In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (13 page)

I went over to the bookshelf where I’d placed the golden retriever book and paged through to the picture that resembled Rochester, where she’d scribbled what I thought was a telephone number. The sequence of ten digits in Caroline’s PDA matched the set in the margin of the book.

So it was an account number, not a phone number. But did it relate to her murder? Mindful of what Rick had told me, I hurried over to the telephone to call him, but before I reached it, I stopped short. What did I have? A couple of notes in a PDA, and what might be an account number of some kind.

I needed to do some more research before I called Rick. Otherwise I would look like an idiot, and this information, if it was important, might end up only as a few lines scrawled in a case file.

All this time, Rochester was watching me, sitting on his haunches on the floor next to the kitchen table. “What do I do next, boy?” I asked.

He came over to me and nudged the book in my hands. “I guess I have to know for sure if this is an account number and see if I can figure out what it has to do with Caroline. Could it be an account at the bank where she worked?”

He followed me upstairs and lay on the floor behind me as I opened up Caroline’s laptop and Googled Quaker State Bank, the bank on Caroline’s business cards, and the phrase “account numbers.”

It’s amazing the stuff you can find online. A link directed me to a guy’s blog which dissected the account numbers from prominent banks. I discovered that the account numbers for Caroline’s bank were indeed ten numbers long. The first three digits identified the branch, and I figured out that this account had been opened in Easton, the next town of any size upriver from Stewart’s Crossing.

The next six digits were sequential numbers that indicated when the account had been opened. It appeared that the account I was looking at had been opened in the previous autumn. The last digit identified the status of the account holder. If it was a zero, the account holder was an individual; if it was a one, the account belonged to a corporation. The number before me ended in a zero.

This was all still a big assumption: that the number in the golden retriever book, which matched the one in Caroline’s PDA, was connected to an account at Quaker State Bank. But I’d studied a bit of philosophy and remembered Occam’s Razor. Make no more assumptions than necessary. Caroline worked at QSB. QSB accounts had ten numbers which fit certain patterns. A ten-digit number that matched those patterns was found among Caroline’s effects, along with her own guess that it represented an account. Therefore, the easiest assumption was that the number indeed identified a QSB account.

I wasn’t sure if that would hold up in a court of law, but it was good enough for me. I didn’t quite know what to do next, though. How was I going to follow Caroline’s instructions to “follow the money?”

Caroline had been on the track of some evidence—and I was sure that finding that evidence had gotten her killed. The shiver that ran down my spine told me I was on to something—but still nothing strong enough to take to the police.

It was time to turn my sniffers loose to find me an unsecured port on some ordinary user’s computer, from which I could launch yet another visit to QSB’s network. It was late by then, and while I waited for the sniffers to find me a port, I took Rochester out for a bedtime walk. The night sky was covered with fast-moving clouds, but in a velvety black gap, I recognized one constellation: Orion. The three stars hanging from Orion’s belt, representing his sword, shone brightly, even when a thin sheen of cloud passed between me and them. I wondered if that was an omen for me. Was Orion’s sword the weapon that I could use to bring Caroline’s killers to justice—or did it represent danger for me?

Back inside, the sniffers had found me a port on a computer connected to the Internet that I could use without detection, and I logged into QSB’s system. “This is why I got in trouble in California,” I said to Rochester, who had sprawled on the tile floor at my feet. “I’m good at this.”  It was a scary feeling, how much fun it was to break in somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be.  Especially knowing how much trouble I’d be in if I were caught.

But still, I navigated my way to the customer database and typed in the account number, then hit Enter. There was a brief delay while my request was relayed over the Internet to the QSB server, which reached into the bowels of its database to display the result.

Edith Passis.

What? I tried again, just to be sure. After a few seconds, the same result.

Edith Passis.

Caroline hadn’t left me a road map to her killer. All she’d left was Edith Passis’s account number.

I frowned, and shut the laptop down. Rick was right; I wasn’t the detective, he was. I had to leave things in his capable hands.

On the other hand, I could help Edith figure out where all her money was, so the search hadn’t been a total loss.

I shut off the computer and went into the bedroom, and Rochester followed on my heels.

It poured that night, and Rochester spent most of it huddled under my bed. I lay on the floor next to him for a while, stroking his fur and making sympathetic noises, and I don’t know if it helped at all.

When I woke in the morning, it was still raining, but I didn’t want Rochester to have any accidents inside, so I dug out my raincoat, found myself an umbrella, and grabbed his leash off the counter.

For once he wasn’t underfoot. “Rochester! Walk!” I called.

No Rochester.

“Don’t make me come upstairs.”

He wasn’t listening. What the hell; I sounded just like my own father, and I hadn’t listened to him either.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor and found him huddled under my bed, as close to the back wall as he could get.

“Come on, Rochester, let’s go for your walk. You like walks.”

I could almost hear him saying, “Yeah, but not in the rain.”

I crawled under the bed, hampered a bit by the raincoat, which had not been designed for such adventures. I petted Rochester’s head and smoothed the fur on his back, talking to him in dulcet tones, and nothing seemed to work. I hooked the leash into his collar, backed out from under the bed, and applied brute force to the situation.

He splayed his paws out, but the carpet was old and worn and he couldn’t get much purchase. When I had his whole body out from under the bed, he gave up and followed along with me.

He didn’t like the rain. Neither did I, even though I had the benefit of a lined raincoat and an umbrella to protect my head. We walked down Sarajevo Court to Bratislava Circle and then back home, and when he saw my house ahead he lowered his head down and bulled forward, dragging me behind him.

