Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  When I parked at Friar Lake, Rochester left Joey’s side at the edge of the parking lot and raced across the pavement to me. He jumped up and down as if I’d abandoned him there for days. It took several minutes of tummy rubs, sweet endearments and a jaunt around the property for him to forgive me.

  I tried as best I could to recreate the conversation Doug and I had and typed it into an email to Rick. “I have the spreadsheets if you, or some fraud investigator, wants to see them,” I wrote.

  After I sent the email, I realized Rochester wasn’t in his normal position on the floor by my desk. When he wasn’t around me, I knew he was up to mischief. “Rochester!” I called. “Where are you, puppy?”

  I found him in the gatehouse lobby, where a stack of glossy brochures about Friar Lake had fallen to the floor. I’d written the text and Lili had taken the photos, as well as incorporating historic ones from back when the property was an abbey called Our Lady of the Waters.

  Rochester’s head was resting on one of the brochures, open to a list of alumni donors to the project. “I can find you a better pillow,” I said to my dog, as I tugged the brochure out from under him.

  Shawn Brumberger was an Eastern graduate, I recalled, as I wiped a glob of Rochester’s drool from the page. Could I find anything about him in our records, or on line, that might indicate a predilection toward crime?

  From the alumni database, I learned that Shawn was nearly fifty, about five years older than Doug and I were, and he had majored in economics, though without distinction.

  Looking back through his file, I discovered that his first job after he graduated from Eastern was as a stockbroker with a firm called Best Capital Advisors, in Long Island City, New York. I looked up the firm, and discovered that it had been the subject of a fraud investigation in the late 1970s. I clicked through a bunch of links until I found the details of the fraud. BCA had been a “boiler room,” a high-pressure call center. Brokers called people on “sucker lists” of potential investors and tried to convince them to buy high-risk stocks.

  Shawn had stayed at BCA for two years, then gone to NYU for an MBA in finance. While he was there, a Federal investigation had shut BCA down, and I couldn’t find any evidence that Shawn had been implicated in the probe. But clearly working at BCA had been Shawn’s introduction to financial fraud.

  He had interned at an investment bank during the summer between his two years at NYU, and then returned to that firm for a full time job after graduation. He had climbed the corporate ladder in fund management, and five years before he had left a position with a big Wall Street firm to found Beauceron. After some industrious digging I found that he’d been divorced at about that time, and remarried soon after. I wondered if the job shift and the divorce and remarriage were connected, and remembered Doug mentioning that he and Shawn had bonded over their bitter divorces, the way Rick and I had.

  Doug had been saddled with crippling alimony and child support payments. Maybe Shawn was in the same boat, and couldn’t afford to write off those bad debts at Beauceron.

  How could I find out if he was having financial trouble without hacking somewhere? I went back over everything I’d found, and saw a mention of his kids. Shawna Brumberger was in her final year at SUNY Binghamton, and Shawn Jr. was a freshman at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York.

  I shook my head at that. You had to have a pretty big ego to name both your kids after yourself. And what about the confusion when someone called?

  If either of them had applied to Eastern, there might be something about Shawn’s finances in their applications. I didn’t have authorization to access our admissions database, so I called Sally Marston, the director of admissions, who I’d worked with in the past. “You have a minute to talk?” I asked.

  “This is a momentary lull in the craziness,” Sally said. “Offers went out April first, so we’re just waiting to see what our yield is and how far we have to dip into the wait list.”

  I didn’t want to tell Sally my real reason for looking into Brumberger, so I spun a story about meeting him and trying to determine if he was worth courting as a fund-raising prospect. “Can you see if either of his kids applied here? If they might have been looking for financial aid? That could tell me if he’s got money or not.”

  Sally said she could look, and I gave her Shawn Brumberger’s name and class year. “Daughter’s name is Shawna, and the son is Shawn Junior.”

