The Surrogate Thief (22 page)

Sam looked at him, startled, as she reached into her pocket to extract the small buccal swab kit needed for the sampling. She could count on one hand the times she’d seen Joe angry, always in response to an immediate crisis—never a real burn like this one.

She approached the slight man with Masius. “Mr. Bander? Sorry, but I need to confirm your identity before taking the swab.”

Masius spoke for his client. “We attest that this is Thomas Bander, for the record.”

“Driver’s license,” Joe said, still keeping his distance.

“I don’t believe that’s necessary,” Masius stated dismissively. “My client is a well-known member of the community.”

Gunther’s voice remained hard. “It’s a court order, goddamn it. Show her the license.”

Masius opened his mouth to respond, but Bander merely extracted his wallet and displayed the ID. Sam peered at the photograph and nodded, handing Masius a copy of the judge’s order.

“You want to sit down for this?” she asked Bander.

He smiled slightly. “Will it hurt?”

Joe suddenly broke from his position, crossed the carpeting quickly, and seized Bander by the upper arm as everyone, Sam included, tensed for a violent outburst. Instead, Gunther roughly drew him to a chair and sat him down like a child.

“Open your mouth,” he ordered.

“Now, just a minute,” Masius objected.

Joe turned on him. “You shut up.”

Bander was looking up, from one to the other.

Gunther refocused on him. “Was there something you didn’t understand?”

His mouth snapped open.

Sam moved around her boss, quickly slipped on a pair of latex gloves, and extracted the swab from its sealed envelope. The sooner they left, she hoped, the sooner she’d be able to prevent Joe from shooting someone.

“I’m sorry, Agent Gunther,” Masius intoned, “But I’m going to have to take this up with your superiors. This is simply not acceptable behavior.”

Joe took three fast steps toward him, forcing him to retreat until he bumped into the wall.

“You call anybody you like, Counselor. I don’t happen to give a good goddamn. But while I’m here, doing what the law allows, I am not going to put up with your shit. Is that understood?”

“I will not . . . ,” the other man began.

“Is that understood?”
Gunther shouted, his face two inches from the lawyer’s.

Masius paused, swallowed, and finally murmured, “Yes.”

Gunther returned to Bander, who was licking his lips following Sam’s careful swiping of both his inner cheeks with the buccal swab, which she was now repackaging at high speed.

“And you,
T. J.,
” he said, leaning forward and emphasizing Bander’s former name, “you better enjoy your last days in this place, ’cause your ass is mine. After all these years getting rich off other people’s misery, you’re in for some serious payback.”

“Okay, boss,” Sam said very quietly. “I’m all set.”

Gunther nodded and was heading for the door when Masius spoke up again.

Sam didn’t hear what he said. Joe whirled around so fast and shouted, “
Don’t
” so loudly, his finger pointed like a sword at the man, that only that one word reverberated around them.

Once again, Masius shut his mouth, his eyes narrow with anger.

Sam and Joe left the room—and the house—in total silence.

Used to weathering a lifetime of male outbursts, Sam made directly for the car, trusting time to settle Joe back down.

But he stayed standing at the bottom of the porch’s broad steps for a moment, his head back, seemingly taking in the cold, overcast sky.

She hesitated by the car door, wondering whether to get in and wait, or stay where she was. When Willy acted out, it was so routine and she was so used to it, she rarely gave it a second’s thought. It was one of the tricks of their unusual relationship that she had this knack, and thus the ability to keep them going as a couple.

But she was off balance here and unsure of how to behave. She finally decided to do nothing and merely stood stock-still, her hand resting on the car’s fender.

As if suddenly losing air from within, Joe dropped his head, slumped his shoulders, and let out a long sigh. He then walked over to the car and brought his fist down on its hood with a crash, leaving a rock-size divot. All without uttering a word.

Sam glanced at the dent along with him for a slow count of five.

“Feel better?” she risked asking.

Almost reluctantly, he brought his eyes up to meet hers. “My hand hurts.”

“Bad?”

He flexed his fingers. “No.”

She tilted her head inquiringly to one side. “You want to get out of here before they hassle us for trespassing?”

He looked at the huge building with a contemptuous frown. “Right.”

