Three Dogs in a Row

by Neil S. Plakcy

  I stepped back to usher him in. “Sure.”

  In the Pennsylvania state parole system, officers visit parolees at their homes. I’d been to his office in Bensalem, for my first visit and to fill out paperwork, and he’d been out to my townhouse in Stewart’s Crossing on an average of once a month since then. They were almost always unannounced visits like this one, as if he was trying to catch me doing something I wasn’t supposed to.

  Well, I guess that was his job, after all.

  I brought him my laptop, and he sat down at my kitchen table with it as I made us both mugs of tea. One of the conditions of my computer use while on parole was the installation of keystroke software, which tells Santos which keys have been pressed, and which windows they were pressed in. It captures emails, usernames, passwords and chat conversations, and only he has the password to see what’s been recorded.

  I wasn’t particularly nervous. I’d been a good boy, keeping my nose clean and resisting the urge to hack into websites.

  Rochester was sprawled behind Santos’s chair, and I had to step over him as I brought the pair of mugs to the kitchen table. Santos swung my laptop sideways so I could see what he was looking at. “Rohypnol, Steve?” he asked. “I’m disappointed in you. You know the conditions of your parole. No hacking, no drugs. No illegal activity of any kind.”

  My mouth dropped open. Sure, I’d been searching for information on Rohypnol, but it was in a good cause. And if I wanted to trick him, I could—but I’d never even considered that Santos would find anything unusual on my computer.

  “You have a reason for this?” Santos asked, looking at me. “Or am I going to have to write you up for a violation?”

  My blood pressure zoomed, but I forced myself to stay calm. “Just some research for Rick Stempler,” I said. “We found this blister pack up at a murder scene, and I wanted to see if I could figure out what it was.”

  He looked skeptical.

  “Honestly, Santiago. You think I’d do that? I committed computer fraud, not a sex crime. And I have a girlfriend. I don’t need date rape drugs.”

  “You don’t understand, Steve. Criminal activity isn’t about the actual violation—it’s about a mindset. The idea that you’re someone special, that the ordinary rules don’t apply to you. That you can take what you want, or do what you want.”

  There was that sociology background of his popping up. It did sound little like my personality, especially when I was on the trail of some piece of information. But I remembered the mantra I had repeated often when I was in prison. I had committed a criminal act, but I wasn’t a criminal.

  “Let me show you what I was doing.” I sat down next to him and pulled up the photo I had enhanced, and matched it to the sites I’d been searching. “If you don’t mind, I’ll give Detective Stempler a call,” he said when I was finished.

  “Go right ahead.”

  He stood up and walked toward the doorway so I couldn’t overhear his conversation. I sat there petting Rochester and fuming. How had I been so stupid? I knew Rohypnol wasn’t legal in the United States, but I’d still left an audit trail on my laptop looking for it. It wasn’t fair. I hadn’t tried to buy the stuff. Any other Joe could have done what I did without penalty. But I was still paying for one stupid thing I had done in California, three years before.

  Scratching behind Rochester’s ears calmed me down. Then Santos returned to the kitchen. “Rick confirms you were looking into the Rohypnol for him. But Steve, you have to remember you can’t do anything you want. You’re a convicted felon, on parole. Everything you do has to go through that filter.”

  “For another six months,” I said.

  “And if you don’t learn to change your habits you’ll do something stupid and end up in prison again. I see a lot of guys like you, Steve. You think you’re smarter than the system. But the system always wins.”

  We talked for a while about my job, and how I was using computers there, but I was still simmering with resentment and couldn’t get him out of the house fast enough.

  I was determined not to let Santiago Santos interfere with what I thought was right. Of course, I was going to report as required, and let him know every time I changed residence or job. I had surrendered the handgun my father left me to Rick, to hold until my parole was over, because simple possession of a gun was enough to violate me.

  But ordinary online searching was allowed under the terms of my parole. So I wasn’t going to let Santiago Santos threaten me. If I wanted to help Rick investigate Rita’s murder I damned well would.

