency

  Lili called as I was fixing dinner. “I got a direct flight tomorrow that gets into Philadelphia at 3:30. Can you pick me up or should I take the train from the airport, and then connect to the one to Yardley?”

  “Things are slow at Friar Lake, so I can pick you up. Text me your flight information. How’s your mom doing in rehab?”

  “Surprise, surprise, she likes it. She has a roommate, which I thought she’d hate, but she has someone to complain with about the food, the temperature, the therapists. The roommate doesn’t speak a word of Spanish, which my mother would hate, too, but she loves, because she can say whatever she wants to me or Fedi and the woman doesn’t understand.”

  “She’s probably lonely,” I said. “Living by herself. It will be good for her to socialize.”

  We talked for a few more minutes and then hung up. When I checked my email, I found that the rabbi had sent me his brother’s address and password. I hoped that maybe there’d be a message there that would connect to what I’d previously found online, something that would give me an idea of what it was Joel was looking for.

  Joel’s email account was chock full of sent and received messages, many of them having to do with the Holocaust. He had emailed back and forth with a number of individuals he had met in forums online, often mentioning that it might be a while before he got back to them because he had to rely on public internet access. He had found someone whose family had emigrated to Trenton after leaving a camp, and he was trying to get that person to open up about his family background and what he knew, but the person was very cagey, always asking Joel more questions and never revealing too much.

  Joel seemed obsessed, but I had to admit that I could be that way myself, particularly when it came to following a trail of evidence or justifying my need to hack into some protected spot online.

  I was quickly overwhelmed by the emotion Joel’s messages represented. Though his sentences were long and often wandered from topic to topic, the passion he felt was clear. No wonder Rabbi Goldberg hadn’t been able to get through too many of the messages. I didn’t have the same connection to Joel that the rabbi did, and even I couldn’t read for more than an hour before I had to stop. Joel’s passion and his intelligence were evident in his interactions, and it was painful to think of all that cut short.

  I played tug-a-rope with Rochester for a while, then went out for a long walk around River Bend with him. When we got back, I sat down for a longer look at Joel Goldberg’s email account. I needed to be organized if I was going to learn anything from this mass of data, so I created a spreadsheet to track it all. All those years in business had trained me to put information into columns and rows, looking for connections between bits and bytes.

  I listed the email addresses, and where I had them, the real names of the people Joel had corresponded with. I created columns for people who were descendants of survivors, and others who were tracking family trees, and a third for people who were just curious, like a high school kid who went under the handle JohnnyBeBad, whom Joel had helped with a class report.

  One of the problems I’d found in teaching at Eastern was that students weren’t able to make judgments about which sources were most valid. I tried to teach them to look for credentials—was the person they were quoting an expert in the field? Did he or she have a degree or a job with a publication?

  Too often they took what they found online as the gospel truth, often with bad consequences for their own work. One of my favorite examples was a student who’d written a paper about the Vietnam conflict, and his only source was a w
ebsite called Marxism.org. Even though I tried to explain that this group represented the ideology on the losing side of the war, he never understood why their work could be biased.

  I wondered what Johnny’s teacher would say if Johnny revealed that his source was a homeless schizophrenic with no more than a high school education. Perhaps that wasn’t quite fair to Joel – according to his brother, Joel was very intelligent, and the material he’d provided to Johnny was based on his own empirical research. But still – if I were the teacher I’d prefer a more credible source.

  The only one of Joel’s correspondents who really intrigued me was a man who went by the clunky handle of Not Who I Think I Am – though with all the words jammed together without capitalization. He had grown up in Trenton, the son of a Holocaust survivor, and he was interested in learning anything he could about Auschwitz, particularly during the years 1943-45. His family had come from Berlin and he sought anyone who might have known an inmate named Karl Kurtz.

  Joel had apparently done some research on the man’s behalf, because he wrote that he had checked the archives in Trenton and been unable to find any record of Kurtz. He did include a note that mentioned the name was both German and Ashkenazi Jewish, derived from the German word for short. He had asked NotWho if he was a short man, but NotWho had not responded.

  Reading Joel’s emails about the after-effects of the Holocaust was fascinating, and I wanted to know more about what was going on in Trenton at that time. Were lots of survivors showing up? Was Shomrei Torah a place that they congregated? Was that how Myer Hafetz’s testimony had showed up there?

  By then, though, I’d had enough for one night. I looked over at Rochester. “Our last night of being temporary bachelors,” I said, as he lay on his side, his golden flanks rising and falling. “Do you miss Mama Lili?”

  He sat up.

  “Is that a yes?”

  Rick called as I was rubbing Rochester’s tummy. “My buddy told me that all the cold case files were digitized by a non-profit agency but right after that budget cuts came through, and the squad got scaled back, focusing only on cases in the last twenty years.”

  “Can he get you the digital file?”

  “He gave me the name of the group and I looked at their website. In order to request the file I’d need a subpoena, and you and I both know we don’t have enough to convince a judge to open that investigation.”

  “What’s the name of the website?”

  “Steve.”

  “I just want to look,” I said, though I knew I was lying.

  Did Rick know, too? He hesitated for a moment, then blew out a deep breath. “It’s called the Agency for Records Digitization. But Steve. You cannot hack into them. Do you hear me? That is illegal and I cannot be involved and I don’t want my best friend to get arrested and sent back to prison.”

  “I guarantee you, I don’t want that either,” I said. He was right; hacking into the site was a very bad idea and I couldn’t jeopardize everything I’d built in the last two years. “I give you my word, I won’t hack their site.”

  “Good.”

