Another Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  This time, because I didn’t have any personal information to include, I chose a different password cracking tool. This one used several techniques, including the simplest, trying passwords from a dictionary. It could also perform a rainbow table attack, using a precomputed table for reversing the encryption used on passwords. And finally, if all else failed, it could carry brute-force attacks by slamming the zip file with an onslaught of password options. It also had special techniques for zip file encryption.

  I initiated the program and let it go. It could take hours to break into the zip file, days, who knows, maybe weeks. I had gotten so caught up in that question that I’d stopped petting Rochester, which made him fretful, and he began bothering me for a walk.

  All of southeastern Pennsylvania was suffering from a heat wave, and the air felt like a big wet blanket. As an adult with a dog who needed a lot of walking, I felt the heat a lot more. Fortunately, golden retrievers have an undercoat that provides a layer of insulation for them, allowing them to feel warmer in winter and cooler in summer. Right then I wished I had a similar situation, but all I could do was sweat my way along, trying to stick to the shady side of the street. I hoped Wildwood Crest would be better—at least there would be ocean breezes.

  Rochester and I went down Sarajevo Court – all the streets in River Bend are named for Eastern European cities – and once again ran into Bob Freehl in his driveway, tinkering with the motorcycle he usually kept locked up in his garage. “Nice day for a ride,” I said to him. “I had a motorcycle license in California and I’m thinking of getting a bike myself.”

  “Nothing like it,” Bob said. “As long as you wear a helmet and observe all the safety rules.”

  That was Bob. Once a cop, always a cop.

  “If I were you I’d rent a bike first before you buy one,” he said. “Say, why don’t you come on a poker run with me next weekend? Most of the money we raise goes to a cancer charity, and it would give you a chance to get your feet wet.”

  “What’s a poker run?” I asked.

  “A bunch of bikers go from one checkpoint to the next, collecting a playing card at each one. At the end, the guy with the best hand wins.”

  “Sounds like fun,” I said, as Rochester pulled me forward to sniff something exciting. “I’ll email you for the details.”

  After I got home and emailed Bob, he responded quickly, sending me to the website where I could register. It cost $25, and began and ended at the Willow Grove Mall, about a half hour away from us on the north side of Philadelphia. As Bob had said, I’d collect a playing card when I signed in, and then one more at each of four stops throughout the countryside. Whoever had the best hand upon the return to Willow Grove won a prize.

  I checked the password software on the other laptop. Faster than I could have done it manually, it was attempting to open the zipped file, being confronted with the request for a password, entering a suggestion and getting rejected, then starting the whole process over again. It was almost mesmerizing to watch, but I forced myself to return to my regular laptop, where I switched over to the Pennsylvania DMV website.

  I downloaded the application for a motorcycle learner’s permit and a PDF of the motorcycle operator’s manual. As I did, Rochester rested his head on my knee, and I couldn’t tell if he approved of what I was doing, if he didn’t—or if he just wanted attention. The only one of those choices I could do anything about was the third one, so I scratched behind his ears and told him what a good boy he was, and he opened his mouth in a big doggy grin.

  By the time Lili came back downstairs, I was sitting on the sofa reading the electronic version of the manual on my iPad, with Rochester taking up a big chunk of real estate beside me. He scrambled off at her approach and settled on the floor as she slid in beside me. “What are you reading?”

  I showed her the screen. “You’re really doing this,” she said. “Getting a motorcycle. When you decide on something, you move fast.”

  “As I did when I met you,” I said. “But you’re for keeps, and the motorcycle is only temporary, while I see if riding one will give me any insights into Peggy Doyle and Carl Landsea. I’m just applying for my learner’s permit and then renting a bike.”

  I told her about the poker run. “I’ll be with Bob Freehl the whole time in case I get into any trouble.”

  She snorted. “You? Get into trouble?” She stood up. “You keep reading. I’ll get some dinner going. How would you feel about a big salad and the leftover eggplant parmigiana?”

  “I’d feel delighted.”

