Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  “What’s happening?” Rick asked.

  I explained what I was doing, and he nodded along. “Where’d you get the software?”

  “Found a guy on a bulletin board who had it for sale. It’s way out of date by now, but it still works.”

  We sat there in silence for a long while, drinking our coffee and watching the software work. “This could take a couple of hours,” I said. “You don’t have to stick around.”

  “I do. How long did it take you last time?”

  “Last time I had the password from an email I intercepted. All I had to figure out was the user ID and that was easy. Now? I have no idea. Let’s hope Striker gave Owen a simple password—not something randomly generated that could take hours to crack.”

  I had a sudden wave of panic. “What if he didn’t give Owen a new password at all,” I said. “Maybe he just removed his access.”

  “Can you tell that?” Rick asked.

  I shook my head. “We’ll have to hope that isn’t the case. But I want to try something else.”

  I minimized the windows and opened a new one. This time I entered the password that had worked before, but instead of owen as the user id, I entered striker23.

  Like magic, the window evaporated and the website opened. I paged to the bottom and pointed to the item next to the reliquary. I right-clicked on it and saved the picture of the Russian icon, then closed the window.

  I went back to the first set of windows and closed them, too.

  “What just happened?” Rick asked.

  I explained everything I’d done. “I’m going to email this picture to Mark right now,” I said, as I opened my mail program. I remembered his address; I had found several messages from him when I hacked Owen’s account, and it’s hard to forget an address like gaylover33 at mymail.com.

  As soon as the message was sent, I called Mark. “Can you check your email?”

  “Already there,” he said. “I just saw a message from you.”

  “Is that the icon that you think Owen stole from your store?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.”

  I thanked him, and hung up. “I think you’d better call your FBI guy ASAP,” I said. “We don’t know how long the striker23 ID and password are going to be active.”

  Rick stood up. “I’m heading to the station right now.” He nodded toward the laptop. “Better put that back where you got it from.”

  “Will do.”

  He walked to the front door, then stopped and turned back. “I see why you do it,” he said. “You get this look on your face and you seem – I don’t know – more alive somehow.” He paused. “Thanks for the coffee. Catch you later.”

  I knew it was just a phrase—but as he walked out and closed the door behind him I kept hearing catch you over and over again.

  30 – Gone Missing

  It was almost eleven o’clock on Friday morning by then. I called Lili to check in with her, but got her voice mail. I figured she was probably tied up with the College Connection kids, probably showing off the collage of their photos she had been working on.

  There was no reason for me to drive up all the way up to Eastern. All I had on my plate was working on the text for the book with Lili, and I could do that just as easily from home. I didn’t even have a boss I had to clear it with.

  I was able to retrieve the files I’d been working with, and I sat down with another café mocha and my laptop to get to work. Rochester got hold of one of his toys and spent some time shaking it and chewing it, then settled down for a nap behind my chair.

  As usual, I got lost in the work, without the distractions of an office. It was close to two o’clock when my cell phone rang and I saw from the display it was Rick.

  “Tony Rinaldi’s here at the station,” he said. “Can you join us?”

  “I guess the only appropriate answer is yes,” I said.

  “You’d be guessing right.”

  “Give me ten minutes.”

  I hung up, got dressed and set the gate up preventing Rochester from getting to the second floor. “I’m trusting you, big guy,” I said. I took him out front for a quick pee, then led him back into the townhouse.

  He was watching me through the sliding glass doors as I left the house and got into the car. As I backed down the driveway, I wondered what would happen to him if I was arrested, and sent back to prison. Would Lili take him? Rick? How would he feel about being abandoned again?

  For the first time, I realized that there was someone who could be very hurt by my hacking – Rochester. Did I owe it to him to stop?

  I drove to the police station and parked in the back lot. Around the front, I introduced myself to the desk sergeant, and he called Rick.

  Rick appeared behind him a minute or two later. “We’re in the conference room,” he said.

