The surrogate thief jg-15

by Archer Mayor

"You didn't, for what it's worth," Tony added. "I wasn't around then, but I know that much."

  "Drop the ball?" Joe asked.

  "Yeah."

  Joe smiled wistfully, all the memories so fresh. "With any luck, maybe I'll get to find that out for myself."

  Back when Joe was playing catch-up on an assault that became a robbery and finally a murder six months later, he was married to someone he deemed the love of his life: a kind, gentle, funny, passionate woman named Ellen.

  This wasn't exactly objective. She had been all those things, but she'd had her flaws, too. He just couldn't recall them. The adage has it that you can't compete with the dead. Over time, they just keep growing in stature.

  And Ellen was definitely dead, killed by cancer over the same six months that Klaus Oberfeldt lingered in a coma.

  Joe and she were married for several years and couldn't have children. She worked at the local bank, and whenever possible, they had lunch together. It wasn't a complicated life. They lived in a rented apartment, didn't have pets, thought a drive to Keene was a trip to the big city. There was an ease to their existence that in hindsight seemed like tempting fate, although even now he didn't see enjoying a little peace as anything deserving of punishment. He sure as hell hadn't back then, when, after a tour of duty in combat and a few years lost in confusion and soul-searching, he'd viewed Ellen's arrival in his life as a gift.

  What killed her was inflammatory breast cancer. Very rare, very lethal, and very fast.

  Joe's next stop after leaving Brandt should have been his own office, above the PD in Brattleboro's municipal building. It was late in the day. He doubted that the other three special agents on his squad would be in, which was part of the appeal. Peace and quiet beckoned, especially valuable in the planning stages of a new or, in this situation, revived case.

  But he walked out into the parking lot instead and drove west toward Gail's house, as if drawn by the need to compare a love he'd come to idealize with the one he enjoyed now.

  He didn't think how doing this instead of going to work highlighted precisely the emotional ambiguity that Tony Brandt had just questioned.

  Gail and Joe were an odd pairing, at least to most of their friends: he, the son of a farmer, a native Vermonter, and a lifelong cop; she, an urban child of privilege, an ex-hippie, a successful businesswoman. Theirs was a union in which the emotional integrity, though tested, had never faltered. Through the turmoils they'd shared, the one constant had been that love-placed on a different plane by the hard work and faith supporting it.

  Which had created a curious paradox: As a result of that trust, their love had been unhitched from the standard vehicles most couples used for its care and feeding. Joe and Gail were not married, had no children, shared few common interests, did not live in the same house, and didn't even work in the same part of the state for over half of each year. Gail was a lawyer/lobbyist for Vermont's most powerful nonprofit environmental organization and spent months on end in Montpelier representing her cause.

  Although, as Sheila Kelly had touched on earlier, this last detail was facing a challenge. On the heels of the retirement of one of the county's white-haired political icons, Gail had announced her intention to occupy his newly opened state senate seat.

  This had hit Joe like the news that an old and crumbling dam had finally yielded to the pressures behind it. So many of her intimates had been urging Gail for years to run for statewide office-believing, quite rightly, that she'd take to it as a bird does to flight-that its occurrence had the feel of inevitability about it.

  Joe's problem was that while he honored this conceptually, as he had her previous career choices, it was taking place on a whole different level. Unlike any of its forerunners, this campaign was demanding her undivided attention-forcing her to be surrounded virtually around the clock by a flock of supporters, strategists, staffers, and fund-raisers who had helped transform her from an interesting human being into someone who now ate, drank, and lived the pursuit of a single goal.

  To Joe, who so cherished their few shared times alone, this sudden and complete myopia had been unsettling. From once having felt that together he and Gail could batten down the hatches during hard times, he was now feeling a bit like a partisan spectator on the fringes of a crowd.

  This had been the status quo ever since she'd announced her intention to enter the primary weeks earlier. And up to now Joe had been philosophical about putting his personal needs aside. After all, this was merely a process, and not without some interesting and possibly exciting ramifications.

