Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I released my grip on him to reach for the towels, he shook his whole body, spraying the walls around the tub, the bathroom floor, and me. I yelped, “Rochester! Bad dog!”

  At least it was clean water.

  Golden retrievers have a soft, water-repellent coat, and then a heavy undercoat that’s hell to get dry. He was as slippery as an eel, struggling to get away from me and go shaking water over the whole house, but I manhandled him into submission. I went through five towels before Rochester was merely damp, instead of soaking wet. Then I let him go, and he scampered away.

  I let the dirty water out of the tub, and refilled with clean water. Then I relaxed and leaned back. Rochester returned, slumping on the tile floor next to me as I scrubbed myself down. When I felt clean enough, I grabbed the last clean towel and dried myself.

  I ate my pizza, giving Rochester some crusts, and then washed up. I dialed Lili’s cell to check in, but the call went direct to voice mail, so I left a message. Rochester was snoozing on the tile floor in the kitchen as I turned on my laptop.

  Since my problems with the California penal system had arisen based on my computer hacking, the conditions of my parole restricted me to owning only one computer. It was a decent laptop, though already over a year old. I thought I might lean on Santiago Santos to relax that condition and let me get another electronic device, maybe a tablet or a netbook. Just for fun, of course. For the most part, I had turned my back on my hacking past.

  The first thing I wanted to know was more about cobra venom, so I did a quick search. The scientific name for the nerve blocking agent was Alpha-Cobratoxin, and as Dr. Conrad had said, it was used to numb the pain when a dog kept chewing away at a bite.

  It was a powerful neurotoxin that acted as a painkiller when administered in small quantities. I wondered how much of it would have been necessary to kill Rita Gaines, but I couldn’t find anything online to tell me. I did discover that the possession of cobra venom wasn’t a crime, although the substance had been banned in horse racing.

  Rita might have mentioned the cobra venom in the sleeping Mexican to anyone who’d come to her barn. That would let out Felae. She would never have shared a glass of iced tea with him or talked about dogs and their treatment with him. I doubted he would have known about cobra venom on his own, known where she kept it, or even known that she drank iced tea with lots of sugar that would disguise the taste.

  Who else could have known that Rita had cobra venom in her barn? Don Kashane had known. And he’d been nosing around her property right after her death, carrying a shotgun. Did he have a motive to kill her?

  Rochester got up and moved behind my chair, where he settled down again.

  Perhaps it was someone who brought a dog to Rita’s agility training sessions, or someone she’d sold a puppy to. I made a note to ask Rick if he had found anyone with a dog who had a grudge against Rita.

  I remembered the rude way Rita had spoken about Rochester. A lot of people are very possessive about their dogs. Had she insulted someone badly enough to get herself killed?

  That didn’t seem very reasonable, despite all the rabid dog-lovers I had met since Rochester came into my life.

  And then there was the flunitrazepam the coroner found in her system. She probably didn’t have that lying around her barn, so the killer must have brought it with him – or her. I remembered the photo I had taken of the blister pack Rochester found in the trash, and I transferred it from my phone to the laptop. Then I opened up Photoshop and enhanced the image. I didn’t want to say anything to Rick, because I knew he’d tell me I was jumping the gun, but I thought Rochester might have discovered the packaging for the drug the killer had used.

  Rochester curled around the back of my chair, as if he was keeping me at the computer until I figured out what I had.

  Once I had a decent image, I searched for pictures of Rohypnol packaging, and found a good one for comparison. I could make out the left part of the capital R on the left side of the open circle, and what looked like the top of the L on the right.

  The giveaway, though, was the remainder of the black hexagon at the bottom of the package. The manufacturer of Rohypnol was Roche Labs, and the bottom part of the Roche logo was clearly visible in the bottom part of the hexagon.

  “Good boy,” I said, leaning down to scratch behind Rochester’s ears. He was still damp, and I knew he would be for a while. “Even though Rick laughed, you found a clue after all.”

