In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (30 page)

He took off, running around the fence toward the wooded area, and the River Road beyond it.

“No! Rochester! Come back!” It was like I was calling some other dog, for all the attention he paid me.

I started running after him, but I was middle-aged and out of shape. By the time I reached the gate to the dog park, he’d disappeared into the woods.

My heart seized. Mary had always complained about my ability to lose myself in my work, shut her out. “You never listen, Steve. You’re a lousy husband. It’s a good thing we don’t have kids because you’d be a rotten father, too.”

Maybe she had been right; her miscarriages had been a sign from God that we would not be good parents. Once in a fit of depression and anger, she’d told me I couldn’t be trusted to take care of a dog. Now Rochester was going to run into the street and get hit by a car, and it would be on me—the way the breakup of our marriage had been laid at my feet, though I knew it hadn’t been my fault alone.

I could feel tears begin to well up in my eyes as I ran around the dog park and toward the woods. Then I heard Rochester begin to bark.

He didn’t make much noise, but already I recognized that deep, throaty bark. “Rochester!” I called. I hoped he hadn’t found some animal in the woods. There were bobcat, lynx, raccoons and possums in the countryside. What if one of them clawed him? What if he was hurt?

My heart pounding, I stumbled to the edge of the woods, then followed the sound of his barking. “What is it, boy? What have you found?”

And then I stopped short, because I saw him, standing by the body of a young man, probably an Eastern student. Just beyond the man lay a young woman of the same age.

The woods had been a popular trysting spot in the spring when I was a student, particularly for freshmen living in Birthday Hall. The rooms were all doubles; if you didn’t have a cooperative roommate, there weren’t many places on campus you could go with your sweetheart. And sometimes couples who didn’t want to be seen together would meet out there as well—two guys, for example.

I stepped closer. There was something familiar about the bodies. The boy was face down, wearing dark pants and a white shirt. From the side, I could just see the edge of his black beard.

But it was the girl who I recognized first. She was lying so that I could see part of her face, but before I even saw it, I noticed the plaid skirt. There was only one girl at Eastern who dressed that way—Melissa Macaretti.

And if I was right, the boy next to her was Menno Zook.

I stood there for a moment. I’d seen dead bodies before, most recently Caroline. Sometimes I think I spent a good part of my childhood at funerals. My father’s father was one of twelve children, and my father had dozens of aunts, uncles and distant cousins. I was an only child, and so my parents dragged me along with them as we traveled to funerals up and down the Eastern Seaboard.

But there’s a difference between seeing a dead person in a coffin, cleaned up, made up, and looking peaceful, and seeing a dead body at your feet—someone you’d known well. Seeing Caroline’s body had been a big shock.

And now, Menno Zook and Melissa Macaretti. I hadn’t known them more than casually; they’d been students, and I knew how they looked, how they wrote, and something of how they thought. But we’d never shared a pizza and beer, never sat around talking.

I could tell from the condition of their clothing that they’d both been dead for some time. Menno’s white shirt had been soaked, and had stuck to his torso when it dried. There were leaves and twigs in his and Melissa’s hair, and dried blood pooled around Melissa’s head.

My first instinct was to call Rick Stemper. I knew that Leighville wasn’t his jurisdiction, but he would know what I should do.

I prayed that he’d be answering his cell phone, and he was. “I found Melissa Macaretti and Menno Zook,” I said.

“You did? Where?”

“At Eastern. Actually, Rochester found them.” I explained, in too much nervous detail, about taking him to the dog park, about how it had been so empty, how he’d managed to get out the gate when it had swung open in the wind.

“Hold on,” Rick finally said, interrupting me. “Are you saying they’re dead?”

“It looks like it.”

“Jesus. Did you call 911?”

“Not yet. I thought I’d call you first and you would tell me what to do.”

“Are you an idiot? Didn’t we got through this once before? You always call 911 first. I know a detective in Leighville—Tony Rinaldi. I’m going to call him. And then I’m going to get my ass up there, too. Now hang up the phone and call 911.”

“OK,” I said.

“Steve? Are you listening to me? Hang up and call 911.”

“OK.” I did just what he said. In what was becoming all too familiar an experience, I called the emergency operator and announced that I had found two dead bodies. I explained in excruciating detail where I was; it sounded like the operator had never heard of Eastern College or River Road, no less the dog park or the wooded area nearby.

I was getting frustrated. I wanted to say, “Have you ever heard of Yahoo Maps? Get a grip.” But I didn’t seem to have the energy to do that, so I just kept explaining about driving up River Road and turning on the lane that led up to the campus, past the dog park.

I was standing at the entrance to the dog park, Rochester at my feet, still on the phone with the 911 operator, when a dark blue sedan with a blue flashing light on the top pulled up. A tall, dark-haired guy in his late forties got out, pulled the light off the roof and tossed it on the front seat of the car. Then he came over to me.

“Professor Levitan?” he asked, sticking out his hand. “I’m Detective Sergeant Rinaldi.”

I hung up on the 911 operator. If she couldn’t get the cops there based on what I’d told her, then at least this Rinaldi guy could.

We shook hands, and Rochester and I led him over to the edge of the woods as I explained what had happened. “They’re in there,” I said. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather not go back in.”

“Sure. Just stay out here, OK?”

He reached down to pet Rochester before he left. “You’re a good boy,” he said. For some reason it took me a minute to realize he wasn’t talking about me.

He came back a couple of minutes later, talking on his radio. Once again he walked me through how Rochester and I had discovered the bodies, and as I did, I heard the sirens approaching. Soon there was a crime scene team there, a woman from the Coroner’s office and a couple of techs of her own, and a number of cops in black and white squad cars which blocked off access to the area.