  “We don’t hold onto detailed records once a class is admitted,” Sally said. “There’s been a big boom in Freedom of Information requests from students who want to see their admissions folders, so President Babson decided that it would be safer for us to destroy the materials rather than have something embarrassing come out. But I can look up these names, see if they applied and if they filed the government forms for aid.”

  I thanked her and hung up. While I waited I did some searching on Shawn and both his wives. There might be details that could add to the puzzle I was assembling.

  Shawn’s ex, Barbara, lived in Westchester County in a house appraised at $5.2 million. He had transferred the deed to her for a dollar a few years before, most likely as part of the divorce settlement.

  Barbara Brumberger did not appear to have a job, though she was on the committees of numerous charities. She was a plump woman in her early fifties with a pretty face and well-coiffed hair, and I found a lot of photos of her at events, wearing ball gowns and what looked like a diamond necklace and matching earrings.

  I also found photos of Brumberger and his second wife, Svetlana, at similar charity events in Pennsylvania. She was a stunning beauty, a couple of inches taller than Shawn in her high heels and blonde bouffant, and she wore diamonds that looked bigger than Barbara’s.

  Sally called back. “Shawna Brumberger, the daughter, applied to Eastern three years ago, but her grades and her scores weren’t very strong. She was wait-listed for admission but ended up going somewhere else. Shawn Junior was admitted last year, but his FAFSA was incomplete so we weren’t able to offer him any financial aid, and he never matriculated.”

  “What does that mean, his FAFSA was incomplete?”

  “The FAFSA is the common financial aid form for all college admissions,” Sally said. “It could be that his parents refused to list their income, or provide copies of their tax returns. Unfortunately, we can’t make an aid decision without it.”

  I thanked Sally and hung up. Why would a kid with wealthy parents apply for financial aid at all? Was it because his father refused to pay for his education? Maybe Shawn Junior had taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and his father held a grudge. Or maybe Shawn Senior didn’t have the money. But then why not fill out the form?

  I remembered my college admissions process, when I first got to see my parents’ financial information—how much each of them earned, how much they had put away for my education, and so on. Maybe Shawn wouldn’t fill out the forms because he didn’t want his son, and by extension his ex-wife, to know that he was broke. Or that he was depending on the illicit income from Beauceron to pay his bills.

  Was Shawn Brumberger the kind of guy who could commit murder? It wasn’t hard to believe that he was cooking the books at Beauceron—it seemed like every Wall Street company had some kind of scam going on. But murder was a big step from cheating some investors, wasn’t it?

  It all came down to motive, I thought. What was Shawn’s motive in stealing from his investors? To maintain his lifestyle? To protect his reputation? Were either of those strong enough to motivate him to kill?

  13 – Open Source Tools

  I was on my way home that evening, Rochester by my side, when Rick called. “I have Doug Guilfoyle’s laptop here, but it’s locked down,” he said. “Catherine says she has no idea what the password is, and neither does the secretary at Beauceron. I could send it off to a computer geek in Doylestown but I figured why wait when I have a geek at my disposal.”

  “You want me to crack his password?” I asked. “I
sn’t that illegal?”

  “Get with the times, pal. Law enforcement is allowed to pursue digital evidence in the form of emails, internet history, documents or other file, as long as they’re relevant to the investigation. I just can’t ask you to use illegal tools.”

  “I have some open source digital forensics tools that a lot of agencies use. I can download the current version of the package at the station and show you how to use it, if you want. I just need to drop Rochester at home and then I can come over to the station.”

  “You can bring him here. He and the desk sergeant have a love affair going.”

  That was certainly true. A couple of times I’d had to take Rochester with me when I went in to speak with Rick, and I’d left him with the sergeant, who always kept some treats in his drawer for the department’s K-9 officers.

  When we got to the station, I went through the same routine—driver’s license and verification that I was expected, though the officer at the window did look curiously at Rochester.