  But that was before Matt Purvis had appeared in his life, carrying a gun from a past so laden with baggage.

  For the first time in quite a while, Joe was sufficiently thrown off balance that his usual stoicism was in real need of Gail's company.

  A few hundred yards beyond the I-91 overpass, he turned right onto Orchard Street and began driving uphill, his eyes to the left, hoping her broad driveway would be empty.

  It wasn't, and as soon as he saw the half-dozen cars tightly packed as if awaiting a ferryboat, he wondered why he'd hoped otherwise. Had he set himself up for this disappointment on purpose, to reward his perfect memories of Ellen by contrast? He pulled over to the roadside opposite the driveway and killed the engine, silently shaking his head. These were just the kind of emotional gymnastics he usually tried to avoid.

  As if to render it all moot, he swung out of the car and wended his way toward the house, looking forward to-if nothing else-being temporarily absorbed into Gail's current maelstrom of a life.

  Certainly, that was alive and well, as he discovered hitting a wall of voices upon opening the back door into the kitchen.

  There were three women before him, moving between restaurant-size salad fixings and a cauldron of soup and using the phone on the wall-Gail had installed four additional lines since announcing her intentions

  One of them stopped talking and smiled at him as he entered. "Hi, Joe. You joining the dinner powwow?"

  He raised his eyebrows. "Knew nothing about it, Brenda. Not sure I'd be of much use, anyhow. Is Gail around?"

  Brenda gestured vaguely at the door leading into the rest of the large house. "We wouldn't be here without her." She paused suddenly and stared at him. "Actually, the way things are heating up, we might be. You hear about Ed Parker?"

  "What about him?" he asked. Parker was a Republican drum banger and local businessman-disarmingly charming, charismatic, and popular at places like the Elks Club, Rotary, and others-who was always writing letters to the editor and talking on the radio about how the state was going to socialist hell in a handbasket. A man who'd married a seductive and appealing style to a rock-ribbed conservative message.

  "The Republicans have finally sorted out their differences and made him their choice for the senate. Pretty extreme, if you ask me."

  "No primary?" Joe asked.

  Brenda looked amused and explained with that odd pride the Democrats have in their particular political dysfunction, "Oh, you know them: one man, one race. God forbid they give the people a choice. Anyhow, Gail is here someplace-check the living room."

  He followed the growing noise-still more voices, but supplemented by the plastic tapping of keyboards and the ringing of phones.

  He paused at the living room entrance, watching the activities of at least five more people. The comfortable furniture he associated with his moments with Gail-including the couch they sometimes made love on-had been replaced with desks, work tables, and a scattering of office chairs.

  A young man frantically clacking on the computer stopped long enough to stare at him inquiringly. "May I help you?"

  Another woman, drawn by the comment, looked up and smiled. "Joe," she said as she crossed over and gave him a hug. "I haven't seen you in ages." She nodded toward the young man. "This is my son, Aaron."

  Joe shook hands, still looking around, which Aaron's mother correctly interpreted. She touched his shoulder and glanced overhead, murmuring, "She
's upstairs. Go on up."

  He left the living room and the noise, walked down the long hallway to the foot of the stairs, and began climbing, thinking that against all odds he might get some time with Gail after all.

  But again he was disappointed. Halfway up, he saw her appear on the landing above, clipboard in hand, accompanied by her oldest friend and now campaign manager, Susan Raffner. They were deep in conversation and didn't even see him until after they'd started down.

  Gail's face broke into a wide smile. "Joe. What a sweet surprise. I didn't know you were coming by." She stooped forward and kissed him awkwardly as Susan looked on. Returning Gail's embrace, he noticed Susan check her watch.

  "You know what they say," he answered, trying to sound upbeat, "I happened to be in the neighborhood-not hard in this town."

  Gail rolled her eyes. "A town with a lot of people, though. I'm starting to feel like I'll meet every one of them before this is over."

  "It's going okay, though, right?" Joe asked. In an attempt to sound both savvy and supportive, he added, "I heard about Parker."