She waited until they’d regained the Upper Dummerston Road, off Hillwinds, before commenting, “This case must be taking its toll.”

He laughed, to her relief, and admitted, “You noticed that, huh? Good investigator.”

“You pick up on the little things,” she said. “It’s like an art.”

He didn’t answer for quite a while, his eyes on the road ahead, before adding, “Or a migraine.”

“You’re not happy about nailing this guy?” she asked.

He mulled that over. “Not really. I mean, I recognize the value of it, but it’s too late. It won’t repair the damage.”

He glanced at her, allowing her a glimpse of unmitigated sadness and loss.

“It’s been too long,” he added. “And it’s cut too deep.”

Chapter 23

I
finally met Tom Bander,” Joe told Gail.

They were sitting opposite each other at the tiny counter that separated Joe’s kitchen from the living room, the remains of a meal between them. Acquiescing to the rigors of the campaign and her own lack of time, Gail had let Joe cook dinner. He’d catered to her strict vegetarian habits by making an iceberg salad and glow-in-the-dark macaroni and cheese out of a box, and, much as she hated to admit it, it had been one of the best meals she’d enjoyed in months.

“I went to his house a few days ago,” Joe continued, getting up to put the water on for some coffee. “First time I’d ever set eyes on him.”

Gail thought she knew what was going on, or hoped she did.

“How was he?”

“Small, quiet. Not a guy to fill a room by just entering it. Not like his lawyer. With all that power and money, the ability to order people killed, he was a nobody.”

“Why were you there?”

“To get a DNA sample,” he said lightly, lining up the mugs and rooting through the fridge for milk.

She turned that over in her mind, trying to imagine the scene. “Must’ve been tough, finally meeting him after all this time.”

Joe returned to his seat and took her hand in his. “I lost it. I pushed him into a chair, yelled at the lawyer, dented the hood of my car afterward with my fist. I may have put Sammie into therapy.”

Gail rubbed his knuckles with her fingertips, in fact happy to hear he’d blown up. “She sleeps with Willy, for God’s sake. She’s got the hide of a rhino.”

He smiled weakly. “Still, I remember seeing my father explode like that when his tractor broke down once, when I was a kid. Scared the hell out of me. I didn’t want to talk to him for weeks afterward.”

Gail raised her eyebrows. “And Sam’s been running away every time she sees you?”

He granted her point. “No. I think I knew at the time it wasn’t the tractor he was mad at—maybe that’s what scared me. I didn’t know what the real reasons were. I just suspected they were there.”

“You ever find out?”

“Good Lord, no. My old man was like a sealed chest on those kinds of things. You didn’t share your
feelings
with your kids—or anyone else, for that matter. Jesus, that would’ve really put me into shock.”

“But you know what set you off at Bander’s,” she suggested.

He took his hand back and propped his chin up with it. “Maybe. I’m not so sure. I was there getting the evidence I’m hoping will put him in jail. Should’ve been a time to rejoice. Instead, I just felt incredibly pissed off at everything he’s caused.”

Gail pushed for more. “What has he caused, exactly? You’ve dealt with murderers before. Some of them have put you through the wringer a lot worse than this guy, it seems.”

He looked at her, surprise on his face. “Partly, I think that’s what got to me—no bluster, no acting out, no nothing. But now I think the bigger part was remembering Katie Clark, sitting in her chair, about as alone and defenseless as you can get. Why kill her? Or Shea or Hannah Shriver, for that matter. It was all so gratuitous. So totally self-serving.”

“But not unique,” she pushed.

To his credit, he didn’t reject this outright. He took it in, turned it around, and finally said, “Maybe, for me, this once it was.”

“Because of how it started?”

He nodded. “Maria Oberfeldt. We got to calling her the bat from hell, the way she went after us, day after day, week after week. At first it was a pain—we were doing what we could. We didn’t have the resources to do much beyond catch people who were still standing over their victims. When we got the evidence implicating Pete Shea, I thought we’d gotten lucky. But then we never found him. As time went on, I kept dreaming about how I’d be able to put her mind at ease someday, so that she could just sit by her husband’s side and pay attention to his dying.”