  My interest in biking rose as I read through the handbook. It was interesting to learn that a driver shouldn’t assumed that a motorcycle was turning just because its turn signal was flashing. A bike’s turn signals might not turn off automatically, like a vehicle’s.

  I hadn’t realized that most motorcycle/vehicle crashes happened at intersections, where a vehicle turned left in front of a moving bike or moped, when the driver of the vehicle should have yielded the right of way. I’d have to be particularly careful of that.

  I took notes as I read, so that I’d remember the material when I had to take the online exam.

  When Lili had the salad and eggplant prepared, we sat together at the kitchen table and ate, talking about the photographs she’d taken that day and the ideas she had for incorporating the new cameras into her curriculum.

  After dinner, the software still hadn’t found the password for the zip file from LoveMySled28 so I went back to Carl’s emails, getting another fifty percent or so sorted into separate files. I kept looking back at the password cracker, and I realized that there had to be a way to automate what I was doing.

  I occasionally prowled through a couple of file sharing sites on the dark web, using the Tor browser to preserve my anonymity, and I kept a decent archive of interesting programs on Caroline’s old laptop. Some of them were hacker tools that allowed me to bypass security features on a web server, but many of them were basic shareware that allowed me to create or manipulate images, edit PDF files and so on.

  I minimized the password window and dipped into the folder where I kept those programs, and found one that would search the content of each file for keywords I put in. I set up one search for “Levitt” and another for “Angels.” At least that would give me a head start.

  While I waited for that program to sort through all the emails, I turned to the leather-bound address book Peggy had given me. Carl Landsea had surprisingly good handwriting for a scum ball—almost as if he’d had some training as an architect or draftsman. The letters weren’t connected, as they’d be in cursive writing, but they were neatly formed and a pleasure to look at.

  His writing reminded me of that of a huge, menacing guy I knew in prison, who was there for life after killing the entire family of a man who owed him a hundred bucks. His handwriting was beautiful, and his explanation was his Catholic school upbringing. “The nuns made us write pretty,” he had said.

  With Carl’s address book in hand, I went back to my own laptop and began using Google and my subscription site to search every name there, looking for connections to Levitt’s Angels or anyone else with a motive to kill Carl. It was slow work, but I was dogged about hunting up every association I could find. I opened a Word document and began listing the names and what I could find, beginning with Martin Anderson.

  From a combination of websites and emails to the Levitt’s Angels, I discovered that Anderson was forty-five, a year younger than I was, married, and owned a home on Bayberry Lane in Levittown with a substantial mortgage. He was a sales rep for one of the mobile phone carriers, rode a Suzuki GSF600, and had no criminal record.

  I kept going. When I got to a Levitt’s Angel named Frank Diehl, I found that he four years before, he had gone to prison on drug charges. He been released about three months before Carl’s death. Something about his name tickled in my brain, and I went back to the notes I’d taken about my conversation with Peggy. She had mentioned an Angel named Frank, on
e with a funny nickname. From the email folders, I found that his buddies called him Big Diehl.

  Then I switched over to my legal offense database site and put in Frank Diehl. He had a couple of minor convictions, like Carl, but then he’d been pulled in for a pretty big sale of heroin to an undercover operator.

  What jumped out was that Carl Landsea had been a co-defendant in the case that had put Diehl in prison. That was the one that resulted in Carl getting off with a fine and time served. Had Carl turned on his fellow biker to get that deal?

  Could that have been a motive for Diehl to come after Landsea once he was free? Diehl had been a member of the Levitt’s Angels as well, so he probably had the skill to fiddle with Carl’s bike.

  But why didn’t Hunter come up with Diehl himself? He had access to the same legal databases I had. Maybe he had—he hadn’t told me anything about his own research, after all, just that he’d been looking into the Levitt’s Angels. But in case he hadn’t, I gathered everything I could about him from my various databases and the deleted emails from Carl’s computer.

