by Neil Plakcy
“It’s July,” I said. “Kind of late for a New Year's resolutions.”
“Better late than never, right? But I thought you came over here because you wanted information.”
“Well, yeah. You have any to share?”
“Went back out to Crossing Estates this afternoon. Paula’s friend identified the earring that Mark found in his van. One of a pair her husband gave her for their twentieth anniversary.”
“So that connects Owen to the robberies,” I said.
“Circumstantially. Couldn’t lift any fingerprints from the earring—it was too tiny. Because we only have Mark’s word that Owen had the van, an attorney could certainly raise reasonable doubt. I’d need a lot more evidence to connect Owen to those burglaries. The only thing I can connect him to right now is the theft from Mark’s place—and even for that, we only have Mark’s word.”
“Assuming that’s Owen’s bike, what do you think it was doing back by the creek?” I asked.
“No idea. I looked around in the woods around the Yardley railroad station and couldn’t find any sign that the bike had been ditched,” he said. “Checked with drivers on the bus route through town, too, and none of them remember him getting on with the bike.”
“Suppose he met someone at the shopping center,” I said. “It’s set back from Main Street so Owen could hang around there, say if he was waiting for someone to pick him up.”
“Why ditch the bike?”
“Maybe he didn’t ditch it – maybe he just hid it there because he couldn’t take it with him, wherever he was going. Or somebody killed him over the relic, and ditched the bike.”
“Both are hypotheses,” Rick said. “So far no evidence to support either one.”
“He must have had a cell phone,” I said. “Have you checked it?”
“Right now all I have him on is a suspected robbery from Mark’s place. It’s not enough to convince a judge to give me an order for Owen’s phone records.”
He looked at me. “And don’t you go trying to hack into those records either,” he said. “Because you know that’s not only illegal, but can violate your parole.”
“You don’t have to hack for that,” I said. “All you need is the carrier name, the phone number, and a good password-breaking program.”
“Which I’m sure you don’t have,” Rick said. “Right?”
“I have no intention of trying to hack his phone records,” I said.
I didn’t even have to cross my fingers behind my back. I had a better idea.
27 – Password Problems
On my way home from Rick’s, I called Mark Figueroa. “Did Owen have an email account?” I asked.
“Yeah, we sent some messages back and forth. Why?”
“Just curious. Can you give me the address?”
“I already tried emailing him. He’s not answering. But feel free to try yourself, if you want. It’s owenvet at mymail.com.”
“Thanks, Mark. Do you know if Owen had any friends in the area—guys with cars who might have given him a ride after he left your place?” I told him about finding a bike that looked like Owen’s behind the shopping center.
“No, he didn’t have many friends. Just Striker, as far as I knew.”
Rochester squirmed around on the car seat next to me and rested his head on my lap as I drove. I stroked his golden fur. “You were a bad boy today, Rochester. Don’t you ever try and run away from me again, all right?”
He didn’t answer, but he did drool on my leg.
When I got home, I climbed up to the attic and retrieved Caroline’s laptop. While it warmed up, I searched through my software for a good random password generator tool. I’d been able to hack into the MyMail servers a few months before, and was pretty confident I could do it again, but I didn’t know Owen well enough to begin to guess what his password might be.
I plugged a bunch of data into the generator before I set it loose. His full name, his parents’ address on Sarajevo Court and the one in Crossing Estates where he’d grown up. Then I threw in anything else I could think of – Afghanistan, the bases where he’d been stationed, and so on.
The MyMail servers had been upgraded since the last time I visited, and they had installed a program that kicked you out after too many password attempts. After the first two times the connection was cut, I got up and started making myself some cappuccino. I wasn’t going to let any crappy email system get the better of me.
I had to keep breaking in over and over again and went through a big mug of café mocha. Then I started to worry that they might be tracking my IP address, and that any minute I’d be getting a knock on my door from Santiago Santos. I wasn’t sure if I was sweating because of the hot coffee or the worry, but I pushed forward.
Finally the password generator scored a hit on a random set of numbers and letters. “Hello, Owen,” I said, rubbing my hands together. At least he was smart enough not to use something common, I thought. But I was smarter.
Yeah, cockier, too. I knew that. I forced myself to slow down, to take every precaution I could, even though I knew that the longer I stayed online and illegally connected to Owen’s account, the greater the chance that I could get caught.
I downloaded everything from Owen’s account to a zipped file on Caroline’s laptop, then I broke the connection to the MyMail server.
Owen Keely wasn’t a big emailer, just as he didn’t talk much. There were only a couple of dozen messages there—a few from Mark Figueroa, some junk, and then a couple from another MyMail address—Striker23.
That had to be the friend of Owen’s that I’d met. I opened the first of the messages, but all I read was a date and a time a couple of months before. Not very helpful.
The next few messages were similar. It looked like Owen and Striker had been meeting every couple of weeks, beginning in early March. Always on a Saturday morning.
I sat back in my chair. That made sense; if they were meeting to go searching for something at Friar Lake, morning was a good time to start. Perhaps Striker had a day job, and was only free on Saturdays.
