Dog Bless You (8 page)

I hurried Rochester along. I was probably over-thinking
things, as I usually did. From what I’d read in the years since my own
incarceration, most criminals did what they did not because they were
inherently bad people. They stole, dealt drugs and committed murder because
they didn’t see other options.

My behavior, I thought, as I unlocked the front door
and ushered Rochester inside, was more akin to an addiction. Goosebumps rose on
my skin and my pulse accelerated when I thought about hacking. And like many
addicts, I thought I could control my behavior and keep myself out of trouble.

In that way, I guessed, I wasn’t much different from
Mary, the way she used retail therapy to ease her psychic pain over the loss of
our unborn children. And probably like Owen Keely, too, who I presumed was
using chemicals to wipe out bad memories of the war in Afghanistan.

I got the stepladder from the garage and carried it to
the upstairs hallway, where I set it up just under the hatch that led to the
attic. I climbed up and popped the lid. There wasn’t much up there—a single
light bulb, a lot of pink insulation and my next-door-neighbor Caroline’s
laptop.

I had found the laptop in her house while I was
investigating her murder. Santiago Santos didn’t know it existed, and if he
ever found it I was sure it would be enough to revoke my parole, because I’d
installed a suite of hacking tools on it which I kept up to date by visiting
certain underground forums I wasn’t supposed to know about.

My fingers tingled as they always did when I was
getting ready for a stint of cybersnooping. I wasn’t sure what I was looking
for but I rationalized that anything I did wouldn’t be bad because I was on the
side of the angels, just trying to help the police.

I considered myself a very moral person, and I only
broke the law when I felt it was justified in pursuit of a greater good.

It’s a slippery slope, I know.

And sure, I could have left all that investigation to Rick
and Tony. They had the badges and the legal access. But where was the fun in
that?

Rochester followed me downstairs, where I opened the
laptop up on the kitchen table. While it booted up, I closed the vertical
blinds that faced out into the courtyard. No need to announce what I was doing
to anyone who happened to drop by.

When I sat back down, Rochester came up to me with a
rope in his mouth. “I can’t play right now, boy,” I said. “Daddy has work to
do.”

Looking for inspiration, I logged in to a couple of
hacker databases. The addresses were always changing; you really had to keep up
in order to stay current with all the available tools and places to find them. “Think
your neighbors are growing pot in their house but aren’t sharing with you?”
read one message. “Use this tool to track power consumption in your area.
Unusually large spikes in usage = neighbors up to no good!”

Somebody running a grow house near Friar Lake would be
a good candidate for dumping a body at the abandoned property. Maybe our victim
had been a nosy neighbor, or a power company inspector, or one of the
conspirators.

Rochester abandoned the rope and put his paws on my
thigh. I had to push him away as I downloaded the tool and followed the
instructions to configure it for the area around Friar Lake.

He gave up on play and fetched one of his bones, and
began chewing noisily right beside me as I waited while my computer’s tentacles
searched the net for an open port I could use to launch my hack. You never want
to run a hack that can be traced back to your own IP address – your unique
connection to the Internet. You want to find somebody who hasn’t secured their
own gateway so you can drop in and mask your activities with their address.

It’s getting harder to do, because it seems everybody
has some kind of firewall on their computer to keep out folks like me. But
eventually my snooper found an unsecured gateway I could use.

Rochester seemed determined to distract me. He made so
much noise with the bone I had to take it away from him, and then he slurped up
some water from his bowl and tried to dry his mouth on my khakis.

But nothing the dog could do would keep me from hacking
once I set my mind to it. I pushed him away, and he gave up and padded
upstairs. Once he was gone, I focused on directing the hacking software to look
at the electric company that covered our area.

It was slow, tedious work, but it was the kind of thing
I could do with only one part of my brain, leaving the rest free to conjecture
other approaches. By the time the software popped up a message that read
“downloading consumption data,” I’d already come up with another idea.

I found a legitimate website that tracked criminal
activity by zip code and plugged in several for areas surrounding Friar Lake. I
found two guys who had been arrested for running a chop shop a few miles down
the country road that led north from the property. A chop shop is a garage that
takes apart stolen cars in order to sell the parts. They had only been arrested
a few weeks before, so they’d probably have been in business during the time
the victim was killed.

To avoid any connection to Caroline’s laptop, I logged
into the web interface for my personal email, and sent the information I had
found to Tony Rinaldi, with a suggestion that the dead man might be connected
to the chop shop. I made sure to include the link to the website where I’d
found the information.