  Frank and Carl had clearly been friends; there were old messages from before Diehl’s incarceration about going out together, getting drunk and looking for women. They’d compared notes on the dancers at Club Hott; while Frank agreed with Carl that Peggy was sexy, Frank preferred women with bigger booties.

  Frank owned no property in his own name, but his name regularly came up in connection with that of a woman named Olga Diehl, who owned a house on Tulip Tree Road in the Twin Oaks neighborhood of Levittown. His wife, or ex? Nope, another search indicated she was eighty-one years old, so probably his mother.

  I couldn’t find any current work record for him, so I wasn’t sure he had returned to Bucks County after his release from prison. I could have tried to hack into a government database to see where he had been assigned a parole officer—but that was far beyond what Hunter had asked me to find.

  I found a bunch of messages from Frank Diehl that mentioned words like pickup and shipment and distribution. Carl and Diehl had both been arrested on a drug distribution charge, and it looked like Carl had cut a deal by testifying against his buddy. That might give Diehl a motive to exact revenge on Carl—and I knew that Diehl had been released from prison shortly before Carl’s death. There were no messages between them after Diehl’s release from prison, but perhaps they’d been in touch by phone.

  I composed an email to Hunter, indicating exactly what steps I had taken to discover the information. When I hit send, I expected to feel satisfied—I’d done what he asked. I had found a solid suspect who could provide reasonable doubt that Peggy wasn’t the only one with means, motive and opportunity to kill Carl Landsea. He could take that to the district attorney and the judge, and use it to shift attention away from Peggy.

  But I didn’t feel that I’d done all I could. I realized that I had fallen into the pattern I’d followed several times before. This project, as it was, had morphed from a favor to Hunter into something deeper about me and my obsession to work through a puzzle, to solve a mystery. I wanted to know who killed Carl Landsea, and why.

  9 – Test Drives

  By the time Rochester and I returned from our bedtime walk, the sorter program had put aside about two hundred fifty of Carl’s formerly deleted emails that contained either the word “Levitt” or “Angel.” But I was tired and Lili was waiting for me in bed, so desire trumped curiosity.

  The next day was a busy one at Friar Lake, and fortunately the PennDOT office in Bensalem was closed on Monday so I didn’t stress about trying to sneak away there. After dinner that evening, while Lili was upstairs fiddling with the photos she’d taken over the weekend, I began to read through the emails the search program had pulled out for me.

  Most of the messages could be deleted—they contained the same kind of material that had been in the group emails I’d looked at before. Advice on bike problems, get-togethers and so on.

  I was surprised to find a few from Peggy in that batch, and wondered why she’d email him rather than text him. Then I remembered that she’d said he had simple flip phone, and that he didn’t text. It was sad that she had to email him to get his attention, and I hoped Lili and I would never come to that point.

  In one message, Peggy complained about how much time Carl was spending with the Angels instead of with her. In another she seemed plaintive – why did Carl want his bike between his legs instead of her? And then in a third, she seemed to be accusing Carl of being gay, wanting to spend all his time with guys instead of with his wife.

  Those messages indicated there was trouble in the relationship, though I couldn’t find any evidence to support what that anonymous caller had said to the cops, that Carl was beating Peggy. Instead, she sounded lonely and increasingly angry that she was being ignored.

  What if Peggy was guilty, and something I did kept her from getting convicted? Suppose, as the gossips suggested, she had killed husbands one and two and gotten away with those as well?

  That led me to wonder if perhaps there wasn’t anything in those deleted messages that would lead to the person who killed Carl. But why had he dumped them all, just before he died? Was it just coincidence? Or had he been cleaning up something that he didn’t want anyone else to know about?

  * * *

  The next afternoon I was able to get out of Friar Lake early and I took a quick run down I-95 to the PennDOT office in Bensalem, where I picked up my learner’s permit. Rochester wasn’t happy he had to stay in the car, but I parked in the shade and left the windows cracked. By the time I returned he had that mournful look on his face intended to guilt me into a biscuit—but it was his bad luck I didn’t have any in the car.