There was only one email that had anything different. It was a link to a website, and beneath it the letters PW, followed by a colon and a combination of letters and numbers.
After I clicked the link, a window popped up asking me for an ID and password. I had the password, but what was the user ID? I tried Striker, and got kicked out.
It was already after eleven, and I was tired and cranky, and Rochester was nuzzling my knee, ready for his late-night walk. I gave up and shut down the laptop. I climbed back up the stepladder and returned it to its place in the attic. I’d try that site again the next day, when I was fresher.
I walked Rochester down past the Keelys', just on the off chance that I’d see something—but the house was shut up and dark.
In the morning, the story was still the same—no activity. That was strange, because in the past there had always been someone outside—Phil, trimming trees or weeding the flower bed; Marie, on her tricycle; or Owen, sitting on the grass smoking. Usually the garage door was open, and often I could hear music floating out of the house.
On our way back, I passed Bob Freehl, dragging his garbage can out to the curb. He loved Rochester, and we stopped so he could pet the dog and tell him what a good boy he was. “Haven’t seen the Keelys lately,” I said.
“On vacation,” Bob said. “Took one of those paddle-wheelers up the Mississippi. Don’t know where Owen is—he’s supposed to be watching the house for them.” He shook his head. “Just between you and me, there’s something not right about that boy.”
“He does strike me as odd,” I said.
“I think it’s the drugs,” Bob said. “Phil said they’ve had a world of trouble with that boy. He got hooked on something over there in Afghanistan, and he’s been through rehab a couple of times.”
He reached down and scratched under Rochester’s chin. “No worry about having that kind of trouble with a dog, is there?” Bob said.
“Sometimes I wonder why any of us have kids at all.”
I knew that Bob had a couple of grown daughters, and at least one of them was married with kids of her own. But I didn’t know what kind of trouble they’d caused him and his wife.
As I drove upriver to Eastern, I wondered if all the Keelys had been in on whatever Owen was up to. It was hard to imagine Phil, the retired Marine, breaking into the chapel at Friar Lake. Or Marie crawling under the altar in search of lost treasure. Maybe they’d gone off on this “vacation” just to avoid the trouble. It did seem awfully convenient.
I dropped Rochester at my office and walked down the hill into Leighville. The college was running short of administrative space, so several departments, including human resources and the news bureau, had been moved into a sixties-era building just off campus with a Wawa grocery on the ground level.
I climbed the stairs to the second floor to the glass door that read “News Bureau.” When I was an undergraduate, I had a work-study job there for year, though back then it was housed in a long-gone building that had been replaced by Harrow Hall.
As a college student, I was under the influence of Ernest Hemingway, and I wanted to be a foreign correspondent like Papa, traveling the world, romancing beautiful foreigners and narrowly escaping danger. It was ironic that instead of becoming that guy, I’d fallen for a woman who had done just that.
To get my press credentials going, I’d signed up for the college newspaper and taken the job with the News Bureau. As a cub reporter on the Eastern Daily Sun, I wrote brief articles about the most mundane events on campus—rehearsals for a student musical, the arrival of new recycling bins, and so on. I was painfully shy back then, and I hated having to go up to people, introduce myself, and ask for information.
The job at the News Bureau was similarly unsatisfying. Instead of writing press releases and attending college parties, I worked in the file room, made photocopies and ran errands. My enthusiasm for journalism waned quickly.
I opened the door to a large room with file cabinets along one wall with half-glass walls at the back revealing two small offices. Ruta was an olive-skinned girl with long brown hair with gold highlights, and if I hadn’t already met her I’d have thought she was a work-study kid like I’d been. She sat at a big desk in the center of the room. It was littered with magazines and newspapers.
She was sitting sideways to me, typing at her computer, her iPod headphones in her ears. It didn’t look like she’d heard me come in, and I stood there for minute, uncertain what to do. Then I walked around in front of her.
Still no response. I leaned down, and waved my hands in front of her. She looked up, startled. “Oh, hi Steve,” she said, when she pulled her headphones out. She motioned around the office. “Sorry for the mess, but I’m the only one here right now. It’s been kind of crazy.”
“Really? When I was a work-study here there was a whole staff.”
“Welcome to the world of downsizing. My boss, the manager, quit three months ago and still hasn’t been replaced, and even though I don’t have the experience for the job, I’m handling it and everything else around here. But between you and me, if I don’t get a raise soon, I’m out of here. I’m twenty-four years old and I should at least be making my age in salary.”
I was surprised. I had been making nearly double that when I was working on press relations for the fund-raising campaign, with a lot less responsibility.
I sat down across from Ruta and went over the couple of projects I had in the works. “I don’t think I’ll be too busy at Friar Lake for a while, so I’m happy to help you out, if I can,” I said. “I could keep working on those alumni profiles for you.”
“That would be terrific,” she said. “You think I could convince you to write the press release for Friar Lake, too? I need something to send out to the local papers, and I was hoping to get a feature together for the alumni magazine.”
“I can do that,” I said. I explained that I was working with Lili on the coffee table book about the history of the Abbey of Our Lady of the Waters, and I could pull together something from that research.
