The Surrogate Thief

by Archer Mayor

  Gunther finally extracted a copy of the medical examiner’s report done on Pete Shea in Massachusetts, and read aloud, “Trauma was apparently inflicted with an approximately seven-inch-long, single-edged blade, administered in a single thrust, completely transecting the descending aorta at the T-six level.”

  He placed the report carefully down before him. “How old was the victim in Tunbridge?”

  Sam felt a tingling at the back of her neck. “Mid-fifties, I think.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You up for a drive in the country?”

  The Tunbridge Fair ran for four days, the most heavily attended being Saturday, which was, naturally, when Joe and Sam headed its way. Joe poked along the narrow two-lane road off of Interstate 89 in a Boston-style traffic jam, enjoying the late summer weather rather than using his lights and siren to save time. Despite the surge of adrenaline that he’d experienced hearing the method of this woman’s death, Joe had been around long enough to distinguish between a real emergency and his own excitement.

  Sammie Martens, true to her nature, was disposed altogether differently. Sitting unhappily in the passenger seat, she stared glumly out the window, occasionally cursing under her breath at the drivers ahead.

  When they finally did draw abreast of the uppermost fair-grounds entrance, however—blocked by sawhorses—Joe did pull out his badge to demand entry. The young man at the gate, overwhelmed by the number and variety of police vehicles already allowed through, barely gave the badge a glance.

  Joe parked on a grassy strip behind a string of cruisers, a mobile command truck, and the crime lab van, and walked down toward the low-slung cow barns to the right, casting an eye over the swarm of people roaming the floodplain below him.

  “I can’t believe they’re still running this thing,” Sam commented.

  “Better that than send everyone away,” Joe said. “At least this way, some witness may still be around to be interviewed.” He pointed ahead. “There they are.”

  He led the way to the area near the footbridge, by now cordoned off with yellow tape. A young state trooper approached them as they neared.

  “Agents Gunther and Martens,” Joe told him. “VBI. Is Paul Spraiger here?”

  The trooper studied their credentials, more out of curiosity than protocol, Joe thought. Word was out by now, especially among younger officers, that to join the VBI was to reach a law enforcement pinnacle. This may not have been the view of its many sister agencies, but Joe got a kick out of it nevertheless. Getting this far had not been easy.

  Returning their badges, the man lifted the tape so they could pass under it, and pointed upstream along the bank. There they could just see a small grouping of men in plainclothes.

  “Hey, Paul,” Joe called out as they came within earshot.

  The group opened up; handshakes were exchanged. Not surprisingly in a state so thinly populated by police officers, those within the even smaller tribe of investigators all knew one another well.

  Paul Spraiger, a scholarly man fluent in French, who’d once teamed with Joe on a case in Sherbrooke, Canada, filled them both in.

  He pointed to a small disturbance in the mud by the water’s edge. “Looks like this is where she was knifed, and probably died, given the wound. Not sure if she was then pushed or just rolled into the river, but she ended up hung up among the bridge pilings.”

  “So we heard,” Joe said. “You have a name yet?”

  “Hannah Shriver,” intoned the lead VSP detective, a lieutenant named Nick Letourneau with whom Joe had also worked before. “D.O.B. 5/16/49. Lived in Townshend.”

  Joe glanced at him, wondering if his having answered for Spraiger meant his nose was officially out of joint. The address he’d mentioned, however, was of special interest. “Just outside Brattleboro. For how long?”

  Letourneau gave him a blank look. “I don’t know. Why?”

  “I’m working an old open case, and someone directly related to it just got knifed the same way in Massachusetts. I’m thinking there might be a connection.”

  Letourneau’s response caught him pleasantly off guard. “Well, that probably makes this one yours, too.”

  Joe stammered slightly in answering. “Oh. No. That wasn’t what I meant. We’re not horning in here . . .”

