“Did you get hold of Felae?” I asked when we were seated at a booth in the back.
Rick shook his head. “College has an address for him in an old house at the far end of Leighville, but the housemates there say he moved out a year ago. Nobody liked him, so no one kept in touch with him. He doesn’t have an account with PECO for gas or electric, he doesn’t own property, and the address listed with Verizon for his cell phone service is a post office box.”
I picked up my Dogfish Head Midas Touch ale and sampled it. I knew that it was made from ingredients found in King Midas’s tomb, and had a sweet, yet dry flavor that was halfway between beer and mead. “Students move around a lot.”
“Especially students with an FBI file.” Rick was drinking the 90 Minute IPA, and I had to wait until he’d taken a healthy swig to hear more. “Seems like Mr. Popescu has been very active with animal rights groups. He’s been arrested for protesting outside animal shelters, and he’s a suspect in a break-in at a pharmaceutical lab that tests products on rabbits.”
“And the FBI is involved in that?”
“They consider it domestic terrorism,” Rick said. “They’ve got a whole task force keeping tabs on people just like your student.”
“Former student. Hey, you know, he used to work at the Hungry Horse in Leighville as a server, but I haven’t seen him there in a while. Maybe they have an address for him.”
He pulled out a spiral notepad and wrote the restaurant’s name down. “Remember when that was?”
“Sometime during the winter. Not that long ago.”
I drank some more beer. “What’s going to happen to all Rita’s dogs?”
“She had an arrangement with another breeder,” he said. “Guy from the horse country in North Jersey. He’s coming down to pack up the dogs. In the meantime her neighbor is taking care of them.”
I sat back and looked around me. The ceiling lights advertising various beers glowed dimly, and the wooden booths were scarred with centuries of names, hearts and epithets. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a George Martha somewhere.
Our burgers arrived. I got mine with ham and cheese, accompanied by curly fries. Rick was a purist; he ordered the quarter-pound burger with no garnish at all, and a trough of onion rings. “You can’t taste the beef if you cover it up with all that crap,” he said.
“Who says I want to taste the beef here?”
“Hey, I’ve been eating these burgers since high school and I’m still here.”
“You used to come here in high school?” I asked. “Even though the drinking age was twenty-one?”
“With my parents. My dad loved the burgers. And when my mom wasn’t looking he’d let me have some of his beer.”
Rick looked over at my burger. “How can you eat it so bloody?”
“It’s medium,” I said. “Pink. Not bloody. Yours is burned beyond recognition.”
“At least I know it’s dead. And speaking of blood, we got the autopsy results back on Rita Gaines late this afternoon,” he said. “Very strange.”
“That’s gross. You talk about my burger and then you go right into autopsy results.”
He laughed. “You know you want to hear all about it. Your junior investigator badge is glowing right now.”
Rick had teased me in the past about my interest in investigating murders. But honestly, I grew up reading mystery novels, from Freddy the Detective to the Hardy Boys to the classic British authors like Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.
I feigned nonchalance. He could tease me if he wanted—but I’d wait him out until he couldn’t resist telling me what I wanted to hear. I ate a hunk of burger, listened the jukebox play a Springsteen song, and then asked, “How’s Rascal?”
“He’s okay. You’d think all that running around yesterday would have tired him out. But no such luck.”
“You need get him some sheep to herd. They could keep your grass cut for you.”
“Can’t raise livestock on less than two acres,” he said. “You need a farm like Rita’s.”
I put my burger down. “All right, I give up. I do want to know about what you found out. What was weird about her autopsy?”
“She had a high level of flunitrazepam in her blood. You know what that is?”
“Am I wearing a white coat? Do I have an MD after my name?”
“Don’t get snotty.” He picked up a couple of french fries and nibbled on them. One of the waitresses passed by carrying a platter of cheesesteaks oozing sautéed onions and spray cheese, curly fries spiraling off the plates.
“Are we playing twenty questions? Is it some kind of sleeping pill? Did she commit suicide?”
He swallowed the fries and leaned closer to me across the scarred wooden tabletop. “It wasn’t suicide. The brand name is Rohypnol, but on the street they’re called roofies.”
“The date rape drug? Somebody raped her?”
“Keep your voice down,” Rick said. “There was no evidence of rape. It looks like someone slipped her a couple of roofies to knock her out. But that’s not what killed her.”
Rick picked up his bottle and drained it.
I wanted to kick him under the table. “Come on, don’t keep me in suspense. What did her in?”
“You won’t believe this. Cobra venom.”
“Are you kidding? Do we have poisonous snakes in Bucks County? Cobras? I thought they were only in India.”
“Join the club. I asked the medical examiner if he was sure. Got my ear reamed out, including a list of where he had gone to school and every certification he has in pathology.”
“You think there was a cobra out at her farm? Underfoot when we were there?”
I shivered. What if Rochester had stumbled on a poisonous snake while he was running around the farm?
He shook his head. “She wasn’t bitten. Doc found a puncture wound in her wrist. Looks like the killer injected the venom directly into her vein with a hypodermic needle.”