“Like you were doing with Ellen?” Gail asked.

He stopped halfway to the stove, where the kettle was beginning to whistle. His face averted, he ran his hand through his hair before turning off the flame. He stood, staring at the steam pumping out of the spout like a miniature chimney fire. A man lost in a dream.

In the silence, Gail heard a truck rumble by the front of the house.

Finally, he picked up the kettle and poured hot water into both mugs. Instant coffee, naturally.

“I didn’t do much for Ellen,” he said at last, addressing the mugs. “I wasn’t able to do much for anyone, as it turned out.”

He spooned in the coffee, added milk and sugar to his, and brought them over to the counter.

“Did I ever tell you what happened to Maria Oberfeldt?” he asked.

“You’ve never told me much about any of this.”

“She left town right after her husband died, which he did when she was at the police station, bugging us yet again. She returned to the hospital, was told that he’d passed, and she left, almost the next day.”

He sat down and cradled the mug between his hands. “Two weeks later, she committed suicide. Seventy-four. They’d been married fifty-five years.”

He let out a sigh, and she noticed that his eyes were glistening. “We’d both been widowed, almost on the same day. When I heard she’d died so soon after, it felt like being hit all over again.”

He paused and took a deep breath. “That day, I told myself I’d never get that close to anyone ever again.”

“You’re talking about Ellen.”

“Yeah.”

He pressed his fingertips against his eyes. “The T. J. Ralphers of the world—or whatever they’re called—have no clue how far out the ripples go. Maybe it was his total lack of character that made me blow up. Damned if I know.”

Gail waited for him to take his time. She thought of how little she’d understood of all this—not just recently, while she’d been distracted by her political ambitions, but during their whole time together, stretching back years. She’d heard some of it, certainly the broad outline, but without the attention it clearly deserved. Now she felt oddly unbalanced, torn between yielding to her own sentimentality, and the knowledge that what he’d revealed was a statement of fact. He would never get as close to anyone as he’d been to Ellen ever again—and despite the love that he and Gail had nurtured and nursed through the years, that included her.

She had fussed around identifying her own reasons for not committing conventionally to this union, through marriage or at least cohabitation. She’d looked at her upbringing, her own parents’ struggles, the rape that had changed her life. But she’d rarely paused to look at him. To some degree, Joe Gunther had just been that lucky catch, the guy who would put up with her eccentricities.

Now, feeling a bit naive, she saw him in more depth—and while she was grateful for his devotion to her, this conversation had left her shaken.

She reached out, took his hand, and kissed it.

Kathy Bartlett’s plan not to arrest Tom Bander prematurely was working well. While Walter Masius kept holding press conferences to decry the abuses being heaped on his client—little unconfirmed snippets of which, Joe was pretty certain, Bartlett was making sure got leaked—Bander himself had all but made a prison out of his sumptuous home. In the meantime, Greenberg was still talking, his three colleagues from the Tunbridge Fair had been rounded up and were adding their songs to his, and the Massachusetts State Police were updating their case daily with new and damning evidence linking Greenberg to the death of Pete Shea.

The only problem with all this momentum was that nothing, aside from Greenberg’s word, linked Bander with what Greenberg claimed he’d done on Bander’s orders. Greenberg’s henchmen had been hired by him, not Bander, and no notes, e-mails, letters, outside witnesses, or phone records could be found tying Bander to Shriver or Shea or to the events leading up to their deaths.

Bartlett’s case so far was entirely circumstantial.

Even the DNA Sammie Martens had collected hadn’t proved as damning as everyone had hoped it would. Upon hearing that the swab was a perfect match for the drops found in the Oberfeldt store, Masius immediately announced that his client had cut himself upon entering the place earlier that day. According to the lawyer, Oberfeldt himself had even helped T. J. Ralpher to bandage his wound, since he’d felt guilty that a nail protruding from the counter had been to blame for the injury. Masius had almost made it sound as if the two men were friends.

Bartlett brushed the denial aside, but Joe could read between the lines. If this case went to trial, who was to say the jury would be any less swayed by that argument than some people he’d overheard discussing it in the street? Tellingly, one of them had even mentioned the phrase, “the benefit of the doubt.”

