The Surrogate Thief (17 page)

There was a moment’s silence as everyone considered the point.

“You can hit the lights, Ron. Thanks.”

They all blinked in the sudden brightness as Joe continued. “Okay, for the time being, I’d like you to just tuck this away—an old anomaly needing closer scrutiny. Our primary job right now is the murder of Hannah Shriver. If nothing else, it’s a spanking new case, which should help. Let’s not forget, though, that she was roughly the same age as Katie and Pete; she lived here the same time they did; she died pretty close to when they both died, and precisely the same way Shea did. In addition, for what it’s worth, Willy’s pretty sure her house was searched before we got to it. We have no idea what may have been taken, if anything, but whoever did it was thorough and tried covering their tracks.”

He rose from where he’d been sitting on the edge of a desk and began pacing before them. “My proposal is that we divide and conquer, concentrating on Hannah now and on Hannah thirty-two years ago, ’cause if I’m right about there being a connection between these three people, Hannah is officially the wild card. It’s looking like Pete was framed for the murder; Katie was definitely his girlfriend, helped ditch the incriminating gun, and might’ve been killed because she knew of his whereabouts. But Hannah? Who knows? If we really dig into her history, both recent and past, my instinct tells me we’ll find the common denominator that pulls everything together.”

He motioned to Sam, who stood up and began distributing packets.

“This is what we’ve got so far. You’ll find photos, crime scene sketches, witness interviews, an inventory of Hannah’s house contents, and anything else we thought might be helpful. The top sheet outlines everyone’s assignments and responsibilities. As you proceed with your separate investigations, there will be daily briefings down here at four p.m. unless or until an alternate time is announced. I would like to stress that if any of you uncovers something clearly fitting someone else’s job description, please make sure that person gets the information ASAP. Sam will be the designated gathering point for everything, and she will be apprising me on a continual basis. Also, if I’m unavailable, she will run the daily briefings. Are there any questions?”

He waited for a slow count of five while they each studied the cover sheets before them, no doubt judging their own ranking in the perceived pecking order of assignments—territoriality being the incurable rash that it is—before he concluded, “All right. Thank you all, and best of luck.”

Chapter 17

I
n fact, Joe was as guilty of being as territorial as anyone else. The assignment he chose for himself—after scrutinizing the employment timeline that Willy had reconstructed from Hannah Shriver’s files and financial records—was to analyze her activities at the time he’d been trying to solve the Oberfeldt robbery-assault. Despite his statement at the meeting that Hannah’s murder should take priority over all else, there was no doubt in his mind that every aspect of this recent mayhem was rooted in that ancient case.

Willy’s timeline was by no means complete. Some of the documents removed from Hannah’s place were helpful—old tax returns, copies of résumés where she’d outlined her professional history, and a few pieces of correspondence. But Willy had shown his mettle by also digging into the town clerks’ offices in both Townshend and Brattleboro, checking tax records, property transfers, and the like, and filling in a few additional holes.

To Joe’s relief, however, the few remaining gaps fell outside his scope of interest, if just barely. At the time of Klaus Oberfeldt’s assault, Hannah Shriver was working as a self-employed court reporter, although by six months later, she’d apparently moved on to something else as yet unknown.

His biggest problem was in how to proceed. So much elapsed time was going to be difficult to backtrack. Hannah’s contemporaries would be middle-aged at best, possibly far afield, and probably have only vague and faulty memories of her. And that was if he found them. He’d brightened when he first heard of the court reporter job, hoping that such a connection to the judiciary, however vague, might hold some promise, but a trip to the county court building revealed that reporters’ names weren’t indexed to the jobs they’d completed, and that locating any such past efforts would require a case-by-case review of everything in the archives. An onerous effort, which, even if successful, still wouldn’t address any jobs she might have done for the various private attorneys across town. The term “court reporter,” after all, wasn’t restricted to the people Willy alluded to when he’d conjured up his vision of Perry Mason. Reporters functioned in all sorts of capacities, transcribing depositions, sworn statements, and any conversations where the participants wanted a full and accurate rendering of what was said. The fruits of their labors weren’t always filed with the court.

If Hannah Shriver had been killed because of something related to her job, it was going to be a neat trick finding it.

There was another possible avenue. At the Tunbridge Fair, Nick Letourneau had mentioned that Hannah had a mother residing just outside Brattleboro, who hadn’t yet been approached for questioning. Generally, Joe liked having such conversations with more facts in hand, but it was clearly time to start hoping for a little dumb luck.

Natalie Shriver lived at Pleasant Acres, a sprawling complex south of town. Part home for the elderly, part straightforward nursing home, it was the only such facility of its size in this entire corner of Vermont, its brethren having been mauled to death in the never-ending and always changing struggle among the powers of Medicare, Medi-caid, the health care industry, and the state.