“So it was murder?”
“Looks like it.”
“Then it should be easy to figure out who did it,” I said, sitting back against the hard wood of the booth. “They probably don’t sell cobra venom at your ordinary drugstore. Or even a veterinary supply place. Can’t you trace who bought it?”
“There’s only one place in the US that sells it, this snake farm down in Florida. I have to get a subpoena to discover who bought the stuff, but they said that any veterinarian can buy it by showing his license.”
“Why? As an antidote for snake bites?”
“Beats me.”
“Any idea who could have killed her?” I asked. “Strictly off the record, of course.”
He shook his head. “You’re not a journalist, Steve, so there’s no record in the first place. And in the second place, it’s way too early. I need to find Mr. Popescu, and I need to look some more into Rita’s life and her business and see if anyone else out there has a motive. I won’t even start speculating until I have all that under my belt.”
“Party pooper,” I said.
“Hey, remember, we’re talking about a dead woman here. A woman you talked to yesterday. This isn’t some murder mystery novel or TV detective program.”
“I remember. I still think of Caroline sometimes. And there are reminders of Joe Dagorian all over Fields Hall.”
We both passed on dessert. Cake, pie and ice cream had become the latest casualties in my war against a creeping paunch. Crossing over forty had been a kind of Rubicon for me. I was in prison in California for that birthday, and I made a lot of extravagant promises to myself then, most of which I hadn’t kept. I was going to exercise more, eat better, color between the lines and keep my nose clean. I’d danced close to the edge a few times but I was still free, and that was what mattered most.
I met regularly with my parole officer, Santiago Santos, and he did his best to help me avoid cyber temptation and the lure of snooping in online places I didn’t belong. And having a best friend who was a cop was a
definite help.
We split the check and threaded our way between the wooden booths and the packed tables to the back door, then out into the spring air, that much fresher for the contrast to the fustiness and spilled-beer smell of the bar.
“See you,” Rick said, as we reached our cars. “Remember, don’t burn your bridges—there might be crocodiles in the river.”
“Words to live by,” I said.
7 – Preventer of Information Technology
The New York Times dedicated a couple of inches to Rita Gaines’ obituary—with no mention of murder, just that she had been found dead at her farm. There wasn’t much in there I didn’t already know, but I was impressed at the Fortune 500 CEOs who knew her and contributed reminiscences. I was pleased to see a mention that she had graduated from Eastern and served on the Board of Trustees.
I tried to keep track of every time Eastern came up in the media. I had a Google alert set up to tell me whenever we were mentioned online, but most of those were useless, simply directions to student blogs. But that morning the list was long, as many different papers and websites picked up the obit from wire services. I copied the obits and put them into a file I labeled with Rita’s name.
When I finished, I started work on the first of a series of profiles of graduating students, part of my promotional efforts tied to graduation. Mike hoped to use them as an incentive to get alumni to fund more scholarships.
Faye Tallity had spent the summer between her junior and senior year volunteering with a group that searched for unexploded land mines in Cambodia. In her spare time, she sang lead with an all-girl band called The Thin Mints, which played a lot of campus events. Their music was heavily based in punk, and they dressed in Girl Scout uniforms pierced with safety pins, with their hair dyed bright colors. Faye wrote most of the band’s music, which tended toward the nihilistic, at least based on what I saw of them on YouTube. They had also put out a self-published album on iTunes, which was selling well in the punk category.
I opened a video clip of The Thin Mints playing, “Just Shoot Me” and Rochester sat up and barked. “It’s only a song, boy,” I said. “Go back to sleep.”
He slumped to the floor, and a reminder popped up on my computer. I was due at a meeting to discuss graduation. I left Rochester snoozing and walked around to the registrar’s office at the front of the building.
Dot Sneiss, whom President Babson had spoken to about Felae’s records, was the college official in charge of registration, student records, and matriculation requirements. She chaired the committee, which was composed of a half-dozen members of the faculty and staff. She was a plump, motherly woman with fading brown hair, wearing a pink cardigan over her white blouse.
She managed an office suite on the first floor of Fields Hall, down the hall and around the corner from mine. When I walked into the conference room there, she was wiping down the white board. “I understand the Stewart’s Crossing police called you for Felae Popescu’s address,” I said.
“I gave him what I had,” she said, turning to face me. “Unfortunately about ten to fifteen percent of our records are out of date at any one time. Students are supposed to update address, phone and email when they register each term, but some of them don’t.”
“So it’s not necessarily suspicious that his info is out of date?”
She shook her head. “If every student who didn’t keep up with us was dangerous we’d be overwhelmed with crime in Leighville.”
The next to arrive was Dr. Jim Shelton from the History Department. As Commencement Marshal, he kept the students in line, organized the faculty procession and carried the mace, a ceremonial staff topped with the Eastern logo, a rising sun. He was about five years older than I was, a genial heavyset man with a salt-and-pepper beard. It was hard to get faculty members to serve on a committee whose responsibilities ran into final exam week; most were busy grading papers then.
