The Surrogate Thief (3 page)

“Hang in there, buddy. I’ll be there in three minutes. Put the gun down, go to the door, and wait for my voice.”

“Okay.”

Klesczewski made sure Matt had left the phone before leaping to his feet and throwing open the van’s door.

Across the way, he saw both Washburn and Kazak emerging from the command post, actually an old converted ambulance. They’d heard everything he’d said.

“I don’t like it,” Kazak said predictably. “As soon as he turns that doorknob, we should go in hard and take him down.”

Ron merely looked at Washburn as he slipped a black vest over his head and strapped it in place.

Thankfully, Ward Washburn understood. “We’ll do it his way, Wayne.”

Ron nodded. “Thanks.” He began trotting toward the trailer around the corner as Kazak coordinated the surrender with his team over the radio.

Halfway up the driveway, a shot exploded from inside the trailer.

Moments later, the door opened, spilling light across the patchy grass, and a woman appeared, swaying on her feet, a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other. She was laughing.

“
Come on in, you assholes
,” she shouted into the night. “I did your job for you. I shot the son of a bitch.”

Chapter 3

J
oe Gunther cupped his cheek in his hand and looked at his old friend. “Ron, you can’t beat yourself up over this. You did it by the book—better, even. Who knew the wife would kill him? And don’t say, ‘I should have,’” he quickly added as Klesczewski opened his mouth to speak.

Ron spoke anyway. “I didn’t do it by the book, Joe. I should never have told him to put the gun down. I knew that—especially the way she was acting. I might as well have told him to hand it to her direct. That exact scenario was in my training. I was just so relieved I was about to get him out safely, I forgot. And I got him killed.”

Gunther shook his head sadly. He’d known Ron for years—had once been his boss as head of Brattleboro’s detective squad—and had seen his younger colleague agonize over issues large and small. It was simply the nature of the man—what helped make him a decent human being, if maybe not the most forceful of leaders.

“Honestly?” Joe told him now. “I doubt it. I think in their own weird way, Mr. and Mrs. Purvis had it worked out long before you showed up. Some people are just built that way—the definition of a love-hate relationship. There’s no getting between them. If you had saved him this time, like you say, they would’ve hooked up later to play it out for keeps.”

Ron was still looking glum.

A knock on his office door caused them both to look up. Sheila Kelly, who’d been promoted to detective after Joe’s departure, was standing there with a sheet of paper in her hand.

“Hi, Joe,” she said with a wide smile, leaning forward to kiss him on the cheek—a rarity among cops. “I haven’t seen you in ages. You’d never know you worked upstairs. How are you?”

Joe acknowledged the gentle rebuke. He was employed by the new Vermont Bureau of Investigation nowadays, was in fact their field force commander, which meant he spent most of his time on the road. Logically, he should have moved to Waterbury, near the center of the state, but he’d worked in Brattleboro his whole career and was loath to leave. So far, his bosses had allowed the eccentricity.

“I’m fine, Sheila,” he said. “Busy, but doing okay.”

“And Gail?”

That called for a more measured response. Gail Zigman and he had been romantically linked for more years than most married couples, although they’d never tied the knot. So the question was reasonable enough. But there was also Gail’s latest ambition to consider—a small hot potato, at least in the traditionally conservative environs of a police station.

“Now,
there’s
busy,” he answered. “I suppose you heard, she’s going to run for state senate. Every night her place looks like headquarters for the Normandy invasion.”

Sheila laughed. “Nope. I didn’t have a clue. Guess that shows how politically involved I am. Well, if anyone can do it, she can. Tell her I wish her well, even if I won’t vote for her.”

Gail’s liberal views were legendary in this corner of the state, where she’d already been a selectperson, a local prosecutor, and forever a standard-bearer of almost every left-leaning cause available, of which there were many. In short, not the typical cop’s sort of politician, which often made Joe’s colleagues wonder how he could keep her company. Actually, although he did agree with Gail on many points, politics was a topic they tended to avoid, if not always successfully. This made him less than thrilled with the hotter-than-ever partisan debate now surrounding her.

“I’ll do that,” he said simply.

Sheila Kelly handed the sheet of paper to Ron. “Fax just came in from the crime lab on that gun. Kind of interesting.”

Ron took it from her, explaining as he did, “Purvis’s gun was an old Ruger Blackhawk. The serial numbers had been ground off, so I thought the lab might like a look at it.”