  I followed him down the hall, past the interview rooms and into a small room with a circular table and four rolling armchairs. There was an American flag on a pole in one corner, the Pennsylvania state flag on a similar pole in another. A couple of old photos of Stewart’s Crossing had been enlarged and framed and hung on the walls.

  Two of the chairs were occupied. I knew Tony, of course. “This is Agent Quillian,” Rick said, as we walked into the room.

  My heart began hammering in my chest. Had Rick brought me there to turn me over to the FBI?

  The FBI agent was in his early thirties, with the kind of weathered, wary look I’d come to associate with ex-military guys. I shook his hand and said hello to Tony Rinaldi. Between his crisply pressed shirt and pants, the G-man’s dark suit, blue tie and white shirt, and Rick’s button-down shirt and khakis, I felt under-dressed.

  “Interesting website you found,” Agent Quillian said. “Want to tell me how you got there?”

  I’ll say one thing for being an English teacher. You learn the value of considering what it is you say and write, and how you can cover your tracks with a careful use of language. “I followed an email trail,” I said. “Mark and Owen had been communicating via email before Owen disappeared. The link was in one of Owen’s emails.”

  I avoided making eye contact with Rick. If Quillian wanted to assume that the link had been in a message from Owen to Mark, which Mark had passed on to me, I wasn’t going to contradict him. But I was sure I’d fail any lie detector test at that point; my pulse was racing and my palms were sweaty.

  Quillian nodded. “You recognized this item you believe was stolen from the abbey?”

  It looked like I’d passed that test, and I took a couple of deep breaths. I explained about going through the photo archives at St. Mary Martyr, and how the picture of the reliquary on the website seemed to match the one Lili and I had found.

  “Mark Figueroa identified the icon he said was stolen from him as well,” Rick put in.

  “I was able to match a couple of other stolen items to that site,” Quillian said. “I’ve got a guy tracking down the site registration right now.”

  My heart began to return to its normal rhythm. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants and nodded along. “Have you been able to find out Striker’s real name? He and Owen served together in Afghanistan,” I said. “Maybe someone from the same platoon would recognize the nickname.”

  “Already done that. James Striker. Served in the same platoon. Anything else you know?”

  “Nothing that I haven’t already told Rick or Tony.”

  “Thanks for coming in.”

  I looked from Rick to Tony. Neither of them said anything, so I stood up. “Good luck,” I said.

  I was driving back to River Bend when Lili called my cell. “Have you seen Ka’Tar Winston today?” she asked.

  “No. I haven’t been up to campus at all.”

  “He was supposed to be at the final assembly but he didn’t show up, and none of the kids have seen him. Dot Sneiss is freaking out.”

  “He told me yesterday that he wanted to see Friar Lake,” I said. “That DeAndre had talked a lot about it. Maybe he went up ther
e.”

  “How could he get there?” Lili asked. “He didn’t have a car.”

  “Could have called a taxi, I guess. Or hitch-hiked.”

  “I’m going up there to look for him. Can you meet me there?”

  “Sure. But I’m in Stewart’s Crossing. It’ll take me a half hour.”

  “Call me when you get close,” she said, and hung up.

  I had just turned onto Quarry Road from Main Street. I could have bypassed the entrance to River Bend, and gone straight on down to the Delaware to pick up River Road.

  But if we were going to look for a missing kid, I thought Rochester’s nose and instincts could be important assets. I drove quickly to the townhouse, where I grabbed Rochester’s leash as he danced around me.

  I loaded him into the car and then headed up north, rocketing down River Road as fast as the curving, narrow road would allow. When I had to stop for a light in Washington’s Crossing I put a Springsteen CD in for additional motivation. By the time I turned down the entrance road to Friar Lake, I was singing along with the Boss and “Born in the USA” was blasting through the open windows.

