Dog Bless You (20 page)

“Suppose he met someone at the shopping center,” I
said. “It’s set back from Main Street so Owen could hang around there, say if
he was waiting for someone to pick him up.”

“Why ditch the bike?”

“Maybe he didn’t ditch it – maybe he just hid it there
because he couldn’t take it with him, wherever he was going. Or somebody killed
him over the relic, and ditched the bike.”

“Both are hypotheses,” Rick said. “So far no evidence
to support either one.”

“He must have had a cell phone,” I said. “Have you
checked it?”

“Right now all I have him on is a suspected robbery
from Mark’s place. It’s not enough to convince a judge to give me an order for
Owen’s phone records.”

He looked at me. “And don’t you go trying to hack into
those records either,” he said. “Because you know that’s not only illegal, but
can violate your parole.”

“You don’t have to hack for that,” I said. “All you
need is the carrier name, the phone number, and a good password-breaking
program.”

“Which I’m sure you don’t have,” Rick said. “Right?”

“I have no intention of trying to hack his phone
records,” I said.

I didn’t even have to cross my fingers behind my back.
I had a better idea.

On my way home from Rick’s, I called Mark Figueroa.
“Did Owen have an email account?” I asked.

“Yeah, we sent some messages back and forth. Why?”

“Just curious. Can you give me the address?”

“I already tried emailing him. He’s not answering. But
feel free to try yourself, if you want. It’s owenvet at mymail.com.”

“Thanks, Mark. Do you know if Owen had any friends in
the area—guys with cars who might have given him a ride after he left your
place?” I told him about finding a bike that looked like Owen’s behind the
shopping center.

“No, he didn’t have many friends.  Just Striker, as far
as I knew.”

Rochester squirmed around on the car seat next to me
and rested his head on my lap as I drove. I stroked his golden fur. “You were a
bad boy today, Rochester. Don’t you ever try and run away from me again, all
right?”

He didn’t answer, but he did drool on my leg.

When I got home, I climbed up to the attic and
retrieved Caroline’s laptop. While it warmed up, I searched through my software
for a good random password generator tool. I’d been able to hack into the
MyMail servers a few months before, and was pretty confident I could do it
again, but I didn’t know Owen well enough to begin to guess what his password
might be.

I plugged a bunch of data into the generator before I
set it loose. His full name, his parents’ address on Sarajevo Court and the one
in Crossing Estates where he’d grown up. Then I threw in anything else I could
think of – Afghanistan, the bases where he’d been stationed, and so on.

The MyMail servers had been upgraded since the last
time I visited, and they had installed a program that kicked you out after too
many password attempts. After the first two times the connection was cut, I got
up and started making myself some cappuccino. I wasn’t going to let any crappy
email system get the better of me.

I had to keep breaking in over and over again and went
through a big mug of café mocha. Then I started to worry that they might be
tracking my IP address, and that any minute I’d be getting a knock on my door
from Santiago Santos. I wasn’t sure if I was sweating because of the hot coffee
or the worry, but I pushed forward.

Finally the password generator scored a hit on a random
set of numbers and letters. “Hello, Owen,” I said, rubbing my hands together. At
least he was smart enough not to use something common, I thought. But I was
smarter.

Yeah, cockier, too. I knew that. I forced myself to
slow down, to take every precaution I could, even though I knew that the longer
I stayed online and illegally connected to Owen’s account, the greater the
chance that I could get caught.

I downloaded everything from Owen’s account to a zipped
file on Caroline’s laptop, then I broke the connection to the MyMail server.

Owen Keely wasn’t a big emailer, just as he didn’t talk
much. There were only a couple of dozen messages there—a few from Mark
Figueroa, some junk, and then a couple from another MyMail address—Striker23.

That had to be the friend of Owen’s that I’d met. I
opened the first of the messages, but all I read was a date and a time a couple
of months before. Not very helpful.

The next few messages were similar. It looked like Owen
and Striker had been meeting every couple of weeks, beginning in early March. Always
on a Saturday morning.

I sat back in my chair. That made sense; if they were
meeting to go searching for something at Friar Lake, morning was a good time to
start. Perhaps Striker had a day job, and was only free on Saturdays.

