The Surrogate Thief (14 page)

He leaned back, stretched his shoulders, and took a deep breath, smiling at her with his head slightly tilted to one side. “Impressive, huh? Not the kind of thing I’d admit to another cop, but that’s how I feel. Leaves me kind of empty-handed, in more ways than one.”

There was some noise at the front door, and five men entered, talking loudly to one another. Evelyn straightened and glanced at them, assessing whether they would head to the jukebox, the pool table, the bathroom, or the bar, and then returned to Joe as they split up and did all but the last for the time being.

“Let me get this straight,” she said, speaking more quickly now that their quiet was about to end for the evening. “For thirty-plus years, nothing happens with this case; then you get lucky, find out where Norm’s been hanging his hat, but as soon as you get here, he winds up dead. Only now you’re not so sure he was the right guy to begin with. Is that it in a nutshell?”

“Pretty much.”

“You don’t think there’s something weird about that?”

He looked at her seriously. “I most certainly do.”

“What’re you going to do about it?”

He didn’t respond. He just kept his eyes on hers.

“Right,” she finally said. “You’ve been sitting here for two days waiting to talk to me.”

“Hoping to talk to you,” he corrected her. “I know the spot you’re in—the credibility you need to keep working here. I’m not asking to jam you up.”

She took a couple of steps backward. The men were beginning to sort out their priorities and were heading for the bar.

“How the hell have you stayed a cop for so long?” she asked. “Don’t other cops drive you crazy?”

He smiled and shrugged instead of answering. That wasn’t something he wanted to try explaining.

Turning away to tend to her other customers, she glanced over her shoulder and said, “I get off at two this morning. Meet me at the end of the pier directly opposite.” She pointed at the bar’s entrance.

“Thanks,” he said, watching her shift gears and fire off a one-liner as she approached the first man to grab a stool.

Gloucester was still a busy town at two in the morning, at least in comparison to Brattleboro, so Joe sat thoroughly entertained on a strategically placed bench at the end of the designated pier. Across the narrow harbor, what he thought might be a packing plant was still open full throttle, its lights blazing and its mechanical heart throbbing deep within. On Main Street, traffic flowed periodically, often accompanied by boisterous shouts and the occasional horn blast. And in the distance, across the decks of several bobbing fishing boats, he could make out a man still working on some piece of equipment by the harsh light of a halogen lamp, the music from his softly playing radio barely audible on the gentle waves of a surprisingly warm, salt-flavored breeze.

And yet, there was quiet amid the groaning of docked vessels and the slap of taut lines against unseen masts—even an unsettling sense of isolation. It wasn’t hard to imagine how easily a man could be waylaid, not a hundred yards from where Joe was sitting, and have a knife silently slipped into the center of his heart.

She emerged from the neon lights like a shadow detaching from the night, at first more a sensation than an actual outline, her footsteps covered by the soft lapping of the tide against the pier’s pilings.

He smiled to himself as she drew into the feeble glow from across the water. Out of the bar’s embrace, she was dressed in light sweatpants and a shirt, her physical attributes no longer available to any possibly good tipper.

She sat next to him without ceremony or greeting, stretching her legs out before her and sighing deeply. “God, it smells good out here, especially after eight hours in that dump.”

“You come out here often after work?”

“Sometimes. It’s a mood thing. There’re nights it gives me the creeps just to walk from the front door to my car. Lot of strange people in this town.”

“How was it tonight?”

She glanced at him, her expression covered by the darkness. “That’s right. You left early. It was okay—average.”

“I couldn’t take two nights of straight Cokes in a row.”

She liked that. “You on the wagon? Must be tough hanging out in a bar.”

“No,” he admitted. “I just gave it up. I never drank much to begin with, but I finally got tired of seeing what it did to people.”

She grunted softly. “Christ. Got that right.”

“You hungry?” he asked suddenly, offering her a small paper bag.

She straightened quickly and turned toward him, accepting the gift. “You kidding? Starving. I usually go to the diner after I get off.”

He smiled. “I know—lobster roll and a strawberry shake. I heard you trading eating habits with your gin rummy partner.”

Surprised, she tore open the bag and reached inside. “I don’t believe it. That’s right.” He saw the flash of her teeth in the gloom as she laughed. “You are too much. Thanks.”

Without further ceremony, she took a large bite and settled back onto the bench, contentedly chewing, her eyes on the stars overhead. “God,” she finally said, “that hits the spot. You want a bite?”

He held up his hand. “No, I’m fine. I might take a hit off the milkshake later, though. Big sweet tooth.”

“Oh, right,” she responded, diving into the bag again and extracting the waxy cup. “Take the first sip.”

He did so as she ate more of her meal, and then placed the cup beside her. “How long have you been working there?”