  It looked like Felae hadn’t killed her—but who else might have? What new information could I discover that could be useful to Rick?

  13 – Country Homes

  I got up and started pacing around the house. I didn’t have far to go; the downstairs of my townhouse is compact, with a living room, dining room, kitchen and breakfast nook. I didn’t count the laundry alcove, where I had a washer-dryer, or the guest bathroom.

  Rochester hauled himself up from the tile floor and began following me. “Go lay down, dog,” I said, pointing at a round, fluffy bed I had bought for him. He stood there and looked at me.

  I slid open the glass door that led to the walled courtyard that protected my house from the street. I had planted a row of lilac bushes there when I moved in, and tiny purple clusters of buds had begun to appear. I was eager for them to open and fill the air with perfume. Rochester crowded up against my legs, sniffing the fresh air.

  From down the street, I heard my neighbor Thad Hertz blasting Bill Halley’s “Rock Around the Clock.” He liked to sit in his driveway in the evening, sharing his taste in music with the whole neighborhood. At least it wasn’t rap.

  Neighbors. Don Kashane said that several of Rita’s neighbors had complained about her. Who were they? Would any of them have had a motive to kill her?

  I returned to the laptop and called up the property appraiser’s records for Bucks County. I entered Rita’s name—but got no results.

  Huh? Didn’t she own the property?

  I scrabbled around for the paper Rick had written her name and address on, and once I found it I entered the address, on a street called Berkey Farm Road. The property was owned by an entity called StanVest LLC. Well, that made sense; I remembered her full name was Margarita Stanville Gaines.

  From the record, I saw that she had paid a half-million dollars for a home, a barn, and four acres, some ten years before. I stepped back a level and entered “Berkey Farm Road” in the search box. While the system searched for the records for all her neighbors, I opened a new window and pulled up a map program. I wanted to see a visual of her property and how it abutted her neighbors.

  Berkey Farm Road was a north-south dead-end off Scammell's Mill Road, which led east to Stewart’s Crossing. I went back to the main window and noted that there were only three addresses on the road. By going back and forth between screens, I figured out that as you turned from Scammell’s Mill Road toward Rita’s, Don Kashane’s farm was on the left. A property belonging to Mark and Selena Hubbard was on the right; Rita’s was next to it.

  The road dead-ended into a thirty-acre farm owned by Hugo and Marjory Furst. A tiny stream ran from the Tohickon Creek along the north side of Rita’s property, forming the border between her farm and the Fursts’.

  Rochester got up from his place behind me, walked over to his water bowl, and slurped for a minute. Then he came back to me and rubbed his wet face on my leg. “I’m not your towel, dog,” I said, but my mind was on what Don Kashane had said. The Fursts were angry that dog waste from Rita’s property was polluting the stream, and the Hubbards hated the noise and smell from Rita’s kennels.

  Which one to start with? I flipped a mental coin and landed on the Hubbards. It was such a common last name, though, that I came up with over six million hits. Finally using a combination of words and quotation marks, I landed at the site for Country House Journal, a glossy magazine that featured custom homes in rural settings.
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  There was a photo-heavy feature on the Hubbards’ home, written by Naomi Schechter, who had once been an assistant professor in the English department at Eastern. When she was denied tenure, she had turned to a freelance career, though she still taught a course or two as an adjunct. We had a nodding acquaintance; during the past year, we had shared space in a narrow room full of computers and semi-private cubicles where part-time faculty could meet with students.

  The sprawling, two-story house had a living room as big as my whole downstairs, with rustic, exposed-beam ceilings, flagstone floor and walls hung with modern art. The rest of the rooms pictured were equally lavish.

  I could imagine that the Hubbards, whose property was valued at over a million bucks, wouldn’t be happy about a bunch of yapping, smelly dogs next door. From the article I could tell Naomi had interviewed the Hubbards, and I opened another new window onto the Eastern College website, where I was able to find out that Naomi had office hours the next day from ten to twelve. I made a note of it.