There was only one email that had anything different.
It was a link to a website, and beneath it the letters PW, followed by a colon
and a combination of letters and numbers.

After I clicked the link, a window popped up asking me
for an ID and password. I had the password, but what was the user ID? I tried
Striker, and got kicked out.

It was already after eleven, and I was tired and
cranky, and Rochester was nuzzling my knee, ready for his late-night walk. I
gave up and shut down the laptop. I climbed back up the stepladder and returned
it to its place in the attic. I’d try that site again the next day, when I was
fresher.

I walked Rochester down past the Keelys', just on the
off chance that I’d see something—but the house was shut up and dark.

In the morning, the story was still the same—no
activity. That was strange, because in the past there had always been someone
outside—Phil, trimming trees or weeding the flower bed; Marie, on her tricycle;
or Owen, sitting on the grass smoking. Usually the garage door was open, and
often I could hear music floating out of the house.

On our way back, I passed Bob Freehl, dragging his
garbage can out to the curb. He loved Rochester, and we stopped so he could pet
the dog and tell him what a good boy he was. “Haven’t seen the Keelys lately,”
I said.

“On vacation,” Bob said. “Took one of those
paddle-wheelers up the Mississippi. Don’t know where Owen is—he’s supposed to
be watching the house for them.” He shook his head. “Just between you and me,
there’s something not right about that boy.”

“He does strike me as odd,” I said.

“I think it’s the drugs,” Bob said. “Phil said they’ve
had a world of trouble with that boy. He got hooked on something over there in Afghanistan,
and he’s been through rehab a couple of times.”

He reached down and scratched under Rochester’s chin.
“No worry about having that kind of trouble with a dog, is there?” Bob said.
“Sometimes I wonder why any of us have kids at all.”

I knew that Bob had a couple of grown daughters, and at
least one of them was married with kids of her own. But I didn’t know what kind
of trouble they’d caused him and his wife.

As I drove upriver to Eastern, I wondered if all the
Keelys had been in on whatever Owen was up to. It was hard to imagine Phil, the
retired Marine, breaking into the chapel at Friar Lake. Or Marie crawling under
the altar in search of lost treasure. Maybe they’d gone off on this “vacation” just
to avoid the trouble. It did seem awfully convenient.

I dropped Rochester at my office and walked down the
hill into Leighville. The college was running short of administrative space, so
several departments, including human resources and the news bureau, had been
moved into a sixties-era building just off campus with a Wawa grocery on the
ground level.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor to the glass
door that read “News Bureau.” When I was an undergraduate, I had a work-study
job there for year, though back then it was housed in a long-gone building that
had been replaced by Harrow Hall.

As a college student, I was under the influence of
Ernest Hemingway, and I wanted to be a foreign correspondent like Papa,
traveling the world, romancing beautiful foreigners and narrowly escaping
danger. It was ironic that instead of becoming that guy, I’d fallen for a woman
who had done just that.

To get my press credentials going, I’d signed up for
the college newspaper and taken the job with the News Bureau. As a cub reporter
on the
Eastern Daily Sun
, I wrote brief articles about the most mundane
events on campus—rehearsals for a student musical, the arrival of new recycling
bins, and so on. I was painfully shy back then, and I hated having to go up to
people, introduce myself, and ask for information.

The job at the News Bureau was similarly unsatisfying.
Instead of writing press releases and attending college parties, I worked in
the file room, made photocopies and ran errands. My enthusiasm for journalism
waned quickly.

I opened the door to a large room with file cabinets
along one wall with half-glass walls at the back revealing two small offices. Ruta
was an olive-skinned girl with long brown hair with gold highlights, and if I
hadn’t already met her I’d have thought she was a work-study kid like I’d been.
She sat at a big desk in the center of the room. It was littered with magazines
and newspapers.

She was sitting sideways to me, typing at her computer,
her iPod headphones in her ears. It didn’t look like she’d heard me come in,
and I stood there for minute, uncertain what to do. Then I walked around in
front of her.