Maybe it was overkill – but my paranoia kicked in
again. I knew that having the extra laptop in my possession could be enough to
violate my parole. Add in the hacking software, and I’d be back in prison
before you could say Travelocity. So I was determined to be like Caesar’s wife,
avoiding even the appearance of impropriety.

By then the power results had been downloaded, and I
disconnected the hacking software, the connection to the open port, and the
sniffers from my – or Caroline’s – laptop. My fingers were clammy, and I felt
an empty spot at the back of my throat. By then, my feelings of paranoia had
been trumped by reality. If I could be traced to any of the hacks I’d
committed, I’d face another trial and another sentence.

Why did I keep doing it? I couldn’t answer that
question, and I did my best to ignore it. In one compartment of my brain I
rationalized my activities; after all, I was trying to solve a crime, to bring
justice to the world. In another part I made excuses – there was some chemical
lacking in my brain that made me crave this kind of stimulation. It wasn’t my
fault at all – just a biological defect. I shut down any other options before
they could form.

I opened the spreadsheet file that had been created
through the hack into the power company. At first, I was baffled – how was I
going to figure anything out? Then I noticed a button that laid the data over a
map, with color-coded results.

The hotter the red color, the more power that was being
consumed in that area. I zeroed in on a property that backed on Tohickon Creek.
The map view showed a single suburban house there, but the power use was bright
red. I did some cross-referencing and discovered that the consumption still
wasn’t high enough to flag the property.

I was still suspicious, so I went to Google maps and
zoomed in on the property. A large boathouse stood on stilts over the creek
behind the house. Thermal imaging for the area showed that boathouse was bright
red, too—meaning there was a lot of heat being generated there.

I was pretty sure there were generators back there, and
they were being used to mask some of the power consumption, keeping it below
the electric company’s radar. Maybe the farmers had even figured out how to
harness some of the water from the creek.

It was getting late, and Rochester was antsy for his
bedtime walk. I already had Tony Rinaldi’s official email address, but I
thought it was better to camouflage my tracks whenever I could. So I checked
the website for the Leighville Police Department and found an address ordinary
citizens could use to ask questions or report crimes.

 I logged into an email account I had set up years
before with an anonymous remailer. I knew that the remailer computer would
strip away the (fake) name and address I had used to set up the account, and
replace it with a dummy address. If Tony, or whoever got the message at the
Leighville PD, wanted to reply to me, he could, because the remailer would
forward the message to me. But no one could connect the email to me.

 I wrote a note pretending to be a neighbor of the
property, and bundled up the power consumption data for the house by the creek.
I attached it to the message. Just in case the police computer wouldn’t allow
the attachment of files to emails, I summarized the information in a couple of
sentences. Then I clicked “send.”

By then, I was exhausted. The initial adrenaline surge
had run through my body, and the mental focus I had put into hacking, and then
reading the power consumption results, had wiped me out. It was too late to check
in with Lili, and I didn’t have the energy to speak to her either.

I forced myself to stand up, stretch, and put away
Caroline’s laptop. Then I went downstairs for Rochester’s leash. He followed me
eagerly, scampering around as I tried to hook him up. I gave up and collapsed
on the couch, which convinced him to calm down enough to let me clip on the
leash. He dragged me out the front door and down the street.

The skies were overcast and there was no one else out
on Sarajevo Court that late. I let Rochester drag me along until he was ready
to go home, and once back in the house, I stripped down and fell into bed. I
was asleep almost immediately.

The next morning Rochester hopped up onto the bottom of
my bed and sat on his haunches, staring at me as I roused. When he saw that I
was awake, he pounced. I ducked my head beneath the comforter but he wasn’t
fooled. He sniffed around, pawing at me, until I emerged. Then he lavished me
with puppy kisses. It was our regular morning love fest, and I wrestled him
down onto his back so I could rub his belly.

He flailed his legs around like a dying cockroach and
turned his head to face me. I marveled once again how his nose was like a
baboon’s, black and moist, and the way the black of his muzzle faded into
golden so quickly. I had slept off my energy drain of the night before, so I
hopped up, pulled on a tank top and a pair of shorts, stepped into my Crocs,
and wrangled Rochester onto his leash. I was pleased that he seemed to be
feeling better.