Which is what made finally getting a phone call from Penny Anderson of the Court Reporters Association such a relief.

“You have any luck?” Joe asked her after a perfunctory exchange of greetings.

“It was harder than I thought,” she conceded. “It’s a little like deciphering someone else’s really bad handwriting.”

“But you did get it?”

“Oh, I got it,” she said cheerfully. “And I also understand why she wasn’t on the job for long, too. She was pretty bad.”

Gunther glanced out the window, repressing the urge to yell at the woman to tell him what he wanted to know.

“Anyhow,” Penny continued, “you were absolutely right about there being a missing piece, and it was exactly where you said it would be. Guess that’s why you’re the detective, right?”

“Right.”

Penny finally picked up that he wasn’t in a chatty mood. “So, I’ll fax you a copy of what I transcribed, but would you like a sneak preview now?”

“That would be great.”

She laughed. “Thought I’d never ask, right?”

Joe made no response, but he reached out and extracted a copy of the transcribed deposition Hannah had given the lawyer, Mr. Jennings.

“Okay. Here goes. Ready?”

Joe sighed silently. “Yup.”

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’. But he was a mess that night, so he’d sure as hell remember seein’ me. He had a nosebleed to beat all. There was blood all over his shirt.

Joe interrupted her. “You’re absolutely sure that’s what it says?

“Oh, yes,” was the response. “I know you wanted this done right, so I had one of my colleagues check it as well, to make double sure.” She hesitated a moment and then asked, “Was that all right? I didn’t think to ask.”

Joe smiled. “That was perfect. Keep going.” In the document before him, all mention of a bloody nose was missing, which is what made Conant’s comment about not talking less odd than it had first appeared. Clearly, what he’d meant was that there had been no detailed discussion.

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. All he said was that I should see the other guy. But he could vouch for me. I don’t know shit about Mitch and that cow he calls a wife . . .

“That’s good,” Joe interrupted. “I got the rest in front of me. He doesn’t mention Ralpher again, does he?”

“No. That’s it.”

“Penny, you’re a peach. Next time I’m in Burlington, dinner’s on me—your choice of restaurants.”

“I don’t know what my husband would say about that.”

“He’s invited, too. Fax me the whole thing, would you? And thanks again.”

Lester Spinney was writing at his desk across from Joe, and looked up as Gunther replaced the phone’s receiver. “Good news?”

“Not bad,” Joe answered, dialing the phone. “David, it’s Joe Gunther,” he said. “You got a minute?”

David Hawke was the head of the state’s crime lab, a man well used to cops calling him out of the blue and disrupting his day.

“Sure,” he responded affably. “What’s up?”

“Is there any way you can tell if a blood sample originated from a nosebleed?”

“Not from the makeup of the blood itself. Blood is blood, Joe. What’re you talking about, specifically?”

“That three-decade-old stuff I’ve been bugging you about.”

“Let me put you on hold so I can retrieve that file.”

Joe stared into middle space as he waited. Spinney correctly interpreted the body language. “On hold?”

Gunther nodded.

“What’re you after?”

“Remember that doctored deposition? I was just told that the missing section identifies Ralpher as having a nosebleed right after the Oberfeldt beating—and admitting that he got it in a fight.”

“I thought Masius said the blood came from a cut hand.”

“Exactly. If I can prove otherwise, it not only makes his client a liar but, if Hawke comes through, it’ll strengthen my case.”

“You still there?” David Hawke asked, back on again.

“Yeah. Go ahead.”

“Well, I looked it over again. I don’t have anything probative, but there are a couple of details supporting a nosebleed. The first is the blood pattern on the floor. It’s consistent with having fallen from a height of about five feet. How tall is your suspect?”

“About five eight. You saying it couldn’t have come from a cut hand?”

“A lawyer could argue that your guy left the place with his hand held high, but that would cause the blood to run down his arm. No one I know would walk around that way—they’d stick the hand down and to one side.”

“Plus,” Joe mentioned, “the lawyer in question is claiming the wound was bandaged before his client left.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” David said, his voice surprised. “The blood drops are very consistent with a free-flowing cut. And you have the trail he took, out the back door after loitering around the hiding place in the floor.”