The Surrogate Thief (18 page)

She was trembling. Embarrassed that he’d so misread her, Joe slipped off his chair to kneel by her side and hold her hand in his own.

“I didn’t recognize that moment as just the beginning,” she said, “Nor did I realize that it would lead to a time when her entire life—everything she’d ever experienced as a living human being—would be as void as what existed before she was born. A mere figment in my mind.”

The tears were flowing freely as she added, “Once she was only the dreams and hopes of a young and happy childless couple. Now she’s now a patchwork of memories to an old, tired, and childless woman. How fair is that?”

“It’s not,” Joe could only agree. But he added, hoping it might help, “Is there any chance you could spend some time with a relative, even for a few days?”

She took a deep breath. “They’re all gone. There weren’t many of us to begin with, and longevity is not our strong suit. I envy them,” she concluded after a pause.

Sensing there was nothing he could say or do to lessen her pain, Joe rose helplessly and murmured, “I’m sorry I’ve put you through this, Mrs. Shriver. It was not my intention.”

Her eyes met his one last time. “Don’t apologize. It actually felt good, getting it out. I’ve become such a closed box of all I’ve known. Without someone to share it with, what good is it finally?”

He nodded and moved toward the door, ready to take his leave, when he suddenly turned and asked her, “Would it be all right for me to visit you again?”

She’d produced a handkerchief from her sleeve and was wiping her eyes. She stopped and gave him a surprised look. “To ask about Hannah? I don’t know how much more—”

He interrupted her with an upheld hand. “No, no. Just to visit.”

She paused to consider the offer before smiling slightly and saying, “Thank you.”

“Okay,” he told her. “I’ll see you later, then.”

The offices of the
Brattleboro Reformer
occupied a flat, bland, modern building adjacent to the interstate at the far north end of town. This was a shame, in Joe’s opinion. He remembered when they used to be on Main Street, on the first floor of one of the cluttered, ancient redbrick behemoths that made of the town’s heart an architectural museum of a bygone era. Before the move, it seemed to him, there was more of a sense of the reporters and editors belonging to the town’s social fabric. It was understandable that cramped quarters, lousy parking, and occasionally iffy electricity had proved too much to bear, but ever since the paper’s relocation to Brattleboro’s outer fringe, Joe felt that a vital though intangible connection had been severed.

It had become a hard-luck place, too. Changes of ownership had taken a toll, and staff turnover was so routine, he’d all but given up remembering who worked there. Also, arching over all, money was such a continual grind that it had become a more frequent topic between him and the paper’s editor, Stanley Katz, than the crime rate, politics, and the state of law enforcement combined.

That hadn’t always been so. Katz had been the courts-and-cops reporter when Joe had run the PD’s detective squad, and as such, he’d only been contemptuous of the paper’s own management issues. His sole mission in life then, it had seemed to Gunther, had been to pester the PD like a cold sore. Katz had always had integrity, though, had never been spiteful, and, now that he was finally inhabiting the editor’s chair, had even mellowed in his dotage.

Of course, it also didn’t hurt that Joe had left the police department behind. Nowadays he rarely had cause to deal with the
Reformer
except as just another Vermont press outlet.

Not this time, however. As he pulled into the paper’s large parking lot off the Black Mountain Road, he had a very specific idea in mind, which definitely played to the
Reformer
’s strength.

He opened the building’s front door, passed through the glass-enclosed antechamber—reminiscent of an air lock—and stepped into a large, open room full of desks and filing cabinets and service counters, a room vast enough to make the ceiling look low and oppressive. He glanced around, briefly thinking of how many times he’d been here over the years, usually on the brink of some sparring session with Katz or his ilk, before he set off for the corner office of the man himself.

Looking older and more worn than Joe remembered, Stanley was sitting, elbows on his desk, staring through half glasses at a pile of financial reports. He looked up wearily as Joe tapped gently on the doorframe.

