Three More Dogs in a Row

by Neil Plakcy

  We had a Sunday subscription to the New York Daily News, which dedicated its center spread to the crime of the week. I gobbled up the details of knife-wielding robbers, kidnappers, murderers and child molesters. When it was time for me to go to Hebrew School in Trenton, my mother arranged a carpool for me. I remember asking, “How will I know it’s safe to get in the car? What if someone kidnaps me?”

  “If they steal you by day, they’ll bring you back by night,” my father said from behind the screen of the evening paper.

  “No one’s going to kidnap you, Steve,” my mother said.

  “But last week in the newspaper—”

  “Enough,” my mother interrupted. “Finish your dinner. I worked all day and I want to get out of the kitchen.”

  I might have grown up a bit paranoid, but when I finally moved to New York myself, I was already street-savvy, despite having grown up in the 'burbs.

  My neighbors in Crossing Estates didn’t seem to have that same awareness that crime lurked around every corner. My parents were never burgled, mugged or carjacked, and I don’t believe they ever saw a dead body outside of a funeral home. What had happened to me? Was I over-concerned, or were the people in these big houses clueless?

  It began to get dark as we approached the intersection of Mifflin and Lincoln, having finished about half the properties on the list. Rick asked, “You know what all these streets have in common?”

  “They’re all paved?”

  “Numb nuts. They’re all named for Revolutionary War generals.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged. “I liked US history in college. Recognized a couple of the names, and so I looked them up.”

  “Want to teach a class at Eastern? You could connect the American Revolution to The Hunger Games.”

  “I’ll pass,” he said. “I have enough to do keeping track of real life.”

  The dogs started barking in the back of the truck as a white van approached us on the cross street, moving very slowly. As it got closer I recognized it.

  “That’s Mark Figueroa’s van. He hired this son of one of my neighbors to work for him.” I leaned forward. “That’s strange. He left Mark’s store at about three. Wonder why he’s still out here this late.”

  “You’d be surprised how late deliveries come out here,” Rick said. “People work all day, and then when they get stuff it needs to be assembled.”

  “All Owen said before he left Mark’s was that he was delivering a sofa,” I said, as he drove through the intersection.

  “Hold on. Owen? Owen Keely?”

  “Yeah, his parents live down the street from me.”

  Rick turned into a driveway, then backed out and returned the way we’d come. “Owen’s a person of interest at the moment,” he said. “You remember where he was making his delivery?”

  I thought. “I wasn’t paying much attention. Sorry.”

  “No worries.” Rick pulled up against the curb and we watched Mark’s van move slowly down Conway Street.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Why are you interested in Owen?”

  “He’s been strange since he got back from Afghanistan,” Rick said. “We’ve had to escort him out of The Drunken Hessian a couple of times because he got loud with the bartender.”

  The Hessian was one of the oldest bars in Bucks County, in the middle of downtown Stewart’s Crossing. Rick and I had spent many hours there together since my return.

  “I thought at first he might have lost his license for a DUI,” I said. “Because I only see him riding a bicycle.”

  “Can’t be that, or he wouldn’t be driving the van. He’s probably just too broke to afford a car.” Rick stayed at the stop sign and we watched the van continue down Conway.

  The van turned right, and Rick eased through the stop sign and followed. As we did, the van exited Crossing Estates, heading out Ferry Road towards town. “I’ll have to give Mark a call tomorrow,” Rick said. “For now, we should get back to our original plan. We still have Phillips, Schuyler, St. Clair and Spencer to check.”

  As it got darker it was harder to identify the houses with alarm signs, but easier to see inside. There were an awful lot of plasma TVs, game systems and small electronics in Crossing Estates.

  “You want McDonalds before I take you home?” Rick asked. “My treat.”

  “Thanks for the offer, big spender,” I said. “But Rochester’s still got an upset stomach, so he’s getting boiled chicken and rice for dinner, and if I ate a hamburger in front of him without giving him some he’d never forgive me.”

  Rick dropped me and Rochester off at home, and I boiled up some fresh chicken and rice, which I mixed in with some of his regular chow. I heated up a TV dinner for myself. We ate together in the kitchen, and then I took him out for his evening walk.

  A car was cruising slowly down Sarajevo Court, and my first reaction was to think someone was scoping out houses for burglary. Was that because of my cruise through Crossing Estates with Rick earlier? Or just because of the way my parents had raised me?

  The car sped up after it passed us and disappeared around a corner. As Rochester sniffed and peed, I thought about crime and wondered if I could find any information on line about crime in Bucks County. Maybe I could discover something that would help Rick with the spate of robberies he was investigating. Or maybe by figuring out where the crime was around Friar Lake, I could give Tony Rinaldi a clue to the identity of the dead body that had been buried out there.

  My heart rate accelerated as I thought about it, and I tugged on Rochester’s leash to get him moving back toward home. I felt that same surge of adrenaline I got whenever I contemplated doing snooping online. It was probably what Rick’s burglars felt when they found a house to break into, that sweet sense of breaking society’s bounds.

