Three Dogs in a Row Page 14

  “Now, Caroline,” Karina said as he left, grasping my hand. It felt nice, though she was as much of a drama queen, if not more, than Reynaldo the law firm proofreader. “You must just be devastated. I know I am.”

  I nodded. I realized that I hadn’t held hands with a woman for a long time, and I liked it. Some long-dormant part of me started to wake up and take notice of the little blush on Karina’s cheeks, the scent of her perfume, the way her foot nestled against my leg.

  It didn’t take much prompting from me; Karina had a lot to say. “I just adored Caroline when we went to school together,” she said. “She was a few years older than I was, and I looked up to her so much.” I heard a lot about how life on a military base was just dismal, especially when you moved around every couple of years as your father got transferred. “When you met up with a kindred spirit, like Caroline, you just treasured the time.”

  She shifted in her seat, and her foot rubbed against my ankle. My body started reacting to her, and I had to shift around a little on my chair to adjust myself. For a moment or two as she talked, I got lost in a little fantasy of moving back to the city and dating Karina Warr. What would she be like in bed? Mary and I had clicked sexually from the first time we slept together. Would Karina and I have that same connection?

  With difficulty, I brought myself back to the present, figuring out from what Karina was saying that despite everything, she and Caroline had not been close for a while. “When she lived in the city, we were like sisters,” Karina said. “I mean we went everywhere together. But then she moved out to Dismal, PA and we just sort of lost touch.”

  She finally listened to herself and turned a bit pink. “I’m sorry, you were her neighbor,” she said. “I never actually visited your lovely little town, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as I expected. Living in New York you do get a little spoiled.”

  “I lived in the city myself for years,” I said. “I can tell you there’s a point when you welcome the chance to live someplace quiet and peaceful, without graffiti on the corner, the smell of urine everywhere, and a drunk sleeping on your stoop.”

  The waiter brought our food, and Caroline poked at her omelet, as if she was going to find a wheel of Jarlsberg lurking under the eggy shell. It seemed to meet with her approval, though, and she sighed happily. “This is the most wonderful restaurant,” she said. “They know how to take care of their customers.”

  “I met up with Chris McCutcheon yesterday,” I said, as we ate. “He mentioned he lived in Korea with you and Caroline.”

  “Oh, Chris,” she said. She leaned in close to me, and once again the scent of roses washed over me. “Tell me, didn’t you think there was something—not quite right—about him?”

  “What do you mean?” I figured that to her “not quite right” meant “not interested in her.”

  “He was the oddest boy in Korea,” she said. “Very secretive. He was just enough older than Caroline and I were to be dangerous. He loved to flick his cigarette lighter, and he was always threatening to set our hair on fire.”

  “That is a little odd.”

  “Did he happen to mention her little dog?” Karina asked.

  “He did say she had a dog.”

  Again, she leaned in toward me. Damn. If she didn’t stop doing that I was going to lose track of the conversation altogether. “And did he say what happened to it?”

  I had to think for a minute, remembering our conversation and trying to ignore the stirrings in my groin that worsened every time Karina got close to me. “Did it run away?”

  “That’s what everyone said.” Karina put down her fork. “I don’t think so.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Chris would catch bugs and then twist off their wings,” she said. “He used to brag about it. And he didn’t like Caroline’s dog at all. He was always saying what he’d do to it if it ever came near him.”

  I thought of Rochester. “But he came to Stewart’s Crossing to visit Caroline. He must have been OK with Rochester.”

  “He must have grown out of it,” Karina said. “But don’t you think it’s strange that he hated that little dog so much, and then one day it just disappeared?”

  “Wasn’t there any investigation?”

  “Caroline’s father didn’t like the dog. He said she was overreacting. But I’ll bet you Chris had something to do with it.”

  The thought gave me the creeps. Chris McCutcheon presented such a confident face to the world—was that all a façade? Had he been responsible for hurting Caroline’s dog all those years before?

  “So tell me about you,” Karina said, reaching out to touch my hand again. “You lived in the city?”

  My skin tingled where she touched me, sending those messages to my groin again. Mary and I had stopped having sex when she got pregnant the last time, and there hadn’t been anyone since. I realized how much I’d missed that intimacy. Taking care of yourself just doesn’t have the same impact.

  We talked through the rest of our meal, and through cappuccinos. But the more Karina talked, the more she reminded me of Mary—and that was a turn-off. I had loved Mary once, found her sexy, loved taking her to bed—but things had changed a lot since the days of our Manhattan courtship. By the time Karina and I finished our coffee, all I wanted to do was go back home. Maybe I wasn’t quite as ready to start dating as my body hoped.

  “Would you like to come over to my place?” she said, after the waiter had taken my credit card away. “It’s not far, and we could continue—getting to know each other.”

  “You’re so kind to offer,” I said, taking her hand and squeezing it lightly. “But you know, I took in Rochester after Caroline died. I have a friend looking after him for the weekend, but I’m worried about him. I don’t want him to think I’ve abandoned him so soon after Caroline’s death.”

  Karina frowned, but then she smiled, as if she was worried about what the frown lines would do to her perfect complexion. “Well, then, I may just have to come down to what is it—Steven’s Crossing—myself.”

  “Stewart’s Crossing,” I said. “You’ll have to let me know if you do.”

  She kissed both my cheeks as we stood outside the café, and squeezed my hand. I ignored the pressure in my groin. “Feel free to call me again,” she said. “It’s so good to talk about the things that upset us.”

  It had gotten colder outside, a brisk wind whipping down the street from the East River, and I shivered in my windbreaker. Like a dumb college kid, I’d been seduced by the early spring sunshine.

  “Thank you,” I said. A cab came by, and with a shrill whistle she flagged it down.

  I felt a tremendous sense of relief as the cab passed out of sight.

  17 – Online Research

  I called Rick from the train and arranged to meet him for dinner at The Drunken Hessian. Then I sat back to consider everything I had learned. I had a much better understanding of identity theft after my conversation with Tor, and I knew that I had to collect more information from Edith before I could consider contacting anyone to try and recover some of the money that had been stolen from her.

  I didn’t know quite as much as I would have liked about Chris McCutcheon, Karina Warr, and what had happened between them and Caroline Kelly in Korea when they were teenagers. I would have to do a lot more research—but I knew that there was something there.

  Had Chris hurt Caroline’s dog? Had she suspected him? How could she have remained friends with him if she had? I’d only had Rochester living with me for a few weeks, but I knew I would be pretty angry if anyone hurt him.

  As the countryside sped past, I was worried that Rochester might have forgotten me, that he’d have settled into life at Annie’s as easily as he’d settled in with me. And that bothered me. As soon as the train reached Trenton, I ransomed my car from the station garage and headed back to Annie’s house.

  I needn’t have worried. When Annie opened the front door, all three dogs rushed at me, yipping and barking and jumping ar
ound like performing seals.

  “Maslow! Lacan! Come here,” Annie called, and her dogs rushed up to her, tails wagging. “Can you tell my husband is a therapist?” she asked.

  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?