“A few years—eight, maybe. Time flies. It’s not my only job. I’m a freelance typist, too, and I do the books for the day-care center at the end of my block. I tend bar mostly for social reasons. It gets me out of the house without worrying about dates and all the mess that goes with them.”

“The bar as safety net?”

She spoke with her mouth full. “Yeah. That sounds pathetic, doesn’t it?”

“Maybe a little lonely.” He hesitated and then took a gamble, adding, “I saw the small exchange between you and the guy with the hair and tattoos and the expensive taste in Scotch.”

She stopped chewing abruptly, and he worried that he’d overstepped. But finally, all she did was nod several times before swallowing.

“You’re pretty observant.” She sighed again, this time less contentedly. “There’s nothing going on there, needless to say. That’s just Kenny being Kenny. And me being a total patsy, basically a wannabe lapdog.”

“That’s a little harsh,” he countered.

“Yeah, well, maybe,” she agreed. “The flip side to my being a bartender, I guess, is that I get to watch everyone doing what I don’t have the guts to do myself. I can act superior and pretend that so-and-so’s looking bad, and such-and-such is going to regret waking up next to
her
in the morning, but who’s kidding who, you know? I’d trade places with any one of them in a shot. The closest I get is slipping Kenny a freebie to make him look good to his buddies.”

“That might not be so dumb.”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t I know it. I have a twenty-year-old daughter. Been there, done that, lost the T-shirt doin’ it.”

He joined her laughing, shaking his head at her unassuming directness. He liked this woman a lot.

She took a deep draw from the milkshake’s straw and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “So,” she announced, redirecting the conversation, “Lonely Norm Chesbro. Now, there’s a man who makes me look good.”

“Pretty solitary?”

“The loner’s loner. Used to sit on the last stool, right up against the wall, and keep completely to himself, every night of the week. Never said a word to anyone but me, and most of the time that was just to order another one.”

“Most of the time?”

“I gave it a shot,” she admitted, “like I do sooner or later with all the regulars. Open them up a little, make them feel more at home. All I got was his first name.”

“And nobody ever joined him?”

“They’d try. People from work would find him there and try to make conversation. He wouldn’t have anything to do with them. It wasn’t hostile,” she added quickly. “It was pretty clear he was just really unhappy and wanted to be left alone, so in the end, that’s just what we did. Who was he, anyway?”

“Who knows?” Joe admitted. “Foster child, early drinker. He was a thief when I knew him, which is why we thought he might’ve had something to do with this homicide, because of the money. But after he disappeared, I have no idea what became of him. I did find a woman he lived with for a while, but thirty years is a long time, and there’s no telling what he was up to.”

“I would say, nothing,” Evelyn said quietly.

“Because of the way he was with you?”

She turned toward him. “This’ll sound pretty stupid, but I think he had a broken heart. It’s hard to get motivated when you have one of those.”

For no reason he could determine, he took her hand in his. “That the voice of experience?”

He could just make out her sad smile. “I mentioned the twenty-year-old.” She squeezed his fingers. “Her father’s long gone.”

“Right. I’m sorry.”

She retrieved her hand to take another bite of lobster roll. “So was I, for a long time.”

He nodded, taking her cue to move on. “Tell me about the last night you saw Norm.”

“There was a stag party going. Having seen the place, you can guess how those go. They were holding it in the back of the room, around the pool table, and had the usual high jinks. You know, strippers, lots of screaming and yelling. Place was packed.”

“Lot of new faces?”

“Oh, sure. People come off the street when they hear all the noise.”

Joe stared off into the surrounding night, filling his brain with an image of the bar’s layout. “That would mean Norm had his back to it all, if he was on his usual stool.”

“And never turned around once. As if the whole thing wasn’t happening. Not that I blamed him.”

“You stayed behind the bar?”

“You bet. If ever that’s my safety zone, it’s during one of those parties. The girls do whatever they can to keep things going, including doing a little servicing in the bathroom afterward. It’s no time for me to go wandering around the room.”

“So, you had a clear view of the party in the back, Norm pretty nearby, and the comings and goings through the door.” It wasn’t phrased as a question.

Evelyn nodded thoughtfully, seeing where he was going. “Yeah, although Norm, as usual, might as well have been invisible.”

“That’s okay,” Joe reassured her. “It’s not him I want you to remember. Think back and tell me: Of all the people in motion, regulars and not, does anyone stick out who either approached Norm or seemed to take interest in him?”

She thought for a while, her eyes focused on some invisible middle space, and then she smiled broadly. “Yeah, there was one. As he was ordering, a guy asked me if that was Norm Chesbro. I didn’t think of it till now, ’cause that was the beginning and the end of it, and like I said, it was super busy.” Her eyes widened, and she put her hand on Joe’s knee. “Is that who killed him?”

He smiled and this time left her hand alone. “Could be. Can you describe him?”