  I hurried Rochester along. I was probably over-thinking things, as I usually did. From what I’d read in the years since my own incarceration, most criminals did what they did not because they were inherently bad people. They stole, dealt drugs and committed murder because they didn’t see other options.

  My behavior, I thought, as I unlocked the front door and ushered Rochester inside, was more akin to an addiction. Goosebumps rose on my skin and my pulse accelerated when I thought about hacking. And like many addicts, I thought I could control my behavior and keep myself out of trouble.

  In that way, I guessed, I wasn’t much different from Mary, the way she used retail therapy to ease her psychic pain over the loss of our unborn children. And probably like Owen Keely, too, who I presumed was using chemicals to wipe out bad memories of the war in Afghanistan.

  I got the stepladder from the garage and carried it to the upstairs hallway, where I set it up just under the hatch that led to the attic. I climbed up and popped the lid. There wasn’t much up there—a single light bulb, a lot of pink insulation and my next-door-neighbor Caroline’s laptop.

  I had found the laptop in her house while I was investigating her murder. Santiago Santos didn’t know it existed, and if he ever found it I was sure it would be enough to revoke my parole, because I’d installed a suite of hacking tools on it which I kept up to date by visiting certain underground forums I wasn’t supposed to know about.

  My fingers tingled as they always did when I was getting ready for a stint of cybersnooping. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for but I rationalized that anything I did wouldn’t be bad because I was on the side of the angels, just trying to help the police.

  I considered myself a very moral person, and I only broke the law when I felt it was justified in pursuit of a greater good.

  It’s a slippery slope, I know.

  And sure, I could have left all that investigation to Rick and Tony. They had the badges and the legal access. But where was the fun in that?

  11 – Police Blotter

  Rochester followed me downstairs, where I opened the laptop up on the kitchen table. While it booted up, I closed the vertical blinds that faced o
ut into the courtyard. No need to announce what I was doing to anyone who happened to drop by.

  When I sat back down, Rochester came up to me with a rope in his mouth. “I can’t play right now, boy,” I said. “Daddy has work to do.”

  Looking for inspiration, I logged in to a couple of hacker databases. The addresses were always changing; you really had to keep up in order to stay current with all the available tools and places to find them. “Think your neighbors are growing pot in their house but aren’t sharing with you?” read one message. “Use this tool to track power consumption in your area. Unusually large spikes in usage = neighbors up to no good!”

  Somebody running a grow house near Friar Lake would be a good candidate for dumping a body at the abandoned property. Maybe our victim had been a nosy neighbor, or a power company inspector, or one of the conspirators.

  Rochester abandoned the rope and put his paws on my thigh. I had to push him away as I downloaded the tool and followed the instructions to configure it for the area around Friar Lake.

  He gave up on play and fetched one of his bones, and began chewing noisily right beside me as I waited while my computer’s tentacles searched the net for an open port I could use to launch my hack. You never want to run a hack that can be traced back to your own IP address – your unique connection to the Internet. You want to find somebody who hasn’t secured their own gateway so you can drop in and mask your activities with their address.

  It’s getting harder to do, because it seems everybody has some kind of firewall on their computer to keep out folks like me. But eventually my snooper found an unsecured gateway I could use.

  Rochester seemed determined to distract me. He made so much noise with the bone I had to take it away from him, and then he slurped up some water from his bowl and tried to dry his mouth on my khakis.

  But nothing the dog could do would keep me from hacking once I set my mind to it. I pushed him away, and he gave up and padded upstairs. Once he was gone, I focused on directing the hacking software to look at the electric company that covered our area.

  It was slow, tedious work, but it was the kind of thing I could do with only one part of my brain, leaving the rest free to conjecture other approaches. By the time the software popped up a message that read “downloading consumption data,” I’d already come up with another idea.

  I found a legitimate website that tracked criminal activity by zip code and plugged in several for areas surrounding Friar Lake. I found two guys who had been arrested for running a chop shop a few miles down the country road that led north from the property. A chop shop is a garage that takes apart stolen cars in order to sell the parts. They had only been arrested a few weeks before, so they’d probably have been in business during the time the victim was killed.

  To avoid any connection to Caroline’s laptop, I logged into the web interface for my personal email, and sent the information I had found to Tony Rinaldi, with a suggestion that the dead man might be connected to the chop shop. I made sure to include the link to the website where I’d found the information.

  Maybe it was overkill – but my paranoia kicked in again. I knew that having the extra laptop in my possession could be enough to violate my parole. Add in the hacking software, and I’d be back in prison before you could say Travelocity. So I was determined to be like Caesar’s wife, avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

  By then the power results had been downloaded, and I disconnected the hacking software, the connection to the open port, and the sniffers from my – or Caroline’s – laptop. My fingers were clammy, and I felt an empty spot at the back of my throat. By then, my feelings of paranoia had been trumped by reality. If I could be traced to any of the hacks I’d committed, I’d face another trial and another sentence.

  Why did I keep doing it? I couldn’t answer that question, and I did my best to ignore it. In one compartment of my brain I rationalized my activities; after all, I was trying to solve a crime, to bring justice to the world. In another part I made excuses – there was some chemical lacking in my brain that made me crave this kind of stimulation. It wasn’t my fault at all – just a biological defect. I shut down any other options before they could form.

