by Archer Mayor
Later that night he got a hopeful, pleasant taste of Susan's forecast after he and Gail had made love upstairs and were curled around each other in contented half sleep.
"I can't wait to get us back," Gail murmured.
Joe appreciated her choice of words. "You been missing us, too?"
She burrowed her forehead into his neck. "Like an ache I can't get rid of. November'll never be here soon enough."
"What if you lose?" he asked, not wanting to leave the question unasked.
"Either way." She then glanced up at him. "I won't be as much fun to be with if I do, but either way."
The next morning, the other problem he'd shared with Susan Raffner worsened. Stepping into the office, he was met by Sammie Martens, holding two documents in her hand.
"Hey, boss," she said. "I got bad news and interesting news. Well, I guess it's bad, too, but whatever."
He stuck out his hand. "Let's start with guaranteed bad."
"That's from the Mass State Police," she explained, handing it over. "A sort of after-the-fact advisory that almost got buried in the dailies. Katie Clark, the woman you interviewed in Orange several weeks ago, was found dead in her apartment."
Joe stared at the document. The date of discovery was one day after his visit.
"I was followed," he muttered. "That must be how they got to Pete."
"What?" Sam asked.
Gunther dropped the fax onto his desk and sat heavily in his chair. "I must've been followed from here to Orange and then preceded to Gloucester. Whoever it was probably got out of Katie what I didn't think she had, and went straight to Gloucester to kill Pete, all while I farted around playing 'twenty questions' with his fingerprints." And spending the night with Gail, he thought.
"How would anyone know you were going to Orange?" Sam asked.
"To quote Gail, '"Confidential" isn't even in the lexicon around here.' As soon as that gun surfaced in the hostage negotiation, everybody and his uncle probably started trading tidbits on the latest developments. It's not like we kept it particularly under wraps ourselves. It was three decades old, after all. Or so we thought."
Joe propped his feet up on his desk and rubbed his face with both hands. "Shit. You dig into what the cops found out in Orange?"
He knew his colleague well. She retrieved a thin folder from her own desk. "I had them e-mail me the report. They're writing it off as a natural death, due to complications stemming from what they call a 'preexisting medical condition.'"
Gunther snorted. "She had chronic fatigue syndrome. That makes you feel like hell: it doesn't kill you."
"You want to give them a call?"
"Oh, I'll call them, all right, but I seriously doubt it'll change anything."
He stood up suddenly and stared out the window, anger and frustration sweeping through him. "Goddamn it."
Sam remained silent. This wasn't the only setback they'd suffered on this case. Following Gunther's return from Gloucester, they'd spent days searching every database they could think of, looking for any mention of a brown-haired lefty with a scar on his hand. They'd come up with nothing, making Joe a pain to work with. And the other piece of news she was bearing wasn't going to improve matters.
"I've rarely seen a person look so vulnerable," he finally said quietly.
"Who?" Sam asked after a pause.
"Katie," he answered tiredly. "She fell asleep in midconversation, she was so worn out. I probably could have killed her myself by just pinching her nose. I doubt she would've quivered. Natural, my ass."
"You want us to do something?"
Joe turned away from the window. "I don't know what else to do, Sam. We've put all our queries out on the wire. The only crimes we can point to happened in other jurisdictions. We're stuck with having to wait-just like we've been doing from the start. Only now we don't even have the suspect we thought we had. 'Cause I'll guarantee you one thing," he emphasized. "We were wrong about Shea, which means the Oberfeldt killing has just been kicked wide open again."
Sam didn't respond. Joe noticed the other sheet of paper in her hand. "Okay, keep the good times rolling. What's the next item?"
She gave it to him. It was a report from the Waterbury crime lab. "When you got back from Gloucester, you asked for Shea's DNA profile to be sent to forensics. It's taken forever, but they finally finished it. Those're their findings comparing his blood to the samples at the Oberfeldt crime scene-the ones you thought were the killer's."
Joe looked up from the report, his face grim. "I knew it. They don't match."
"'Fraid not."
Four days later, Hannah Shriver parked her car in a sunlit field in Tunbridge, Vermont. It was warm for mid-September, a glorious late-summer day, and Hannah was feeling as upbeat as the weather. She got out, locked the door, and surveyed her surroundings. Hers was one of hundreds of parked vehicles glistening in the sun, spread out over eleven acres of precariously uneven pastureland, all sloping toward a flat floodplain beyond a small, rushing river called the North Branch. In the distance, thin and tinny spurts of canned carnival music swam against the air currents emanating from a man-made confection that was adorning the plain like the icing on a wedding cake-the Tunbridge World's Fair, one of Vermont's oldest and most cherished annual agricultural events.
Hannah paused to admire the view, positioned as she was like a scout atop a bluff. The basic, permanent blueprint of the place was simplicity itself: a half-mile-long oval dirt track, pinned in place along one side by a ramshackle wooden grandstand (with beer hall beneath the bleachers), a covered stage for live music facing it across the track's narrow width, and a large, open-ended pulling shed in the oval's center. That, year-round, along with a few low-lying cow, horse, and poultry barns, was all there was, along with a lot of open ground that in the old days was used to grow corn in the summer.
