Three Dogs in a Row Read online

  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.

  18 – Caroline’s Diary

  After dinner, I decided to take a thorough look through Caroline’s boxes before they were shipped off to upstate New York.

  Ginny had donated Caroline’s clothes and linens to the Episcopal Thrift Shop on Canal Street in Stewart’s Crossing. It was right across the street from Mark Figueroa’s antique shop, and I thought it was a good source of merchandise. The rest of the stuff from her bedroom was packed in a set of boxes I hadn’t looked through yet, so I started with those.

  I carried four boxes into my living room and set them on the floor, then sat down to look through them. Rochester was right on top of me, trying to get into the boxes himself. “What’s up, boy?” I asked, stroking his head. “You smell your mom?”

  The first box I opened was filled with Caroline’s cosmetics, so I could understand Rochester’s strong reaction. Perfume, face cream, eye shadow, lip liner—every product women were bamboozled into thinking was necessary in order to snag or keep a husband. I sealed the box back up. I’d had quite enough of Mary’s endless cabinet of cosmetics.

  The second and third box contained jewelry and heirloom linens—lace shams, embroidered pillow cases, and so on. The last was full of knickknacks, stuffed animals, framed photos, and so on. Toward the bottom, though, I found mementos of Caroline’s time in Korea, including her junior and senior yearbooks. Chris McCutcheon was a graduating senior in the first; he’d been voted “Least Likely to Pursue a Military Career” by his classmates. He had been a member of the tae kwon do club, the karate dojo, and the wrestling team. Great background for a potential psychopath. And he was only a year older than she was; that wasn’t the impression he had given me.

  I flipped through the pages, hoping a clue would jump out at me. Had the seeds of Caroline’s death been sown that long ago? If Karina was right, Chris had been a dangerous kid, but the casual shots of him showed a skinny boy with long, stringy hair and a leather jacket—just your standard-issue adolescent rebel. There was no neon sign blinking over his head saying, “Danger, Will Robinson,” no robot frantically waving mechanical arms.

  Caroline was in the second. She had been on the math team, vice-president of the French Club, and on the Honor Roll all four years of high school. There was one casual shot of Karina Warr; she’d been in the French Club with Caroline. Below the yearbooks I found a couple of photo albums, one full of Polaroids from her teenaged years. I could make out Chris and Karina along with a young Caroline. There was even a picture of the Shih-Tzu Karina thought Chris had kidnapped and killed. There was a lot of other memorabilia—programs from school plays, souvenirs from a class trip to Hong Kong and so on.

  At the very bottom of the pile there was a faded, clothbound book with a fold-over snap to hold it closed.

  I opened the clasp. The title page read, “DIARY: CAROLINE GRACE KELLY.”

  Sweet. Her father had probably called her “princess.”

  I put the diary aside, then packed the boxes back up. Rochester was very interested in the book, sniffing it and butting it with his head. “I’m going to read it, Rochester,” I said. “Give me a minute to get organized.”

  I took the boxes back into the garage, and when I returned to the living room Rochester had the book between his two front paws and was gnawing on one corner. “Not yours!” I said. “Give that back to me!”

  I had to tug hard on the book to get it out of his grip. I went upstairs, the dog right on my heels. I lay down on the bed, and he disappeared for a minute—but I knew what he was up to. And sure enough, he was building up speed in the hallway for a jump onto the bed. He came galloping into my room and landed with a huge whoomp on the bed next to me.

  “Stay down there,” I said, using my right foot to position him. He lay down with his head on his front paws, watching me.

  I opened Caroline’s diary and started to read. I skimmed a lot; she wasn’t Anne Frank, and the prose was about the level of my students’ papers. Descriptions were non-existent, as was dialogue and characterization. But hey, she wasn’t trying to write the Great American (or Korean, for that matter) Novel; she was just recording the thoughts and feelings of a teenaged girl in unusual circumstances.

  The dog was named Kimchee, after the spicy Korean cabbage dish; her father didn’t like either very much. There were a lot of mentions of him, and then one day, in capital letters, KIMCHEE IS GONE! She and her mother had hunted all over the base. They had asked the MPs to keep an eye out. They had put up lost dog posters. There had been no sign of him.

  Caroline’s father said some Korean on the base had taken Kimchee home for dinner, though there was only enough meat on his bones for an appetizer.

