Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Everyone stopped their hurried packing to look up at me. “I don’t know what the college’s policy is, but as long as Romeo is quiet, it’s OK with me.” I waited a beat, then said, “But I’m not grading his papers.”

  Everyone except Menno laughed, and they all scurried out, like shaggy, pierced rats leaving a sinking classroom. On my way up to the third floor, I overheard a student in the hallway say, in a plaintive voice, “I can’t believe he smoked crack. We made a new year’s resolution.”

  The faculty lounge is a sunny room on the top floor of Blair Hall, lit by metal-framed skylights. The department secretary, Candice (“Don’t call me Candy”) Kane, a Wiccan whose love for the natural world exceeds any tiny bit of affection she might harbor for humans, has a green thumb, and she tends a series of spider plants in hanging baskets. Cabinets full of coffee filters and paper plates hang over a sink, with an adjacent refrigerator. A half-dozen round tables, with straight-backed wooden chairs, complete the room.

  I joined Jackie Devere at the cappuccino machine and began preparing myself a café mocha. “I had a new student in my freshman comp class this morning,” I said.

  “Three months into the term?” she asked. “Let me guess. He had some kind of elaborate excuse why he hasn’t come to class. His dog ate his computer?”

  “Close. The new student is a dog.”

  She looked at me. “Now, Steve. I know that you are not trying to tell me that you have some butt-ugly girl student in your class. Because if you are, butt-ugly is a much better term than dog.”

  “No, a real dog,” I said. “In a Burberry carrying case. He even has a matching plaid bow in his hair. I’m not sure what breed he is; one of those little fluffy things.”

  “Are you sure it’s a boy dog?”

  I nodded as I pulled the hot water for my tea out of the microwave. “Yup. His name is Romeo.” I paused. “And he expressed his opinion of the class with a lifted leg on the way out.”

  Jackie grew up on the mean streets of Newark before escaping to Rutgers and the world of English literature. At twenty-nine, she’s petite and slim-hipped, a mix of street-smart woman and super-educated college professor. If not for her brain, you might even mistake her for a college senior.

  “He’ll probably end up being one of your smarter students,” she said. Jackie was quite a coup for Eastern; our department chair, Lucas Roosevelt, had been plagued by the lack of diversity in his faculty, and no matter how hard he’d tried, it was tough to convince smart, well-educated African-American or Hispanic faculty to come to the Pennsylvania countryside for a second-tier college.

  Jackie’s family still lived somewhere around Newark, and she thought Eastern was close enough but not too close. She also said she preferred Eastern’s emphasis on teaching over research, but I’m sure Lucas opened the department’s wallet, too.

  We retired to her office once our beverages were complete, a room that might have been considered spacious had it not been lined with overflowing bookshelves, the floor a minefield of piled books. Two gothic-arched windows, similar to the ones in my classroom, framed one wall of Jackie’s office, with the original leaded panes. They were poorly sealed, and let a stream of cold air float into the office, which Jackie counteracted with a very illegal space heater under her desk.

  I knocked into one of the piles as I followed her in, and a couple of books toppled to the ground. “Occupational hazard of teaching six courses a term,” she said. “You don’t get much time to organize.”

  The standard course load for a full-time professor like Jackie was four courses, though Jackie had told me she’d taken on the extra load for the cash.

  As an adjunct, I could only teach three courses, or the IRS would think of me as a real employee instead of an independent contractor and demand that the college give me pesky little benefits like life and health insurance, a department secretary to do my photocopying, and lunch on Eastern once a semester. That was a shame; adjunct pay barely covered my mortgage and car payment. If I had a full-time teaching gig, Santiago Santos would stop bugging me about my future plans. But then, if I didn’t have a felony conviction, I wouldn’t have Santiago around at all. So all in all, my problems were more my fault than Eastern’s.

  I moved a torn jiffy bag to the trash, spilling nasty gray fluff as I did, and sat across from Jackie. In the background I saw a photo in which she cuddled with her black dog, a mix of German Shepherd and woolly mammoth.

  “I’m so glad you’ve adopted a dog,” Jackie said. “Living by yourself is not healthy.”

  “I decided yesterday that he can stay,” I said. “We’ll see how it works out. Dogs are so needy. Walk me, feed me, pet me. The great thing about being divorced is that you don’t have to cater to anyone else. ‘No, honey, that dress doesn’t make you look fat. No, honey, I don’t mind driving two hours, while you nap in the front seat, so that you can argue with your mother in person.’”

  “Cranky, party of one,” she said. “Your table is now ready. Seriously, you get selfish living by yourself. It’s good to put yourself out there for another creature. Didn’t you ever have a pet?”

  “Mary Queen of Snots had a cat,” I said. “A fluffy Persian that hated me. For ten years that cat hissed at me every time I walked past. What a pity she died just a few months before Mary and I divorced.”

  “I thought your ex was Jewish. Her name was Mary?”

  “Her Hebrew name is Miriam, which means bitter. Need I say more?” I looked at my watch. “Back to the grind,” I said. “I have tech writing in five minutes.”

  “I have the next period free,” Jackie said, “If you can call having a stack of essays from African American Lit to grade ‘free.’”

