Whom Dog Hath Joined (25 page)

I had very little left from my life in California, and I’d
grown accustomed to living with lots of open space, shelves empty except for
books and a few knickknacks. Would all of Lili’s stuff start to crowd me out?

Rochester nosed my hand, and I reached out to stroke his
fur. As long as he and I were together, I could handle anything the world threw
my way. Lili started talking about curtains and slipcovers and I flashed on the
way Mary had taken over the decoration of our house in California.

Lili certainly wasn’t Mary, though, and I had to find a way
to get my ex-wife out of my head, or else I was going to doom my relationship
with Lili. But how could I do that? In the past I’d always buried myself in
computer work whenever something went wrong in my personal life. And see where
that had gotten me.

30 – Scrawl

Lili had some papers to grade, so she went into her office
and left me on the sofa. To keep from thinking too much about how my life was
going to change once Lili moved in, I went back to the case, but there were no
new clues I could follow. We had interviewed everyone still alive who’d worked
with Brannigan. Despite his creepy behavior, there was no evidence against Eben
Hosford unless Rick could match fingerprints from his soap or candles to the
crime scene. Vera Lee Isay could have been involved somehow, but she was too
busy protecting Brannigan’s reputation to give us anything incriminating. And
Peter Breaux had disappeared into Canada, never to be heard from again.

Rochester clambered up on to the sofa and nestled against
me. He had a piece of paper in his teeth with the Eastern College letterhead,
and I pulled it from him gently. “What are you, the postal person now?” I asked.
It was a departmental memo from Dr. Peter Bobeaux announcing new procedures for
petty cash disbursement. I was about to crumple it up when I looked at his
scrawled signature.

It looked as if he’d written “Breaux” instead of “Bobeaux.”

I remembered the problem Lili had had with her student, Jean
or Joan Bean. Could the same thing have happened to Peter Breaux – a mix-up
with the spelling of his last name? My brain started running. Lili’s new boss
was about the right age to have been a draft evader in the 1960s. He’d
graduated from college in Canada. I’d assumed he was French Canadian, with a
name like Bobeaux. But what if he wasn’t?

I jumped up and went into Lili’s office. She was sitting at
the desk, logged into our online learning system. “I hate to interrupt you, but
can I use your computer?” I asked.

“Sure.” She pushed back her chair and stood up, and I slid
into her place. “What do you need?”

“Give me a minute. I have so many ideas mashing around in my
head that I can barely type.”

With Lili looking over my shoulder, I started at the Eastern
website, where I found that Peter Bobeaux had received his bachelor’s in French
literature from Carleton University in Ottawa in 1973 – perfect timing for a
high school senior fleeing the draft in 1969. I pointed that out to Lili.

“Oh, my,” she said, and I could tell she was following my
thoughts.

Bobeaux had gone on to receive his master’s and doctoral
degrees from the same university. From there he had taught at a number of
colleges and universities, eventually landing in the United Arab Emirates,
where he had been before coming to Eastern.

“What made you think of the connection?” Lili asked.

“Joan Bean, Jean Bean,” I said. “Peter Breaux, Peter
Bobeaux.” I showed her the memo, and Bobeaux’s scrawled signature.

“Why would he come back here, if he killed someone?” Lili
asked.

“I don’t know. But murder isn’t a logical act, so I don’t
think you can apply logic to anything that happens afterward.” I looked at her.
“He has a temper, doesn’t he? I saw him get angry in the committee meeting.
Imagine somebody with his personality, a teenager with less impulse control,
scared and nervous?”

“So what do you do now?”

My fingers itched to do some hacking. I wanted to check
Peter Bobeaux’s student records at Carleton and see if there was any indication
of where he’d gone to high school. Maybe I could match that to where our
missing draft dodger, Peter Breaux, had gone. I could make an excuse to Lili,
head back to my laptop and its hacking tools. What the heck, right? Nobody had
to know. I could be in and out of Carleton’s database before anyone knew I was
there.

Rochester suddenly sat up and placed his front paws on my
thigh, sniffing at me, and that was enough to snap me back to reality. Nope.
That was something I could get Rick to discover through official channels.

