The woman sprang to her feet at their entrance. “Hi,” she said cheerily, rounding the corner of the desk and ushering them in. “Welcome. I’m Dolores Oetjen. Glad to meet you.”
Sam almost felt sorry for having ignited so much enthusiasm. “Hi, Dolores,” she said, shaking hands. “Don’t get your hopes up. We’re cops, not buyers.”
Nice, Lester thought. Too much Willy time.
Dolores’s face fell. “Police? What happened?”
Les spoke up. “Absolutely nothing, Ms. Oetjen. We’re here for a huge favor, is all. Sorry to have alarmed you. Can we all sit down?”
Put to ease but still confused, Oetjen waved at the chairs facing her desk. “Sure,” she said. “How can I help?”
“We’re on sort of a hunting expedition,” Sam explained, fitting her tone to Lester’s. “Much of what we do is chase down leads, just like you see on TV, and one of those leads brought us here.”
Oetjen pointed to herself as she sat back down. “To me? What did I do?”
Les allowed for what he hoped was a comforting laugh. “Probably nothing, Dolores. But your phone number popped up on a list of others, and we wanted to ask you about that.”
“My number?” she parroted.
Sam allowed for a slight edge to creep into her voice. “Yeah, Dolores. Your number—on the phone of a guy we just put in jail.”
Oetjen’s mouth opened in surprise. “What? Who?”
Lester extracted a photograph from his pocket and laid it on her desk. “You ever see him before? His name is Travis Reynolds.”
She stared at the picture without touching it, as if it might be electrified. “No,” she replied, her voice reflecting her growing concern. “I don’t understand. How did he get my number?”
“You phoned him,” Sam said bluntly. “You had his number.”
Oetjen straightened in her chair. “But I don’t know him.”
Lester leaned forward and tapped his finger on the oversized desk pad calendar she had before her. “That’s the date the call was placed from here.”
As she had earlier with Travis’s photo, Oetjen stared at the calendar. “I don’t know,” she murmured.
Sam stood for emphasis and leaned on the desk. “Ms. Oetjen, just so you realize, this is a murder investigation. You might want to start getting your head straight here.”
“What were you doing that day, Dolores?” Lester asked gently, in classic good cop–bad cop style. “Is it written down there, maybe?”
Oetjen looked up at him. “None of this makes sense.”
“The calendar,” Sam said flatly.
The young woman placed her hand to her head and looked around haplessly, saying, “Right, right. I’m sorry. Of course. It’s…,” before seeing her tablet computer lying off to her right, faceup on the table. “I don’t actually use the paper calendar. My mom gave it to me, but I can’t carry it around.”
She hurriedly brought the tablet to life, smiling reflexively at Lester as Sam rolled her eyes.
“I don’t know,” Oetjen said, her eyes scanning the screen. “It was a normal workday. I had a couple of appointments.… one house showing.”
Les laid his hand on the desk phone. “Is there cell service from here?” he asked.
“It’s not very good,” she replied.
“So you usually use this?”
“Yes.”
“It looks like a sophisticated phone. Does it record outgoing calls for the previous month, do you think?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know. I suppose it does. I’ve never checked. That would be handy, wouldn’t it?”
Sam had heard enough. She walked away and began sightlessly staring at house offerings on a poster across the room.
Lester smiled. “Dolores,” he offered, “If you’d allow me, I’d be happy to see if it works.”
She waved at the device. “Oh, sure. Be my guest.”
Spinney began punching commands into the phone as Sam turned and asked in a more pleasant tone of voice, “How many extensions do you have in the house?”
“Three,” was the instant response. “And a cell I keep in my purse for when I’m on the road.”
“Les,” Sam asked. “Is that unit gonna capture all outgoing calls, or just the ones placed on that unit?”
Lester was their most electronically skilled member, although Willy had made it his mission to catch up.
Les glanced at Oetjen. “You bought the three phones as a package? This looks like one of these sets that can have up to six extensions.”
“It is.”
“There you have it,” he told his colleague. “All calls’ll be logged in here. This is like the mother ship.”
They watched him as he continued hitting buttons, guided by the small screen mounted into the phone’s display.
“Here we go,” he finally announced, pulling out his own cell phone and quickly taking a picture of the image on the screen. “At ten forty-three that night, lasting three minutes.”
Oetjen half rose in shock to stand and stare at the display. “What? Ten forty-three? Are you sure?”
“Yup.” He tapped the source of the information with his fingertip.
She sat back down heavily. “I don’t believe it.”
Sam quickly returned, circled the desk, and stood with her face inches from Oetjen’s. “It wasn’t you, was it, Dolores?”
“No,” was the barely whispered response.
“So who was it?”
“It must’ve been Aaron.”
“Aaron who?”
“Whitledge.”
“He your boyfriend?”
Dolores nodded, qualifying, “Kind of.”
“How long have you two been seeing each other?”
“Not long. Six months. Usually only on weekends, but not every one, either.”
“Tell us about him,” Lester suggested as Sam backed away.
“He’s nice,” she said vaguely.
“I’m sure he is. How did you meet?”