“That would be terrific!” Her phone rang, and she answered. I could tell from the conversation that it was going to be a long one, so I motioned that I’d call her, and walked out.
I stopped at the Wawa and got a cup of coffee and a doggy treat for Rochester. As I climbed back up the hill, I thought about the circumstances that had kept me at Eastern. Lucas Roosevelt had been kind enough to give me a couple of adjunct gigs when I had no other means of support. Then Mike MacCormac had taken me under his wing and gotten me the full-time job.
None of that would have happened without the support of President Babson, though. Though my felony conviction might not have come up when I was hired as an adjunct, I was sure Babson had learned about it before I was offered the full-time job with Mike’s office. Had he been looking out for me all this time? Why? Just because I was an alumnus? Or had he seen something worth saving in me?
I finished my coffee as I reached Fields Hall. I gave Rochester his treat, then went over to Blair Hall for my second class with the College Connection kids. I was pleased to see that when Ka’Tar filed in, he was laughing and joking with the other kids.
I got them up and moving around, acting out the messages they were going to send to the other characters from The Hunger Games, and then had them take an online quiz about the book and the movie. Then we talked about the proper structure of a paragraph, with a topic sentence and supporting details, I had them each write a paragraph about their experiences so far at Eastern.
I put a couple of the paragraphs up on the screen and walked them through how a professor would approach reading and responding to their writing. By the time our hour and a half was over, I felt that I’d given them a pretty good introduction to college-level writing.
Once again, I accompanied them to lunch after class. On our way to Burgers Commons, I walked next to Ka’Tar. “Are you having a good time here?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah. Only thing I ain’t seen yet is that place DeAndre talked about, the one with the monks.”
“Friar Lake?” I asked. He nodded.
“What did he tell you about it?”
“How pretty it was—the old church and the lake and the woods and all. He’d never seen any place like it.”
“Did he ever tell you how he got out there?” I asked. “It’s hard to get to without a car.”
“He knew this skinny white dude from the drop-in center, guy by the name of Striker,” Tar said. “DeAndre used to take the train down to some place in Jersey where Striker live, and they drive together.”
Striker? The same friend Owen had been talking to and emailing? “His friend Owen there too?” I asked.
“Owen? The crazy dude from Afghanistan? DeAndre talked about him sometimes. He was some kind of meth head.”
“I thought he was over all that,” I said.
“You don’t never get over something like that,” Ka’Tar said. “DeAndre never did nothing more than smoke dope, and he told me to stay clean, too. He said when that Owen dude was high he was scary.”
I could see that, I thought, as I held the door to Burgers Commons open for Ka’Tar, and then a couple of his classmates. The couple of times I’d seen him, he’d been pleasant enough, though I had always sensed some kind of edge beneath his surface. I wondered if Owen had been high around Mark, and Mark hadn’t noticed.
What had Rick avoided seeing about Paula until their confrontation out at Crossing Estates? Was there something I wasn’t seeing about Lili? How could any of us really know the object of our affection?
28 – Anonymous
Thursday afternoon Lili was busy trying to put together all the photos that the College Connection kids had been taking and working with, so once again I was on my own with Rochester. I spent the afternoon with her research materials on Friar Lake, beginning to write the narrative that would accompany her photographs.
I
was so engaged in the work that I didn’t notice the time passing, until Rochester got restless and started thrashing around one of his toys, a hard plastic starfish with blue-and-white ropes radiating from it. He grabbed one of the ropes in his teeth and started shaking his head back and forth.
That’s when I looked up and noticed it was after five. “No wonder you’re antsy,” I said. I stood up and stretched, then closed down the computer and got his leash. We took a quick walk around the campus for him to sniff and pee, then drove back home. I boiled up some pasta and microwaved a frozen container of sauce I’d prepared a bucket of a few months back, and while the dinner cooked I climbed upstairs and retrieved Caroline’s laptop.
Once I was finished eating, I opened the laptop and once more opened the link to the protected website Striker had emailed Owen. I tried “owen” as the user ID to go along with the password Striker had emailed him. The password window evaporated, and the website opened beneath it.
“Duh,” I said out loud. “I must have been dense last night.”
Rochester didn’t say anything, just lay sprawled on the kitchen floor behind my chair. It looked as if I was visiting some kind of eBay clone: there was a line-up of products, each with one or more photos and a brief description. But there was no heading on the page, and no indication of how to bid on or buy any of the items. There were several dozen items on the page, too, and it took me a couple of minutes to realize that they were all religious artifacts of some kind.
The first item was a silver spice box of the kind used at the havdalah services on Saturday evening, at the conclusion of the Jewish Sabbath. A six-sided box sat on an embossed pedestal, with a silver spire atop it, surmounted by a pennant with a Star of David on it. I’d seen pictures of similar items, but since I had grown up as a Reformed Jew, mostly attending only the High Holy Day services, I’d never seen one in use.
This box, though, was more special than the ordinary ones I might have seen. According to the description, it was from the seventeenth century and had been used in the main synagogue in Warsaw for several centuries.