Dog Bless You by Neil S. Plakcy Page B

I
rationalized my activities; after all, I was trying to solve a crime, to bring
justice to the world. In another part I made excuses – there was some chemical
lacking in my brain that made me crave this kind of stimulation. It wasn’t my
fault at all – just a biological defect. I shut down any other options before
they could form.
    I opened the spreadsheet file that had been created
through the hack into the power company. At first, I was baffled – how was I
going to figure anything out? Then I noticed a button that laid the data over a
map, with color-coded results.
    The hotter the red color, the more power that was being
consumed in that area. I zeroed in on a property that backed on Tohickon Creek.
The map view showed a single suburban house there, but the power use was bright
red. I did some cross-referencing and discovered that the consumption still
wasn’t high enough to flag the property.
    I was still suspicious, so I went to Google maps and
zoomed in on the property. A large boathouse stood on stilts over the creek
behind the house. Thermal imaging for the area showed that boathouse was bright
red, too—meaning there was a lot of heat being generated there.
    I was pretty sure there were generators back there, and
they were being used to mask some of the power consumption, keeping it below
the electric company’s radar. Maybe the farmers had even figured out how to
harness some of the water from the creek.
    It was getting late, and Rochester was antsy for his
bedtime walk. I already had Tony Rinaldi’s official email address, but I
thought it was better to camouflage my tracks whenever I could. So I checked
the website for the Leighville Police Department and found an address ordinary
citizens could use to ask questions or report crimes.
     I logged into an email account I had set up years
before with an anonymous remailer. I knew that the remailer computer would
strip away the (fake) name and address I had used to set up the account, and
replace it with a dummy address. If Tony, or whoever got the message at the
Leighville PD, wanted to reply to me, he could, because the remailer would
forward the message to me. But no one could connect the email to me.
     I wrote a note pretending to be a neighbor of the
property, and bundled up the power consumption data for the house by the creek.
I attached it to the message. Just in case the police computer wouldn’t allow
the attachment of files to emails, I summarized the information in a couple of
sentences. Then I clicked “send.”
    By then, I was exhausted. The initial adrenaline surge
had run through my body, and the mental focus I had put into hacking, and then
reading the power consumption results, had wiped me out. It was too late to check
in with Lili, and I didn’t have the energy to speak to her either.
    I forced myself to stand up, stretch, and put away
Caroline’s laptop. Then I went downstairs for Rochester’s leash. He followed me
eagerly, scampering around as I tried to hook him up. I gave up and collapsed
on the couch, which convinced him to calm down enough to let me clip on the
leash. He dragged me out the front door and down the street.
    The skies were overcast and there was no one else out
on Sarajevo Court that late. I let Rochester drag me along until he was ready
to go home, and once back in the house, I stripped down and fell into bed. I
was asleep almost immediately.
    The next morning Rochester hopped up onto the bottom of
my bed and sat on his haunches, staring at me as I roused. When he saw that I
was awake, he pounced. I ducked my head beneath the comforter but he wasn’t
fooled. He sniffed around, pawing at me, until I emerged. Then he lavished me
with puppy kisses. It was our regular morning love fest, and I wrestled him
down onto his back so I could rub his belly.
    He flailed his legs around like a dying cockroach and
turned his head to face me. I marveled once again how his nose was like a
baboon’s, black and moist, and the