  She made a face. "He's such a screwball. Problem is, nobody knows it, despite what he says. Anyhow, he's not my problem. I have to beat all the Democrats in the race first, and nicely enough that they don't take it personally. Such a weird process. Makes running for selectman a total breeze." She paused and touched his cheek. "God, I haven't seen you in days. Feels like forever." She furrowed her brow. "Are you all right? You look tired."

  "Just a case I'm on," he said vaguely.

  "Gail," Susan's voice dropped between them.

  Gail stepped back against the railing and glanced up at her friend. "I know, I know." She looked at Joe again and shrugged helplessly. "I gotta go."

  He smiled halfheartedly. "Brenda told me-big powwow."

  Her expression was torn. "Right. You want to listen in? God knows I could use the input."

  But he begged off. "Too much homework at the office."

  Susan took two steps down, pressuring them to take the hint. They did, Gail leading and talking over her shoulder. "God, don't talk about homework. That's all I do anymore-that and eat vegetarian rubber chicken."

  She paused again at the foot of the stairs. "Come back later?" she asked, placing her hand on his chest as he drew near.

  He took her hand and kissed it as Susan took her other elbow and began steering her along the hallway. "If I can. Good luck."

  Joe watched them go and then left by the front door, not wanting to walk through the house again.

  Chapter 5

  Joe Gunther unlocked the door with the borrowed key and paused before switching on the light, reflecting on the dark stillness before him. He was in the basement of the municipal building, on the threshold of the police department's storeroom. A windowless, airless black cave, it was the endpoint for everything from old parade uniforms to forgotten files, to pieces of hardware that hadn't quite made it to the dump. It also housed hundreds of past case files, labeled by date and name, each box containing records, reports, photographs, and even items of evidence, often as casually tossed together as the contents of a dorm room just before vacation.

  The smell of the place was dry and dusty, slightly enhanced by something so subtle, he could only ascribe it to ancient memories. His mind drifted to how many investigations he'd reduced to such a container now tucked away in the gloom before him. It seemed he and his colleagues had unconsciously created a museum of humanity's clumsy chaos in the process, replicating Pandora's box with dozens of tiny, less dramatic facsimiles, rendered all the more poignant for their mundane contents. Drunken brawls, jealous rages, venal dreams-and all the mess they implied-now silenced, defeated, and forgotten, row on row.

  He turned on the lights and began walking by the chronologically arranged metal shelf units, counting off the years and heading toward the dawn of his own career. He eventually paused, turned into an aisle, and came to two dust-coated boxes at eye level marked "Oberfeldt."

  He piled one atop the other, finding them disappointingly light, and headed upstairs to his office.

  Klaus Oberfeldt never returned home after that night, and he never awoke to say who had assaulted him. He made one trip in his remaining half year of life up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to Mary Hitchcock Hospital, for some tests and an evaluation, but it was done out of courtesy or curiosity, or more likely because of Maria Oberfeldt's endless haranguing. Everyone treating him knew what the outcome would be, and when his last breath was expelled, it was accompanied by a collective sigh of relief.

  Young Joe Gunther witnessed that with a conflicting mixture of understanding and outrage. Typical of his nature, while he hadn't been spared Maria's generalized contempt, Joe had sympathized with both her sorrow and her fury. She and her husband might have been short on social graces, but neither had deserved what they'd been delivered. Joe happened to be at the hospital when Maria was told of Klaus's death, and he'd seen the last remnant of hope drift from her eyes. The fact that he was at the same place and time because his own mate was dying a couple of doors down both exacerbated his desire to bring closure to Maria's grief and confronted him with his own impotence. The fusion of their separate sorrows seemed merely to create a void, leaving the case that had united them listless and without chance of resolution.

  Joe sat at his desk in the otherwise deserted VBI office, the overhead lights extinguished in favor of a more intimate desk lamp, and spread out the contents of the two Oberfeldt case boxes.