  I opened the spreadsheet file that had been created through the hack into the power company. At first, I was baffled – how was I going to figure anything out? Then I noticed a button that laid the data over a map, with color-coded results.

  The hotter the red color, the more power that was being consumed in that area. I zeroed in on a property that backed on Tohickon Creek. The map view showed a single suburban house there, but the power use was bright red. I did some cross-referencing and discovered that the consumption still wasn’t high enough to flag the property.

  I was still suspicious, so I went to Google maps and zoomed in on the property. A large boathouse stood on stilts over the creek behind the house. Thermal imaging for the area showed that boathouse was bright red, too—meaning there was a lot of heat being generated there.

  I was pretty sure there were generators back there, and they were being used to mask some of the power consumption, keeping it below the electric company’s radar. Maybe the farmers had even figured out how to harness some of the water from the creek.

  It was getting late, and Rochester was antsy for his bedtime walk. I already had Tony Rinaldi’s official email address, but I thought it was better to camouflage my tracks whenever I could. So I checked the website for the Leighville Police Department and found an address ordinary citizens could use to ask questions or report crimes.

  I logged into an email account I had set up years before with an anonymous remailer. I knew that the remailer computer would strip away the (fake) name and address I had used to set up the account, and replace it with a dummy address. If Tony, or whoever got the message at the Leighville PD, wanted to reply to me, he could, because the remailer would forward the message to me. But no one could connect the email to me.

  I wrote a note pretending to be a neighbor of the property, and bundled up the power consumption data for the house by the creek. I attached it to the message. Just in case the police computer wouldn’t allow the attachment of files to emails, I summarized the information in a couple of sentences. Then I clicked “send.”

  By then, I was exhausted. The initial adrenaline surge had run through my body, and the mental focus I had put into hacking, and then reading the power consumption results, had wiped me out. It was too late to check in with Lili, and I didn’t have the energy to speak to her either.

  I forced myself to stand up, stretch, and put away Caroline’s laptop. Then I went downstairs for Rochester’s leash. He followed me eagerly, scampering around as I tried to hook him up. I gave up and collapsed on the couch, which convinced him to calm down enough to let me clip on the leash. He dragged me out the front door and down the street.

  The skies were overcast and there was no one else out on Sarajevo Court that late. I let Rochester drag me along until he was ready to go home, and once back in the house, I stripped down and fell into bed. I was asleep almost immediately.

  The next morning Rochester hopped up onto the bottom of my bed and sat on his haunches, staring at me as I roused. When he saw that I was awake, he pounced. I ducked my head beneath the comforter but he wasn’t fooled. He sniffed around, pawing at me, until I emerged. Then he lavished me with puppy kisses. It was our regular morning love fest, and I wrestled him down onto his back so I could rub his belly.

  He flailed his legs around like a dying cockroach and turned his head to face me. I marveled once again how his nose was like a baboon’s, black and moist, and the way the black of his muzzle faded into golden so quickly. I had slept off my energy drain of the night before, so I hopped up, pulled on a tank top and a pair of shorts, stepped into my Crocs, and wrangled Rochester onto his leash. I was pleased that he seemed to be feeling better.

  We walked through the center of River Bend, past the twin lakes. As we were circling back home, Ow
en Keely’s mother Marie approached us on her three-wheeled bicycle.

  She was a slim blonde in her early sixties, but she’d had a stroke a year before and was still recovering. She’d gotten the bike, with one front wheel and two in back, for exercise, and now she often rode around, waving and smiling at everyone. She had a big basket in the back of the bike, with a bumper sticker that read “I Brake for Yard Sales.”

  “Such a beautiful dog,” she said, pulling up beside us. She reached her hand out to him, and he bounded up to her. I remembered his reluctance to sniff her son and wondered about that. Did he have some drug-addict scent that Rochester had reacted to?

  “How are you this morning?” I asked her.

  “I’m here for another day,” she said cheerfully.

  What a contrast she was to her son, I thought. Owen must take after her husband; Phil had never been that friendly, either. He was a retired Marine, and Corps logos and stickers decorated his SUV and his garage. He often wore Marine T-shirts, and even had a license plate frame on his car that read Semper Fi. Seeing it always tempted me to look for one that read Semper Fido.

  “I saw Owen at River Antiques yesterday,” I said. “How’s he settling in?”

  She sighed. “You don’t have children, do you, Steve?”

  I shook my head. “Didn’t work out that way.”

  She scratched Rochester behind his ears, and he opened his mouth in a big doggy grin. “Owen was such a sunny child, but the Army changed all that. When he came back he was like a different boy. And then of course we found out about the drugs. It’s been a real battle. But that Mark Figueroa is such a nice boy. I think he’ll be a good influence on Owen.”

  “I hope so too,” I said.

  She put her feet back on the pedals and waved a cheerful goodbye. “Have a lovely day!” She continued past, wobbling a bit from side to side. Rochester tried to chase her but I reined him in.