He removed the glasses and smiled. “Joe Gunther. My God.”

He rose and circled around to shake hands, escorting his guest to a chair and then choosing one next to it. Joe had never been so warmly greeted before.

“How the hell are you? It’s been a dog’s age.”

“I’m doing well, Stan. You keeping out of trouble?”

Katz laughed. “Don’t I wish. I never thought I’d actually look forward to retirement, but there are days . . . and I have years to go before qualifying. Goddamned depressing.”

He took a breath and added, “Pretty exciting about Gail, huh? Finally going for the big leagues—relatively speaking.”

Not being as glib with such comments, loaded as they were with double meanings in his own mind, Joe merely stammered, “Yeah. Well, we’re all keeping our fingers crossed.”

Katz looked at him for a moment, pretending to be caught off guard. “Come on. She’s got a decent chance. If she totally nails Marlboro, Newfane, Putney, and Brattleboro, and works overtime to paint Parker as Bander’s lapdog, she could pull it off. It also wouldn’t hurt if every Republican in the county came down with the flu on election day, but still, if I were her, I’d make room for some champagne in the fridge. Hey,” he added with the cynical lift of an eyebrow, “she’s got our endorsement, after all.”

He waited for a response and got only a half smile in return, followed by “Nice try, Stanley.”

Katz shook his head. “Such a hard-ass. Well, you’ve never been so desperate you came here just to shoot the shit. What’re you hoping to squeeze out of me this time? Or am I about to hear some spin on a screwup we don’t even know about yet?”

Gunther let out a moan and held his forehead. “Jesus, Stan, do you practice that in the shower? The lowly press as Christian martyr, suffering for the public good?”

“Not with my last name, I don’t,” the newsman hedged. “I do think we fulfill a service, though.”

Joe held up his hand. “All right, all right. Let’s not go there, especially since I am about to ask a favor.”

“That old case you’re working on?” Katz guessed.

Joe nodded. “Very good. The showoff gets lucky. You know the details?”

“No thanks to you people. Old man Oberfeldt, a thousand years ago, took six months to die from an assault and left a cold case with a vengeance. There was blood, a bullet hole, and the mechanism of death was a pistol-whipping. You had your suspicions, but nothing ever came of them. That much,” he added with an upraised forefinger, “is what you gave my predecessors. I doubt things were any different then than they are now, so I’m assuming you kept as much or more to yourselves.”

“The gun disappeared at the time,” Gunther admitted, “and now it’s resurfaced. That’s what got me going again.”

Katz was clearly interested. “When? How?”

“The hostage negotiation that went bad. Same gun. It’d been hidden under some floorboards all this time, discovered by accident, and put on the secondhand market. That’s how Matt Purvis got hold of it. It still had some blood on it. We got lucky—the ballistics matched.”

“You do a DNA match as well?” Stanley asked, all management woes behind him now.

“We ran a profile, but no hit.”

“So, you’re stuck again?”

“Maybe, but I’d like to try a long shot.”

Katz smiled broadly. “Which is why you just fed me all that. I better be able to use it.”

Joe nodded. “Oh, yeah, and I’ll follow it up with some more, within reason, but for the moment, what I’d like to do is have a picture run in the paper of a woman who may have been connected to it all.”

“Who?”

Joe figured that the name alone would be enough. “Hannah Shriver.”

Katz whistled. “No shit? The Tunbridge woman?”

“We don’t know how or why—to be honest, we don’t even know
if
—but I’m thinking she played a part in the Oberfeldt case, although maybe just a small one. If we could find out what that was, it might open things up.”

Katz nodded, leaned forward, and pushed the intercom button on his phone. “Get a reporter in here,” he ordered. “Preferably Alice, if she’s around.”

He sat back and gave Joe an appraising look. “You got yourself a deal.”