Still no response. I leaned down, and waved my hands in
front of her. She looked up, startled. “Oh, hi Steve,” she said, when she
pulled her headphones out. She motioned around the office. “Sorry for the mess,
but I’m the only one here right now. It’s been kind of crazy.”

“Really? When I was a work-study here there was a whole
staff.”

“Welcome to the world of downsizing. My boss, the
manager, quit three months ago and still hasn’t been replaced, and even though
I don’t have the experience for the job, I’m handling it and everything else
around here. But between you and me, if I don’t get a raise soon, I’m out of
here. I’m twenty-four years old and I should at least be making my age in
salary.”

I was surprised. I had been making nearly double that
when I was working on press relations for the fund-raising campaign, with a lot
less responsibility.

I sat down across from Ruta and went over the couple of
projects I had in the works. “I don’t think I’ll be too busy at Friar Lake for
a while, so I’m happy to help you out, if I can,” I said. “I could keep working
on those alumni profiles for you.”

“That would be terrific,” she said. “You think I could
convince you to write the press release for Friar Lake, too? I need something
to send out to the local papers, and I was hoping to get a feature together for
the alumni magazine.”

“I can do that,” I said. I explained that I was working
with Lili on the coffee table book about the history of the Abbey of Our Lady
of the Waters, and I could pull together something from that research.

“That would be terrific!” Her phone rang, and she
answered. I could tell from the conversation that it was going to be a long
one, so I motioned that I’d call her, and walked out.

I stopped at the Wawa and got a cup of coffee and a
doggy treat for Rochester. As I climbed back up the hill, I thought about the
circumstances that had kept me at Eastern. Lucas Roosevelt had been kind enough
to give me a couple of adjunct gigs when I had no other means of support. Then
Mike MacCormac had taken me under his wing and gotten me the full-time job.

None of that would have happened without the support of
President Babson, though. Though my felony conviction might not have come up
when I was hired as an adjunct, I was sure Babson had learned about it before I
was offered the full-time job with Mike’s office. Had he been looking out for
me all this time? Why? Just because I was an alumnus? Or had he seen something
worth saving in me?

I finished my coffee as I reached Fields Hall. I gave
Rochester his treat, then went over to Blair Hall for my second class with the
College Connection kids. I was pleased to see that when Ka’Tar filed in, he was
laughing and joking with the other kids.

I got them up and moving around, acting out the
messages they were going to send to the other characters from
The Hunger
Games
, and then had them take an online quiz about the book and the movie.
Then we talked about the proper structure of a paragraph, with a topic sentence
and supporting details, I had them each write a paragraph about their
experiences so far at Eastern.

I put a couple of the paragraphs up on the screen and
walked them through how a professor would approach reading and responding to
their writing. By the time our hour and a half was over, I felt that I’d given
them a pretty good introduction to college-level writing.

Once again, I accompanied them to lunch after class. On
our way to Burgers Commons, I walked next to Ka’Tar. “Are you having a good
time here?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah. Only thing I ain’t seen yet is that place
DeAndre talked about, the one with the monks.”

“Friar Lake?” I asked. He nodded.

“What did he tell you about it?”

“How pretty it was—the old church and the lake and the
woods and all. He’d never seen any place like it.”

“Did he ever tell you how he got out there?” I asked.
“It’s hard to get to without a car.”

“He knew this skinny white dude from the drop-in
center, guy by the name of Striker,” Tar said. “DeAndre used to take the train
down to some place in Jersey where Striker live, and they drive together.”

Striker? The same friend Owen had been talking to and
emailing? “His friend Owen there too?” I asked.

“Owen? The crazy dude from Afghanistan? DeAndre talked
about him sometimes. He was some kind of meth head.”

“I thought he was over all that,” I said.

“You don’t never get over something like that,” Ka’Tar
said. “DeAndre never did nothing more than smoke dope, and he told me to stay
clean, too. He said when that Owen dude was high he was scary.”

I could see that, I thought, as I held the door to Burgers
Commons open for Ka’Tar, and then a couple of his classmates. The couple of
times I’d seen him, he’d been pleasant enough, though I had always sensed some
kind of edge beneath his surface. I wondered if Owen had been high around Mark,
and Mark hadn’t noticed.