  A motorcycle zoomed down Sarajevo Court, and Rochester jumped into guard-dog mode, his toenails scrabbling on the tile floor as he rushed toward the door, his bark deep and throaty.

  “Quiet, Rochester!” He kept barking, until he was sure that the motorcycle was long past. “You really are not in charge around here, you know.”

  He looked at me and smiled a big doggy grin, then slumped back to the floor.

  The article mentioned that Mark Hubbard was the CEO of a computer software company, and with that information I was able to pull up his corporate bio and a picture of him and his wife. He was a tall, slim man with salt and pepper hair, while Selena was a buxom dark-haired brunette at least twenty years younger.

  They also owned a penthouse overlooking Central Park and a vacation getaway on St. Bart’s. Well, if Rita’s dogs got on their nerves at least they had someplace else to go.

  The Furst property was appraised at only a hundred grand, which was surprising considering how much bigger it was than Rita’s or the Hubbards’. But there was an asterisk noting that it had an agricultural exemption, hence the lower value. I opened a new window with Google Earth, and looked at the satellite photos of the area. I could pick out Rita’s house and barn, the Hubbards’ sprawling mansion, and the Furst farmhouse and a big barn. The area around the house showed evidence of constant cultivation. There was also a field full of cows, and I wondered if Furst had a dairy operation as well.

  It was bedtime by then, so I took Rochester for a walk around River Bend. Thad had gone in, shutting down his music, and the neighborhood sang with crickets, frogs and the distant hum of a car engine. Rochester chased a squirrel and tried to clamber under a forsythia hedge, abundant with yellow blooms, but I pulled him back. I heard the Philadelphia train approach the crossing at Scammell’s Mill Road, a couple of miles away, the long whistle that always reminded me of faraway places.

  I used to hear that whistle all the time as a kid, and because I knew you could hop on the train in Stewart’s Crossing and get to Philadelphia, and from there to anywhere, it resonated with me and how I wanted to travel far away from Bucks County, see those places I could only read about in National Geographic. I remembered lying in our back yard on summer afternoons, watching planes fly high overhead, wondering where those people were going.

  Now I was content to be back home. I hadn’t seen the world, but I’d lived in Manhattan and Silicon Valley, vacationed in Europe and Mexico and the Caribbean. With luck, I’d hold on to my job at Eastern, and Lili and I might go somewhere together. As a photojournalist, she had traveled a lot more than I had, but I hoped there were still some places she wanted to see—with me.

  14 – Problems Cascade

  The next morning I dropped Rochester off at my office with a fresh rawhide bone, and hung around the cubicles and round tables of the adjunct area for a half hour, waiting for Naomi Schecter to come in, but with no luck. I ended up leaving a note in her mailbox asking her to call or come by my office.

  On my way back to Fields Hall, I detoured past Harrison Hall, the dimly lit stone building where the history department was located. Jim Shelton, who was on the graduation committee with me, was the chair of the department. His office was on the ground floor, across from the secretarial area where students got their closed class cards and asked random questions they could have answered by checking the college website.

  Jim’s office was lined with bookshelves, and a miscellaneous collection of texts and reference books crowded together with piles of handouts and student papers. His large desk was so covered with file folders and post-it notes there was little room for his keyboard and mouse.

  I rapped on the doorframe, and he looked up from his paperwork. “Hey, Steve. Come on in. I was looking over this graduation fiasco.”

  “What’s wrong now?”

  “The same stuff we were talking about in the meeting. The program that vets student transcripts for graduation keeps breaking down. I’m worried we’ll have to let anyone who applies march in the procession and then clean up the mess afterward.”

  “That’s why I stopped by.” I told him what Dustin De Bree had told me, about seeing the check from Freezer Burn to Verri M. Parshall.

  He sat back in his big wooden chair. “That’s a serious accusation. But I can’t say it sounds unfounded. I’ve fielded more complaints about computers in offices and classrooms this semester than ever before, and Verri doesn’t seem to care.”

