I took it back to my office to eat, where Rochester was delighted to see me. Or maybe it was the hoagie. He sat up right next to my desk, and I fed the fatty bits of beef to him. I had just crumpled the wrapper and tossed it in the trash when he woofed once and I looked up to see Naomi. She was a short, compact woman wearing a man’s blue and white striped shirt over black pedal-pushers, with a ruby starburst pin over her right breast.
“Oh, Steve, it’s you,” she said. “I wasn’t sure when I saw your note. You’re an administrator now?”
I stood up. “Yeah. You know what a sucker’s game adjuncting is. Had to find a better way to pay the bills.”
“Tell me about it. Freelancing is only marginally better.”
We both sat. “Thanks for coming by. I know this must be a busy time for you.”
“I’m only teaching two courses this term, so I’m almost finished grading.” Rochester shuffled over to Naomi and sniffed her outstretched hand.
“Do you remember interviewing Mark and Selena Hubbard about their house?”
“Oh, God, them,” she said. “Don’t tell me he graduated from Eastern?”
I was puzzled for a moment, then realized she’d made a connection to my job. “No, but he and his wife live next door to Rita Gaines, who was on the Board of Trustees. She was murdered this past Sunday, and President Babson asked me to keep tabs on the police investigation in case there’s any PR fallout.”
I sat back in my chair. “The police detective investigating the crime is a friend of mine, and I was out at Rita’s house with him the other day. One of her other neighbors said the Hubbards and Rita had squabbled, and when I saw you’d interviewed them I thought I’d ask you about it.”
“If you’ve been out there, you know how the place smelled.” She looked down at Rochester. “No offense to you, doggie, but when a bunch of you get together there’s a real stink. Not to mention all that yapping.”
“Yeah, I’ve been out there. That bothered the Hubbards?”
“You bet. Apparently Rita only had a few dogs when they moved in, but over the years she developed a real breeding operation and things got worse and worse.”
She fished in her bag for a tissue and blew her nose. “It’s a beautiful home, but they can’t keep the windows open in the spring or the fall. They can’t go outside in the summer and swim in the pool or have a barbecue. The noise and smell of Rita’s dogs was a real sore point for them.”
“They complained?”
“Especially Selena. She’s a former beauty queen from Venezuela and Mark spoils her rotten. Second marriage, you know.”
“I guessed.”
“He does everything he can to please her. Fortunately he’s got the money to do it.”
“You think he’d go so far as to kill Rita?”
She shuddered. “I wouldn’t put it past either of them. One day when I was there a couple of petals had fallen off the roses in the living room and the maid didn’t clean them up fast enough. Selena let loose on her in Spanish. And you know how Mark made his money, right?”
I shook my head. “I thought he owned a company.”
“Yeah. He started out in business with a partner who was some kind of genius programmer. Within a year he had screwed the partner out of his ownership. He leveraged the business to buy a competitor, and then he took off. Buying companies, gutting them and then dumping them. He’s not a nice man.”
She looked at her watch, a Swatch with gaudy designs along the plastic band. “Gotta run. I’m actually on my way out to the Hubbards’ now. I’m ghost-writing a business book with Mark.”
“After all you know about him?”
“That’s how I know it all. And he’s paying through the nose because this is a big vanity project for him. When you’re a freelancer, you’ve got to go where the money is.”
“I know that. I worked my butt off trying to start a tech writing business when I first moved back here.” I stood up and shook her hand. “Thanks for coming by. And good luck with the book.”
“It doesn’t have to sell,” she said. “I just have to finish it. Right now I’m half writer, half therapist. Fortunately I have a high tolerance for nuts with money.”
After she left I sat back at my computer. So Mark Hubbard was a corporate raider with a spoiled wife and no conscience. Would he have gone so far as to kill Rita Gaines to please his wife and protect his country idyll?
I spent the next couple of hours researching details of our honorary degree recipients and then knitting them into a press release that didn’t bore the pants off the reader.
Just before four o’clock, I took Rochester out for a quick pee. Students stood, sat and lounged in an endless line that snaked out of the front door of Fields Hall and along a flagstone path that led to the Cafette. I overheard a girl say, “I am so glad to be getting out of this place. I have this friend who’s a junior, who says her father has gotten three tuition bills for the fall, all with different amounts. He’s going crazy.”
I saw Yudame from my tech writing class halfway along the line. He was wearing a T-shirt with the psychedelic logo for the movie Taking Woodstock, along with artfully torn jeans, which had either come from the Goodwill store in Leighville or a fancy Manhattan boutique. I couldn’t tell the difference. “Looks like you’re camped out for tickets for a rock concert or something,” I said.
He shook his head. “Yo, my Prof,” he said. “I wish. Just these skeezy graduation audits.”
Like many other students, in class Yudame spoke well – excellent grammar, enunciating the last letters of words, never using slang. But outside? It was another language. Level of discourse was one of the things we talked about in tech writing—targeting your speech and writing to your audience.
“Audits?” I asked. “Like to make sure your bills are all paid up?”