  I ended the call. It wasn’t illegal to do some research on the organization, though. To prove to myself that I was going to keep my word to Rick, I left the old laptop with my hacking tools in the attic, and used the legitimate computer to search.

  There was very little online about the ARD beyond a contact button, a log in for law enforcement officials and a mission statement that read: “To assist law enforcement by providing digitization services for paper files relating to unsolved crimes from the distant and recent past. Advances in forensic technology and evidence analysis may lead to the solution of cases that could not be properly investigated at the time of commission.”

  I went back to my search results. If I was interested in hacking this site, maybe someone else on the dark web had wanted to also – and didn’t have the same legal or ethical restrictions I did.

  There is a lot of information out there that doesn’t come up in search results. Experts call that the “deep web” – things like your bank information, your medical records, anything that requires a log in and ID to retrieve. If you pull them up yourself, it’s not illegal. But if others do, that’s a whole different story.

  There is another part of the deep web called the dark web – the place where hackers and crackers and script kiddies hang out, those who are interested in getting into those places where you ought to have permission. It’s where I find my hacker tools, where I visit forums to keep up my skills, and where all manner of nefarious deeds take place, from supplying fake ID to money laundering and more.

  It took some digging but eventually I found a forum dedicated to the Agency for Records Digitization. There were a lot of wild theories bandied about there – it was a front for the FBI or the CIA, further evidence of Big Brother’s incursion into our lives, and so on. Several hackers had tried to break in, with varying levels of success, and I found after some more digging that I could access the records they’d found.

  So I wasn’t hacking, I told myself. I was just using my talents for discovering information that was out there to be found.

  Whatever. My fingers were itching as I dove in the database that had been unlocked and reposted on a quasi-public site. The interface was rudimentary, very Web 1.0, with a simple search box and a button to click – not even the icon of a magnifying glass to glamorize your experience.

  I typed in “Sapinsky” and clicked the button. I didn’t realize I was holding my breath until a single record popped up: Sapinsky, Morris, underlined and hyperlinked.

  I clicked on the link and was taken to a simple list of documents, each one a PDF file which could be read or downloaded. I saved each of them to a folder on my laptop, then exited the site.

  Adrenaline was coursing through my system. I hadn’t hacked in the sense that I hadn’t broken through any security measures set up by the ADR to prevent access to their data. All I’d done was benefit from someone else’s illegal act. I knew from reading legal opinions on the Wikileaks material that downloading and reading public available material was unlikely to be viewed as a crime unless you used material to steal someone’s identity or commit a collateral crime.

  Would Rick see it the same way? Good thing I was no longer on parole, so I didn’t have to worry about what my parole officer would say—or what he could have done to me if he’d discovered something like this on his watch.

  19 – Big Questions

  It was only nine o’clock, still early enough to pay an impromptu visit to Rick. “How’d you like to go for a ride?” I asked Rochester. “Go see your buddy Rascal?”

  Rochester recognized the key words in that sentence and began hopping around like a demented kangaroo. I thought I’d get a better response from Rick if I came carrying beer, so we made a pit stop on the way to pick up a six-pack of Dogfish Head. I parked in Rick’s driveway and then stepped up to his door, ringing the bell while holding the six-pack in one hand and my laptop in the other.

  He opened the door and Rochester rushed past. He looked at the beer and the computer, then back up at me. “This does not bode well.”

  “All legal,” I said. “I promise.”

  He blew out a long breath. “You’d better come in, then.”

  He popped the tops off a couple of beers for us while I turned on the laptop and opened the file directory. When he joined me at the kitchen table I explained to him how I’d found the files.

  “So someone else hacked the site before you did,” he said. “And you think that makes it okay.”

  I used the Wikileaks analogy.

  “That material was sent to the news media and posted everywhere,” Rick said. “You had to go digging for this.”

  “I did. But I didn’t break any laws to find it. If anyone committed a criminal act it was whoever did the original hack. And I have no knowledge of who that was or how they did it.”

  He frowned at me and thought for a while. “Fine, let’s see w
hat you’ve got.”

  Morris Jacob Sapinsky was a white male, age 31, with a home address in Trenton. His occupation was Rabbi, his death was classified “violent,” and the box that read “found dead” was also checked.

  We read the description of the body and the visible wounds. Sapinsky had been shot in the chest by a small-caliber handgun. Stippling was observed around the wound, consistent with a shooter at close range. The manner of death was homicide, and an autopsy had been performed. The file was signed by the county medical examiner.

  The investigating detective was a man named Bernard Parker. He had spoken with a man who discovered Sapinsky’s body in the temple when he arrived for morning services, then called the police. In addition to that man, who spoke little English, Parker interviewed a number of men who had been at the evening minyan, or worship service, with the rabbi.

  Only one man provided any information. Sandor Rabinowitz, aged 52, a native of Hungary now residing in Trenton, said that Rabbi Sapinsky had been attempting to build bridges between new immigrants and more established residents. This effort had been controversial, resulting in many arguments among members of Shomrei Torah.

  Parker added that he spoke with a young boy named Solly, who had been studying with the rabbi that evening. He had a feeling that the boy knew something, but was too frightened to speak up, and Solly’s parents either didn’t speak English, or pretended not to.

  He concluded his report with his belief that the rabbi had been killed due to this controversy, and that the insularity of the Jewish community would prevent an outside investigator from discovering the perpetrator.

  “You believe this?” Rick asked me, when we’d read through everything.

  “It doesn’t seem reasonable that a Jew would kill his rabbi for doing charitable work. Even if members of the congregation were upset, they’d fire the rabbi before killing him.”