The Surrogate Thief (16 page)

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

I
t 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.

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.”

Joe smiled at him. “You like her.”

Willy frowned. “I understand her. She did what she had to do, or so it seems.”

“Which was . . . ?”

Willy sat back. “Well, it’s not like she had her life cataloged and waiting for us, but from what I found, she tried her hand at teaching, bookkeeping, secretarial work, housecleaning, dispatching for a trucking company, and even did a stint as a court secretary or whatever it is where you use those goofy-looking typewriters you see in Perry Mason movies.”

“Court reporter,” Joe said, his interest sharpened. “They’re called steno machines. When did she do that?”

“Beats me,” Willy answered. “All that’s here is the machine and a bunch of the paper rolls that come out the far end of it, all bundled up. Looks like Sanskrit.”

“What about family, husbands, boyfriends, anything like that?”

“A few pictures, some letters. Nothing recent, though. No diary I could find. No address book.” He paused and then added, “Off the top of my head? I get the feeling of somebody whose batteries were running low. She kept the place up, did her laundry, washed the dishes, made sure the bathroom was clean, but that’s about it—maintenance-level stuff. That’s the dignity I was talking about. But three years from now, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a 911 call for a suicide here.”

“A life of quiet desperation?” Joe asked, gazing about, struck by his colleague’s insight—the very thing that kept Joe playing interference for the man.

Willy covered with a dismissive laugh, probably worried that he’d revealed too much sensitivity. “Shit, no. That’s me. This broad was just going crazy.”

Joe nodded quietly, allowing Willy his pretense. “Well, if you think you’re done, let’s collect what we’ll need and move it to where we can work on it. I better beg the PD for their basement room—set up a data center. I get the feeling that before we’re done, this’ll just be the tip of the iceberg.”

Willy stood up and stretched his one good arm, looking oddly like a man hailing a cab. “Sounds like a pain in the ass to me.”

He then paused and fixed his boss with a pleased expression Gunther had grown to expect. “There is something else.”

“Ah—I was wondering.”

Kunkle’s smile broadened. “The place was tossed before we got here—very carefully.”

Gunther stared at him. “I thought that was the two of you. I was going to compliment you on being so neat and tidy.”

Willy was clearly insulted. “Neat and tidy? Shit, if I’m left on my own, I guarantee you’ll never know I was there. These guys weren’t that good. If you did notice something—assuming you’re not bullshitting me—it was the people who came before us.”

“You think they found what they were after?”

Willy was back to looking superior. “What did I say? No diary, no address book.”

Gunther waited for the standard premeeting chatter to peter out. They were in a windowless room in the basement of Brattleboro’s municipal center, designed to serve as an emergency command post when needed, and thus equipped with phones, copiers, computer hook-ups, and the rest. It was used only sparingly, and mostly during drills or serious storms. For the VBI, with its one office upstairs, it had come in handy more than once as a conference or training room.

Joe watched as the stragglers got their coffee and doughnuts at a table lining one wall and searched out an empty chair. In attendance were his three squad members, Paul Spraiger and two more from up north, several BCI officers from the state police, and a couple of Brattleboro’s finest, Ron Klesczewski and J. P. Tyler, both of whom had worked for Gunther when he was chief of detectives.

“I’d like to thank you all for coming,” he said as the last chair scraped into position. “I think everybody knows everybody else, if only by reputation.”

“Guess that covers Willy,” Spraiger said to general laughter.

“Some of you,” Joe continued after a pause, “are here because of the death of Hannah Shriver in Tunbridge. Others because of a thirty-two-year-old Brattleboro homicide. What connects them is an old gun that surfaced during a hostage negotiation several weeks ago here in town, along with the recent deaths of a woman in Orange and a man in Gloucester, Massachusetts, both of whom, like Hannah Shriver, were living in Brattleboro years ago when a shopkeeper named Klaus Oberfeldt was beaten to death and he and his wife were robbed of their life savings.”

Gunther gestured to Ron. “Could you fire up that projector?”

The room’s lighting dimmed, and the white screen beside Joe became one of the black-and-white images he’d studied upon first revisiting this case.

“The Oberfeldt store, taken from the entrance looking toward the back room. You’ll note the large bloodstain on the floor, belonging to the victim, who died of his injuries six months later, and a small string of droplets heading toward the rear exit. The working theory, then as now, is that during the beating, the assailant was also wounded and left those smaller bloodstains behind on his way to the storage room, where he removed the money from under the floorboards before escaping out the back door.”