  “I know,” he replied with a small smile. “Paul’s made that crystal clear. But we’ve been kicking this around since dawn, and I’ve got a gut feeling it’s going to cost a fortune in overtime. What with all the bitching upstairs about money, my ass’ll be grass if I turn down free help. So I’d just as soon hand the whole thing over. Happy to assist,” he added, almost as an afterthought, “within reason.”

  Joe smiled in appreciation. “Okay. Well, we still don’t like hogging the trough, so I’ll take you up on that—within reason—and we’ll still make you look good at the end.”

  “Assuming it works out,” suggested Letourneau meaningfully.

  Gunther laughed. Too much, he thought. “Gotcha. We end up with zero, we take the heat, despite VSP’s best efforts to make us look good.”

  The implied irony of the last comment had no effect on his counterpart. “Great,” he said. “It’s a deal.”

  Next to Joe, Sam let out an impatient sigh and walked off toward the bridge, clearly pissed off.

  Joe, on the other hand, was genuinely happy. This was one case he definitely wanted to control. He didn’t give a damn who collected the credit later—or the blame. And he had to admire Letourneau’s pragmatism.

  “How’d you find out who she was?” he asked, moving on.

  This time, Paul was allowed to answer. “Her car. At daybreak, it was all by itself in the lot across the river.” He pointed off into the distance, and Joe could see a hole in the sea of cars on the opposite slope, ringed by more yellow tape and filled by a single vehicle guarded by another trooper.

  “We ran the plate, had a photo ID e-mailed to the command vehicle, and matched it to her. Then we broke in. Didn’t find anything of interest, but with your old case, maybe you’ll think different.”

  “I’ll take a look later,” Joe told him. “What else?”

  “We’ve tried figuring out when she got here yesterday and who she might’ve met with. Her photo’s being circulated all over the fair right now, mostly among the vendors and staff. So far, no luck beyond a fried-dough guy who says he noticed someone like her around the bingo barn last night, but he couldn’t be sure, since the woman he saw had a cowboy hat. He thought the shirt matched, though—bright red.”

  “The Ferris wheel operator remembers a cowboy hat, too,” Letourneau added, “but he couldn’t swear to the shirt or even to it being a woman. He just focused on the hat because he was afraid it might blow off and he’d get the blame. Said it had happened before.”

  “You ask lost-and-found for the hat?” Gunther asked.

  In the ensuing awkward silence, both men revealed not having thought of that. “I’ll check it out,” Paul said softly.

  “What about her family or friends?” Joe continued. “Any luck there?”

  Letourneau was clearly happier with that. “We’ve got people chasing it down. So far, just a mother near Brattleboro, in a nursing home. Last I heard, no one had talked to her.”

  “And friends?”

  “I had someone check her place in Townshend. Looks like she lived alone, kind of in the sticks. A rental house on some out-of-stater’s property. Looks like a custodial deal, maybe, where she got a discount for keeping an eye out in general. We’ve asked the Connecticut State Police to contact the owners and have them call us.”

  Joe nodded. It certainly looked like the basics were being covered. “Did you get anything out of her house? Bank records, letters, a diary?”

  Letourneau pursed his lips before answering. “Not enough manpower. I just have a trooper sitting on it till we can get an investigator there.”

  Gunther immediately thought of Kunkle, who, despite his impatient personality, had a paradoxical affinity for
painstaking house searches. “I’ll get someone up there.”

  He glanced around. “I saw the crime lab van. Have they figured out how it happened?”

  “They have a theory,” Paul Spraiger confirmed. “Not much to go on, though, what with thousands of people walking all over the place. Because of where she ended up, they think she may have been corralled out here. At night it’s pretty dark, even this close to the bridge. Since she was parked on the other side, it’s possible she was heading back to her car when she was cut off.”

  The radio on Letourneau’s belt chattered briefly. He pulled it out and exchanged a few words, finally replacing it and telling them, “They found a couple of more witnesses who maybe saw her. They’re at the command post.”