  The old photographs told the story best, not surprisingly, if for reasons beyond the mere images they conveyed. They were in black-and-white, for one thing, and large-eight-by-tens. Nowadays crime scene photos were often color Polaroids, or quasi-amateur snaps taken by whatever detective was nearest a digital camera. But, as was common back then, these had been shot by the owner of the local camera store, and they reflected his intuitive feel for lighting, angle, and depth of field. They were creepily cinematographic in their perfection, as if snipped from a moody film noir of the fifties, and they produced a certain artificial immediacy, being at once too good to be true and so real as to be palpable. Looking at them brought Joe fully back to when he'd been standing just to one side of the frame.

  The fact that they were monochromatic reminded him of the passage of time, and of the distance he'd traveled in the intervening decades. "Feeling old" was too maudlin to capture the emotion. Joe took the aging process as simply one of life's by-products-something to be undertaken with few complaints and as much decorum as possible. But he didn't dismiss his experience as lightly, and his experience had been to witness such scenes as now littered his desk more times than he could count. That these were old enough to be in black-and-white was a sad and telling reminder of his journey's length.

  The Oberfeldts' store had been long and narrow, with the counter and two freestanding shelf units running perpendicular to the back storage room and the staircase beyond. In a fanciful way, it was reminiscent of a bowling alley, if smaller, a bit wider, and far more cluttered-a truly tiny, old-fashioned mom-and-pop market. In truth, the photographs made it look like a frontier store out of the Wild West, the black pool of blood on the floor only heightening the impression.

  The body didn't feature in any of the photographs-it had yet to become a body. For that matter, given that this was initially a robbery-assault, photographs of this quality shouldn't even have been taken. It wasn't standard protocol. Gunther had requested the camera store owner to drop by, and his chief at the time gave him hell for it later. Such a waste of money during tight fiscal times was not looked upon kindly.

  Joe had acted on instinct and didn't mind the reprimand. He'd seen Klaus at the hospital, after all, and had been told by the man's physician that he probably wouldn't last long. As things turned out, the pictures had been an extravagance. Although they were requested on the assumption that Klaus would die, his killer would be caught, and such evidence would be needed at trial, only the first had come to pass-and way to
o late for these images to be of much use, regardless of any clues they contained.

  And they did contain clues: a bullet hole near the front door, the violent pattern of Oberfeldt's blood spatter, the open hiding place in the back room's floor where the couple's life savings had been, and-most interesting of all-a trail of smaller blood drops leading away from the scene, along with an open switchblade found lying in Klaus's gore, both presumed to be the assailant's.

  Joe selected a picture showing the knife in close-up, the lighting arranged to best reveal the ridges of a single thumb-print on the blade, peering out from under a thin smear of blood.

  There certainly was a nagging anomaly. Why the knife? It was found open, had clearly been taken out for some use, while all of Klaus's injuries had been due to the pistol-whipping.

  And yet the knife proved useful. The thumbprint was carefully lifted and compared to the thousands on file at the police department. The officer who fancied himself a forensics man spent weeks poring over endless cards with a magnifying glass, as intent as a spider weaving a web against all odds, until he finally hit pay dirt in the name of a local thief named Peter Shea. Pete was a relatively low-profile bad boy, had a problem with alcohol, and was generally considered one of the usual suspects when that phrase was still common currency.

  Unfortunately, he was not to be found. Nor had he been found to this day.

  In a truly ironic paradox, that disappearance hadn't turned out to be all bad news. Clearly, it wasn't good that Pete had vanished, but at least they now had a name to pursue. Until that thumbprint had yielded an identity-and the person owning it had fled-Joe had been getting nowhere.

  And he had worked the problem hard-persistent even in his youth. At least, for the first couple of months. He'd conducted several canvasses, chased down every complaint the Oberfeldts had ever filed, checked out all the local crooks with even vaguely similar MOs. He'd interviewed Maria three times, hoping to extract a memory of someone who might have wished them far more than simple ill will. And he'd pushed her aggressively on who could have known about the nest egg's hiding place.