“Were samples collected of both?” J. P. Tyler, the PD’s forensics expert, asked from the darkness.

“Yes,” Joe answered, “and they both still have viable DNA, one matching the victim, the other unmatched to date. There was also blood on . . . next slide.”

The shop was replaced by a close-up of the knife.

“This switchblade,” Joe continued, “which matched Mr. Oberfeldt’s. It also had a thumbprint on the blade, the only solid clue we managed to get at the time. The print belonged to a young repeat offender—primarily a thief—named Peter Shea. We went after this kid for the robbery-assault—Mr. Oberfeldt hadn’t died yet—but Shea had already left town, we think because of this.” He nodded to Ron, who brought up a slide of the Blackhawk.

“According to Shea’s girlfriend, Katie Clark, Pete found this under his mattress in the apartment they shared. The papers at the time were told that Oberfeldt was pistol-whipped, but not about the switchblade, so Shea apparently figured that the gun, covered with blood when he found it, was the one we were looking for. Already being a penal system graduate, he assumed we’d connect the gun to him and throw away the key. So he ran.”

“Wasn’t he right?” asked one of the troopers. “If the knife was his and the gun was under his bed, didn’t that make him the bad guy? Did he have an alibi?”

“No,” Joe conceded, “which is why we liked him, not to mention that the blood type of those droplets matched his, as they did most of us in the pre-DNA days. But you’ll see the real problem in a bit. This takes a little explaining. Next, Ron.”

This time the slide was of Katie Clark, looking fast asleep, just as he’d left her. Except that this was a medical examiner’s photograph.

“This is the girlfriend I mentioned—Katie Clark—found dead a few days ago in her apartment in Orange. So far, she’s been ruled a natural, although obviously I have my doubts. In any case, after Pete left Brattleboro, Katie gave the Blackhawk to her brother, who hid it in his Dummerston house, probably forgot all about it, and then died a few years later. In the last couple of months, a young couple bought the place and began fixing it up. During that process, a floor refinisher found the gun, stole it, and sold it, indirectly, to the guy who died in that hostage negotiation. That’s how it resurfaced. It had been so well preserved over the years that the lab was able to match the blood on it to Klaus Oberfeldt’s.”

Joe paused to let everyone absorb what he’d told them so far, before resuming, “Now here’s one of the first problems I mentioned: if Katie told the truth, and Pete did find the gun planted under his mattress, who planted it? One of you already suggested it wasn’t planted at all, implying Katie was covering for her boyfriend. That’s fair enough—God knows we’ve seen that before—but a second problem then presents itself. Next slide.”

This showed a body floating in the water at night, wedged between a boat and a dock piling. “This is the late Peter Shea, who’d been living under an assumed name in Gloucester for several years. He was murdered just hours before I could talk to him, just as Katie Clark died one day after I spoke with her. Needless to say, if Shea was Oberfeldt’s killer, then who killed him and why? And here’s the kicker: The knife wound that did in Shea is a carbon copy of the one the ME found in Hannah Shriver.”

Predictably, there were a few muted comments exchanged among the audience.

“All right,” Joe went on. “Let’s allow for several explanations, the first being that Shea was good for the Oberfeldt killing, that Katie lied about his finding the gun under the mattress, and that he died the death of any number of drunks who hang around the rough part of town. That would also mean that Katie did in fact die of natural causes and that Hannah Shriver’s wound looking a lot like Pete’s is pure coincidence.”

“Right,” Willy commented caustically.

“Another explanation,” Joe said, “is that Shea was framed, like he claimed, and that the recent resurfacing of the gun had the effect of pounding a fist on a chess table and rearranging the pieces. The person who framed him was forced to cover tracks he didn’t think he’d ever have to worry about again.”

“Isn’t that a bit of a reach?” asked Tyler. “The evidence still points to Shea.”

“Yes and no,” Joe answered. “The circumstantial case is the same, but now, with DNA analysis, we know that those blood droplets, although of the same group, aren’t actually his. To my mind, they represent the one unplanned aspect of this whole thing. You could see someone stealing Shea’s knife, which he did say he’d lost; you could see the same person planting the gun on Shea later. But who could predict that Oberfeldt might land a lucky punch as he was being beaten? It’s the spontaneous nature of those droplets that gives them credibility.”