In Dog We Trust (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (36 page)

There was a return email from my client. He was impressed with the progress I’d made, but he’d answered every one of my questions, so my stalling tactic had failed. I knew I’d have to spend all day Saturday and Sunday pounding his crappy prose into shape.

With that out of the way, I had no choice but to pick up Jackie’s folder. Her academic record wasn’t quite as stellar as I’d expected. She was a smart, sassy girl, and I assumed there was significant brain power behind her pretty face. In high school, she’d been a star. She had graduated from an academic magnet school, where she had been the lead on the debate team, a champion chess player, and a regular fixture on the dean’s list.

But her college-level academic record wasn’t stellar. She’d left Rutgers with a C plus average, and I discovered that though she had completed all her course work, again with just over a C average, she had not finished her dissertation.

There was a note from her advisor at UMass, that her topic had been approved, and her outline had been returned to her twice for revision. There was a limit of six years to complete all the work toward a PhD, and he had every expectation that Ms. Devere would complete the dissertation before her time expired. It wasn’t clear what would happen if she didn’t finish in time; would they make her take extra courses? Boot her out of the program?

That meant there was a time pressure on Jackie. And when you’re young, time equals money—if you spend all your time teaching, to earn money, as I knew Jackie did, that left very little time for research or writing. Full-time faculty at Eastern taught four courses a term, and Jackie was teaching the allowable additional two courses, for extra money.

You could get an additional stipend for advising independent study students, and I saw from the department records that Jackie had four of those. She was also the advisor for the African-American Students Club—at yet another stipend.

Where did she get the stamina? She was almost fourteen years younger than I was, and when I was twenty-eight I had a lot more energy. But to manage six courses, all those other requirements, and write a dissertation? If she’d had more money, she could have had more time for her own academic pursuits.

Not to mention the pressure to publish. At Eastern, tenure-track faculty had six years to prove themselves, through a combination of writing and research (well, they were supposed to be good teachers, too, but that was lowest on the list.) During the sixth year, they went up before the tenure committee.

At that time, they had to present the fruits of their labors at Eastern. I knew from other faculty that you had to have at least published one book, preferably from a well-known academic press. You needed a curriculum vitae full of articles published in journals, as well as evidence of serious research that advanced your discipline.

Most faculty depended on publishing their dissertations, and then on expanding and continuing that research. Every year Jackie spent working on her thesis was a year she couldn’t spend on writing articles for publication. That had to add pressure to her life.

The same database I’d hacked into to learn about Strings Livorno told me a bit about Jackie. As a first-year faculty member without a PhD, she wasn’t making much money. She didn’t have an account at Quaker State Bank, and I didn’t want to waste time trying to hack into every bank in the region to find her records.

She had a hefty student loan burden. PhDs don’t come cheap these days, and the low level of her academic work had meant she didn’t earn merit scholarships. She owed over a hundred grand in loans—which was going to take her years to pay off at a college professor’s salary.

I’d always assumed she came from a poor family. Why hadn’t she gotten more of a free ride?

The more I investigated, the more I was able to move Jackie from one compartment in my brain to another—from friend and colleague to murder suspect. It was the only way; I had to think of her like Floyd Zook or Strings Livorno.

 I’d assumed Jackie had grown up in the get-toe, as she called it, but in her Rutgers record I found her mother’s address in Union, a middle-class suburb of Newark. Further research (and the judicious use of private databases) indicated that her mother, Cynthia Hastings, was a registered nurse, and had been married twice, to Freddick Devere, who was born in Newark, and to Otis Roberts, who was from Grand Cayman. Both marriages ended in divorce. Jackie had two brothers, Cyrus Devere and Jamahl Roberts. Jackie was 28, Cyrus 26, and Jamahl 22.

Cynthia still lived in the house on Alice Terrace and worked at a big regional hospital. She had a mortgage of about $20,000 on a house that was worth close to ten times that. Her hospital salary was a matter of public record once I figured what her employment level was. She made a little over $70,000 a year—more than twice what Jackie made. With her kids grown, she was enjoying financial security.