  We were buzzed in, and as soon as Rochester saw the desk sergeant, he started jumping up and down with delight. I left my dog happily chewing a biscuit and crossed the room to Rick’s desk, where he had a fairly new laptop open in front of him.

  “So does this mean you think Doug was murdered?” I asked.

  “Too early to make a judgment,” Rick said. “There may be evidence on this laptop of his mood, for example, which could support suicide. But I can’t get past this password window.”

  I directed him to the website where he could get the open source password-cracker, and while we waited for it to download, he continued. “Guilfoyle had a high blood alcohol count, but the ME says that doesn’t mean he was drunk when he went into the water. Apparently your body manufacturers alcohol after you die, and that process gets accelerated when a body becomes waterlogged.”

  That was bad news. I could imagine Doug drowning his sorrows somewhere, then feeling maudlin enough to give up.

  “I interviewed a waitress at the Drunken Hessian,” Rick said. “She saw Guilfoyle drinking that night with another man. She pulled the tab for me – it was paid on the corporate credit card for Beauceron, the place where he worked.”

  He shook his head. “I love dogs as much as the next guy but I still think it’s dumb to name a whole company after one.”

  “You mean we’re not going to form Rochester and Rascal Investigations someday?”

  “Highly doubtful. Anyway, I checked with the boss and he said they had a couple of beers to talk over things at work. He last saw Guilfoyle in the parking lot – Guilfoyle said he was going for a walk to clear his head before he drove home.”

  “Did you look at that information I sent to you? About Doug’s suspicions?”

  “I asked Brumberger about it, in a kind of roundabout way, because of course I couldn’t tell him where I got the information. He said that’s why they went out that night, because Guilfoyle didn’t understand the way things worked at the company. Brumberger says Guilfoyle was satisfied when they got done.”

  Or Doug confronted Shawn, and Shawn killed him, I thought. “Do you believe him?”

  “No reason not to right now. And Guilfoyle’s blood alcohol count was .9, which is enough in Pennsylvania to get you a $300 fine and six months’ probation if you get caught behind the wheel.”

  “A good reason to go for a walk,” I said. “But why along the canal? It’s dark back there. He could have just walked up and down Main Street.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted to risk being picked up for public intoxication,” Rick said.

  “That’s a crime? Just walking down the street drunk?”

  “We can arrest you, if you’re so drunk that you pose a threat to yourself or to other people. And with so much alcohol in his system it’s doubtful he was thinking logically anyway. I’m leaning towards a suicide ruling now—it’s possible that after all that drinking he got maudlin and decided to end it all.”

  “I don’t believe that. Doug was going to have his kids this weekend. He was determined to reestablish his relationship with them. He wouldn’t have killed himself.”

  “You never know what somebody else is thinking,” Rick said. “There was some slight evidence of head trauma, so he might have hit his head on a low-hanging branch and lost his balance.”

  “Or that somebody hit him in the head and knocked him in the water.”

  Rick looked at me. In the past I’d let my imagination run ahead of the facts. And though there were a bunch of people with a motive to kill Doug, there was no evidence yet to show that his death was murder.

  The password cracker program completed its download, and I showed Rick how to use it. We entered as much data about Doug as we knew – his birthday and those of his ex-wife and kids, his anniversary, kids’ names, even the dog’s name, Pixie. We connected Doug’s laptop to Rick’s computer with a cable, and then started the program.

  Doug’s password was pretty simple to crack, as most human-generated ones are. His kids’ names, Ethan and Maddie, with numbers replacing certain letters—3thanMadd13. I could have figured that out without the software but I wasn’t going to brag.

  “Thanks,” Rick said. “I can take it from here.”

  “Hold on, cowboy,” I said. “Wait, isn’t that something you say to me?”

  Rick pursed his lips at me.

  “I have a couple more things to show you. You know that you can view the metadata of the files, right? When a document first appeared on a computer, when it was last edited, when it was last saved or printed and which user were involved.”

  He nodded. “Got it.”

