Read Online Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) by Neil S. Plakcy - Free Book Online Page B

spreadsheet he posted there, 95% of his loans were being paid off regularly; the remaining five percent had been written off due to serious illness or death of the recipient.
    I admired him, as I did all the other graduates I was profiling. When I was an Eastern senior on the verge of leaving Leighville, I was like a blind puppy newly weaned, with no real sense of the world or where I would fit in it. I had contributed nothing to the world and had no idea where my true talents were.
    What were they, anyway? Like Rochester, I had a nose for crime—only mine was usually on the wrong side of the law. I could follow the logic of code until I found a place where I could slip past a host computer’s defenses, where I could assume a user’s identity, access passwords or other forbidden information. I had never used that ability for malicious purposes, but I knew that I could.
    Fortunately, I hadn’t discovered that ability until I had the maturity to handle the knowledge. Perhaps my ex-wife and my parole officer might dispute that—but if I’d been a teenager in today’s environment, and figured out how to hack, I know I’d have gotten into much more trouble. I seriously doubt I’d have had the maturity or insight to have turned out like Faye Tallity or Boris Oxhoff.
    I finished the profile on Boris, then caught up on my email inbox. By then Rochester had given up on the squeaky ball and gone back to sleep. I retrieved the plastic ball, wiped the saliva off it, and put it back in my desk drawer.
    Around three o’clock I walked back over to Green Hall to talk to Dr. Jackie Conrad about cobra venom. The last time I took biology was in high school, so I could barely make sense of the posters outside her office.
    She was talking to a student about the way the blood pumped through the heart, so I waited out in the hall until she was finished. When the young woman left, I stuck my head in her door. “Dr. Conrad? Dr. Searcy suggested I talk to you. My name is Steve Levitan.”
    “Have a seat.” She motioned me to the chair across from her desk. Her office was littered with textbooks, piles of papers, and small furry hand puppets in strange shapes. She was fifty-something, with an open, friendly face, framed with blonde curls, and I hoped she wouldn’t close up when I asked her about a poison.
    “You look too old to be a student and too young to be a parent. What can I do for you?”
    “I work in the alumni relations office, but my question has nothing to do with the college.” I explained about Rita Gaines’ murder and the use of the cobra venom.
    “I met her,” Dr. Conrad said. “About a year ago. The science faculty did a meet and greet with the Board of Trustees. She was a dog breeder, wasn’t she? And if I can say it without speaking too ill of the dead, wasn’t she something of a bitch herself?”
    “You’ve got that. Any idea where somebody could get cobra venom? And how common it would be?”
    “Cobra venom.” She thought for a minute. “Of course, she was a dog breeder.”
    That connection made no sense to me, but it seemed to turn a light bulb on over Dr. Conrad’s head. She turned back to her computer and started typing. “I used to be a vet,” she said. “Long ago, when we were still treating woolly mammoths for broken legs and tooth decay. We used cobra venom for something... I just can’t remember what.”
    While she typed, I looked more closely at her furry hand puppets. They weren’t little teddy bears or pigs or even any animal I recognized. The closest to anything I knew was a fuzzy tan oval with brown tentacles—it looked like a mutant jellyfish.
    She kept typing, muttering to herself, opening and closing windows. “There it is!” she said in triumph. “Acral lick granuloma.”
    Once again I thanked my lucky stars I had never had an interest in science. “Excuse me?”
    She turned back toward me, and the breeze created by her chair moving rattled the bones of the plastic skeleton