  Caroline thought he was cruel, and described at length how she had cr
ied over the dog’s disappearance. Karina and another girl had been very supportive, though the boys, led by Chris McCutcheon, had tended to agree with her father.

  For some time after Kimchee’s disappearance, Chris had mimed gnawing on a bone every time he saw Caroline. She thought he was “a real meanie.”

  Karina had believed Chris was behind Kimchee’s disappearance even then. She had led Caroline on a snooping expedition behind Chris’s family quarters, where there was some fresh dirt. That had sealed it for Karina, and she had pressed Caroline to challenge Chris.

  Caroline had refused—good sense on her part. If he was guilty, he was damaged, and you didn’t want to press someone like that. If he was innocent, she was just going to make life in a small community that much more difficult.

  There was one entry, after Chris had left the base for college in the states, that intrigued me. Caroline had written about how devastated Karina had been when Chris left, and how she couldn’t seem to stop talking about him. “Does Karina Chris?” she had written. “Is she jealous of me + Chris?”

  What did that mean, I wondered. Caroline hadn’t written about Chris as a boyfriend; she hadn’t even spun any romantic fantasies about him. They were friends, it seemed; he was a bit like a big brother to her, especially when it came to teasing her. Their fathers were friends, so the two were often thrown together.

  But once Chris left Korea for NYU, there was no more than a fleeting reference to him—a postcard he had sent home of the Statue of Liberty as a torch singer. “Had to explain to Karina what a torch singer was,” Caroline noted. “Even then she didn’t get the joke.”

  After Caroline graduated from high school, her father had been posted to Germany. Caroline had gone to Utica to spend the summer with her great-aunt, then on to SUNY. The diary’s entries stopped after a couple of months in college. There was no indication of whether she’d been in touch with Chris once she returned to the States. I knew only that the three of them had reconnected when they were all living in Manhattan.

  I closed the book and looked down at Rochester, who had turned on his side, his legs splayed out. He snored lightly, and his chest rose and fell with each breath.

  Had the diary provided me with anything I didn’t already know? At least I had Caroline’s viewpoint on what had happened to Kimchee, not just Karina’s. All the suspicion was still on Karina’s part.

  I looked at the materials stacked next to me on the bed. Caroline’s great aunt wouldn’t have any use for them, but Karina or Chris might. I left Rochester sleeping on the bed and went into the office, where I emailed Karina to let her know what I had and ask if she wanted any of it.

  I’d just finished sending the message when my cell phone rang. “Hi, Professor Levitan, it’s Melissa Macaretti. Sorry, but I’m at my boyfriend’s place, and he doesn’t have internet, or I’d have emailed you. Can I use information I got from talking to one of my professors in my paper?”

  “Sure,” I said. “You reference it like a personal interview.”

  “Which is how?”

  “OK. Who was the professor?”

  “Professor Richard Livorno, in the music department.”

  I knew him. He’d been around when I was in school. His cousin, Francis “Chickie” Livorno, was a minor Mafioso who’d been indicted my junior year, and there had been rumors running wild around campus that his cousin Richie was connected, too. The school paper had a field day, learning that Livorno was the Italian name for a city called Leghorn in English, which was also a breed of chicken—hence Chickie’s name.

  The paper had christened Professor Livorno as “Strings,” because in addition to teaching he played the violin, and for a few years afterward had always referred to him as Professor Richard “Strings” Livorno, in the style of Mafia figures.

  I explained to Melissa how to quote him, using a signal phrase, and had to resist saying, “According to Professor Richard ‘Strings’ Livorno.” Then we went over how to cite the interview in her Works Cited list. By the time we were done I wanted to ask her, “Do you want me to write the paper for you, too?”

  I took Rochester out for a quick walk around eleven, and then out of habit, I glanced at my date book for the next day, and realized, with a sudden drop in my stomach, that Santiago Santos was due to come by for a follow up visit the next afternoon.

  I’d just wasted the entire evening looking through Caroline’s diary, when I should have been working on my business plan. I was sunk. Sure, I had been looking for new clients, even picking up a couple of small jobs, but I still didn’t have a clear idea of what I was going to do for money once the Eastern paychecks stopped coming in. Santiago Santos wasn’t going to like that.

  I had trouble sleeping, thoughts of Santos and a possible return to prison in California rolling through my brain. I got up around two AM and tried to work at the computer, but it was no good.