  Rochester yawned deeply and sprawled on to his side. He knew his work was done.

  I called Rick in triumph. “That blister pack I found in the garbage? It’s for Rohypnol.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I told him about taking the picture, enhancing it and matching it.

  “You can’t leave things alone, can you?” he said.

  “Hey, I’m not calling up your chief and telling him I’m doing your job. Just you.”

  “You’re not doing my job, Steve. Most of the time, you’re getting in the way.”

  “Don’t be a dick, Rick. Hey, that rhymes.”

  He sighed. “Email me your picture and the match. Now go watch TV or something.”

  Of course I couldn’t do that. Instead I started surfing the internet trying to figure out how easy it was to get your hands on Rohypnol. Not that I was actually going to buy it, you understand. I wanted to know where the killer could have gotten it, and if there might be a purchase trail Rick could follow.

  I found that I could order it from a dozen online pharmacies—no prescription needed, as long as I was willing to fill out an online questionnaire that would evaluate whether the medication was right for me. If I passed, then their “on-call physician” would write the script so they could fill it.

  I made a list for Rick of all the online pharmacies. It was a long shot, but maybe he could get a subpoena for client records and match them to someone who knew Rita and had a motive to kill her.

  That reminded me of Felae, who was in danger of losing his scholarship, and perhaps even being sent back to his country, wherever that was. I did a quick search for Felae Popescu, but all I could find was his involvement with an animal rights group called Don’t Operate on Animals, or DOA. He had been involved in a couple of protests at medical research facilities and had written numerous blog posts about treating animals properly. I couldn’t argue with any of that.

  It was almost eleven o’clock by then, so I took Rochester out for a quick walk. A cold front had swept in, and the air was chilly, but the sky was so clear I could see dozens of constellations. Orion the hunter loomed right overhead, and I wondered who had been hunting Rita Gaines—and why.

  * * *

  When I woke up the next morning, Rochester was on the floor next to my bed, lying on his back and waving all his legs in the air like a dying cockroach. I looked over at him and laughed, and he immediately rolled over and jumped up to lick my face. We carried out our usual morning routine. We went outside, and Rochester chased a couple of dead leaves fluttering past in the light breeze as if they were prey he was going to capture and return to me in exchange for a treat. Then we drove up to Eastern.

  I was in my office working on another of the many press releases I had to complete for graduation when Rochester sat up and barked a couple of times. I looked up to see a tall, rangy kid with crooked teeth and acne standing in the door. “The dog doesn’t bite, does he?” he asked.

  “No, he’s sweet.” I turned to the dog, who was still barking. “Rochester, hush.”

  Then I looked back at the kid in the doorway. “Can I help you?”

  “Lou from the writing lab told me to come talk to you. I’m Dustin De Bree.”

  “Oh, yeah. Come on in, have a seat. Lou said you were having a problem?”

  “Can I close the door?” he asked.

  “Sure.”

  He closed it, then sat down across from me. He wore a light blue Eastern ball cap turned backwards on his head.

  “So what’s going on?
”

  “Can this, like, be in total confidence? I’m really freaked and I don’t know what to do.” He picked nervously at a zit on his neck.

  “I can’t promise you anything until I hear what your problem is. But I can tell you I have a friend on the Leighville Police, so if you’re in trouble with them…”

  “Oh, no, it’s not illegal. I mean, I’m not in trouble. But I saw something I wasn’t supposed to. And that might be illegal.”

  I blew a breath out through my pursed lips. “Let’s start from the beginning. You’re a student here, right?”

  He nodded. “I’m a sophomore, majoring in computer science. I’ve always been really good with computers. I have a work-study job in the IT department. My job is to go around to people’s offices and stuff and fix their computers when things break.”

  “We really have people who do that? I thought you just put a help desk ticket in and they ignore it.”