Sheila wandered back into the squad room just outside Ron’s office. Joe watched her settling down at her desk as Ron read the contents of the fax, thinking back to when he used to head the unit. By now, Ron and their forensics expert, J. P. Tyler, were the only original members left. The other two, Sammie Martens and the infamously difficult Willy Kunkle, had moved with Joe to the VBI. Nobody here had ever admitted missing having Kunkle around.

His expression guarded, Ron handed his old boss the fax. “You might want to read this, Joe. The bullet they test-fired from Purvis’s Ruger matches one you gave them thirty-two years ago.”

Vermont is shaped like a broken wedge pointed south. It’s barely over 40 miles across at the bottom, 90 across the top, and 160 in length. It has two interstates: I-91 running north-south, and I-89, which it inherits from New Hampshire in a diagonal jaunt from Boston to Montreal. The Green Mountains sew the state together like a protuberant spinal column, the vertebrae a series of picturesque, tree-topped peaks that slope down to the Connecticut River on the east, and Lake Champlain to the west.

It is tiny, rural, landlocked, unindustrialized, politically quirky, among the whitest states in the union, and the forty-ninth in population. Its capital, Montpelier, is the smallest of its ilk in the nation, and the only one not to have a McDonald’s restaurant.

Ask anyone in the country about Vermont, and you are almost sure to be given some impression, however inaccurate. From the Green Mountain Boys to maple syrup, skiing, fall foliage, and cows—not to mention civil unions and some surprisingly high-profile, plain-speaking politicians—Vermont tends to stick in people’s minds, if not always benignly.

It is a place with resonance beyond its modest statistics, and, for Joe, a world in itself.

He knew it better than most, too. Even when he worked at the Brattleboro PD, he made it a point to get out and visit other departments. There are only about a thousand full-time police officers in Vermont, and no jurisdictional boundaries—a cop is a cop anywhere in the state, fully certified and responsible to act as such if necessary. Gunther was keenly aware of that fact and saw the whole as a single tribe, if made up of different factions. His joining the VBI, in truth, had less to do with personal advancement, and more with easing the turf struggles he saw only slowly fading among many of the almost seventy law enforcement agencies across the state.

It was a great source of satisfaction to him, seeing how the growth in information sharing had resulted in a commensurate decline in unsolved crimes.

Which only added to the irony that he’d been the one involved in—and possibly responsible for—one of the more notorious of the state’s still open cases.

Thirty-two years ago.

He watched the familiar countryside roll by as he drove toward Waterbury and the forensics lab along one of the most beautiful traffic corridors in the Northeast. It was a trip he never tired of, and one he’d come to use, in good weather and poor, as an opportunity for reflection. If meditation was best pursued in peaceful, supportive, nurturing environments, Joe could think of none better than this smoothly curving road through the mountainous heart of his home state.

And, in this instance, such solace was a blessing, for the long-dormant thoughts created by the discovery of Purvis’s gun were a muddle of loss and mourning and lasting disappointment.

Thirty-two years ago, Gunther had been a fresh-faced detective on the Brattleboro force. A bright, hardworking patrolman, he’d made the transition to plainclothes quickly and had been in the unit about a year. He was good at what he did, made his bosses happy, and had a reputation around town for fairness and discretion.

The latter was crucial back then. The department had had no more than fourteen officers total, versus twice that today; the town was the same size then as now, and the crime rate had seemed rampant. Many a time Joe had to choose between arresting and processing someone and thereby leaving the street, and letting him go and hoping a lecture would suffice. Sometimes a phone call to an overworked but decent parent was enough; sometimes a little old-fashioned intimidation was called for. Miranda rights had just barely been introduced and were undergoing judicial adjustment. They certainly weren’t yet routine. A police officer’s discretion—and his knowledge of whom he was dealing with—was often the better guide than the rule book. Shoving a nightstick down someone’s pants and frog-walking him across the bridge to Hinsdale, New Hampshire, to get rid of him for the evening had worked more than once.

But discretion could be pushed too far. On the night that Klaus Oberfeldt was found battered and unconscious on the floor of their store by his wife, the ambulance was called and the bare facts recorded. But it wasn’t until the next day, when Joe came back on duty, that he first heard of it. No neighborhood canvass had been conducted, no evidence collected, no statements or photographs taken. The beat cops at the time had written it off as a mugging and had filed it for a detective follow-up.

Nobody had liked old man Oberfeldt, as the lack of initiative made clear.