  The three of them picked up Sam on the way back to the VSP’s mobile office. Standing outside it, looking slightly nervous, were two men, one dressed in a fair official’s dark blue vest.

  A uniformed officer made the introductions to his boss, ignoring the rest of them. “Hi, Lieutenant, this is Rick Manelli. Operates a bow-and-arrow booth near the National Guard display inside the oval. And this is Fran Dupont, who sort of backs up security.”

  “I’m a roamer,” Dupont clarified, shaking hands all around. “We do a bit of everything, wherever we’re needed.”

  Gunther started with him. “And you saw something we might be interested in?”

  Dupont didn’t look that confident. “Maybe. It didn’t have anything to do with the lady you’re looking for, though. I don’t know about her.”

  “That’s okay. What did you see?”

  “Four guys. They were jumping the fence separating the track from the midway area, between the bingo hall and the grandstand.”

  “That’s unusual?”

  Dupont shrugged. “No. Happens all the time. Sometimes even when the races are on. Back in the seventies, some woman, high on pot, just walked right out there to wave at the guy in the starting truck. He faces backwards, see, so he can know when all the horses are lined up, and then he operates the fence on the back of the truck and swings it in so they can really open up. It’s really kind of neat to watch. Anyhow, this woman just walked out . . .”

  Joe had silently placed his hand on the man’s forearm, stopping him cold.

  “Sorry,” Dupont resumed. “Anyhow, they weren’t like that—they were serious. Plus, it’s not like it’s a good shortcut or anything. Takes some effort to climb, you know?”

  “What do you think they were doing?”

  Dupont finally got to the point. “Chasing someone. I could tell. It was real obvious. They were pretty mad and pushing each other to climb the fence faster. I yelled at them but they just ignored me. It didn’t really matter ’cause nothing was going on and they moved off fast. Ran, in fact.”

  “Did you see who they were chasing?”

  “No, sir, I didn’t.”

  “I did, maybe,” Rick Manelli spoke up, sounding left out.

  Joe ignored him temporarily by asking Dupont, “Can you describe the men?”

  That seemed to stump him. “Describe them? You mean, what they looked like?”

  “Sure. You could start there.”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Regular.”

  “Any of them have a beard or no hair at all or anything distinctive?” Letourneau asked.

  Dupont looked confused. “Like a bald man? I don’t think any of them was bald. ’Course, one of them mighta had a hat.”

  “What kind of hat?”

  “I don’t know. What kind are you looking for?”

  “What did you see, Mr. Manelli?” Joe asked, turning to the other man.

  Manelli’s eyes were bright with eagerness. “That woman you been asking about. I saw her run by. She looked bad. Scared. And she threw her hat away. That’s why I remember her. I couldn’t figure that out. Nice cowboy hat.”

  “You have it?”

  “Nope. Gave it to lost-and-found.”

  There was a telling stillness among several of the police officers.

  “Did you see anyone following her?” Joe asked quickly.

  But Manelli was very clear about that. “Nope. I looked, too, because that happens sometimes—women being hassled. I try to look out for stuff like that. Don’t like it.”

  “But there was no one?”

  “Nobody I saw, like I said. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. See, after she ditched the hat, the woman stopped running and tried to walk normal, like she was pretending. So maybe the guy did the same and I didn’t notice.”

  “Anything else?” Joe asked both of them.

  They looked at each other and remained silent. Joe thanked them, and Letourneau made sure they could be located later if needed.

  The four of them were watching the two men walk away when Joe suddenly asked, “People take a lot of pictures when they’re here?”

  “I guess,” Letourneau replied.

  “It may be a stretch, but I wonder if we couldn’t get some of the folks who were hanging around here last night to help us out. Circulate it in the papers and on the radio that we’re looking for any and all photographs taken at the fair on Friday night that have any crowd shots whatsoever, even if they’re in the background.”

  Nick Letourneau grunted softly. “Good idea. I can get that going.”

  Joe eyed the command post. “And if it’s all right, I’d like to make a phone call and get somebody started on Hannah Shriver’s house. If we’re lucky, she may still have something to tell us.”

