In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (14 page)

God save me from adolescents, I thought, as I graded her essay and moved on to the next.

I kept waiting for the phone to ring—Rick telling me that the shell casing Rochester and I had found was the key that broke open the case—but no one called. Late in the day I called him and suggested we meet up for a drink. He agreed, and around 6:30, after I’d given Rochester his evening walk and fed him, I convinced him to go into his crate and I headed down to The Drunken Hessian.

Rick was already there, sitting in a booth in the back and cradling a bottle of Corona. I got one of my own, then joined him.

“Were you able to find anything out about Caroline’s ex-boss?” I asked, after being careful to say hello first.

He nodded. “Dead end. The bank made him a settlement and he dropped the lawsuit at least three weeks before Caroline was shot. He used the settlement money to prop up his brother-in-law’s business, and they got a big contract. He told me that he was glad about what Caroline did—otherwise he’d still be stuck at the bank, and his brother-in-law’s business would be bankrupt.”

“That’s a bummer,” I said. “He seemed like such a good suspect.”

“That’s the way it goes.”

We ordered a platter of nachos to go with our beers. After the waitress had left, I asked, “Did you get any results from that shell casing?”

“This is not
CSI: Stewart’s Crossing
,” he grumbled. “We don’t get results back from stuff like that before the next commercial break. I have to send that casing to a lab in Philadelphia. And they’re backed up at least two or three weeks. It’s going out tomorrow morning, so I’ll get back to you, say, by July 4
^th
.”

“You’re not taking this very seriously,” I said.

“You don’t get it, do you?” Rick asked. “Caroline’s murder is the first one we’ve had in Stewart’s Crossing since Johnny Menotto shot up this place six years ago. I don’t have a team to help me. I’m tracking four break-ins, a vandalism at the synagogue on Ferry Road, two cases of domestic abuse and a peeping Tom.”

He started playing with a sugar packet. “I want to find out who killed Caroline as much as you do—more, because it’s my job.” He took a breath, and I could tell he was trying to calm his voice. “Most people are killed by someone they know—a family member, ex-boyfriend, jealous co-worker, that kind of thing. We’ve ruled all that out in Caroline’s case, and I’m stuck. I don’t like this feeling but I haven’t figured out what else I can do.”

“Is there anything I can do to help you?”

He shook his head. “Not without ten months at the police academy and at least three years as a patrolman. Oh, and there’s that messy issue of a felony conviction. The police frown on hiring the opposition.”

“Come on, Rick. I found out that information about Caroline’s ex-boss. I know computers. I can see what else I can find out.”

“If you even use the word ‘hacker’ I’m getting up from this table. Don’t forget that I’m an officer of the law and if I find out you’re violating your parole I’m bound to report you to Santiago Santos.”

Well, then, I wasn’t going to tell him about hacking into QSB’s system to find out about Edith’s account.  Looking back now, I wonder why it didn’t frighten me more that Rick could rat me out to Santos. I guess the lure of hacking was so strong that I disregarded the signs, the way a smoker might ignore those warnings about nicotine, even as his lungs were filling with cancerous polyps.

We played a couple of rounds of pool and shared the platter of nachos. He started flirting with a girl playing pool with friends, and I took that opportunity to duck out and head home to Rochester.

Rick was stuck in his investigation, and I knew that with the press of other cases, if he didn’t get some new information soon, Caroline’s murder would drop into the cold case file, and there would never be justice for her. With Rochester underfoot every day, a living reminder of her death, I couldn’t let that happen, even if there were going to be consequences.

Rochester woke me Friday morning, barking like crazy. When I looked out the bedroom window, I saw Ginny’s car pulling into Caroline’s driveway. She had a young couple with her.

“You don’t like the idea of somebody moving into your old house,” I said, sitting next to him and stroking his head. “But it’s going to happen.”

He lay his head in my lap and sprawled the rest of his body on the carpet next to me. I petted him for a while, until I heard Caroline’s gate swing shut and I was sure Ginny and the prospective buyers were inside. Then I stood up, pulled on my sweat pants and an Eastern sweatshirt, and headed downstairs, Rochester right on my heels.

He did his crazy pre-walk dance, but I was getting better at anticipating his moves and got him on the leash.

The weather was warming up, and River Bend was full of mothers, grandmothers and nannies pushing babies in strollers. When had all those kids been born? Like the crocus blossoms, the budding trees and the baby ducks, they all seemed to pop out when spring came.

When we got home, I decided to forego working for my clients or polishing my business plan for a while in order to look for Edith Passis’s paperwork among Caroline’s belongings. I’d match up the account number I had with the paperwork I found, and I’d create some kind of spreadsheet program she could use to keep better track of her money. That would be one way to honor Caroline’s memory—to finish the job she’d started.

Rochester watched me from a position in the doorway between the house and the garage. Working in the chill, my bare arms and legs started to get cold. I picked out five boxes and I dragged each one into the kitchen.

At that point, I was ready to call it quits. I was cold and sweaty and tired, and I hadn’t made any real headway. But Edith Passis had put up with my lack of piano progress for three years, so I figured I owed her at least another hour or two.

Plus my supervisor, Rochester, looked like he wasn’t ready to let me give up. So I stripped off my t-shirt and used it to wipe the sweat from my forehead, then sat at the kitchen table to go through the first box of paperwork.

Everything was out of order, and it took me a few minutes to remember that someone had trashed Caroline’s house the night after her murder, strewing her papers around. I recalled a filing cabinet that had been dumped on the floor, and I groaned. This was going to be worse than grading freshman comp essays.