Chapter 18

T
he next few days were filled with forging through a thickening blizzard of information. Between the search for photographs from the fair, responses to Hannah’s picture in the paper, and collecting and collating reams of witness interviews concerning both Hannah’s death and Pete Shea’s, Joe had all he could do to find a few hours’ sleep. Now it was he and not Gail who had a hard time returning phone calls or e-mails. In truth, her entire campaign all but slipped from his mind as he spent most of his time in the Municipal Building’s basement room, like a commander under attack, hoping for a break not just in the relatively new Shriver case but also in the one that had become as intimate as a lifelong ailment.

And that wasn’t all. Reliving Ellen’s death, hearing his mother’s take on why he’d remained single and childless, and comparing it to Gail’s current disappearance into her campaign had made him ponder his past—even amid the present chaos—and consider what might be waiting in the near future.

If Stanley Katz was right about Gail, and she did pull that rabbit out of the hat, then Joe would soon be involved with a high-profile politician. Not because being a state senator amounted to that much—Vermont had a citizen legislature that worked for only a few months of every year—but because Gail would treat her new post as the proverbial bully pulpit. Becoming a senator would mark only the beginning of her ambitions. She wouldn’t be lost to him forever, as Ellen had been, but he sensed that they might undergo a permanent change.

For that alone, he saw his present workload as a blessed distraction.

The biggest logjam was the photographs of the Tunbridge Fair. Considering both the popularity of the event and the egregious nature of the crime, the publicity surrounding Hannah’s death had become statewide and constant, creating yet another pull on Joe’s time in terms of daily press conferences and endless phone calls in which nothing new was ever revealed.

Pictures came in by mail, were dropped off in person, or arrived via e-mail, and covered the gamut from professional near masterpieces to barely discernible snapshots. Sizes varied, too. The standard four-by-fives and five-by-sevens made up the majority, but added to them in surprising numbers were tiny thumbnail shots in the form of miniature stickers, produced, Joe was told by a savvy Lester Spinney, by the latest teenage rage of point-and-shoot camera. But however they came, and in whatever format, there were thousands of them, each one demanding the utmost scrutiny.

The response to Hannah’s picture in the
Reformer
was an entirely different matter. Joe had made sure that the photograph was roughly contemporary to the era in question, but perhaps as a result, both the command center and the
Reformer
’s letters-to-the-editor column were quickly filled with any number of reactions—as much to her as to other young women who might have simply resembled her. To a startlingly large number of people—despite her name being printed right under the photograph—the smiling girl in the quaint hairdo served as a substitute for loved ones now long gone.

It wasn’t all for naught, however. As the days slipped by, Joe began to construct a mental home movie of Hannah Shriver as she practiced her newly learned profession, found an apartment on Main Street, and began integrating herself into the community after her two years of schooling in Burlington.

Lawyers, friends, a landlord, a bartender, an old lover—all began adding their own brushstrokes to the portrait begun during Joe’s conversation with Natalie Shriver. What emerged was a more detailed version of the elderly woman’s recollection, given more immediacy by many of the portrayers’ having been of Hannah’s age.

Lou Boxer was one of them. A quiet, serious, bespectacled man given to extensive pauses between sentences, he came by Joe’s office one afternoon and confessed in a muted monotone that he and Hannah had once been lovers.

“Was this when she was working as a court reporter?” Gunther asked after offering him a seat and a cup of coffee.

Boxer turned down the coffee as he settled into a chair. “Yes. Not that she did that full-time.”

“Oh?” Joe asked.

“She was a freelancer. Little tough to find jobs right out of the starting gate.”

“That’s reasonable,” Joe conceded. “Did things improve over time?”

“A little. Never to the point where she made a living.”

“How did she pay the rent, then?”

Boxer smiled wistfully. “She got people to help her out. Like me. Hannah could be persuasive.”

Gunther raised his eyebrows. “Interesting comment. Tough relationship?”

The other man considered that before asking, “Aren’t those two words synonymous?” He fell silent for a moment and studied the ceiling in contemplation. Joe let him think.