Mrs. Shriver, he happily discovered, lived in the independent wing, meaning, he hoped, that she might be more helpful than he’d feared upon first learning of her address. On the other hand, he knew that she’d learned of her daughter’s death by now, and while he’d never had children, Joe had witnessed the grief of parents outliving their youngsters. Such misery was hard to imagine, even after his own experience with loss.

A cheery LPN escorted him down a series of hallways, eventually delivering him to the open doorway of a large, bright room overlooking a gently sloping lawn and some manicured trees. Sitting by the large window, looking out, was a small, slight woman with a full head of white hair, who turned toward them as the nurse gently knocked on the door.

“Natalie?” she said gently. “You have a visitor.”

The old woman merely watched them with a vacant expression.

“It’s okay,” the nurse whispered to Joe. “Just sit with her awhile. She needs the company.”

In a louder voice she added, “Okay. I’ll leave you two alone. If you need me, you know how to get me coming.”

Joe waited until she’d left before entering the room a few feet. “Mrs. Shriver? Is it okay that I’m here? I don’t want to disturb you. I know you’ve just been through a huge shock.”

Natalie Shriver tiredly waved a hand toward the other chair by the window. “It’s all right.”

Joe sat opposite her. “I’m a police officer, Mrs. Shriver.”

“Natalie. Everyone calls me that.”

“Okay. I’m Joe. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about Hannah.”

Natalie’s tired, pale blue eyes studied him as if searching for salvation. “That would be fine.”

“Before we start, is there anything I can get for you, or would you like to ask me about what happened?”

She blinked a couple of times, he thought perhaps translating his words into something she could decipher.

“No.”

“Okay. If you don’t mind, then, I’ll be direct, only because I don’t want to drag this out more than I have to. But if anything I say upsets you, or if you want to stop at any time, please just tell me. Times like these are tough enough without people like me making them worse.”

She continued looking at him, and finally acknowledged his speech with a barely perceptible nod.

“All right,” he began, unsure of what to make of her silence. “Do you know of anyone who might’ve wished Hannah harm?”

“No.” The answer came after a moment’s reflection.

“Did she mention that she was involved in anything or with anyone that might’ve been even slightly risky, or which might’ve caused you concern?”

“No.”

“How about just the reverse? Did she seem upbeat lately, perhaps excited about something good coming her way?”

“No.”

Gunther paused to rethink his approach. There was nothing hostile in the woman’s responses. Her voice was thin but steady, her expression open.

It dawned on him where he might have gone wrong. “When was the last time you saw your daughter, Natalie?”

This time there was a slight frown. “I’m not sure. I think it was about five years ago, but it might have been longer. Time isn’t quite the same when you reach my age.”

Joe couldn’t resist smiling a little. God knows, time had been a little confusing to him, too, lately. “I may be gaining on you, then,” he said. “If it’s not too personal, were the two of you not close, or was your daughter just very busy?”

This time the small smile was hers. “You have a nice way of putting things. Do you have any children?”

Whether it was the directness he already sensed in this woman, or simply a decision to set the mood by opening up first, he chose to answer her honestly.

“I wish I did. I wanted to, a long time ago, but my wife died of cancer and I never had the heart to try anything like that again.”

Natalie nodded thoughtfully and gazed out at the peaceful sylvan view. “That’s the struggle, isn’t it? Not to have kids and to mourn their absence, or to have them and be forever concerned about their fate.”

Joe stared at her. A startling aspect of this job was how often people defied expectations. Before coming here, he’d worried about this person being mentally capable. Now he knew he was dealing with someone whose brains and verbal competence were several notches above the norm. He was grateful he’d broken the ice as he had.

“Was Hannah a challenge along those lines?” he asked.

“She was willful, independent, stubborn, and proud,” her mother told him. “All the makings of a corporate tyrant. Unfortunately, she was also lazy, hedonistic, impatient, and arrogant.”

Gunther felt a small chill. He didn’t doubt the portrait’s accuracy, but he would have expected it from someone other than the subject’s own mother. It was almost clinically detached. The image of grief-stricken parent was undergoing serious revision.

“Sounds like she might’ve been a handful now and then,” he commented blandly.

Natalie shifted her gaze outdoors once more. “I suppose so. It’s a shame you never had children, in a way. They’re quite fascinating to watch. You can learn a great deal. The concept that they mimic their elders is quite hopeless, obviously, beyond certain speech patterns and behavioral twitches. Fundamentally, they set their own course pretty early on, which I think is why so many parents become baffled and anxious when the child acts so wholly differently from their memories of themselves.”

She stopped. Joe waited, unsure if that constituted her answer in full, or if she was warming up to an entire treatise on children as lab rats.

But she was done.

“You’ve given it a lot of thought. I’m guessing you’ve had training in some of this,” he suggested, by now ready for anything.