Joe dropped by the store the next morning to see Maria Oberfeldt, Klaus’s wife. He was embarrassed by her incredulity at the official poor showing, which helped him bear her tongue-lashing. She, like her husband, was short-tempered, judgmental, imperious, and distrustful. Together they’d turned the area around their small grocery store into a social fire zone. Kids, animals, vagrants, and often customers knew to expect a hostile and suspicious reception. The police were called regularly to investigate thefts and vandalisms and even loitering that often wasn’t so. Not that some abuse didn’t exist. The town in those days was a magnet for teenagers on the loose, who often threw eggs or paint at store windows for the hell of it. To many, as a result of this chemistry, the Oberfeldts only got what they deserved.

Nobody argued that Klaus’s beating was wrong, but few were surprised, and no one besides Maria grieved for him.

She greeted Joe at the store’s locked door—she hadn’t opened that morning—and gave him an earful for thirty minutes straight. Then she stopped, fell apart, and collapsed crying into his arms.

It turned out that not only was Klaus comatose, but they’d been robbed of $12,000—a small fortune in earned savings that they’d kept under a floorboard in the back room.

Joe finally led her back upstairs to where she and Klaus shared an apartment, and convinced her to take a small drink and lie down for a rest. He then returned to the store, grateful that it hadn’t been overly contaminated since the attack, and began treating it as it should have been from the start: as a major crime scene.

Joe left the interstate at Exit 10 and entered the town of Waterbury, best known for its proximity to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream plant and as the home of the Vermont State Police.

The latter’s headquarters were located in the vaguely named State Office Complex, a large gathering of redbrick buildings that had slowly grown around the original state mental hospital, built in the 1890s and now almost empty. All of it looked to Joe like some manic-depressive architect’s vision of a college campus for the imaginatively impaired.

The Department of Public Safety building was located off to one side of the campus, as institutionally bland as the rest although bristling with antennas and microwave dishes.

Joe abandoned his car on the grass bordering the chronically full parking lot. He entered the building’s lobby, was buzzed through by the dispatcher behind her bulletproof glass, and began climbing the staircase to the top floor.

The building’s top, or third, floor hosted the crime lab, Criminal Justice Services, a couple of meeting rooms, and the office of VBI’s director, Bill Allard. As a result, while the lab was Joe’s destination, he knew it would be impolitic not to drop by Bill’s office first.

This wasn’t a chore by any means. They were good friends, a couple of warhorses who’d come up through the ranks riding the learning curve that transformed so many law enforcement leaders from hot dogs into problem solvers—an evolution that had made both of them attractive to the creators of VBI. The Bureau was a bit of a thorn to the law enforcement community. A statewide major-crimes investigative unit culled from the best of each agency across Vermont, it had seriously rocked the boat when the governor and a compliant legislature had given it birth. The state police, which still had its own plainclothes unit, saw it as an unnecessary rival, while every municipal department complained it would lure away their most talented personnel.

Being accurate made both views hard to dismiss, although the politicians kept trying. Gunther and Allard, the latter of whom had spent his whole career in the state police, didn’t bother. They just kept proving, in case after case, that the VBI was there for the overall good as a highly qualified, well-funded support unit that only came into a case by invitation, did its job discreetly and competently, and then disappeared, making sure the credit always went to the host agency. It had been a successful tactic so far, and a small but growing number of former critics had been heard to admit—if only off the record—that maybe VBI wasn’t as bad as had been feared. So far.

Allard was sitting at his desk in an office so small it barely allowed for two folding guest chairs. He was gazing with apparent wonderment at some cluttered document on the computer screen, his large, stubby fingers poised over the keyboard as if frozen.

His face lit up as Gunther crossed the threshold.

“Joe. I didn’t know you were coming up. Have a seat. You’re not hand-delivering bad news, are you?”

Joe sat down, shaking his head. “Nope, no fouls, no errors, and no need to ask forgiveness as far as I know. I’m just up here checking on something at the lab.”

Allard raised his eyebrows. There were five VBI outposts across the state, including a unit downstairs, and Bill Allard made it his business to be at least aware of every case they were working on. “From your neck of the woods?”

Gunther waved his concern aside. “No, the Bratt PD had a domestic a couple of days ago—ex-wife shot her husband. But the gun was missing its serial number, so they had the lab run a check. Turns out the same gun was used in an old case of mine.”

“No kidding?”