  On my way home I called Rick. “You busy later?”

  “You want to meet at the Drunken Hessian?” he asked. “I could use a break. Been a rough time at the station.”

  “If you can give me a ride into Tullytown, then I’ll treat you to a beer and a burger.” I explained that I wanted to rent a motorcycle so I could go on the poker run with Bob Freehl that Sunday.

  “A motorcycle? What brought this on?”

  “I’ll explain on the way.”

  I took Rochester home, fed and walked him, and told Lili I was going out with Rick to pick up the bike. “Have fun,” she said. “I just got a new e-book of photos by Gregory Crewdson and I want to immerse myself in his images.”

  Rick picked me up about a half hour later, and on the way to Pennsy Choppers he grilled me about the connection between my new interest in biking and Peggy Doyle’s case.

  “It’s not exactly a new interest,” I protested. “I had a learner’s permit in California. If it hadn’t been for everything that happened after I hacked those credit sites, I might have bought a bike back then.”

  “But right now you’re just doing this because your old gal pal needs help,” he said.

  “At least I’m not hacking,” I said.

  “There’s that. You say you’re going to do this ride with Freehl?”

  “He’ll look out for me. It’ll be almost like having you there.”

  “Yeah, me when I’m thirty years older and retired from the force.”

  “He’s still a pretty sharp guy. And he knows about bikes.”

  “At least you’re not hacking,” Rick echoed as he pulled into the parking lot.

  Rick followed me into the store, where we found Travis on his back on the showroom floor as he tinkered with the chain on a bright red moped. He looked tired and frustrated, and there was a spot of oil on his goatee.

  “I’m kind of surprised you came back,” he said, as he stood up. He wiped his greasy hands on a blue bandana. “A lot of guys your age come in to look around but never follow through.”

  I bristled at the “guys your age” comment, especially because I noticed Rick smirking. But hell, I was in my mid-forties, prime time for a midlife crisis, so I couldn’t blame Travis for making the assumption.

  “I’d like to rent a
bike for a couple of weeks before I make a final decision,” I said. “One with a sidecar for the dog.”

  “I’ve got a used Honda I can let you have,” he said. “It’s a pretty popular model, and though it’s got about 75,000 miles on it, I just worked it over last week.”

  I agreed to take it. While Rick browsed around the store, Travis made a copy of my driver’s license and the Pennsylvania learner’s permit I’d picked up at the PennDOT office. Then he found a helmet for Rochester and a harness I could use to strap him in place. The last thing I wanted was the big dog to jump out of the sidecar.

  While Travis put the bike and the sidecar together, I walked over to Rick. “You ever want to ride a motorcycle?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Seen too many dumb bikers who end up in the hospital or the morgue,” he said.

  “You can be a careful biker,” I said. “And it’s pretty cool when you’re out on the road, kind of like flying.”

  “I’ll stick to the ski slopes if I want that kind of experience.”

  It was funny to think of myself as more adventurous than Rick—I was the dull administrator who faced nothing more dangerous on a daily basis than the possibility of slipping and falling while walking Rochester. Rick had taken down angry drunks, disarmed would-be robbers, and dealt with violent domestic incidents. But maybe that was the point; he got all the thrills he needed at work.

  When we saw that Travis had the bike ready, Rick and I walked outside, and he said, “I’ll follow you to the Drunken Hessian. Try not to cause an accident, all right?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  I was grateful for the long summer day, because it was still daylight as I navigated my way back down Route 13, and I remembered how much I’d enjoyed that brief time back in California when I had the bike, before my old life fell apart.

  I had a good new one, I reminded myself. And I needed to pay attention to the road, not wallow in the past. I resisted the urge to dart around slower drivers, leaning back with my hands firmly on the handlebars, and let the scenery roll past me. Then a long stretch opened up ahead of me, and I revved the engine and zoomed forward, the hot summer air rushing past me, my shirt ballooning out behind me. I’d take this over skiing any day.