“At a party.” She rubbed her forehead. “Well, sort of one. It was at a bar, actually. A club, I guess.”
“Name?” Sam asked.
“The Four Leaf Clover, in Montpelier.”
Sam changed her demeanor, becoming more intimate in her body language, and almost confided her next comment. “You more interested in a commitment than he is?”
Oetjen sighed. “Yeah. As usual.”
Lester stayed silent as Sam continued. “He a bit of a player?”
After hesitating, Oetjen murmured, “Guess beggars can’t be choosers.”
“Tell us about that day,” Sam tapped the desk calendar. “What was it like?”
“It was fine. He came up, we had fun, he stayed the night—which he doesn’t always do.”
“How ’bout at ten forty-three? What were you doing then?”
“I was sleeping,” Dolores said, her voice stronger. “I had a sale that day, which is a big deal for me. I’m not doing that well, especially nowadays, and sure as hell not after that stupid storm. So when Aaron came up, we celebrated. I overdid it a little with the wine. By ten o’clock, we’d had dinner, watched a Netflix movie, cuddled a bit. I was wiped.”
“But he stayed over?”
“Yes. That’s what I said.”
“Are you a heavy sleeper, Dolores?” Les asked.
She smiled sheepishly. “I think I am, especially if I’ve been drinking.”
“So Aaron could’ve used the phone without your knowing it?”
“I suppose,” she said. “I don’t know why, though.”
“What do you know about him?” Sam asked. “Where’s he work, for example?”
“Montpelier. I think for state government.”
“You think?”
She flushed. “He said he wasn’t really free to talk about it. That his boss had him do special things sometimes that he couldn’t discuss.”
Lester almost laughed. “Like he was a secret agent?”
Dolores
looked embarrassed. “I know. I know. It seemed kinda dumb to me, too, but then I thought maybe he was covering for being a file clerk or something. I liked him. He was nice to me. And so what if he wasn’t into commitment or anything long-term? He made me feel special, and I started thinking that was good enough.”
“Did you ever go to his house?” Sam asked. “Or did he always come here?”
“No, we spent the night at his place a couple of times. Mostly, he wanted to get away from Montpelier. It was a cool apartment, though. I liked going there. It was a converted loft or something, overlooking the main drag—State Street. Not big, but nice, with big windows.”
Lester handed over his notepad, open to a blank page. “Write down the address.”
“And add whatever phone numbers you have for him,” Sam requested.
Oetjen did as requested, asking as she wrote, “Is he in trouble now? You said you were looking into a murder.”
Les made a point of laughing. “Good Lord, no. We’re not looking at him. We just want to see how he connects to this other guy, and even he’s not the one we’re after. This is like looking at a bunch of pick-up sticks, and figuring out which one fell first.”
“That being said,” Sam added grimly, folding the sheet of paper and placing it into her pocket, “We don’t want you calling Aaron after we leave. You do that, we’ll know about it, and we’ll be back to talk about the price of hindering a police investigation. Do you understand that?”
Oetjen nodded.
Sam leaned onto the desk again. “I didn’t hear you.”
“I understand,” Oetjen said meekly.
* * *
Back in the car fifteen minutes later—and after borrowing a photo of Oetjen and Whitledge posing before the statehouse—Sam turned to her partner and asked, “How much you wanna bet she’s on the phone right now?”
Lester laughed. “You and Willy really are a match made in heaven.”
* * *
Joe was on the interstate when his cell phone went off. Someone had asked him once what he looked forward to the most when he retired. He’d reached into his pocket, extracted the cell, and answered, “Turning this damn thing off, once and forever.”
But right now, as usual, he pulled it out and answered, “Gunther.”
“Hi. It’s me.”
Despite his eagerness to reach his destination, he pulled over to the side of the interstate.
“Hey, there, Governor. How’re you doing? I’ve been hearing the news reports. I can’t quite figure it all out, but it sounds like you have your hands full, as if Irene wasn’t enough.”
Gail Zigman sounded tense and exhausted. “Tell me about it. Imagine trying to make political hay while the whole state is hurting. These damn people are like maggots, I swear to God.”
What Joe had been hearing, of course, was far from anything that simple or clear, running the gamut from a political ambush to a prime example of neophyte arrogance and inexperience, combined.
“I am sorry,” he said, hoping to steer clear of a lengthy debate. As a couple, they’d been compatible on some levels, and less so on others, making many of their friends wonder how they’d stayed together as long as they had. One of their points of divergence had been Gail’s tendency to see issues in starker shades of black-and-white than he.
“I thought about calling you,” he added. “But with all this, I didn’t want to get in the way. I know you’ve become the proverbial one-armed paperhanger.”
“Oh, Joe,” she said sadly. “You should know you can always call. I would never be too tired or too busy to talk. You’ve always been my safe haven.”
Thinking back, he considered that “often” might have been more accurate than “always.” But he appreciated the sentiment, and felt all the more generous in light of what he and Beverly had reignited.
“I guess the bottom line,” he offered, “is that the governorship is a long way from the Brattleboro selectboard.”