But every September, for the past 130 years, the place was transformed for less than a week-so filled with a Ferris wheel, carnival rides, food stands, equipment trucks, show tents, and trailers that you couldn't even see the ground anymore. Over a span of four event-jammed days, up to 50,000 people came to the tiny village of Tunbridge-most of them Vermonters-to enjoy one of the last truly agricultural events left in the state. Hannah Shriver had been one of those people for forty-one years.
She smiled at the memory. No wonder she'd thought of this as a meeting place. It was one of the only upbeat constants in her life-a reliable album snapshot of happiness and goodwill where regular folks convened to have a good time each year before buttoning up for the winter. In more ways than one, in fact. When Hannah was a teenager, the saying used to be that you hadn't been to the fair until you left with a pint in your pocket and someone else's wife on your arm. Things had been so acceptably rowdy in those days that even the sheriff's department had sponsored a girlie show as a fund-raiser.
Naturally, everything was "respectable" now, and Hannah had to admit, she didn't miss some of the lechery she'd been a victim of at the hands of a few older drunks back then. As for the antics among her fellow teens, that was something else. She lost her virginity here, behind the racing sheds on the bank of the North Branch River, and despite the fumbling at the time, still recalled the moment fondly.
She set out downhill, aiming for a narrow, two-lane temporary footbridge that the fair staff had erected just for this event. The North Branch was fickle enough to have run riot over the years, so much so that all the barn doors were left open during the winter, allowing the spring floods simply to tear through the buildings rather than rip them from their moorings. Against fury like that, any so-called permanent footbridge would have been an exercise in futility.
All that seemed incongruous today. As she crossed the bridge, Hannah admired the river's peaceful gurglings around the pilings, empathizing with how the carnies always chose the curve of the tree-shaded bank just to the right to line up their mobile homes and trailers. She imagined that Tunbridge was one of the few venues they frequented where such sylvan gentl
eness was located so close to the frenzy of their jobs.
She stepped onto the fairgrounds proper and worked her way between the cow sheds before her. Here, farm kids by the dozen tended animals so curried and washed and meticulously trimmed that their hides took on the softness of brown butter. She'd loved hanging around here as a youth, not just for the boys but for the lowing beasts, too-their huge bulk and warm odors as inviting to her as the smell of fresh hay after a cutting.
She proceeded to the north end of the midway and melted into its crush of humanity, dense as any subway crowd at the height of rush hour. Here the smells were of boiling fat and fried dough, of sugar and beer and too many people, all things she found as appealing in their way as the ones she'd just left.
Basically, there was nothing that wasn't going to seem good to her right now, because today, as the saying went, was the beginning of the rest of her life.
Which could definitely stand improvement. Hannah, she'd come to believe, was one of those people whom good things avoided. A decent man, any children whatsoever, a home to call her own, a fulfilling job-even a car that worked properly-had all eluded her over a life filled with brawls, heartbreak, single-wide trailers, and a longing so deep, she thought it had no bottom.
Until she'd read that headline: "Cold Case Files? Cops Reopen Ancient Murder."
That's when she'd called T. J. to let him know she was still alive-and still equipped with a good memory. Not to mention a little something extra, in case the cops needed proof. Not surprisingly, she hadn't told him that part. That, she was keeping in reserve-her ace up the sleeve. After all, there was no point in revealing too much. He might come to see her as expendable, and she never wanted that to happen.
She smiled broadly to herself, weaving through the crowd. To think that a stupid job she'd held for a few months so long ago would suddenly become a gold mine-not once, but twice. She stopped at a fried-dough booth to indulge in a bit of celebratory excess.
The afternoon went by in similar high spirits. The harness racing was fun and profitable. She made ten bucks on a bet, which was clearly a good omen. She wandered by every booth, visited every tent, took the rides that wouldn't upset her stomach, including a tour on the Ferris wheel, where she caught a bird's-eye perspective. But as day yielded to night, and the sun gave way to the throb and blur of neon and flashing arcade lights, she did have to admit to a slow but steady building of second thoughts.
She knew she'd chosen the right place. She was familiar with every inch of it, both public and private. She was also secure in the context. Meet in a crowd-that's what the movies always said. She'd given clear and easy instructions-contact at the entrance to the bingo hall at ten p.m.-and had even thought to tell him to watch for the woman wearing a cowboy hat and a red blouse, an unusual outfit to compensate for how much she'd aged and for the number of people that were sure to be milling around her.
She'd covered everything. And couldn't stop worrying about what she'd left out.
By the appointed time, all the fun had evaporated. She was back where she usually was, convinced it would go wrong and that she'd get the short end of the stick again. She stood by the bingo hall entrance, feeling stupid in her hat, drawing bemused looks from passersby.
Ten p.m. Ten-fifteen. Ten-twenty.
"Nice hat, Hannah."
She whirled around at the proximity of the voice, right by her ear, and came face-to-face with a bland-faced man with brown hair and a mustache.
"Who're you?" she demanded, her voice high with tension.
"The man with the money."