“Those were different times,” he finally said. “We worked harder at being cool and detached, trying not to be possessive.”

“She had other lovers.”

Boxer nodded silently.

“You know who any of them were?”

“Oh, sure. That was part of it, wearing those kinds of things on your sleeve. Very countercultural.”

“Sounds like you’ve gotten a little cynical over time.”

Boxer sighed. “I shop at the Co-op, protest against the government, and always vote pro-union. Let’s just say I’ve either gotten wiser or too tired to cover much beyond the basics. Right now all the posturing we indulged in sounds as self-focused as anything the movie stars do in the tabloids.”

Gunther moved on. “How soon after Hannah hit town did you two hook up?” He pulled a calendar from a file of the right year. “Maybe this’ll help nail down the date, more or less. Anytime around then?” He flipped to the month Oberfeldt was attacked.

Lou Boxer glanced at the calendar. “About two weeks earlier.”

“Pretty good memory.”

Boxer reacted to Joe’s doubtful tone. “Not really. I celebrated my birthday with her shortly after we met.” He reached out and tapped a date with his finger. “Then.”

One day after the attack. “You recall how she was that day, since it’s clear in your mind?”

Boxer looked at him quizzically. “How she was? Meaning what?”

“Was she nervous, distracted, in any way unlike herself?”

Again the nostalgic smile. “No. What little I do remember is pretty pleasant.”

Joe changed his approach. “Do you remember reading about an assault on a storekeeper around that time?”

“Yeah, vaguely. That may be because it’s been in the news, though. You guys are supposed to be looking into it again. Is that connected to Hannah?”

Gunther answered him truthfully. “We don’t know, but we’re looking at everything right now. Did you and she ever talk about that case?”

Boxer shrugged. “God, I don’t know. Some things I remember better than others—chitchat isn’t one of them.”

Which at least meant it hadn’t been a major topic of conversation. “All right,” Joe continued. “Let’s step back a little, then. How long were you two an item?”

“About half a year, give or take.”

“Okay. So you met, you hit it off, had some good times, did all the right cool things. Then what? A falling-out? What changed?”

“She did,” Boxer answered, without hesitation for once.

“Could you elaborate?”

The other man removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’d fallen in love with her. I knew it was a bad idea. Hannah was a free spirit—
there’s
a phrase from the old days. Groovy. Now I guess I’d call her flighty and selfish and maybe a little cruel. It was pretty much her way or the highway. At the time, I saw it as feminism and free expression and all that other crap, but it was what it was. In hindsight, or maybe just because I
am
more cynical now, I don’t think she ever gave a damn about the feminist cause, or any other cause, for that matter—just herself.”

“So, she gave you your walking papers because she wasn’t ready to commit?” Joe asked.

But Lou Boxer was clearly still struggling to define a specifically sharper memory. “Partly. There was something else, too. She wouldn’t own up to it, but it was almost like I was suddenly superfluous—like she’d caught a sudden gust in her sails and I was just slowing her down.”

“Suddenly?” Joe repeated, struck by the word. “What do you think happened?”

Boxer replaced his glasses carefully. “I don’t know. She dumped the whole court reporter thing right afterward, so maybe it was tied to that.”

“After two years of study,” Gunther mused, remembering Natalie’s mention of the same thing. “Makes you wonder why. She come into some money?”

“She didn’t tell me one way or the other. I didn’t get hit for any more financial favors, but I assumed that was because I was old news.”

“So, she wasn’t living high on the hog that you could tell?”

“She might’ve been,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have known. To be honest, I took this pretty hard. Wandered off to lick my wounds. Lived in California for a couple of years. I never heard from her again. Not,” he added ruefully, “until I saw that photo in the paper. That was a real shock.”

Gunther let a moment of silence pass before asking, “You mentioned you knew her other lovers, or at least some of them. You remember any names?”