  “Free at last, free at last,” I said. “Thank god almighty, we are free at last.”

  “Go to class,” she said, and waved me out of her office. The nasty gray fluff clung to my pants as I walked away.

  7 – Sniffing and Searching

  When I sat down to work on Tuesday morning, Rochester came into the office, sniffed around, and then settled at my feet. But every half hour or so, he’d wake up, sit up on his hind legs, and try to stick his face onto the keyboard.

  “Rochester, this is getting old,” I said, pushing him away with my knee after about the fourth time. “Is there something on the Internet you want?”

  I looked at the page on my screen. I’d been at Google, searching for some information for a client, and a light bulb went off over my head. Why didn’t I Google Caroline? Maybe there was a clue online that would lead Rick to her killer.

  At the time, I didn’t even think about Santiago Santos, or wonder if he’d care what I was doing. I put “Caroline Kelly” in quotation marks, so that Google would search for it as a phrase, and brought up over 31,000 hits. Even adding extra key words, such as “Quaker State Bank” and “accountant,” didn’t get me much in the way of results.

  None of the other commercial engines were much help either—Yahoo, MSN, Netscape, Metacrawler—there was just too much out there. I searched by her phone number, her corporate title, even with “golden retriever” as an additional search term. I either got too much, or nothing.

  You search for my name online, and even though there are other Steve Levitans out there, you can find me—ghostly reminders of website work I had done in the past, for my job, my legitimate clients. But Caroline Kelly? Nothing.

  Rochester woke up to check on my progress, stretching his long legs first and yawning, then sticking his big golden head up by the computer keyboard. “Nothing yet, boy,” I said. “But I’m not done, not by a long shot.”

  The thrill of the search was back. This was what I had loved to do back in Silicon Valley. When Mary and I first moved to California, I was unable to find a job. I adjuncted for a while, then took a temporary gig providing technical support for a software company called Mastodon Systems. After a year, I’d been offered a full-time job doing technical writing. Every time they developed a new program for dat
a entry or job tracking, I wrote the manual. I wrote all their HR policies, and created a book with procedures and responsibilities for each position at the company.

  In addition to my writing, I had a specialty in information. I built (or had built for me) tools that I could use to search our massive databases for documents, customer orders, even employee information. I found, with a little tweaking, that these tools could be used not just in-house, but on the big, broad Internet as well.

  The big furry monster rolled over, popping the cord that connected my in-home network. “Rochester!” I said. I nudged him with my foot and he rolled away. When I plugged the cord back in, I went through the process of initializing the network, which included viewing all possible connections. Since the townhouses at River Bend share common walls, I can often see my neighbors’ networks, and connect to them if I want, as long as they’re not password-protected.

  While I waited I remembered Santiago Santos, and started to worry about what he would say when he viewed my audit trail. I was supposed to be working on a business plan, not playing amateur sleuth. I remembered seeing Caroline’s laptop in her home office. If I used her laptop, and another neighbor’s network, there was no way anything could be traced to me.

  Looking back now, I see that was the first step in a long process. I knew I was violating my parole, and I knew the consequences could land me in jail. But I had to know what happened to Caroline. For me, and for Rochester.

  My problems had begun at Mastodon. If one of our competitors had some interesting information about new products, and they didn’t take care to secure it—well, then that was almost the same as public record, wasn’t it? I learned how to use back doors into protected sites, and I learned how to sniff out unprotected ports on home computers that I could use to launch my searches.

  I began to make some money on the side doing freelance work, finding information. Mary and I had been trying to have a baby, and it was around that time that she discovered she was pregnant. I took on a few questionable jobs to build up our savings. And then, two months later, Mary miscarried.

  I tried everything I could think of to make her feel better. When I told her we could try again, she began to sob. When I asked her to consider our faith, that perhaps God had a plan for us, she hit me. The only thing that made her feel better was retail therapy.

  We both made good livings, and we had always maintained separate bank accounts and credit cards, with a joint account for household bills. So I didn’t realize how much money Mary had been spending until about six months later, when I accidentally opened one of her credit card bills, thinking it was mine.

  Between massages, manicures, expensive shoes, designer clothes, and a pocketbook named after a British vocalist, she’d rung up the debt of a small country. I confronted her that night, and after days of arguing we worked out a plan. She agreed to speak to a counselor, and I helped pay off her debt.

  Things got better for a while, and then Mary got pregnant again. She did everything the doctor suggested, including quitting her job to stay at home, without stress. It didn’t work, though; she miscarried a second time.

  This meltdown was worse than the first. Mary was convinced that she could never have children, and she was angry that she’d quit her job only to end up childless. I was scared she was going for another spending spree, so I hacked into the three major credit bureaus and put a flag on her account, trying to keep her from getting any new credit cards.

  I thought it was a pretty harmless little hack. I wasn’t trying to steal anything, after all, just keep my wife from dragging us down into debt again.

  The judge saw it differently, especially when all three credit bureaus filed briefs against me.

  Caroline’s laptop was buried under a pile of papers in her office. Bringing it back to my house, I plugged it in and connected to one of my neighbors’ networks.