“Well, yes and no,” she half agreed. “Some of the brains are as small, but you’re right about the numbers being bigger. Speaking of which,” she segued, “what do you know about a guy named Sheldon Scott?”
Joe was silent, grateful to have pulled off the road. Scott, of course, had surfaced in the past history of the late Gorden Marshall.
“He’s a lobbyist, isn’t he?” he asked noncommittally.
“He’s a right-wing, flesh-eating barracuda is more like it,” she responded. “He’s the son of a bitch behind the mess that’s making Irene look like a summer shower.”
Joe frowned. Even at her most stressed, Gail rarely gave in to such narcissistic language. He’d been hearing of a few thousand people who might have argued with her about the relative impacts between Irene’s devastation and Scott’s political shenanigans.
“You really are feeling the heat on this, aren’t you?” he asked. “I don’t think many of us on the outside are getting the full story.”
“You probably never will, Joe,” she said. “I’ll be a one-term wonder because of this prick, and he’ll slink back into the slime. Nobody will ever hear about all the backroom knife-wielding that went into this. It has nothing to do with the people or the state or doing what’s best for the poor bastards whose houses went downriver. This is about power, and men, and the good ol’ boy system—alive and well, even in this socialist Nirvana.”
Joe pulled in his chin at the vitriol, and tried to introduce a little levity. “Hey, don’t hold back. Tell me what you think.”
She tried to play along. “Never can and always will, Joe. Someday, you’ll be arresting me for sedition or something.”
He laughed. “That can’t be against the law in Vermont.”
“Well, this crap should be,” she countered darkly, adding, “So, what do you know about Scott?”
“Just what I told you, and it sounds like considerably less than what you already know.”
“I need more,” she said bluntly.
He didn’t respond, holding the phone to his ear and staring out at the traffic as if in suspended animation. In all their time together—through her brief stint as a deputy state’s attorney, her years as a selectman, even during her recovery from being raped, Gail had never asked him to break the law on her behalf.
Until she’d run for executive office, when she’d asked him for something inappropriate concerning the previous governor. That, Joe had refused to do.
Now she was on the brink of doing it again.
“Have you thought through what I think you’re about to ask?” he asked her.
“You getting technical on me?” she shot back.
“I’m remembering my oath of office,” he said carefully.
But not carefully enough.
“Meaning I’ve forgotten mine?” she asked sharply.
“No. Meaning that you’re under a huge amount of pressure and you need all the help you can get.”
“Which you won’t give me.”
“Which you don’t want,” he argued levelly. “Gail, you will always have a piece of my heart. You know that. But you don’t want to do this.”
She didn’t respond.
“Ask me for something I can grant,” he said, “and it’s yours. That’s probably why you called in the first place. You just got a little blurry ’cause we’re friends. Don’t worry about it.”
In the persistent silence, he added, “Look, I realize I don’t know all the details, and that it’s probably complicated as hell, but I bet you can beat it if you bring it to the people who voted you in. You were the one who told the wheeler-dealers and the politicos to take a hike, and it got you elected. That’s your strength, not playing their game on their terms.”
“I know how to politick, Joe. You stick to catching bad guys.”
He quieted, letting the frustrated egotism of her comment linger between them.
“I’m sorry. I gotta go,” she finally said. “I didn’t mean to jam you up. Take care.”
The phone went dead.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Pierson Library in Shelburne is tacked on to the old town hall, which looks, from Route 7, like something close to Thomas Jefferson’s heart as an architect. The actual library, however, is in the modern ex-town offices and police station to the rear, and coincidentally shares a large parking lot with the same fire department that responded to the Barber residence a couple of blocks to the south.
It was here that Joe Gunther was headed when he’d spoken with Gail—direct from his scrutiny of the old Vermont State Hospital admission forms—and here that he hoped an old-fashioned piece of pure, unadulterated inspiration might bear fruit.
He introduced himself at the front desk and asked for the reference librarian.
He was met by an amused response. “I’m afraid we’re not that big or fancy. There are only six of us here, including the director. Maybe you should talk with her first.”
He was escorted to the office of a lively middle-aged woman with long red hair, who greeted him with a surprisingly firm grip.
“How may we help you?” she asked after introductions were made and the circulation assistant had left.
Joe looked a little self-conscious. “This is a long shot, in more ways than one,” he admitted. “But if somebody were to walk in here asking how to find a historic local celebrity—maybe an old politician who was famous back when—what might you tell them?”
The director smiled as she said, “It’s all about the Internet nowadays. I’d steer them to Elizabeth, our new technical services person.”
“She here today?”
“She’s here every day. She’s become our most crucial employee, complete with a master’s degree in the subject. Would you like me to introduce you?”
She led him to another part of the library, suitably equipped with several computer stations, and to the desk of a young woman with an infectious smile and bright, intelligent eyes.
“Elizabeth? Special Agent Joe Gunther, of the VBI.”
The librarian’s face lit up. “Am I supposed to call you a G-man? It qualifies, even if it’s state government.”
Joe laughed. “Oh, Lord—please don’t. People are confused enough about who we are.”
“You’re the result of political expediency,” she said, shaking hands. “But I think it’s a great idea, and I hear good things about what you do.”
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