“About my height,” she answered quickly, the trained observer brought to life. “Medium build. Light brown hair and a mustache, no beard. What else? Let’s see . . . Oh, there was a scar on the hand that handed me the cash. Left hand, so he was a lefty, probably. The scar ran right along the back, dead center.” She paused. “Is that enough?”

“That’s pretty good,” he admitted. In fact, better than he’d hoped. “Do you remember seeing him again that night?”

“I didn’t serve him again. I know that, which is kind of unusual.” She thought for a while longer. “No. He might’ve been there—for hours, even—I just don’t know.”

“How ’bout what time you served him?”

She straightened at first, as if to tell him how unlikely her memory of that would be, when she suddenly stopped short. “It was late. God, this is weird. I can see it like it was a photograph. I can see his face looking at me, and behind him, one of the strippers doing her whipped cream thing. They never get into that until they’re almost out of tricks. The reason I remember is because at the time, only the guy with the mustache and Norm were facing me. Every other head in the whole place was turned toward the stripper. I remember thinking that was like noticing the only face at a tennis game not following the ball going back and forth. I saw that in a movie once. Never forgot it.”

A small silence grew between them as Joe ran out of questions. “Well,” he finally said. “I guess that’s it, then.”

“What happens now?”

“Nothing too exciting,” he allowed. “I pass that description on to the locals, leaving your name out of it, of course, and then I go home—assuming they’ve never heard of Mr. Mustache—and I begin to put the computers to work. The scar will be handy, and the left-handedness. They collect details like that when they arrest people, exactly for situations like this.”

“Unless he’s never been arrested,” she suggested.

He stood up. “Well, there’s that. But at least we can try. Plus, the PD here and the state trooper assigned to the case will be working on it. Maybe one of us’ll get lucky.”

She rose with him, crumpling the small paper bag and dropping it into a trash barrel beside the bench.

They stood facing each other awkwardly for a moment. “So, it’s back to Vermont,” she concluded for him.

“Yeah.”

“Joe Gunther.”

He nodded. “I never did get your last name, Evelyn.”

She stretched up on her toes and kissed him lightly, her hand on his cheek. Her warmth mingled with the cool night air.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, stepping back. “Take care of yourself, okay?”

“I promise,” he replied. “You, too.”

And he watched her vanish as she’d appeared, into the dark.

Chapter 14

T
he noise reminded him of the bar in Gloucester, except that, in every sense, this was as far from there as Joe could imagine.

People were happy, even ecstatic. It was now September, and Gail had just won her primary race. Two more months, and the die would be cast on whether she or Ed Parker got to hang their hat in the state senate for a couple of years.

Joe stood against the wall in Gail’s converted living room, a plastic glass of cranberry juice in his hand. The furniture and computers and phones and faxes and all the rest had been shoved to one side, and everyone was milling around, exchanging hugs and talking loudly. “Send Gail to the Senate” signs were hung on the walls around the room, as they’d been adorning car bumpers and yard signs across the county for the past few months, although here they were accompanied by a few hand-lettered “Send Ed to Bed” ones as well.

“What do you think?”

Joe glanced down to his side. Susan Raffner, the epitome of the satisfied campaign manager, was sharing the wall beside him, watching the crowd like a pleased raptor.

“It’s a little odd,” he answered honestly. “I am happy for her.”

Susan looked up at him silently for a moment. “That’s good,” she said. “You should be. She worked hard to get here.”

He didn’t respond. That was archetypal Susan: hard as nails, as partisan as they came, and the kind of friend he didn’t think they made outside the Marine Corps.

“How are you doing?” she asked.

He smiled. And there was her saving grace. Once she’d established where she stood, she was all heart. He knew the question wasn’t frivolous.

“Part of me’s doing wonderfully,” he told her. “The rest . . .” he left the sentence unfinished.

She tilted her chin toward the milling crowd. “This have anything to do with that?”

“Ah, yes. The political-widow syndrome, with a gender twist. I guess a little,” he conceded. “We sure don’t have the private time we once did, and I miss that. But there’s something different gnawing at me, too—job related.”

“That old case I read about in the paper?” she asked.

He nodded, still regretful that he hadn’t gotten out ahead of that story. He’d never contacted Ted McDonald even after the news had broken on the radio, nor had he gone beyond a traditionally bland general press release when the
Brattleboro Reformer
had followed up soon thereafter. “Yup. Lot of baggage tied into that.”

He didn’t elaborate, and she didn’t push.

“Look,” she told him. “I can’t help you there, but I’ve been in politics a while. This’ll settle down. You’ll get her back. Right now, she’s like an outnumbered combat pilot in a dogfight—all focus and adrenaline. What really counts doesn’t matter, and what doesn’t matter ruins her whole day. There’s no perspective beyond the here and now. They all snap out of it after they win.” She glanced at him one last time before heading back into circulation, adding with the grim determination of someone hoping a prayer will overcome reality, “And she will win.”

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 gentleness 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.