“I’m going to do a bit more searching on Peter Bobeaux,” I
said. “Nothing illegal. I want to see if I can find out where he came from
before he started school at Carleton.”

“I’ll be in the bedroom reading. Come in whenever you’re
finished.” She kissed my cheek and walked out of the room, and I let my fingers
do the walking through the Internet.  Everything I found tied back to that
student at Carleton University, but I couldn’t discover any records from before
that time that matched him.

I called Rick again. “I have an idea I want to run past you.”
I explained about the way Peter Bobeaux scrawled his name, and the confusion
over Jean or Joan Bean, and what I’d discovered about Bobeaux’s background.

“You think he could be the same guy?” Rick asked. “But why
would he come back to Stewart’s Crossing?”

“He didn’t,” I said. “From what I understand, he needed a
job, stat, and saw the one available at Eastern. He may not even have known
that Leighville and Stewart’s Crossing were in the same area. Or he may be some
kind of psychopath who wants to revisit the scene of the crime. You pick.”

“Spell the new name,” he said, and I did. “Tomorrow morning,
I’ll call this university and check his credentials.”

“More than that. See if you can find out where he grew up,
where he went to high school, that kind of thing. If you come up blank, then we
know we’re on to something. Or else you find something that eliminates him.”

After I hung up, I went into the bedroom, and Rochester and
I spent the night at Lili’s, where she and I further cemented our affection. When
we woke up I said, “I hope you’re going to bring these pillows with you, because
they’re a lot more comfortable than the ones I have.”

“Always the romantic,” she said, and she turned on her side
to face me. “Think Rochester can wait a little while for his morning walk?”

I leaned over and kissed her. “My dog is very attuned to my
moods. “He’ll wait.”

31 – Information Technology

By the time I got to Friar Lake on Wednesday morning, Joey’s
crew had cleared away the debris from the fire. A crisp breeze that rolled down
from the higher mountains pushed away all but a lingering scent and moved puffy
white clouds restlessly above us. I noticed that more of the trees were losing
their leaves as autumn crept up.

My email box was full – a request for an update from
President Babson, order confirmations for finishes that Mark and I had agreed
on, and a raft of the usual academic business. The Faculty Senate wanted input
on a resolution to ban student cell phones and the smoking of electronic
cigarettes in classes. New parking decals were available for faculty and staff.

The last message was an invitation from Dr. Bobeaux, who had
scheduled another meeting of the IT committee for that afternoon. I grumbled,
because I preferred more notice for trips on campus. But a meeting organizer
could view faculty schedules through the college intranet, and anybody could
schedule an appointment with you as long as it didn’t conflict with teaching. I’d
have to drop Rochester at Lili’s office, because I couldn’t take him to the
meeting and I wouldn’t have time to drive him back home.

Around noon, Rick called. “You remember Hank Quillian from
the FBI, don’t you?”

I had met Agent Quillian a couple of months before, when my
snooping into a murder turned up a website selling stolen goods.
He was in his early thirties, with the kind of
weathered, wary look I’d come to associate with ex-military guys. “Sure,” I
said.

“I got him to expedite a
request for me.
Peter Bobeaux got his GED right before enrolling at
Carleton, and they have no records that would indicate where he came from or
where he went to high school.”

“I guess they were more lax back then,” I said. “I can’t
imagine a kid getting into Eastern today without a pile of recommendations,
authenticated transcripts, and a laundry list of high school activities.”

“It doesn’t mean that he’s the same guy as that kid who left
the Meeting House in 1969, but it doesn’t eliminate him from suspicion.”

“What are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Keep checking. Hank’s going to cross-reference immigration
records for me and see when Peter Bobeaux entered and left Canada, but that’s
going to take more time.”

I thought about telling Rick that I’d be seeing Dr. Bobo
that afternoon, but I knew he’d caution me not to say anything. I figured I’d
think on my feet, and see if any opportunity came up to ask Bobeaux about his
background. I wondered if I could drop in a mention of my own application to
Eastern, all the hoops I’d had to jump through back then. Maybe casually ask
him if that had been the case when he applied to Carleton for his undergraduate
degree.