“Nah. There’s some kind of epic fail with the big brother computer system. So you got to make sure you ain’t got probs with your classes – you gots all the ones you need, or the haters be making sure you ain’t getting no diploma. So we all gots to wait in this line and talk to a dude in meat space.”
He looked like that prospect didn’t thrill him. But that was the net generation; most of my students would rather interact with computers than people, and they’d rather text a friend than meet up in person.
He leaned down to pet Rochester, who reared up and put his paws on Yudame’s jeans. The kid just laughed and scratched behind his ears. Maybe they were from the thrift store. Or Yudame’s parents were so rich it didn’t matter. At Eastern you never know.
I returned Rochester to my office, then walked back around the corner to the registrar’s to meet with Jim Shelton and Dot Sneiss. Fields Hall was an old fieldstone house that had been retrofitted a hundred years ago as an office building, and many of the spaces inside were unusual in shape. The registrar’s lobby was an odd half-hexagon, with three teller-like windows and a rope to organize those waiting in line. But there were so many students in the room, crammed into every corner, that I had to excuse myself and squeeze past to get to the door that led to Dot’s office.
I tried the door handle, and since it was locked I knocked lightly. No answer. I looked around but couldn’t get the attention of anyone behind the window to buzz me in. I stood there, uncomfortably squeezed between a guy in a ball cap and football jersey and a heavyset young woman wearing stiletto heels that were too high to keep her balanced.
Jim Shelton shouldered his way through the crowd a couple of minutes later, after I’d knocked three more times. “This is chaos,” he said. He dug his cell phone out of his jacket pocket, apologizing to the teetering girl for elbowing her, and called Dot.
The line moved forward, the guy in the jersey squeezing past us so he didn’t lose his place in line. Finally the door opened, and Jim and I were able to slip inside.
I took a deep breath. “That’s a mess out there.”
“I’m going to kill Verri Parshall one of these days,” Dot said. “
I’m extending hours til eight o’clock tonight, and even then we won’t get through everyone waiting.”
She led us into the conference room. “What’s up?”
We sat down at the big oval table and I explained what Dustin De Bree had told me. “That explains a lot,” Dot said. “I couldn’t imagine why we were still using that product when it was so crappy.”
“Have you spoken to John Babson about these computer problems?” Jim asked Dot.
“Just in the most general way. He’s been traveling a lot lately and I haven’t had the chance to sit down with him one on one.”
“I think you’re going to have to,” Jim said. “We don’t want to accuse Verri of anything based on one student’s sour grapes, but Babson needs to know that we’re in danger of a massive screw up with graduation.”
Dot sighed. “I know. I’ve been here twenty years and things have never been this chaotic. I’ll try and get a meeting with him as soon as possible.”
“This has gone beyond the level of an inconvenience,” Jim said. “Very soon, you’re going to have the entire faculty trying to access the mainframe computer to enter our final grades. At least one third of our classes are taught by adjunct faculty who go off the payroll, and in many cases disappear, as soon as the semester is over. If they can’t get their grades in, students can’t graduate.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Jim,” Dot said. “Transfers get screwed up, too. And don’t even think about Federal financial aid. If we can’t demonstrate that students successfully completed their courses, we’ll lose our funding. The whole damn college will grind to a halt.”
“All from a software malfunction,” Jim said.
“Welcome to the world of computers,” I said.
15 – Itchy Fingers
Dot let Jim and me out a back door into the garden so we didn’t have to fight the crowds. “See if you can talk to that student again,” Jim said, as we walked back around to the front of the building. “We’re going to need every piece of ammunition we can find against Verri if this comes to a fight.”
“I’ll try.”
But I wondered if there was any evidence I could dig up myself. Eastern wasn’t only my employer, it was my alma mater. I couldn’t stand by and let someone sabotage it, if that’s what was going on. Even if it was only massive incompetence, I had to do what I could to head off disaster.
I could already feel my fingers itching. Instead of going back to my office I headed for that secluded carrel in the library. I felt like some kind of undercover agent as I looked all around me before I slipped into it.
I sat down at my computer and flexed my fingers. I was going to enjoy this. Verri’s team had locked down the college system, but I’d gotten around such safeguards in the past.
I got myself a DOS prompt and started trying to figure out how I could get around Freezer Burn. If it was as crappy a program as I thought, I knew I could find a back door into it. At my last job I had gotten a lot of experience trying to break into software, helping the engineers figure out where the bugs were and how to fix them. I’d learned that hitting a random mix of keyboard keys and function keys together often confused a program. I’d run password generating programs that tried endless combinations of letters, numbers and symbols until they hit one that would give me high-level access, enabling me to actually edit the code that ran things. I had a lot of ideas and I was willing to use them all.
I was right; Freezer Burn was a crappy program. It took me only a half hour to figure out that if I arrested my computer’s boot-up before it hit the Freezer Burn code, I could bypass that section of the routine. Once I’d done that, I could also bypass the software that restricted what could be done on any campus computer based on its location and internet protocol address. The computers open to students for their use, for example, couldn’t access the employee database, even if you logged into one with an employee ID.