“I was a psychologist at Tufts for thirty years,” she answered. “Research work only, of course,” she added.

Of course, he thought. Probably a good thing, too—might have cranked up the suicide rate otherwise.

“Did her father play much of a role in her upbringing?” he asked.

She eyed him appreciatively. “You are good. Were we divorced? Yes, early on. His name was Howard, and after we broke up, he moved to Vermont—Norwich. Hannah spent most of her summers with him. After I got her back each fall, it would take me weeks to undo the bad habits he let fester.”

Joe opened his mouth to ask the next obvious question, but she anticipated him with, “He died almost fifteen years ago.”

He nodded and pretended to consult the notebook he’d pulled from his pocket. At least he was no longer concerned about her falling apart. “She had a lot of different jobs over the years. Why was that, do you think?”

Natalie sighed—not impatiently, Joe chose to think, but perhaps with a touch of melancholy. “Hannah was one of the perpetually discontent. She aspired to wealth, respect, and being admired, but she never worked hard enough to earn them. In purely structural terms, you might say she was too eager to operate at the uppermost tiers to bother constructing the scaffolding that could have gotten her there. She never seemed to either understand that dichotomy or to stop hoping that some shortcut might render it moot.”

“Did she ever marry or have any boyfriends?”

She looked straight at him. “Same disability with the same results. No one ever measured up. She tried enough times, but again, with absurd expectations.”

“Anyone recently that you know of?”

“I knew little of her life during these last ten years. She grew distant. Perhaps my increasing lack of vitality proved discouraging—too much of a reminder of what she would be facing soon herself.”

Joe could have thought of a variety of other, more plausible reasons for Hannah to distance herself from Mom. Lack of warmth, for one. For that matter, Joe was beginning to think that adding vitality to the woman before him might be a horrible idea.

“When I was looking into Hannah’s background,” he continued, “I noticed she worked as a court reporter for a period. Do you recall that?”

Natalie Shriver nodded slowly. “About thirty years ago. She went to Champlain College in Burlington for training. Took her a couple of years or more. I was quite impressed at the time. I didn’t understand the interest, but she seemed very taken with it. Perhaps she thought it would lead to an easy entrance to the legal world and all that might entail. I never asked much about it, because I was afraid she’d take such questioning as interference and quit.”

“But she did quit, didn’t she, not long after starting?”

The woman’s brow furrowed. “Yes. I never understood that. It was an odd period in her life, generally—I suppose as it was for so many her age. Society in a turmoil, the country running without a rudder. Her behavior was quite erratic.”

“Can you go into a little more detail?” Gunther asked, at this point milking the professional viewpoint for all it was worth.

“Not really. One of her patterns then was to be quite secretive. At one moment she was working as a court reporter, complaining as usual about how difficult it was to get ahead, and the next she was footloose and fancy-free, not working at all and living like a bohemian. That lasted about a year before she settled down to yet another job.”

Joe’s interest sharpened at this. “How did she support herself during that year?”

“I don’t know. I assumed she’d either saved up or done something lucrative enough to once again short-circuit her potential.”

“But in either case, she acted as if she’d come into some money?”

“I don’t know that I’d put it that way, but she had no job that I knew of.” She sighed once more. When next she spoke, her voice was higher, more distressed. “Poor child never seemed able to get a grip. Do you know what I mean?”

She’d closed one narrow, angular hand into a fist and was looking at him again in that pleading way he’d mistaken for heartbreak at the start.

But now, to his own surprise, he was no longer so sure he was wrong. In her detached, academic way, Natalie Shriver appeared to be genuinely grappling with the abruptness of her daughter’s death—not just the news of it, but with the unexpected effect it was having on her. It was as if the scientist was trying to understand why emotion was interjecting itself in the midst of an analysis.

“Natalie,” he asked softly, “when Hannah was working as a court reporter, did she do any jobs that affected her personally—something she mentioned to you?”

Natalie spoke to her hands. “It was so long ago. You tell yourself that everything your child does will be locked in your memory forever. It comes as such a shock, that first time you discover it isn’t so. Shouldn’t there be a special capacity there? An exception that places a son or daughter apart from everyone else you meet?”

She glanced up, and he could see that at last her eyes were moist. “The first time Hannah left me for any period of time,” she continued, “was to live up here in Vermont with her father for a few months as a teenager. Not for the summer, as before, but to finish out the school year. We’d had a falling-out, and we all three thought a short separation might help. And it did, to a degree. At least the arguments abated. But when she returned, I remember looking at her face once, as she was reading and unaware, and thinking to myself that for the first time in her life, things had happened to her on a daily basis that I would never know about. Influences, encounters, thoughts, even a fragment of evolution I’d never share with her. It struck me with such force, it almost made me cry on the spot.”