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked. “Tell Babson?”

  “Not without some proof,” he said. “Verri’s been around forever and she has a lot of support around the campus. Plus she’s a special pet of John Babson’s. Not to mention the fact that she’s got a stranglehold on IT around here.”

  “We should talk to Dot Sneiss,” I said. “Maybe we can go at this from a different direction. If this Freezer Burn program is screwing up registration as well as classrooms and offices, then Babson will have to get involved.”

  Jim picked up his phone. “Dot? Jim Shelton here. You have a few minutes this afternoon to talk? Four o’clock?” He looked at me and I nodded. “Steve Levitan and I will come over to your office then.”

  I stood up. “Thanks, Jim. I didn’t know what do when this kid came in to me. At least now we have a plan.”

  I was curious to know more about Freezer Burn. But I didn’t want to go right back to my office and start searching in a way that might be tied back to me. So I walked to the library instead.

  When I was an Eastern student, the library was a run-down repository of books older than the statue of old man Fields that stood in front of it. I had once asked one of the librarians where the contemporary novels were and she told me, in very frosty tones, that the library was intended for serious research, not pleasure reading.

  As an English major, I had spent many hours in the dusty stacks, searching for research material. Once I returned to Eastern, though, I discovered that the electronic revolution had finally reached Leighville, and the bulk of the collection had been digitized. The old wooden card catalogs had been replaced by sleek metal tables lined with desktop computers, and most of the rows of study carrels now had computers as well. I found one in a back corner and slid into the chair.

  All the public computers are automatically logged into the Eastern network under a Guest ID. So short of dusting the keyboard for my fingerprints, there was no way Verri could tie what I was doing in to me personally.

  I did a quick Internet search for Freezer Burn, and came up with thousands of hits. The most interesting was a blog called “ihatefreezerburn” which had attracted a lot of comments, mostly from students at colleges that had instituted the software. As an English teacher, it was almost painful for me to read through their ungrammatical, misspelled rants, but one thing was clear: students detested the software.

  Not for the obvious reasons—that it might block their access to social networks or personal email. No, they hated it because it caused camp
us computers to freeze on a regular basis, often in the middle of exams or while a student was trying to research and write a paper. It seemed that no matter how powerful the computer or stable the network, Freezer Burn managed to do something to screw things up.

  Why use it, then? I navigated my way to the corporate website. Freezer Burn was an independent start-up company, run by a couple of IT wizards who had cut their teeth at Microsoft and Apple. The video explaining the software had high production values, and I could see how someone might be seduced. It looked like they were preying on fear, promising system administrators that Freezer Burn would reduce vulnerability to hackers and viruses, protecting student data and network integrity.

  One warning flag to me was that they were only on release 2.02. I knew that meant it was only the second patch, or revision, to the second version of the software. I couldn’t imagine how anything so new could manage to negotiate with the wide variety of hardware and software you’d find on a college campus—everything from the homemade programs the math department used to format equations to the sophisticated databases that managed registration and grade processing. I knew from experience that the computers on the Eastern campus were a patchwork of older and newer models, both PC and Mac, with a range of operating software and peripheral equipment. Every time Microsoft comes out with a new edition of Windows, people complain that their older printers and other equipment are left behind because the developers didn’t bother to build in the capability to work with those older, nearly obsolete pieces of equipment. I had the feeling that problem would be even worse with a new company like Freezer Burn, which wouldn’t have the resources to devote to tracking down every old piece of software and hardware out there.

  I rebooted before I left the library. One good thing about Freezer Burn was that it would erase my browsing history on that computer. It was almost lunchtime, so on my way back to Fields Hall I picked up a roast beef hoagie. I had missed those big, beefy sandwiches when I lived in New York and California; nobody makes them the way they do in Philly and its suburbs. I liked my hoagies on a fresh-baked crusty Italian-style roll, layered with Russian dressing, shredded lettuce, sliced tomatoes, and thin sheets of rare roast beef. Heaven on a bun.