If Cynthia had significant assets, then Jackie would have been excluded from any need-based scholarships. Without academic excellence, all she could count on were a few grants aimed at increasing the presence of minority students in graduate programs. $100,000 was a tough burden, especially on a college salary. Cynthia was in a position to help out, but who knew what other expenses she had?

Jamahl was a DJ and rapper operating as Jam Boy Jay; he was available for private parties at $150 an hour. He had a fancy website, with downloadable MP3 clips of his original music, and video clips of him in action at some smoky club. He specialized in gangsta rap, filled with strong language and a chauvinistic attitude toward women. I wondered if he got into fights with his feminist sister.

Cynthia had been a single mom, and I guessed she had worked long shifts to pay for that house in Union and put food on the table. As the oldest, Jackie had to baby-sit her brothers, help out with cleaning and cooking.

It wasn’t what I’d call the get-toe, but it wasn’t a bed of roses either.

I couldn’t find much on Cyrus Devere. He didn’t have a fancy website like his half-brother. He had not graduated from high school or attended college. Googling him brought up no results.

I don’t like being stumped. I searched every local newspaper in north Jersey, looking for references to Cyrus. I found just one—in a police blotter in Weehawken, just across the Hudson from New York City. He had been picked up for possession of a controlled substance.

That gave me an idea. There’s a Federal Inmate Locator online; you type in the first and last name and you can find out where the inmate is incarcerated. Time was running short; it was after five by that time, and I had to get Rochester walked and fed in order to meet Rick at the Drunken Hessian.

I typed in Cyrus Devere and waited. After churning through its database search, the site returned one result: Cyrus Devere was in a medium-security federal correctional institution in Fairton, NJ. A quick jump to Yahoo Maps showed Fairton was in south-east Jersey, due west of Atlantic City and just east of Delaware Bay.

It wasn’t a part of the state I’d visited; there wasn’t much down there, as far as I knew, but cranberry bogs and empty land. Great place for a prison.

I did a quick printout, and then closed Caroline’s laptop and put it back in my closet. I was sitting on the floor playing with Rochester, getting him ready for his walk, when my doorbell rang.

Looking out the peephole, I saw Santiago Santos. “Hey,” I said, opening the door.  “Did I forget a meeting?”

“Last time I was here we talked about getting together in another month,” he said. “But I’ve been talking to Rick Stemper about you, and I didn’t want to wait that long to catch up with you. I thought I’d check in and see how things are going.”

“Sure. Come on in.” I was nervous, but I knew I’d been careful, using Caroline’s laptop and not my own. “Let me just get my computer.”

When I came back downstairs with the laptop, he was sitting at the kitchen table petting Rochester. “Coffee?” I asked. I looked at the clock. I was due to meet Rick in a few minutes, though I knew he’d understand if I was stuck with Santos.

“I’m good.” While he opened the computer and checked the logs, I paced around the kitchen. I knew he’d see all the job boards I’d been surfing, all the local company websites I’d checked out, and all the work I’d been putting into the risk manager’s manual.  Even if I still didn’t have my business plan together, I’d been trying. That ought to buy me some more time.

He looked up.  “I see you’ve been looking for work, and I can see the hours you’ve put into this new client,” he said. “What I don’t see is the stuff you’ve been doing for Rick.”

My mouth went dry. “What do you mean?”

“Rick told me he’s been asking you to do some computer research for him.  I can’t say I approve of it, because that’s how you got into trouble in California, but I’m only a parole officer. I can’t argue with a cop.”  He pushed the laptop toward me.  “So show me what you’ve been doing.”

I knew from the look on his face that I’d been busted. Not only had Rick told him I’d been keeping a gun, he knew that I’d been doing unauthorized surfing. But I couldn’t show him Caroline’s laptop. That would be a major violation, especially once he confiscated it and had his tech experts find the hacking software I’d installed.  I’d have a one-way ticket back to California. I doubted they’d let me take Rochester to prison with me.  And if I was in jail, there’d be nothing I could do to help Rick figure out who was behind all the murders.