  When I pulled to a stop next to Lili’s Mini Cooper, Rochester tried to jump out the window, but I grabbed his collar and told him, “No more exiting the vehicle on your own!”

  Lili stepped out of the chapel, and Rochester and I met her there. “I haven’t found him anywhere,” she said. “But I know he has to be here.”

  “Have you been down to the lake yet?”

  She shook her head. “I assumed he’d follow the road up here.”

  “Well, let’s go down there and look.” We took a narrow path through the woods behind the chapel, down to the lake and the small house where the mendicant friars had lived. It was cool and dim in there, the trees and underbrush crowding in against us. Long fiddlehead ferns stroked my legs as I ducked under a low-hanging maple.

  About halfway down, Rochester began pulling, and I nearly lost my footing. I had to grab the trunk of a slim birch to steady myself. He romped back up toward me, and I reached down and unhooked his leash. “Don’t get lost, boy,” I said. “And don’t dig up any more bodies!”

  He scampered downhill. Lili and I followed more slowly as the dirt path snaked around between massive old oaks. The sunlight filtered down to us with a greenish tint, and the air was moist and heavy.

  “You’re going to have to do something about this path,” Lili said, as some dirt skittered from under her feet, and she grabbed my arm. “Either close it off or pave it. Otherwise it’s just an accident waiting to happen.”

  “Fred Searcy from the biology department knows his botany,” I said. “Maybe I can get him to come up with some signs identifying the trees and flowers. Then we can make this a kind of nature walk.”

  Branches of a skinny maple swayed as a squirrel scampered somewhere inside the thicket of leaves. We reached the bottom of the hill and stepped back out into the sunlight. We were at the edge of the meadow next to the house, the one where Rochester had found DeAndre’s body.

  Up ahead of us we saw an open trench that looked to be where the body had been. Ka’Tar sat Indian-style beside it, and Rochester was on his belly beside him. As we approached, Ka’Tar reached out and stroked Rochester’s shimmering flank.

  Lili hung back, and I heard the shutter of her camera begin to click in rapid succession. I remembered that she’d once told me, “When there’ s something I don’t want to see, I let the camera see it for me.”

  I thought that the photos of the dark-skinned boy, the golden dog and the open grave would be very poignant, though I doubted they’d make it into our coffee-table book on the history of the abbey.

  “Hey, Ka’Tar,” I said, as I got close to him. “You had us worried.”

  “This is where he was buried, isn’t it?” His right hand rested on Rochester, and the sun glinted on the fused fourth and fifth fingers, the ones DeAndre had hoped to have repaired.

  “Yup.” I sat down catty-cornered to him. Rochester didn’t move.

  “Do they know who kilt him?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet. But I know the police are working on it.”

  Tar looked up at me and held out his hand. “When the kids teased me about my hand, DeAndre say I was just perfect to him. That God made me this way for a reason.”

  “I believe that,” I said. “I think God cares about every one of us, even when we do things that aren’t right.”

  I thought about the hacking I’d done. Would God, in all his mercy, have approved? I thought so—but maybe that was just my hubris.

  “He was right. It’s real pretty out here.” Ka’Tar looked out toward the lake. “You think they could bury him out here for real? They’s that cemetery up on the hill.”

  Lili joined us, holding her camera loosely in her right hand. “Hi, Ka’Tar,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But Shenetta and Jamarcus are going to move down here, so maybe we can find DeAndre a spot in a real cemetery, out here in the country.”

  Ka’Tar nodded. “I like this place a lot. And Mrs. Dot say if I keep my grades up this year I can apply to be a real student.”

  I stood up. “Mrs. Dot’s worried about you,” I said. “Why don’t you let us drive you back up to the college?”

  Ka’Tar nodded, and stood up. “You want to ride with me and Rochester?” I asked. “Or with Professor Weinstock?”

  “I like Rochester,” he said, and the dog nuzzled his hand. “He like me, too.”

  “He’s a good boy,” I said.