We walked through the center of River Bend, past the
twin lakes. As we were circling back home, Owen Keely’s mother Marie approached
us on her three-wheeled bicycle.

She was a slim blonde in her early sixties, but she’d
had a stroke a year before and was still recovering. She’d gotten the bike,
with one front wheel and two in back, for exercise, and now she often rode
around, waving and smiling at everyone. She had a big basket in the back of the
bike, with a bumper sticker that read “I Brake for Yard Sales.”

“Such a beautiful dog,” she said, pulling up beside us.
She reached her hand out to him, and he bounded up to her. I remembered his
reluctance to sniff her son and wondered about that. Did he have some drug-addict
scent that Rochester had reacted to?

“How are you this morning?” I asked her.

“I’m here for another day,” she said cheerfully.

What a contrast she was to her son, I thought. Owen
must take after her husband; Phil had never been that friendly, either. He was
a retired Marine, and Corps logos and stickers decorated his SUV and his
garage. He often wore Marine T-shirts, and even had a license plate frame on
his car that read
Semper F
i. Seeing it always tempted me to look for one
that read
Semper Fido
.

“I saw Owen at River Antiques yesterday,” I said. “How’s
he settling in?”

She sighed. “You don’t have children, do you, Steve?”

I shook my head. “Didn’t work out that way.”

She scratched Rochester behind his ears, and he opened
his mouth in a big doggy grin. “Owen was such a sunny child, but the Army
changed all that. When he came back he was like a different boy. And then of
course we found out about the drugs. It’s been a real battle. But that Mark
Figueroa is such a nice boy. I think he’ll be a good influence on Owen.”

“I hope so too,” I said.

She put her feet back on the pedals and waved a
cheerful goodbye. “Have a lovely day!” She continued past, wobbling a bit from
side to side.  Rochester tried to chase her but I reined him in.

Rochester and I made our way home, and then I drove up
to the Eastern campus, with the big goof riding shotgun and his head out the
window. He seemed to have recovered, but I was going to keep on mixing the
chicken and rice with his food for a day or two and make sure that he finished
all the pills Dr. Horz had prescribed.

I spent the morning cleaning up my files, deciding what
I could trash and what I ought to send over to Ruta del Camion at the News
Bureau. My only big projects were a couple of fund-raising events over the next
few weeks, and I put together a report with everything I’d done, including all
my press contacts.

Using the college’s online email and calendar program,
I scheduled a meeting with Ruta, so I could explain what I was giving her. Most
of my materials were digital, and I zipped them up and then emailed the lot to Ruta.
The paper files went into a cardboard box, which I’d carry over when I met with
her.

Within a couple of minutes after I’d sent the meeting
request, Ruta called me. “Hey Steve,” she said. “I just got a weird call from a
reporter. He said that he understood a dead body had been found on Eastern
property. I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. You hear
anything?”

“Not on the campus,” I said. “Out at Friar Lake. Do you
know about Babson’s plans for a conference center out there?”

“Just the outline. You know about this body?”

“I found it,” I said. “Or to be more specific, my dog
did.” I explained to her what I knew. “I don’t know if the police have
identified the body yet.”

“So it’s a big no comment from us,” Ruta said. “If you
hear anything, will you let me know?”

“Sure thing, Ruta.” When I hung up, I looked back at my
computer. What was I supposed to do for the next year? I’d already met with Joe
Capodilupo and with Mark Figueroa. The missing piece seemed to be the kind of
programming I would be running out at Friar Lake.

Babson had given me a free hand in developing the
slate, but I was sure he’d have a lot of input as I began to come up with
program ideas. I figured the first thing I could do was remind myself what kind
of research and scholarship we had going on at Eastern, so I could investigate
building programs based on that.

I had a boss once who said that he liked to practice
MBWA – management by walking around. He’d stroll past our cubicles, checking in
on us, getting involved in conversations and decisions. It might have worked
for him; I preferred to practice MBWR – management by walking Rochester.

“Want to go for a walk, puppy?” I asked.

He jumped up and nodded his head in agreement. Or maybe
he nodded because he liked going for walks.

We went down the hill behind Fields Hall, where
Rochester could romp among the pine trees and be admired by fawning students. I
liked the slower pace of the campus during the summer. Most students were only
taking one or two classes, and there were a lot of pick-up Frisbee games on the
lawns that Rochester could join. Girls sunbathed in skimpy bikinis while boys pretended
to read in the shade. There was always the faint sound of music coming from
somewhere.