“I’ve been doing that research up at Eastern,” I said, making up the story as I went.  “I knew you wouldn’t approve, so I’ve been using the computers in the library up there. They have this deep-freeze software that resets the computer every time you turn it off so there’s no way anyone can trace where you’ve been. I know it’s a violation, but Rick asked me to do it. He told me he’d square it with you.”

He shook his head, and his dark eyes glared at me. “I could violate you right now,” he said. “I’ve ot enough ammunition. You just don’t seem to get it, do you, Steve? You’re not an ordinary citizen any more. You’re on parole. You can’t just do what you please, even if your friend asks you nice.”

I swallowed hard.  “What are you going to do?”

He stood up, pushing back the chair. “I don’t know. I’m going to kick this one up to my supervisor, see what she says. If it were up to me, I’d end this right now.  You’ve been wasting your time chasing around with your buddy instead of working on your business plan. You had a gun, a clear violation. Now I find out you’re using other computers, when I’ve always made it clear to you that’s against the rules.”  He shook his head again, and walked to the front door.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said. “In the meantime, I hope you think long and hard about what you’ve been doing, and what the consequences can be.”

Rick wasn’t at The Drunken Hessian when I arrived, and I’d finished my first beer and started my second by the time he showed. I kept replaying Santiago Santos’s final words, trying to find a way things could work out. I wasn’t having any luck. And when I got my mind off Santos, it strayed to Jackie Devere, and the feeling that I had betrayed her friendship.

“Sorry,” Rick said, slipping into the booth across from me. I’d picked one up by the front, far removed from the noise of the bar and the pool tables, so we could talk. “MVA on River Road, with a fatality. Had to wait for the Coroner’s Office to arrive before I could get away.”

“Anyone we knew?”

Between Rick and me, we knew a hell of a lot of people in Bucks County. Every kid we went to school with, their parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins; every teacher we had; every store owner we knew; our neighbors and our casual acquaintances. When you added my students and Rick’s professional contacts—cops, attorneys, crooks—the net got even wider.

Rick shrugged. “Teenager on a souped-up Kawasaki motorcycle. Born in Haiti, grew up in Trenton. Name of Arsene Philippe.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell.” The waitress came over, and we ordered platters of baby back ribs. Rick ordered a Heineken, but I was good with the beer I had left.

“What have you got for me?” Rick asked.

I wanted to tell him about the surprise visit from Santiago Santos, but I knew Santos would talk to him about it. And there wasn’t anything Rick could do at this point. He’d asked me to do the research, after all. He hadn’t told me that I had to use my own computer, that Santos would be checking up on me.

There was nothing to do but keep moving forward and hope it would all work out in the end. I’d printed out everything I had emailed to Rick, and I laid the pages on the table, starting with Floyd Zook. “Names to run through your databases,” I said, showing him the list of Floyd’s criminal acquaintances. “General background on Floyd and the rest of the family.”

He scanned through the pages. “OK. Next?”

“Melissa’s music professor, Strings Livorno. Ready to retire, looks short of cash.” I pushed those papers across to him.

“OK.” He stopped when he saw the printouts of Livorno’s bank account. “Where’d you get this?”

I looked at him. “You want to know?”

He shook his head. “Nope.” He read through the pages more carefully, then got up and walked to the bar.

My pulse started racing. What was he going to do? After my conversation with Santiago Santos, I needed Rick on my side.

He returned a minute later with a pack of matches. He tore the printout of Strings Livorno’s bank accounts into small pieces and dropped them into the flat, glass ashtray on the table.  He lit a match and dropped it onto the papers, which flared up. Fortunately, the Drunken Hessian is the kind of place that doesn’t mind the occasional pyromania from its customers.