  “Lots of stuff we can’t actually do anything about. There’s this weird control program installed on all the computers on campus, called Freezer Burn. No matter what you do to the computer when it’s on, as soon as you reboot, Freezer Burn brings it back to the original configuration.”

  We’d had a similar program at the place where I worked in California. “But can’t you customize Freezer Burn to accept changes if an administrator makes them?”

  He shook his head. “It’s a really crappy program, but Mrs. Parshall won’t let us use anything else.”

  That sounded like Verri M. Parshall to me.

  He took a deep breath. “That’s where the trouble is.”

  “Go on.”

  He sat up. “See, I kept wondering why we use such a crappy program. It’s constantly screwing up all kinds of systems because it wasn’t designed for such a large installation like we have here.”

  That made sense. I remembered hearing the problems the registrar was having with graduation audits, and Verri’s unwillingness to do anything about them.

  Dustin gave up picking at his zit, but began rubbing his hands against each other.

  “So why are you here, Dustin? Sounds like a problem within your department. And you’re only a work-study student, aren’t you? It’s almost the end of the semester. Your job’s going to be over in a week or two.”

  He nodded. “But see, the other day I saw something I wasn’t supposed to, and I feel weird about it, like I should report it to someone. It’s really messing with my head, you know? Like we had to sign the Eastern Pledge, right?”

  The Pledge was something all freshmen had to sign. Students agreed not to cheat on exams, to plagiarize papers, to steal from the College or from each other, and so on. I’d signed it myself, long ago.

  I nodded, though I didn’t know what the Pledge had to do with anything.

  “Mrs. Parshall had left this folder open on her desk, and there was a check inside,” Dustin continued. “From this company called MDC.”

  “So?”

  “So that’s the company that makes the Freezer Burn software.”

  I was starting to get impatient with Dustin. I had to get back to my press release and get it finished before some other crisis came up. “Was it some kind of refund?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. It was payable to her personally. For like twenty thousand dollars.”

  I turned my head a few degrees and pressed my lips shut. Why would Verri M. Parshall be getting a personal check from a vendor?

  “You get it, right?” Dustin asked. “It must be some kind of payoff, for using this crappy software. And I’m afraid she knows I saw the check. What if she has me killed or something?”

  “I think you’ve been watching too many movies, Dustin,” I said. “Mrs. Parshall isn’t a mob boss. You’re not going to wake up one morning with a horse’s head in bed next to you.”

  Dustin recoiled in horror. “A horse’s head? What would that be for? Does she keep horses or something?”

  “It’s a scene from a movie. The Godfather. But don’t watch it. It’ll only give you horrible ideas.”

  “I’ve got enough of those.” He was wearing one of those evolution T-shirts, the kind with a progression from left to right, starting with a monkey, then a Neanderthal, and so on. At the far right was a guy sitting at a computer terminal, with the slogan “Something went terribly wrong” underneath it.

  “What should I do, Mr. Levitan? What she’s doing is wrong, and it’s screwing up the college computers. But I’m afraid that if she knows I reported her, she’ll fire me, or even get me expelled or something.”

  “Let me think about it.” I had been puzzled over Freezer Burn’s obvious flaws, and yet Verri’s unwillingness to take action. If she had accepted a bribe to install inferior software, that explained her behavior. It was also a very serious charge to make against someone, especially a college employee with such a long tenure and so many friends in high places.

  I had no idea what I could do, but my words seemed to have a good effect on Dustin De Bree. For the first time since he’d walked into my office he relaxed.

  “Leave me your phone number and your email address,” I said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  He scrawled it on the top page of an Eastern College logo pad, and pushed it across to me. “I feel so much better. You’re like, really cool. Lou was totally right about you.”

  “Thanks.”

  He left, and I went back to my press release, which was sounding wooden and boring. I couldn’t focus on it when I had Rita Gaines and now Dustin De Bree taking up space in my brain.

