In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (19 page)

I was left with Rochester, who was so happy to see me that I felt even worse about leaving him. “Were you a good boy?” I asked, ruffling his ears. “Did you play nice with the other doggies?”

“For the first day, he sat around and moped,” Annie said. “But Maslow and Lacan convinced him to play. He was just fine in the end.”

I had about an hour to play with him at home before I had to leave for The Drunken Hessian to meet Rick. Rochester just seemed happy to be back home, and after a quick walk and a bowl full of doggy chow, he was content to sprawl under the dining room table until I returned.

When I got to the bar, Rick was already there, flirting with a twenty-something brunette in a dancer’s leotard, and I had to wait until he’d gotten her phone number for him to come over to the booth and sit down. I recapped what I’d learned about Chris and Karina, though he was most interested in the Colnago, the fancy bike Chris had ridden. “That’s the price of a small car,” he said.

“He drives an SUV, too,” I said. Somewhere in the back of my head, a bell rang. “Hey, I saw a black SUV speeding away after Caroline was shot. It could have been his car.”

“Or it could have been one of a thousand others,” he said. “You didn’t notice the make or model?”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t paying attention.”

“The story of my life,” he said. “Witnesses never pay attention to anything.”

“Can you see if Chris McCutcheon has a criminal record?” I asked. “The way Karina was talking he was some kind of budding psychopath in Korea. He might have gotten in trouble since then.”

Rick shrugged. “I can try, but I don’t know what that will tell us.” He took a swig of his beer. “I got the ballistics results on that shell casing you found.”

“And?”

“It matches one of the bullets that the coroner pulled out of Caroline Kelly.”

“What can you do with that?”

He shrugged. “Not much. However, there was a partial fingerprint on the casing, and that will tie the shooter to the weapon.”

“Great! Whose print is it?”

“No match in any of our databases. But if we ever find a suspect, it’s a way to connect him or her to the crime.”

“Him or her? Can’t you even tell if it’s a man’s or a woman’s print?”

“There’s no reliable way to distinguish whether a fingerprint belongs to a man or a woman,” he said. “A man can have big hands or small hands, and so can a woman.”

I wanted to get right to work at researching Chris McCutcheon when I got home, but instead I ended up playing with Rochester and unpacking. I had laundry to do, and I needed some down time to process the weekend, seeing Tor and the way memories of Mary had clung to some places we had been together.

On Monday in freshman comp, I waited until the class had settled down and said, “Let’s go around the room and brainstorm on your research paper topics.”

Of course none of them had thought about what they wanted to write about, despite the fact that they had less than a week before their rough drafts were due. “OK, who has even the vaguest idea?” I asked.

There was no response from the room until Melissa Macaretti raised her hand. “I’m thinking about a music topic,” she said.

“Any kind of music in particular?”

“I really like Pachelbel’s Canon in D,” she said, surprising me. I bet most of the class had no idea what that sounded like, even if they’d heard it as background music dozens of times.

“That’s an interesting topic,” I said. “You could research Pachelbel himself, the baroque era—maybe even on the number of different variations there are.”

Melissa looked satisfied with herself, and the fact that she had survived that brief inquisition caused a few other students to raise their hands. Wakeem wanted to write about ballistics, while Joaquin was interested in a comparison and contrast paper between the 9 mm and the 357 Magnum. Billy Rubin wanted to write about treating gunshot wounds, and another one of the Melissas wanted to write about being a crime scene tech. One of the Jakes was interested in pathology, and the other in trace evidence.

Jeremy Eisenberg wanted to write about Ecstasy, and either Dionne or Dianne wanted to write about date rape. The other—I had just three more weeks to try and tell them apart—wanted to write about careers in nursing.

“That’s a pretty broad topic,” I said. “See if you can narrow it down a little. There are so many different kinds of nurses. If you like kids, you could be a pediatric nurse. If you like excitement, you could work in an emergency room. If you don’t like dealing with patients, you could work in the operating room, because the patients are always knocked out by the time they get there.”

The class laughed. I noticed that the lovebirds, Billy Rubin and Anna Rexick, had split up, with Wakeem and Joaquin now between them instead of to one side. Anna wanted to write about emergency room medicine. She announced to the class that she was no longer interested in nursing; she was going to medical school. “More than fifty percent of entering medical students are female nowadays,” she said. She loved the TV program
ER
and wanted to work in an environment like that.

I was relieved when Menno bucked the trend and announced he wanted to write about offshore banking. “It’s where you put all your money in a bank in some foreign country so you don’t have to pay taxes on it.”

Tasheba snickered. “You can’t open a bank account with two nickels.”

“How about you?” I asked. She was debating between writing about animal shelters or Shih-Tzus; as she reminded us all, Romeo, her Shih-Tzu, had come from a shelter.

“Is Shih-Tzu spelled like shit?” Menno asked, earning a glare from Tasheba. I moved on fast. One of the Jeremys wanted to write about
manga
, a kind of Japanese comics, while another wanted to research computer hackers.

I was tempted to make a smart remark, something like “Be sure to include what happens after you get caught,” but my jail time wasn’t the class’s business. It was a reminder of how the rest of the world viewed what I referred to as my little problem.  In my opinion, your garden variety hacker is a lot like me, somebody who breaks into sites just to see if he can do it, for that rush that comes with forbidden behavior.

If they’d been honest, I’ll bet everyone in the class could have copped to a range of felonies and misdemeanors. Slipping a highlighter at the bookstore into your backpack without anyone noticing. Driving over the speed limit. Smoking or ingesting a controlled substance. How was hitting computer keys in a particular sequence any worse than those?

Maybe you think I don’t regret the things I did that got me sent to jail. Could I have protected Mary some other way? Cut up her credit cards? Forced her to go to counseling? None of those would have worked. Mary was too strong-willed, too much her own person.