But Jim was chair of his department, which meant he only taught one class. He was also chair of the Faculty Senate, and he preferred college politics to academic research and publication. His kids were in their early twenties, and he had no grandchildren to spoil.
Right behind him was Dr. Fred Searcy from the biology department. In the sciences, at least at Eastern, most exams are multiple choice, slid through a machine that grades them automatically, leaving Fred free for committee service if he chose.
He was a slim sixty-something guy in a white lab coat, totally bald, with a friendly smile. I’d seen him working with students and been impressed with the passion he had for his subject and the ease he had in communicating it. He had helped me out a few months before when I was looking for information on a rare plant. I walked over to him. “Hey, Fred, I’m trying to find out some information about cobra venom.”
“You’d need Dr. Conrad,” he said. “She teaches Anatomy and Physiology, and our one course in Zoology. If anybody can help you, she can.”
“Her office in Green Hall?” It was the oldest classroom building on campus and the least “green” of any of our buildings. One of the main targets of the capital campaign was a new building for the physical sciences, with up-to-date computer-equipped labs.
“Down the hall from mine. You can’t miss it. There are diagrams of the body systems on the wall around her door.”
“Thanks. I’ll have to check out her office hours.”
“I can do that for you,” he said, as we sat down at the big conference table. He pulled out a smart phone and typed with amazing speed. “Her office hours are from two to five this afternoon,” he said.
I shook my head. “That’s cool.”
“Gotta keep up with the times.”
The rest of the committee was made up of administrative types like me, including a couple of staffers from student advising, a guy from Eastern’s Investment Office, and Verri M. Parshall, a woman I liked to call The Preventer of Information Technology, though her official title was Associate Dean for Technology and Information Systems. She was a classic example of the Peter Principle; she had worked her way up from a data entry operator back when the college kept its records on punch cards, and in my opinion she was scared of any new technology. It was funny that Fred was more comfortable with high-tech than she was.
Dot Sneiss stepped up and called the meeting to order then. “Verri, there seems to be a bug with the program that audits student graduation requests,” she said. “Students are complaining that they need the most recent version of Internet Explorer to access it.”
Verri was in her mid-fifties, and everything about her was brisk and no-nonsense, from her short, gray-brown hair to her man-tailored pants suits. “Then they need to download it. It’s free.”
“But that version is still very shaky on the Mac,” Jim Shelton said. “I had a student show me the problem he was having.”
“The Macintosh is not part of the college’s supported hardware package,” Verri said. “There are computers all over campus for students who don’t have their own PCs.”
“The ones in the lobby outside our office are always breaking down,” one of the staffers from student services said. I was pretty sure her name was Shireen, but her long dark hair blocked her name tag, so it could have been Shirley, too. “Students keep complaining to our office staff.”
“Then your staff needs to put in a service request.”
“We do that, almost every day,” Shir-something said. “But you need to manage your equipment better.”
“I’m happy to remove the computers from your lobby if you prefer,” Verri said, pointing outside. She wore no jewelry beyond a plain watch, and no polish on her fingernails. She probably used a DOS-based computer, too. No fancy icon-based systems for her. “Frankly I’d be happiest if we restricted on-campus computer use to as few people as possible.”
“You can take that up separately,” Dot said. “Let’s get back on track here.”
She explained the process of degree audits; apparently the online system wasn’t working
properly, so each student who wanted to graduate would have to schedule an appointment with an advisor.
“There’s no way we can meet with every graduating student in the next two weeks,” Shir-something protested. “Verri, can’t you make the system work properly?”
“I don’t appreciate your personal attacks,” Verri said. “If you have a problem, you need to call the help desk and put in a ticket.”
“The help desk phone number is always busy,” Jim Shelton said. “I call at least once a week with a problem in my office or in a classroom. All I get is a recorded message telling me to send an email.”
Verri looked at him like he was stupid. “If you and the rest of the faculty didn’t make so many requests, we wouldn’t be so overwhelmed.”
“They aren’t requests, Verri,” he said. “If you maintained the computers on campus better, or you let faculty download programs they need, we wouldn’t be calling you all the time.”
“I have more productive things to do than listen to your gripes.” Verri stood up. “Dot, you can email me meeting notes with anything you need from my department.”
“My email address is corrupted,” Dot said. “I’ve been waiting three days for a tech to come to my office and fix it.”
“Put in another request,” Verri said. “I can’t do anything for you unless you go through the proper channels.”
She turned and strode out of the conference room. The foam rubber soles of her orthopedic shoes squeaked on the hardwood floors. “Well,” Dot said, sighing. “Where were we?”
It was Phil Berry’s turn next. He was an African-American guy in his mid-thirties with close-cropped black hair and skin the color of milk chocolate, a financial geek who had worked at one of the big Wall Street firms and escaped before it imploded. Now he managed the college’s investments. Most of the time I could barely follow him because of all the financial jargon.
He pulled out his BlackBerry and punched a couple of keys.
Okay, Phil Berry was black, and he had a BlackBerry. I suppressed a giggle as he started to speak. Dot had given him the responsibility for coordinating our commencement speakers, and for once I understood everything he said.
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