As soon as we got inside the house, he stopped and shook, and water went flying everywhere. “I guess you need a towel,” I said, slipping and sliding across the tile floor to get one. I did my best to dry him off, but it wasn’t the greatest job, and he retreated back under the bed to shelter himself from me and the storm.

I left around 11:00 for mystery fiction, leaving Rochester under the bed rather than forcing him into his crate. I hurried home right after class to make sure he was OK and that he hadn’t destroyed the house while I was gone.

As I drove back into River Bend, I could see that the wind and rain had played havoc with the neighborhood. There was an unfamiliar door mat under the oak tree in my front yard, and the driveway was strewn with leaves and twigs. Puddles of water still littered the roadway.

Since he’d been gypped out of his long morning walk, I took Rochester out for an afternoon stroll. We were drawn back to the place where Caroline’s body had been found. Though I tried to restrain him as we neared the area, he was just too strong for me, and pulled me down the street like a dog on a mission.

“I’m not your pull toy. What are you, part Eskimo sled dog?” But nothing would stop him, and he dragged me toward River Road, stopping at the grassy lane that led to the Revolutionary War cemetery, the area where Caroline had been shot.

Rochester sat his furry butt down in the street and wouldn’t be budged. “What is it, boy? What do you want?”

He barked once.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak dog.” I stared at him. “What?”

He heaved a big sigh, as if I was the dumbest human in the world, and started sniffing the area where Caroline’s body had lain. “Come out of there, Rochester,” I said, pulling on his leash. “I’m sure you’re disturbing a crime scene or something.”

But he kept moving farther into the underbrush, dragging me behind him, til he stopped, sat on his haunches and barked once. “What’s up, boy? Did you find something that belonged to your mom?”

The rain and wind had cleared out the underbrush, and as I looked ahead I saw something shiny, an empty metal cylinder a little over an inch long; the outside was a copper color. All those years of reading mysteries and watching forensics programs on TV paid off. I recognized I was looking at a bullet casing.

I pulled out my phone and called Rick Stemper. “Did you ever recover any casings from the gun that shot Caroline?” I asked.

“Good afternoon to you, too. Got your junior detective kit out again?”

“I’m asking because Rochester dragged me down to where Caroline was shot, and there’s a casing here.”

He heaved a big sigh. “Wait there. I’m on my way.”

He brought gloves and an evidence bag, and he agreed there was a pretty good chance that the bullet casing came from the gun that shot Caroline.

I was going to tell him about finding Edith’s account number, but I knew he’d frown on my ability to get into Quaker State Bank’s systems, and maybe even violate me to Santiago Santos. Since I doubted Edith had shot Caroline, I decided to keep that information to myself.

He walked the area again with me, but the shell casing was the only new piece of evidence he was able to find. “The dog dragged you out here?”

I looked at Rochester, who sat in the middle of the grassy path. “Yup.”

“You sure you haven’t been out here every day looking for evidence?”

“Get a life, Rick.”

“Just checking.”

He drove off, and Rochester and I walked home. He rewarded me with a big stinking pile of poop, which I got to scoop up with one of my plastic grocery bags. The joys of dog ownership.

Back home, I had to return to grading, and there was Menno’s essay, waiting for me. I read about his father’s many crimes, and the way the Amish community had shunned him. Menno, his mother, and his brothers and sisters were all expected to adhere to the shunning—his father couldn’t live with them any more, and no one in the community would buy the produce grown on their farm, or sell his father any of the seeds or equipment he needed.

His father had left home and moved to Easton. Menno and his brother Godfrey had chosen to go with him, though their two sisters and youngest brother had remained with their mother on the farm outside Lancaster.

The essay was well-written, with few small errors, and I found it very powerful. Having to choose your father over your mother, life outside the cloistered environment of the Amish to the life you’d always known—those were big steps for a boy of fourteen.

Without her husband and sons to help on the farm, his mother had been forced to sell the property and move in with her brother’s family. The community would not allow her to divorce Menno’s father, or to accept any money from him, not even child support. According to Menno’s essay, she now worked for an Amish farm store, baking dozens of shoo-fly pies a day.

Menno had left school at twelve, but in Easton he’d been forced by the state to return, and he’d graduated from the public high school and qualified for a diversity scholarship at Eastern.

“If my father wasn’t a thief, I’d never have graduated from high school,” he concluded. “I would be married by now, and working my own land. But I would still be bound by a useless religion. Now, it is clear to me that what my father really stole was freedom for me, and I am grateful to him for it.”

It was a different approach, and I gave him a high grade and then went on to the rest of the papers in my pile. Each of the Jeremys made the same tired points about high school graduation, and Dionne’s essay on her mother’s MS diagnosis, which should have been moving, was so riddled with grammar and spelling errors that all I could see were the comma splices, the fused sentences and the dangling participles.

Both of the Melissas wrote about boyfriends. Melissa Bintliff met hers at a debate competition, and in the end, she wrote, it was a debate that broke them apart. He was from a Catholic school and wanted to wait until marriage to have sex, while she disagreed. They broke up, and she later discovered that he was gay. “No wonder he didn’t want to have sex with me,” she concluded.

I refrained from comment on her conclusion, but did mark up the way she began every sentence with I. “Try to vary your sentence structure,” I wrote. “I know this is a personal essay, but there are other ways to begin sentences.”

Melissa Macaretti met her boyfriend at Eastern, she wrote, and he was unlike any boy she’d ever known in high school.

Yes, I wanted to scrawl in the margin, college romances are always like that. Get on with it. But I kept my red pen to myself. He was a bad boy, the 21
^st
century equivalent of James Dean or Marlon Brando (the thin, sexy Brando, not the walrus of his later years.) Though she didn’t come right out and say they had great sex, she implied that he had “broadened” her “horizons.”