  So I took Rochester out for a walk. Instead of traipsing down the hill, like we usually did, we circled around the back of the campus, where the hillside sloped down sharply to a wooded ravine. A burbling creek marked the edge of the college property. Beyond it lay a series of fields burgeoning with new growth. I let Rochester off his leash and he took off down the slope toward the darkness, his golden flanks shimmering as he ran.

  It was so peaceful back there—and yet my brain was filled with murder and corruption. Just like that thicket, there were dark places around the campus, both literal and metaphorical. The college newspaper regularly reported break-ins and the occasional assault. Students had been arrested on and off campus for drug possession, and at least once a year a depressed young man or woman committed suicide.

  I shook those gloomy thoughts off as Rochester dashed around, stopping to sniff and pee, then galloping again. Every time I saw him going toward the thicket I called him back, but he couldn’t resist stepping in to the dense underbrush. I had to scrabble down the slope myself and step between the trees, pushing aside fiddlehead ferns and something prickly.

  It was much cooler inside there. I could barely hear the noises of the campus—the whirr of the generators, the beep of a truck backing up, rap music from a car passing. It smelled musty and primeval.

  Rochester had stopped to sniff some flat-topped mushrooms, and I was able to hook his collar and jerk his head back before he could eat any. Holding him tight, I backed out of the thicket, scratching my arm on the tree bark. Once we were outside I turned and dragged him back up the slope behind me.

  We stopped at one of the lunch trucks on the way back and I got a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza. We sat on a bench and I fed him the meat circles as I ate. By the time we were finished I felt refreshed enough to tackle the graduation press release again. I had it ready to go by the time I had to leave for the last day of my tech writing class.

  Lou was standing at the teaching podium when I walked in. He’d smartened up for his presentation, wearing a collared shirt and neatly pressed jeans. As the rest of the class filtered in, he said, “I can’t get my presentation to start. I don’t know what’s wrong.”

  I groaned. It drove me wild when I was teaching and the computer systems weren’t up to date, and there was nothing I could do about it. Every time I wanted to show a class a Flash movie, I had to fill out a licensing form. Each time I wanted to open a PDF fi
le, I had to accept the conditions of the software. I couldn’t download and install anything myself, even freeware to help students edit pictures or sound clips for their presentations. And when a student used a personal address to email me a paper and I tried to download it, the system took it for a virus and forced my system to reboot.

  Lou turned the computer off and then on again, and we waited for it to cycle through its seemingly endless start-up menu. But once it did, whatever had hung it up before was fixed, and he was able to get his PowerPoint running.

  The first screen had a picture of a bunch of students sitting at computers, with his name and the title of his presentation: writting better with the help of the lab. I chose not to point out the typo in the headline.

  “The Writing Lab is located at the rear of Blair Hall, around the corner from this room,” he said to us. “You may never have been there, but it can be a valuable resource for you. I’d like to explain why.”

  He clicked forward to a list of all the help a student could get at the Writing Lab. “Most students think the Lab is only for remedial help, but anybody can go in for paper reviews, too,” he said.

  He showed a short video clip of himself working with a female student I recognized as his girlfriend Desiree. He was explaining how important structure was in an academic paper.

  When the video ended he flipped forward. “Need help with your research or citation?” he asked the class. “You can come to the Writing Lab for help.” He showed a second clip, of him helping Dustin De Bree with MLA-style citations for an English paper.

  As the second clip was finishing, the computer froze. “Shit,” Lou said. Then he looked up at the class. “Sorry.”

  “Reboot,” I said. I took a deep breath. It never paid to get irritated when things went wrong in class; the students could sense your fear and uncertainty and would pounce on you like wolves, asking if they could leave early, get extensions on deadlines, or skip taking exams. “While you’re waiting for the computer to come back, why don’t you take some questions from the class?”

  Barbara Seville asked if professors minded if students got help from the Lab. “Isn’t that like cheating?”