  31 – Tennis Ball

  Once we were on our way back to Eastern, I called Dot’s office to let her know that we had found Ka’Tar. Lili walked him over to Harrow Hall to rejoin the rest of the CC kids, and I tracked down Joe Capodilupo to talk to him about how we could make the path that connected the abbey to the lake safer.

  I called Rick on my way back to Fields Hall, but went right to voice mail. “Call me when you can,” I said.

  It was nearly six o’clock on Friday evening. Dot had arranged a big graduation dinner at Burgers Commons to celebrate the conclusion of the College Connection program. I couldn’t take Rochester there, so I left him in my nearly empty office with a rawhide and a bowl of chow.

  I was pleased to see the kids I’d had in class; they all looked so much more comfortable and confident than they had when they’d gotten off the bus on Sunday. Babson was there, glad-handing and beaming.

  “Looks like this program was pretty successful,” I said to Lili, as we stood in line for turkey breast, stuffing, mashed sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce.

  “They’re great kids,” Lili said. “A couple of them have some real artistic talent. After we eat I’ll show you the collage I put together. I promised Aquamarisha and Zazeem that I’d help them keep taking pictures, and point them to some websites where they can post them.”

  “You’re really working from A to Z,” I said.

  She laughed and shook her head. We got our food and joined a group of kids at a long table. We ate and talked with them, and then President Babson came over to us. “I’m glad you’re here, Steve,” he said. “I had a phone conference call with the Board of Trustees this morning, and they gave me the okay to go ahead with the Friar Lake project. I signed your offer letter and sent it to Elaine. You should get your copy on Monday.”

  He reached out, and we shook hands. “I have every confidence you’ll do a great job,” he said.

  “Thank you, sir. I won’t disappoint you.”

  He left us then, walking over to Dot Sneiss, and Lili and I hugged and kissed. “Congratulations!” she said. “I’m thrilled the project is going to go through. Even though that means I’ll have to get back to work on the book about the abbey. I need to get that done before the fall term starts.”

  “I’ll make sure to keep you on schedule,” I said. I took her and and we walked back to her office in Harrow Hall to look at the collage. Then we kissed for a while, celebrating again,
until I realized that I’d left Rochester alone in my office for an awful long time.

  “I’ll talk to you tomorrow morning,” she said. “Maybe we’ll go to the flea market.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” I kissed her again, and then picked up the plate of leftover turkey breast for Rochester.

  I fed him pieces as we drove back to Stewart’s Crossing. It was about nine in the evening by then, and the sky was darkening. As we drove down Sarajevo Court, I noticed a shadowy figure in the Keelys’ front yard.

  I slowed down and tried to see if it was Owen Keely, but his back was to me, and I couldn’t just stop there. There was no car parked in front of the house and the lights were dark.

  I continued on down the street to my own driveway, and as I did I fumbled for my cell phone and called Rick.

  “There’s somebody outside the Keelys’ townhouse,” I said. “I couldn’t get a good enough look to see if it was Owen or not.”

  “I’ll get a uniform right over there,” he said. “And I’ll come over, too. In the meantime see if you can keep an eye on him.”

  I turned the car off and hooked up Rochester’s leash. “Come on, boy, let’s go for a walk,” I said. I grabbed the emergency tennis ball I kept in the glove compartment, in case I needed to create a distraction, and stuffed it into my pants pocket.

  We began walking back down the street toward the Keelys’ house. Rochester seemed to know what we were doing; instead of sniffing every bush and tree trunk, or going after squirrels, he was focused on heading down the street.

  “Slow down,” I said to him. I didn’t want to confront Owen Keely, if that’s who it was. I just wanted to keep an eye on him for Rick.

  I reined Rochester in as we got closer to the Keelys. When I wanted him to dawdle, he refused. “Sniff something!” I whispered to him.

  The shadowy figure was leaning up against the side of the Keelys’ garage, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t tell if it was Owen or not.