  Chapter 16

  It was a full day before Joe got to Townshend and Hannah Shriver’s small house in the woods above the village. Willy had recruited Lester Spinney to help him out and, in his own manic fashion, had been driving them both relentlessly since getting the call to check the place out.

  By the time Joe arrived, he was greeted by Lester at the front door of the mudroom and given the look of a man fresh from the desert eyeing his first glass of water.

  Joe smiled at his expression. “Been having fun?”

  Usually ready with an upbeat response, Lester could only say, out of Willy’s earshot, “Been having fun seeing a man prove he’s a total head case, is more like it. Can I go home and catch some shut-eye?”

  Joe let him go and wandered deeper into the house. It was a log cabin, old and bruised, probably uncomfortably cool in the winter, with a rusty woodstove at its heart, a sleeping loft over half the diminutive living room, and a bathroom and kitchen to one side. In many ways, not much different from what a similar home would have looked like two hundred years earlier, apart from the plumbing and electricity.

  Joe glanced up toward the loft at the sound of someone moving around out of sight.

  “That you, Willy?”

  “Jesus, save me,” came the muffled sarcastic reply. “It must be Sherlock Holmes.”

  Gunther sighed and climbed the sturdy ladder. As his head cleared the level of the floor, he saw Willy on his hands and knees, half buried in a three-foot-tall storage closet cut into the knee wall abutting the sharply angled roofline. He resisted further comment and merely finished his ascent, settling on the edge of a mattress lying directly on the floor.

  Waiting for Willy to finish up, he looked around, getting his bearings, much as he had in Pete Shea’s room in Gloucester.

  It was a threadbare home, filled only with the necessities, most of those either secondhand or with so many miles on them, he guessed they’d come through several generations. But it wasn’t a hovel. The sofa below him was tastefully covered with shawls and blankets to hide the rips and worn spots. Odd pieces of discarded junk—a rusty saw, a few old bottles, some plates—hung on the wooden walls as decoration. The few pictures of sunsets and tropical islands alongside them, clearly cut from calendars or magazines, were carefully framed and mounted behind glass, and there were plants and dried flowers on the windowsills and on the rickety table that Gunther guessed had been used as a place to dine. There was no TV set, only a radio by the sofa.<
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  Joe had been in some isolated houses before, running the gamut from trailers in need of a bulldozer to rustic mansions of millionaires wanting to “get away from it all.” More often, however, they’d been places like this one: modest, well-cared-for homes, lived in by people whose indepen-dence meant more to them than the ease of modern conveniences.

  There was something odd about this one, however. The more Gunther studied it, the more it looked almost imperceptibly disheveled, as if everything, from the wall hangings to the pillows, to the one rug in the center of the floor, had been recently moved and not quite replaced to its original position. It was as subtle an anomaly as someone wearing a hairpiece. Willy and Lester had been both thorough and tidy.

  “Thinking of buying it?” Willy asked, having emerged from the closet, flashlight in hand.

  “You could do worse.”

  “Place is a substitute rubber room—be like putting a rat in a box and watching it go bananas.”

  “That what she did?”

  Kunkle made an equivocal expression. “From what I’ve dug up so far, I don’t think she was certifiable, but I figure she had a few fuses blown, living in a dump like this. It’s a half mile from the closest neighbor, for Christ sake.”

  “Lot of people live that way in this state.”

  Kunkle snorted. “I rest my case. Fuckin’ crackers.”

  Despite the years he’d lived up here, Willy was a born New Yorker. Joe moved on.

  “You find anything interesting?”

  Kunkle sat in a rocking chair in the corner, the only other piece of furniture in the loft besides a small chest of drawers and the mattress on the floor. His response was unusually philosophical. “Interesting in terms of her death? Not off the bat. Interesting in terms of a life lived on the margins, making ends meet, and maintaining some dignity at the same time? Yeah.”