"Where's T. J.?"
"Busy. He sent us."
Us? She glanced around nervously. In the swirl of passing bodies, she saw three others standing still at various distances from them, all looking at her.
"Why so many?"
The brown-haired man smiled. "It's a lot of money."
"Do you have it?"
He ignored her. "He wants assurances this will be the last time you call him."
That angered her. "The last time? I haven't called him in over thirty years. What's he complaining about?"
"So, this is it, then?"
It was an interesting question. She hadn't actually thought that through, that this could become a steady source of income. "Sure," she lied.
His smile widened. "Good. That's all we needed to hear."
"Fine. You got it?" she repeated.
"Yeah. Follow me."
She stood fast, her arms straight by her sides. "I want it here. Now."
He looked at her quizzically. "It's in a briefcase, Hannah. I left it in the car. No point lugging it all over the place." He then added as a joke, "It's not like it's a check."
Still she hesitated. He didn't seem threatening, and what he'd said made sense. But where was T. J.? And why were the others here if the money was in a car?
"I'll wait," she said. "Bring it to me."
The smile faded. "Hannah. T. J.'s doing you a favor here. Did he complain when you called? He said he'd help you out right off the bat, didn't he? Don't be a pain. Come get your money so we can all go home."
She looked around again, now feeling almost panicky. "I don't know."
The man shrugged. "Fine, call him tomorrow and work something else out." He motioned to the others and turned to go.
"Wait," she blurted.
He paused.
"Okay."
He seemed to relax and leaned toward her in a conspiratorial way. "Great, and you know what I said about this being the only time?"
She had to strain to hear his near whisper in all the surrounding noise.
"Well," he continued, gently taking her arm and beginning to walk her south, parallel to the midway and toward the parking lots below the fairgrounds. "I'm just an employee, and T. J.'s a real easy touch. I wouldn't take that part too seriously, if I were you."
She didn't like being held that way, but he did seem to be on her side. "Really?"
"Sure. Give it some time, and then maybe talk to him about being put on a kind of salary. God, you read about that sort of arrangement all the time, don't you?"
It was true, she guessed, but her mind was still in a whirl. She remained anxious-almost skittish. It wasn't what she had planned. It was becoming complicated, and it was slipping from her fingers. Just like always.
To give herself a little breathing room, she jerked her arm free of the man's grasp. In that split second, she both saw his face flash with anger and sensed one of the men right behind her suddenly moving as if to head her off.
It was all she needed.
She pretended to shift left, toward the midway and the solid column of people there, and then cut right as her escort went for the feint, pushing the off-balance brown-haired man out of her way as she cut into a narrow alley between the two buildings beside them, tipping over a large trash barrel behind her as she went.
It worked. She reached the fence separating the alleyway from the racetrack and climbed over it before the men behind her could clear away the barrel.
Opposite her was the covered stage, facing the grandstand to her left. She cut away from the music and the bright lights and ran north as fast as she could, making for the entrance of the track's central oval. She heard a fair attendant yelling over her shoulder at the men climbing the fence in pursuit.
The inner oval combined all of the fair's offerings. There was a second midway, complete with rides, tents, and booths, and a second crowd of people. On its far side, near the river, was also where most of the vehicles and trailers belonging to vendors and other personnel were parked in near-total darkness. As kids, that was often where Hannah and her friends ended up to indulge in some of their more private activities.
She quickly glanced back as she passed through the gate. All four men were coming on at a run.
Now convinced her life was at stake, she plowed heedlessly into the people before her, at once desperate and hopeful that her actions would cause problems for her pursuers.
/> She was right. Slipping by the initial shouts of angry surprise, she was aware of a secondary outburst being triggered by those in her wake. Risking a second backward look, she saw them being slowed and blocked by the protesting crowd.
Except that now there were only two of them.
Hannah kept struggling west toward the darkness. Like a passing fog, the crowd abruptly melted to a few stragglers as she passed the entrance to the second midway and headed for the horse barns barely visible in the gloom. If she could reach the far gate, leave the oval, cross the track, and work her way between the barns and the riverbank back toward the bridge and her car, she might still get away. At which point, she thought bitterly, old T. J. wouldn't know the meaning of the word "misery."
A man's shadow suddenly appeared out of the night, blocking the gate and her planned route.
She veered right, still inside the oval, running toward the lights of a small circular clearing lined with some secondary food booths. A thin cluster of people and their kids were milling around eating French fries and cotton candy.
She slowed slightly, tossed her hat away, and headed for a knot of two large families debating what to do next.
Startled, they made way for her as she knifed through their midst, closing behind her like a body of water. Hidden for just a moment from anyone following, Hannah ducked and slipped in between two booths, again aiming for the railing separating the oval from the surrounding track. She was now facing north. On the far side were the cow barns, filled with people as before, and beyond them the bridge to her car. She could almost make out the steep parking lot in the night sky above the low-slung wooden buildings ahead of her.
Stealthily, in the blackness of the narrow space between the two booths, she leaned over the railing and checked the track in both directions.
Nobody.
Shaking by now, sweating and near exhaustion, she climbed the railing and jumped.