  My first target was Quaker State Bank. A little investigation showed me just how I could slip past their ineffective security—though before I did anything, I checked that I wasn’t being lured into a “honey pot,” a system set up to trap hackers who are attracted to a site. We’d had one of those at Mastodon.

  It appeared to be part of our network, a gateway that would let you into our customer and employee databases, but instead captured the IP address and other data from any computer that tried to access it. We belonged to a consortium of software companies, and we shared those IP addresses and forwarded them to the police for further investigation.

  I copied some files to Caroline’s computer from a set of disks that Santiago Santos would not have approved of, and then set my sniffers to work finding an open port on an unsuspecting user’s computer that I could use to launch my surveillance of the bank. I ground some beans and brewed myself a cup of coffee while I waited.

  Rochester followed me downstairs, guarding the entrance to the kitchen for me. By the time my coffee was ready, I had to step over him to get to the stairs—and he scrambled up and followed me. When I got upstairs, I saw the sniffers had discovered a couple of open ports I could use.

  When you go online, you should be protected. There are a lot of guys like me out there in the world.

  I took a sip of coffee, burned my tongue, and sat down at Caroline’s laptop. A half hour later, I was reviewing QSB’s employee records—only for Caroline Kelly, though. I discovered she made $80,000 a year, that she had eight vacation days remaining in the calendar year, and that she had left a life insurance policy in the amount of double her salary to her great-aunt, who lived in Utica, New York.

  Her job title was director of corporate accounting, and she’d been promoted three months previously. I followed a hyperlink to a description of her job, which was about as interesting as watching Rochester shed hair all over my sofa. I clicked another hyperlink from there, and took another sip of my cooling coffee.

  That new link was much more interesting. It seemed that Caroline’s boss had been fired and she had been named to replace him. There was mention of some corporate impropriety—wisely, not spelled out in the document—and a note that the fired employee, whose name was Eric Hemminger, was going to sue the bank.

  I opened another window and Googled Eric Hemminger. I got a couple of hits, including one that indicated he had filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania Commonwealth Court for unfair termination.

  I’m not good enough—or dumb enough—to try and hack into any government database. I did some searching through legal means, including the Lexis/Nexis database I have access to through Eastern, but couldn’t find anything more about Hemminger’s suit.

  What if his anger toward Caroline had gone beyond legal means? I didn’t know why he’d been fired or if he’d held a grudge. But I bet whoever had taken over Caroline’s job would know. I pulled up the bank’s website and searched for employees. Caroline’s name was still listed.

  I picked up my cell and dialed her office number. The phone rang for a while, and then a voice mail system picked up. A woman with a soft Hispanic accent said, “Evelina Curcio,” and then the system’s mechanical voice continued “is not available now. At the sound of the tone, please leave a message.”

  I hung up. Back at the bank’s website I found that Evelina Curcio was an assistant vice president – the most common, and most meaningless, title at a bank. I wrote her name down and decided to think about how to approach her.

  I could tell from her name and accent that she was Hispanic. There had been a report on the news a few weeks before that blacks and Hispanics were uncomfortable talking to the police—even just as witnesses. They were less likely to report crimes committed against them, and they were less apt to provide information than white, non-Hispanics were.

  I could tell Rick what I had found—but would Evelina Curcio talk to him? Maybe not. But I could go to the memorial service for Caroline the following week, and strike up a conversation with Evelina. Who knew what she might know?

  When I gave up on the bank, I found a website for military
brats, a place where you could type in your father’s posts and then search for kids you might have known whose parents were posted at the same time and place.

  Their information was in an SQL database; I didn’t even need to hack to get into it. Caroline had signed up, using “Rochester” as her password, and I was able to generate a complete list of the military bases where her father had served, along with the names of the international schools she had attended in Korea and Germany, as well as the public schools in the Florida panhandle and in North Dakota.

  “Your mom got around,” I said to Rochester, and he came over to me and nuzzled his head against my knees.

  I wasn’t sure why I was taking the time and the risk to look into Caroline’s life and death. On the one hand, I felt bad that I hadn’t gotten to know her better while she was alive. She was my neighbor, and I’d found her attractive. I suppose you might have called her a friend, or at least an acquaintance. Maybe getting to know more about her now would help me feel better about her death.

  I needed to focus on my business plan. But the lure of information was so seductive that I kept on surfing and hacking long after I should have stopped. I justified it by saying that I might find something important I could give to Rick.

  When I looked at the clock, it was almost time to leave for class. Rochester refused to get into the crate, and I worried about leaving him alone in the house. So I decided to take him to Eastern with me. If Tasheba could bring Romeo to class, what was to prevent me from bringing Rochester?

  First, though, I had to convince him to get into the front seat of the BMW. He preferred sitting on the front floor, resting his head on the seat. As I drove I reached over and petted him, and tried to keep the drool from staining my cloth upholstery.

  I’d just put him on the leash in the faculty parking lot when I saw Jackie Devere. “Is this the dog?” she asked, leaning down to pet him. Rochester sat on his haunches and submitted to having his neck rubbed.