I remembered Lucas Harriman’s request, and I did some quick
research on academic format for research papers. Every reputable site indicated
that what Lucas was asking for was standard. I printed pages from a site I’d
often used myself to bring to the committee.

I left Friar Lake at three and parked behind Harrow Hall. Lili’s
office door was locked, but I got her secretary, Matilda, to open it for me.
“Don’t destroy anything, Rochester,” I said. Lili kept a couple of his toys
there, and I retrieved a green squeaky ball and a blue-and-white rope to keep
him occupied.

I was the last one to arrive at the meeting. I noticed that
the collar of Peter Bobeaux’s navy pinstriped suit jacket was a bit threadbare,
but his white shirt was starched and gleaming, his red power tie spangled with
tiny blue stars.

He had a whole agenda prepared for us. “Let’s start with problems
with the learning management system,” he said. “I had lunch yesterday with Dr.
Marshall, the AVP for Educational Technology, at the Faculty Club. He’s very
concerned about the way the system interacts with our college computers.”

“I’ve complained to him myself several times,” Jackie Conrad
said tartly, “though not over lunch at the Faculty Club.” The Club was a
separate dining room at the rear of the college’s new Howard M. Burgers Dining Commons,
with separate entry and what was rumored to be higher-quality food than was
served to the hoi polloi.

She crossed her arms over her white lab jacket. “My students
are not able to access their exams, even though I know that I’ve set the dates
and times correctly. And I’m tired of tech support simply telling me to go back
and check my work.”

“I agree,” Marie-Carmel Etienne said. She was chic as ever
in her tailored black suit and white cowl-neck blouse. She could have been a
runway model as easily as a professor of computer science. “I’ve called a dozen
times with problems and all I get is a run-around. My students are having
problems uploading PowerPoint presentations because they’re too large for the
system to handle. That is ridiculous considering how much server capacity we
have and what fast upload speeds we have.”

None of the problems with the learning management system
were anything we as a committee could handle, which was annoying. We went on to
the monitors in teaching podiums, which were tilted too far down to be easily
visible, then updates to Flash and Java which professors were prevented from
installing. As we went through items, I couldn’t manage to work in a reference
to student applications or credentials, which was frustrating.

The last item on the agenda was identity theft. “I’ve been
hearing of several cases recently where student passwords have been
compromised,” Bobeaux said. He looked down at the sheet in front of him. “Rachel
Ritchie, a junior, had her entire schedule dropped. She said that an
ex-boyfriend had access to her password and had done it to get back at her. Nelson
Tarrazu was accused of sending suggestive messages through the college instant
message system, and he alleges that he accidentally stayed logged on at a
computer classroom and someone else sent those messages under his name.”

“Those are user errors,” moon-faced Oscar said. “There’s no
way we can prevent that kind of abuse.” I had the feeling he’d worked too long
for his predecessor, Verri M. Parshall, the Preventer of Information
Technology. Then again, I’d worked in IT myself for years, and I knew that the
habit of blaming users for tech problems ran deep.

“We could ask for double-secure logins,” Marie-Carmel said.
“You’d have to know a student password and some other piece of data.”

Oscar shook his head. “If you know something as personal as
someone’s password, then you probably know any other piece of data we could
use. And an outsider hacking into our system and stealing passwords could steal
the confirmation data as well.”

“Is someone breaking into our computers?” Bobeaux asked. “I
haven’t heard anything about that.”

“There have been instances at other schools and colleges of
hackers changing grades,” I said. I’d never done anything like that myself, but
I’d read enough about it on hacker bulletin boards.

“Your identity is the most important thing you have online,”
Oscar said. “It’s your responsibility to make sure you protect it. Not ours.”

I saw my opportunity, and I jumped on it. “But how do we
know who any student is, in the end?” I asked. “I’ve read about people who
enter college or graduate school with false credentials, under assumed names.
Every other week it seems you read about someone who’s lost a job because he
faked his graduation records.”