It wasn’t until one o’clock that I found the first piece of paper with Edith’s name on it. I took a break for dinner and to walk Rochester, and then went back to work by the light of the hanging lamp over the kitchen table. By the time I gave up at eleven, I’d found a half dozen statements on various accounts. From what I’d seen so far, Edith’s late husband had left her quite well-fixed. None of the paperwork I found matched the account at Quaker State Bank.

Saturday morning, I took Rochester for a long walk, circling our way through all the different corners of River Bend. We were on Budapest Lane when we saw a father dragging his five-year-old out to his Land Rover SUV. “Yeah, yeah, life’s a disappointment,” he said to the boy. “Come back to me when you’re forty years old and your life sucks and then we’ll talk.”

That could have been me, I thought, as Rochester sniffed his way along the street. If one of the babies who had begun life in Mary’s womb had come to term, and I was still back in an unhappy marriage in Silicon Valley.

I was into delaying that morning. I took a leisurely bath, then fixed myself croissant French toast with maple syrup. After cleaning up the dishes and tidying the living room, I had no choice but to finish sorting through Caroline’s boxes. By the time I was done, I’d found eight statements, which showed me that Edith’s financial affairs were a mess. She had a checking and savings account at QSB, brokerage accounts with two different brokers, as well as a 401K account and an IRA, both managed by separate companies, which appeared to have been passed on by Walter, her late husband.

In addition, it appeared that she held some stock certificates herself and had the dividend checks sent to her, rather than going through one of the brokerage accounts. No wonder she was having trouble keeping track of everything.

Using Caroline’s laptop once more, I logged on to the website for the company that managed Walter’s 401K. I knew Edith didn’t have a computer, which made me pretty sure she hadn’t yet set up online access to her account, so I did. At every step, though, I had to jump through hoops, often simple things I’d always taken for granted. E-mail address? I didn’t want to use mine, because I didn’t want anyone to think I was trying to hijack her account, so I had to jump to another site and set up a free email account for her there, then once that was set up come back to the brokerage.

Looking through the papers I had, I was able to piece together enough information—her husband’s social security number, her date of birth and so on—to get the account access established. Finally I got to the point where I could see the records of her most recent transactions.

I could have invited her to come over to my house and watch me while I did all this—but it was bad enough that I had Rochester hovering around. I didn’t have to explain every last thing I did to him – and I was pretty sure I’d have to do that with Edith.

When I pulled up her account information, I discovered that she had changed her address to a post office box six months before. Her statements and quarterly dividend checks had been mailed to that address since Thanksgiving.

It was strange that she hadn’t mentioned it, and even stranger that the post office box was located in Easton. There was no reason for Edith to have set up a box there when there was a post office in Stewart’s Crossing.

That reminded me of the Quaker State Bank account in Easton. What if Walter had set the account up before he died, and Edith kept using it?

But the account number indicated the account had been set up in the past year—long after Walter’s death. I started to wonder if Edith had business that took her to Easton. I knew she went to Leighville once a week, but Easton was another forty-five minutes north, in the opposite direction from Stewart’s Crossing.

Edith paid her bills from the checking account based out of the Stewart’s Crossing QSB branch. Maybe that account and the one in Easton served different purposes—one for her personal expenses, perhaps, and another for her piano teaching revenue and expenses? But Edith had stopped giving private lessons, and only taught at Eastern, where I could see her paycheck was automatically deposited into the account at the Stewart’s Crossing branch.

It was all too confusing. I went back to the records of the online account, and discovered that her quarterly dividend checks for January and March had been cashed. But they had not been deposited into her checking account. And since these were checks to her, and not checks she had written herself, I couldn’t see any more information, such as the endorsement, and I had no idea what had happened to the money.

I was about to call Edith and ask her what she was doing in Easton, when I realized that it might be connected to secrets she didn’t want to reveal. What if she was supporting an illegitimate child or grandchild up there? Or doing some charitable work she didn’t want publicized? Or could someone else be diverting her mail and her checks?

It was all supposition. In any case, I thought it would be better to see what I could do with each one of her statements before I presented her with anything that might be unpleasant.

I tried to spend some time that afternoon on my client work—what I would have done the day before, if I hadn’t gotten so caught up in Edith’s missing paperwork. Using my own laptop, I reviewed the work I had to do. It wasn’t much; just finish up a set of forms for a client—petty cash reimbursement, vacation requests, and so on. But I was only using half my brain, so I quit after a couple of hours. I just couldn’t stop thinking about Caroline.

I’d known people before who had died—both my parents, for starters, and miscellaneous friends, neighbors, in-laws and co-workers. But maybe because I’d seen Caroline’s body, or because I’d inherited Rochester, or maybe just because her case was still an unsolved homicide, her death kept haunting me.

But what could I do about it? Rick was stuck, and if he didn’t know what to do, with all the resources of the police department, how could I know?

I happened to notice the instructions I’d written for retrieving available employee sick time from an SQL database. Something rang in my head but I wasn’t sure what it was. I turned away from the computer, and Rochester was there, wanting attention. “What’s up, puppy?” I asked, ruffling the fur around his neck. “I know, you miss your mom.”

That was the connection. I’d seen Caroline’s name in an SQL database. But where? I turned to Caroline’s laptop, leaving Rochester staring at the place where my hands had just been. A couple of keystrokes later, I was back at the site for military brats.

I ran a couple of queries against the database, looking for people who’d been at the same bases with Caroline, and came up with half a dozen hits. Two people lived in New York City, making it likely Caroline had been back in touch with them: a guy named Christian McCutcheon and a woman named Karina Warr.

Was McCutcheon the guy whose SUV had been parked in Caroline’s driveway? She’d mentioned a guy in New York to both me and Evelina Curcio. If that was the case, his name and address would be in her PDA.