  I woke up around seven, not feeling refreshed at all, and let Rochester drag me around the neighborhood as I continued to stress over the visit from Santos. When I got back home, the phone was ringing—never a good sign so early in the morning.

  “Steve, it’s Santiago Santos,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I’m not going to be able to get out to your place this afternoon. I’ve got an emergency with another client.”

  “That’s OK,” I said, trying to keep the relief from my voice. “I understand.”

  “I know it’s irregular, but do you think I could come by Sunday afternoon? Say two o’clock? My calendar is pretty jammed.”

  “Sure, Sunday’s fine,” I said.

  The day looked a lot sunnier. I gave Rochester a biscuit, which he appreciated, and sat down to breakfast myself. When I checked my email after breakfast, there was a message from Karina Warr, saying that she was going to try and get down to Stewart’s Crossing on Saturday afternoon. Would I be around to show her the personal stuff Caroline had left behind? I emailed back to her and said yes. I offered to send her directions, but I didn’t get a response.

  It struck me that I didn’t know much about Karina beyond her connections to Caroline and Chris. What did she do for a living, for example?

  I knew I was supposed to work on my business plan—but I had a reprieve of a couple of days, so I indulged my curiosity instead of doing what I should. Gee, isn’t that how I got in trouble in the first place?

  Opening Caroline’s laptop once more, I Googled Karina and was surprised at how many hits I got. Many of them were useless; she attended an awful lot of parties that got written up in online gossip columns. However, I did find out that she was in charge of location scouting for a chain of fast food sushi restaurants called Wok ‘n’ Roll.

  To me, fast food sushi was an oxymoron; good sushi was prepared by a trained chef, not thrown together by a high school kid in a paper cap. It was served according to long-standing Japanese traditions, not slung onto paper plates and handed across a counter by a teenager with an attitude.

  Karina Warr sure had attitude, though. I’d seen it demonstrated at brunch, and I saw it online, too. She’d rubbed a couple of people the wrong way, and they’d taken to the Internet to voice their complaints. A man named Surinder Darthy accused her of underhanded negotiations, concealing her affiliation with Wok ‘n’ Roll as she negotiated for a lease on his storefront in Washington Heights. He thought she was a real witch.

  C.S. Verdad owned a shopping center in Manhattan Beach that was in danger of default. If Karina had signed the lease for a Wok ‘n’ Roll outlet there as she had promised, he would have been able to use that commitment to hold off his lenders; instead, she had delayed until the deadline had passed, and then negotiated a deal with the creditors who had taken over the plaza.

  Karina had agreed to serve on the board of an organization called Kids in Danger, whose sole purpose seemed to be preventing gay men and lesbians from adopting children. Karina had also promised that Wok ‘n’ Roll would cater their fundraiser. A woman named Mary Cone, who claimed to be the president of this
idiotic organization, accused Karina of defaulting on her obligations.

  There were more—articles in neighborhood flyers, posts to discussion boards, but they were all in the same vein. Karina was a sneaky, unscrupulous bitch who would just as soon rip you off as look at you.

  Reminded me a lot of my ex-wife.

  But had she expanded her repertoire to include murder? I found a picture taken at an event called “Shooting for a Cure,” a breast-cancer fundraiser held at a private gun club in Manhattan, which showed Karina in plastic glasses and protective ear muffs, aiming a handgun at a target. So she could shoot.

  Was that Chris McCutcheon behind her, steadying her hand? It was impossible to tell for sure, but he was the right height and it could have been him.

  The photo implied that both Chris and Karina knew how to shoot, and I knew both had access to Chris’s black SUV. Karina might have been jealous over Caroline’s friendship with Chris. Based on what Karina said of his youth, and his criminal record, Chris might be some kind of psychopath. But I had nothing more than that. I knew what a defense attorney would claim on LA Law or Boston Legal—circumstantial evidence. Rick would need a lot more to arrest either one of them.

  I still had some time before I had to go up to Eastern for my mystery fiction class, so I loaded Rochester into the Beemer and drove up to The Chocolate Ear. As usual, Gail had a couple of biscuits for Rochester, and it was warm enough that the two of us could sit out at one of her curbside tables to enjoy our respective treats.

  I was reading an essay that analyzed the dialogue in Rita Mae Brown’s talking cat mysteries when Rick Stemper pulled up in front of the café in his white pickup. He nodded hello, then came out a few minutes later and sat with me. Rochester was all over him. “Hey, boy, down,” he said. “I don’t have any treats.”