Would I do it all again? My conviction and prison term had been the death knell for my marriage. Why would I sacrifice so much for a woman who dumped me and took almost everything I owned?

Then again, I loved her. I thought it was my job, as the husband, to protect her. I know, it’s sexist, and I know Mary was quite able to take care of herself. But we are wired in certain ways. I couldn’t seem to tame my curiosity, and I doubt I could have held back when there was something I thought I could do to help Mary through the aftermath of the miscarriage.

I gave the class my cell phone number again. “Since I don’t have an office here at Eastern, you can’t just drop by and ask me any questions. So feel free to email me or call me, and I’ll help you out.”

Up in the faculty lounge, I ran into Jackie Devere. “Do you know what kind of license plate frame I saw this morning? ‘Jesus Died 4 U.’ As if the sacrifice of our Lord was something to instant message about. What is up with that? Were they charging by the letter when that idiot ordered his frame?”

“Conservative Christians are destroying our nation’s educational fabric,” I said. “News at eleven.”

Jackie left for a committee meeting, and Dee Gamay, one of the other adjuncts, came in, grumbling. “People on this campus have no respect for human life,” she said.

It sounded like “human laugh.” “What happened?” I asked, eager for any diversion.

“This big black SUV nearly ran me over in the parking lot,” she complained, dropping a pile of books on the table next to me with a thud.

“Disgruntled student?”

“More like nasty faculty member,” she said. “It was that Jackie Devere. I know she doesn’t like adjuncts, but that doesn’t mean she has to kill us.”

I left a little later, and when I got home I pulled Caroline’s laptop down from the closet shelf, to log on and snoop around.  I thought of what Santos would say if he ever found the computer or discovered what I’d been doing. My natural curiosity, as well as the seductive power of knowledge, pulled me forward.

I started with a basic Google search, just getting to know Chris a little. I discovered that he was a real estate speculator—he bought apartments, houses and commercial property all around the five boroughs, did some fixing up, and resold for a profit. He’d spoken at a conference on Rehabbing the City, and I read the brief bio he had supplied.

“After a globe-hopping childhood, Christian McCutcheon has made New York City his home,” it read. “Educated at NYU, he has bought and sold property from Washington Heights to the Battery, and almost every subway stop in between, as well as ventures in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island.”

From there I went to NYU. With a little finagling, the kind that both Santiago Santos and Rick Stemper would have disapproved of, I discovered that Chris had attended class there almost twenty years ago, but had not received a degree. Searching property records, I found he had bought his first building, a storefront in the East Village, after he stopped going to class.

How had he come up with the money, I wondered. Had his parents been wealthy? Had they left him money? I kept making notes. There was a clear paper trail of his property acquisitions; every time, he traded up. His latest sale had netted him a profit of over $100,000. I found a post on a Porsche site where he mentioned his black Cayenne. But had that been the SUV I saw speeding away after Caroline had been shot?

And if Chris had shot her—why? Had he been obsessed with her since they were teenagers together? Perhaps she had rejected him. He didn’t look like the kind of guy who took no for an answer. If he’d kidnapped and killed her dog in Korea, he was capable of growing into murder.

When Rochester came over to lay his head in my lap, I realized I was letting my imagination get away from me. I didn’t like the guy, but that didn’t mean that Karina’s unsubstantiated belief that Chris had killed Caroline’s dog was true. And there was no evidence of any bad feelings between Chris and Caroline.

I opened her email again. The online service she used archived messages back three months, and I searched for any email to or from either Chris or Karina. There was nothing of interest. The messages between Chris and Caroline were simple—friends who were busy but keeping in touch, like the messages Tor and I exchanged.

I was getting frustrated. I’m accustomed to finding what I look for online. But maybe there just wasn’t anything there to find.

And if that was the case, then I was no closer to finding out who killed Caroline Kelly.

My phone rang as I was preparing dinner. “Chris McCutcheon has a juvenile record, which is sealed,” Rick said, jumping in just the way he didn’t like me to do. “And he has two misdemeanor convictions for criminal mischief. The first got him a suspended sentence, the second got him a hundred hours of community service.”

“What does that mean, criminal mischief?”

“He damaged someone’s property. I’m not sure about New York, but in Pennsylvania, it’s a third degree misdemeanor if the damage is between $500 and $1,000. Second degree misdemeanor if it’s between $1,000 and $5,000, and third degree felony if the damage is over $5,000.”

“Which means what?”

“From the penalties, I’m guessing these were second degree misdemeanors,” Rick said. “It could have been anything—a bar fight, a landlord-tenant dispute, getting back at an ex-girlfriend. Although the fact that there are two convictions a year apart means your guy is a bit of a loose cannon.”

“You said real or personal property, right?” He agreed, and I told him about Chris’s career as a property redeveloper. “Maybe he goes around and bangs up houses, then tries to buy them at a discount.”

“You have a real imagination, you know that, Steve? You ever consider writing fiction?”

“Ha funny ha,” I said.
“So the guy has a temper. He could have been mad at Caroline Kelly and shot her.”

“Try taking that to a judge,” Rick said. “Right now I’ve got nothing, and the chief is pressuring me to shelve this as a lost cause and move on. My case load is piling up. Catch you later.”

Walking Rochester a little later, I worried that Caroline’s murder would go unsolved if Rick had to move on to other cases. But what could I do about it? My few attempts at finding information hadn’t been successful. Even my hacking hadn’t turned up much information, just a couple of leads that hadn’t panned out.

I resolved to look further into Chris McCutcheon’s background. There was something more there—I knew it. And if the answer didn’t lie with him, then I would keep scratching and digging until I found out who killed Caroline. I owed that much to her, and to Rochester.