Lou Boxer scratched his forehead. “So long ago. One of them was named Travis. I never knew his last name. Another . . . Jesus . . . Bob comes to mind. That’s useful, right?” He sighed. “I’m not going to be much help there. They were faces to me, you know? Rivals. I didn’t want to know who they were. It was bad enough they existed. I was never as cool as I pretended. Just a middle-class kid undercover.”

Gunther nodded sympathetically, but with visions of Hannah and Pete Shea and Katie Clark and even himself as a young man in his head, he was thinking that there was quite a bit of pretense taking place back then.

Slowly and sporadically, another piece of the puzzle that was Hannah Shriver fell into place from her incoming transcriptions. Task force members started uncovering old documents from the court archives, and a couple of law offices pitched in with yellowed depositions and other interviews. It was haphazard and erratic, done by the private lawyers only in the hope that it might curry favor with law enforcement, but even so, it resulted in a tremendous pile of reading. Transcribed conversations average one page per minute of dialogue, depending on how they’re typed up, and every “uh,” “ah,” and “you know” is faithfully and excruciatingly recorded. Staring at page after page of vacuous meanderings, baffling phrasing, and—in Hannah’s case—a stunning number of typos and misspellings helped Joe understand why she might have left the business so quickly, and why she’d been hard up for work while she lasted. Considering many of her efforts as professionally produced documents almost seemed ludicrous at times.

On one such day of overexposure, he was leaning back in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his aching eyes, when Sammie Martens walked in from downstairs. Finding the windowless basement claustrophobic, Joe had temporarily fled to his top-floor office.

“Got something that may be a total dead end,” she told him, dropping yet another transcript onto his desk. “But the date in it is the same night Oberfeldt got whacked. I figured you’d want to see it. I marked the section.”

Joe straightened and picked up the document, leafing to the page with the yellow Post-it note.

Sam continued speaking. “It’s a deposition Hannah typed from someone named Sandy Conant. He was a coworker of a guy named Mitch Blood, whose wife claimed she was being abused and had been beaten in front of Conant, making him a witness. Problem was, Sandy claimed ignorance and had an alibi to back him up. He was collecting his mail in the lobby at exactly the same time the wife said she was being clobbered across town.”

Joe focused on the words before him.

MR. CONANT: I pick up my mail same time every day, right after I get off work. 9:30 on the dot. Been doin’ it for years.

MR. JENNINGS: I understand that, Sandy, but without corroboration, we only have your word. Did any . . .

MR. CONANT: Corra-what?

MR. JENNINGS: We need to know if anyone saw you doing that. Getting your mail.

MR. CONANT: T. J. was there. Came in just as I opened the box.

MR. JENNINGS: Does T. J. have a last name?

MR. CONANT: Sure. Everybody does.

MR. JENNINGS: And what is T. J.’s last name?

MR. CONANT: Ralpher. T. J. Ralpher. I have no clue what the T. J.’s for, so don’t bother askin’.

MR. JENNINGS: Did you and T. J. talk?

MR. CONANT: Nope. We’re not like friends. He said hi, I said hi. We live in the same building. That’s about it, but he could vouch for me. I don’t know shit about Mitch and that cow he calls a wife. Never seen him lay a hand on her, and if she says different, well, then she’s full of it.

MR. JENNINGS: Thank you, Sandy. I think we get the idea.

Joe turned the page, but Sam interrupted him. “That’s really it. A little more about where he worked and what he knew of Mitch’s marital problems, and then it’s over.”

Gunther closed the transcript and returned it. “Any alarms go off?”

She shrugged. “I called the lawyer who gave us this—Jennings. He didn’t remember the case, but he had one of his slaves look it up for me. It never went anywhere. I guess it all hinged on Conant being a witness, so once he faded, that was it.”

“You look up T. J. Ralpher?” Joe asked. “That rings a faint bell.”

Sam equivocated. “I ran him by VCIC on the computer. Some ancient stuff, dating to back then. After that, nothing. Like I said, I only showed you this because of the timing.”