Without Freezer Burn blocking my access to the college’s mainframe computer, I was able to start figuring out why our systems seemed to be constantly failing. One routine asked for an employee password before granting access to the college network. It looked to a particular database to validate the credentials. However, the path to that database required the employee to already have logged in to another database on a different server.
That server was supposed to be first on the path to log in—but if you were logging in from an off-campus computer, or a computer the network didn’t recognize, the path didn’t lead you in the right direction.
Freezer Burn was clearly a lousy program, and one that the college was wasting money on. But what should I do with the information? I couldn’t go to President Babson with the evidence I’d discovered without admitting that I’d broken the law myself. And no matter how valuable the information was, I couldn’t see how he could justify keeping an unreformed hacker on his staff.
It was after five o’clock by then, so I gave up hacking for a different kind of investigation. I shut the computer down, looked around to make sure the coast was clear, and then left the carrel, and the library.
When I unlocked the door to my office, Rochester rolled over onto his back and waved his paws in the air. “What, you don’t want to go home?” I sat down on the floor next to him and rubbed his belly. “Who’s a good boy?”
“You do love that dog, don’t you?”
I looked up to see Mike MacCormac at my office door.
“Yeah. A friend of mine has a term for it. Puppy whipped.”
Mike laughed. “I guess I belong in that crowd, too. Anyway, I came by to ask if talked to Mariana at the News Bureau about helping her with press releases.”
The News Bureau handled all the general public relations work for the College, while I handled everything related to fund-raising. “Yeah, I’m splitting the workload with her. I’ve finished one for each recipient of an honorary degree and sent them out, along with bios and photos. Next up I’m working on a couple of releases about the valedictorian, the salutatorian, and the students who won the honor awards.”
Like any old-line college, Eastern had a range of legacy awards given to exceptional students—all related to our logo, the rising sun. The Ray award was for school spirit, the Corona for volunteerism, and so on. “I’ll be sending them to all their hometown papers, too. I figure any mention of Eastern is good for us.”
“Great. Why don’t you cross-reference our donor database and email them to any alums in the area, too? It’ll be nice for them to hear something from us that isn’t asking for money.”
I stood up. “Will do.”
Mike left, and Rochester scrambled to his feet. “Feel like a ride, boy?” I asked, as I hooked up his leash. I wanted to go back out to Berkey Farm Road and take a look at Rita’s neighbors. When I’d been there in the past I hadn’t noticed them at all.
I rolled down the windows, and Rochester sat on the passenger seat with his big golden head streaming in the breeze as we navigated those country roads once again. As we got close on Scammell’s Mill Road, I slowed down to note my surroundings.
One new development was under construction, a series of sprawling faux-Colonial homes on wide lots, and I wondered who had the money for such properties in the current economy. I passed a couple of farmsteads, and then approached Don Kashane’s property. He kept a couple of horses in a field by the road, protected by a white split-rail fence. Beyond them I could see his house, and a series of newly planted fields. I smelled dirt and fresh grass as I signaled my right onto Berkey Farm Road.
As soon as I made the turn, though, the breeze shifted and I smelled dogs, and dog shit. Rochester sniffed it too. I could also hear the cacophony of barking, even far from Rita’s driveway. I could only imagine how irritating it would be to have every evening ruined by that kind of sound and smell.
I pulled next to Don’s fence and stopped the car. A big Jeep Grand Cherokee sat in the Hubbards’ driveway, and from the Eastern parking decal on the back window I assumed that meant Nao
mi was still there. The house was faced with fieldstone, and floor-to-ceiling windows looked out from what was probably the living room. A flagstone path led up to the front door, which sat slightly back, protected by the two-story right wing of the house. The yard was immaculately groomed, with fresh-blooming tulips in beds around the maple trees.
Could I be living in a house like that, I wondered, if Mary hadn’t miscarried, if I hadn’t hacked into the credit bureaus, if I hadn’t gone to prison and we hadn’t divorced? Was this my road not taken? Mary had been a high-earning business executive, and though I hadn’t matched her income, I’d done well for myself.
Suppose she hadn’t miscarried, and we’d moved back to the East Coast. We could have had a house like that—maybe not quite so fancy or expensive, but we probably could have bought in that development I had passed. Would I be a stay-at-home dad, freelancing or doing computer consulting?
Rochester leaned over and put his head in my lap. “Yes, boy, that’s not a road we want to go down, is it? My life has led me here, to you, and we’re going to make the best of it, aren’t we?”
He snuffled my crotch and I laughed. “Come on, let’s go.” I put the car in gear and we cruised down the road, past the driveway that led to Rita’s property. Berkey Farm Road dead ended at Hugo Furst’s drive, and I noticed a farm stand in the Fursts’ front yard.
Jars of strawberry and rhubarb preserves shared space on a splintered plywood table with bundles of fresh asparagus and spinach, heads of green leaf lettuce, and a tray of other mixed vegetables. An older man sat behind the table and looked up as I got out of the car and walked over. He wore a pair of overalls and a white T-shirt.
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