I was getting tired, just standing there with Rochester, waiting for someone to talk to me again. He was antsy; I guess he remembered the last time we’d seen all those cops and flashing lights, and the memories weren’t good ones. Finally Rick Stemper showed up.

He waved hello to me but went over to Detective Rinaldi. They talked for a while. It was starting to get dark, and I knew Rochester would be hungry and want to go home. I was pretty eager to get away myself.

After a long time, both Rick Stemper and Tony Rinaldi came over to me. “Rick tells me you have quite a talent for finding dead bodies,” Rinaldi said.

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a talent,” I said. “More like a misfortune.”

Behind him, I saw the Coroner’s techs carrying a body out of the woods on a stretcher. I didn’t know if it was Menno or Melissa, and I didn’t want to know.

“The deceased were both your students?”

I nodded. “In my freshman composition class.”

“And you think one or both of them might have tried to run you off the road the other day?”

“I thought it might have been one of my students,” I said, remembering my confrontation with Lay Zee. “I wasn’t thinking of Melissa or Menno.” I turned to Rick. “You think it was them?”

“If we believe that they killed Caroline, then there’s a good chance they tried to kill you,” he said.

“I’d like you to come down to the station so we can talk about all this,” Rinaldi said. “Bring me up to speed, so to speak.”

“I’m exhausted. And Rochester needs his dinner. Can we do it tomorrow?”

“Really need you to come in this evening,” Rinaldi said. “While all these details are fresh in your brain. We’ve got a K-9 works out of our station—I’m sure we’ve got some chow down there for your dog.”

I looked over at Rick, but his face was a blank. “All right,” I said. “My car’s up at the faculty parking lot.”

“Why don’t you and your dog ride along with me,” Rinaldi said. “I’ll see that you get back to your car when we’re finished.”

It didn’t look like I had much of a choice. I ushered Rochester into the back seat of Rinaldi’s blue sedan and then got in beside him. “You can ride up front,” Rinaldi said.

“I’ll stay back here with Rochester, if you don’t mind,” I said.

It wasn’t my first trip to the Leighville Police Station. My freshman year at Eastern, I’d lived in Birthday Hall, the dorm right up the road from the dog park, though at the time there had been no park there; woods had stretched all the way from the edge of Birthday’s manicured lawn down to the river.

In an attempt to improve the fitness level of the average student, the college had constructed an outdoor fitness course around the perimeter of the lawn. Wooden sleepers were laid out to simulate certain exercises—step-ups, pull-ups, and so on. The idea was to start at the first station and work your way around the square, ending up back at the front door of Birthday House where you’d begun.

One spring night just before final exams, I was playing a drinking game in the student lounge with a bunch of my buddies. Yes, we were all under twenty-one, the legal drinking age in Pennsylvania at the time, but ever since I was about sixteen I’d looked old enough to shop at the State Store, the state-run liquor outlet in Leighville, without being carded.

I don’t remember the TV program we’d been watching in the lounge, but every time one of the characters did or said something, you had to chug your beer. They did it or said it often enough that by midnight we were all in our cups.

It was a clear warm night, with the illumination of a full moon. One of the guys had the brilliant idea that we should race around the fitness course—naked.

Hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

There were about a dozen of us. We stripped down in the lobby and left our clothes in a big, sloppy pile, then took off outside.

I think we were about halfway through when the cops arrived. I guess we’d woken up some of the nerds in the dorm who thought sleep was important for success at final exams.

A couple of the guys got away, but they pulled in at least nine or ten of us. The cops wouldn’t let us go in the dorm to retrieve our clothes, so we were jammed into the back seats of squad cars, an uncomfortable position among a bunch of naked, drunk teenagers.

“Hey, get your hands off me, you mo,” I remember my buddy Nick howling.

I was the guy in the middle. “Your ass is touching my ass,” I said. “Both of you. Scoot over toward the door.”

I don’t remember the name of the third guy, but I remember him saying, “Daddy, he’s touching me,” to the cop.

“Simmer down back there,” the cop said.

By the time we got back to the station a couple of the guys had thrown up, and we were all sobering up fast. But when Nick kicked off the trend to give fake names, we all followed suit. My name, if I recall, was Joe Mamma.

They threw us all in a holding cell, and the guys who stunk of vomit had to stay over in the corner. The rest of us tried to maintain a proper distance between us, tried to avoid sizing up each others’ equipment. But there wasn’t much else to look at, and the whole experience was probably in danger of disintegrating into a circle jerk when one of the cops threw a pile of clothes into the room and we fell on them like wolves on fresh kill.

They never did get our names, but they let us loose at first light to make our way back to campus on foot. After that, I made a point of steering clear of any interaction with the Leighville Police Department.

That is, until I arrived at the back door of the station in Tony Rinaldi’s sedan.

The department’s located on the first floor of the town hall, on College Avenue in the center of town. It’s a three-story brick building with a memorial to Leighville soldiers killed in various wars in a little grassy patch out front.

The offices of the mayor, the town council, the tax assessor and so on were upstairs. The left half used to belong to the fire department, with the right for the police, but some time when I was in California the town fathers built a state-of-the-art fire station a few blocks away and renovated the police department. I didn’t remember much of the building from that first visit, but I could tell that the town had put some bucks into the new station.

The desk sergeant took Rochester away to get him some dinner, and I followed Rinaldi down a carpeted hallway to an interrogation room. “Where’s Rick?” I asked as we walked in. “Is he going to come in here, too?”

“Detective Stemper’s putting together his own statement,” Rinaldi said. “You just tell me your side of the story.”