  “These tools can also recover hidden or deleted files. Why don’t I show you how to do that before I head out?”

  “I bow to your superior knowledge.”

  I took over the keyboard and initiated a bunch of commands, and eventually a list of deleted files popped up, most of them emails. I retrieved them, and then pushed the laptop away. “My work here is finished.”

  He thanked me, and I picked up Rochester from the desk sergeant. Out in front of the station, he sniffed a bush and left some p-mail for his official investigative colleagues.

  “What do you think, boy?” I asked him as we walked to the car. “Was Doug’s death a suicide, an accident, or murder?”

  Rochester had no opinion on the matter.

  When we got home Lili was in the kitchen preparing dinner, and I poured out Rochester’s chow while she added some water to the pot of risotto on the stove and stirred it. The smell of mushrooms and asparagus rose in clouds around her.

  “Bad news today,” I said, as I put down the bowl for Rochester. “Remember my college friend, Doug Guilfoyle? The one who helped out at Friar Lake last weekend?”

  “Sure. Isn’t he the ex-husband of Tamsen’s cousin?”

  “He is. Or he was. He’s dead.”

  Lili stopped stirring and turned to look at me. “Dead? What happened?”

  “Rick isn’t sure, but Doug’s body was found floating in the canal this morning by a jogger. He’d been drinking at the Drunken Hessian with his boss and went to walk off the buzz. It’s not clear if he fell in the water, was pushed in – or jumped.”

  Lili dished out the risotto and we sat down to eat. “Rick called you about him?” she asked.

  Between bites, I explained about the contract in Doug’s pocket that had identified him, how I’d given Rick some background that morning. “Then this evening, Rochester and I stopped by the police station and I showed Rick how to use some free public software to crack the password on Doug’s laptop. He’s trying to see what Doug’s state of mind was before he died.”

  “Do you think Doug was depressed enough to commit suicide?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I know he loved his kids and wanted to be part of their lives, but it looked like he was going to have to quit his job and start over again, and he might have thought it was just too much.”

  “Poor guy,” Lili sai
d.

  “I know. And Ethan and Maddie – they both were pretty upset by the divorce, and now they won’t have time to work things out with their dad.”

  “Maybe we’ll go over to Catherine’s house this weekend,” Lili said. She finished the last bit of rice, mushroom and asparagus on her plate, then crossed her silverware over it. “They aren’t Jewish so they won’t be sitting shiva, but I’m sure they could use some friends around, especially because they haven’t lived here very long and probably don’t know a lot of local people.”

  “Sure,” I said. “Though I doubt Catherine will need much comforting. That is, unless Doug didn’t leave her enough insurance.”

  “Steve! That’s mean.”

  “It may be, but it’s true. You heard her talk about Doug. And didn’t Tamsen tell you Catherine was seeing someone? If she remarried, she’d lose her alimony, and she might have to get a real job instead of screwing around trying to write a children’s book about a Lenni Lenape girl.”

  “I don’t like the way you always see the worst in people,” Lili said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “I like Catherine,” I protested. “I’ve known her as long as I’ve known Doug, though clearly I wasn’t in touch with either of them until very recently. I’m not accusing her of anything. But things could get uncomfortable between Rick and Tamsen if Rick thinks Catherine had anything to do with Doug’s death.”

  “I’m going upstairs,” Lili said. “I have some papers to read. You can clean up.”

  The subtext was clear; I ought to stay downstairs. At least Rochester was willing to stay with me.

  14 – Cat and Mouse

  I paced restlessly around the living room, Rochester on my heels, thinking about Doug, worried that there was nothing more I could do to help him. I picked up the book I was reading but I couldn’t focus on it, and when I turned the TV on there was nothing I wanted to watch. I was idly flipping through channels when Rochester left me to go upstairs.

  I gave up and shut the TV off as Rochester came trundling back down the stairs with something in his mouth. He came up to me and dropped it at my feet, as if he was a cat with a dead mouse.