The Surrogate Thief (4 page)

“Yeah. I never solved it. It’s bugged me ever since.”

“A killing?”

“Didn’t start out that way. It was a robbery-assault at a mom-and-pop grocery store. Nobody liked the victim, an old grouch named Oberfeldt, and at first we didn’t even bother finding out their life savings had been stolen. The bad old days with a vengeance. The guy wasn’t dead; he was just in the hospital—although the word ‘just’ doesn’t do it justice. He was in a coma. But the selectmen were on the rampage for us to clean up the bars and get the kids off the street to make the town more appealing. The case pretty much fell to me on my own.”

“What happened?” Allard asked.

A lot, Gunther thought to himself—almost more than he thought he could bear at the time, or bear to remember now.

“Not much,” he said instead. “Six months later, old man Oberfeldt died without regaining consciousness. His wife sold the store and left town. I never found out who did it.”

“And now the gun’s resurfaced,” Bill Allard suggested.

“Yup. Three decades later.”

Allard let out a low whistle. “Jesus,” he said, and then pointed toward the door. “Okay, you’ve officially proved you have good manners, Joe. Go to the lab and nab yourself some bad guy who’s probably using a walker by now. Thanks for stopping in.”

The Vermont Forensic Lab took up the entire top floor of the building’s longest wing. It was a narrow, cluttered, bizarrely designed layout, clearly never intended for its present use. Old equipment lined the walls of the dark, close central hallway; doors to either side revealed impossibly jam-packed labs or eccentric secondary parallel halls. Half the time Joe couldn’t discern if what he was looking at was a storage room or a workplace that only resembled a mad scientist’s attic.

Ballistics was housed at the far end, across the corridor from latent prints. None of this was labeled or looked the role, any more than the whole remotely resembled any popular perception of a crime lab. Joe simply knew where to go from past experience. In a state so thinly populated, it was understood that you could figure out how to get somewhere by merely wandering about for a while.

In the old days, when the state police ran things, technicians were officers on rotation. Times had changed. Now the place was a part of Public Safety’s Criminal Justice Services—as was VBI, for that matter—and staffed by people qualified enough in their specialties to have earned the lab national accreditation. An honor indeed, given that it appeared to be housed in a condemned high school building.

Malcolm Nash had been in ballistics for over fifteen years, first as an assistant but recently as the man in charge. He was tall, stooped, and energetic, and Gunther thought he’d probably always looked as he did now, and forever would: a somewhat geeky mid-forties. Pure hell in high school, no doubt, but not too bad as time passed.

“Joe Gunther,” he said, clearly pleased, as Joe entered the cluttered office. He crossed the room and extended his hand for a shake. “I thought you might show up. Too interesting to resist, right?”

He motioned to a shabby wheeled chair as he perched on the edge of a desk. The room was one of two, this one filled with filing cabinets, a couple of desks, some scientific equipment, and a huge IBIS computer used for bullet and cartridge identification. On semipermanent loan from ATF, it filled a quarter of the floor space like a robot on steroids. The back room, reserved for test firings, contained a cotton box for high velocity rounds, and a water well running down the inside corner of the building, for slower bullets. The latter was a bane to downstairs residents, since any testing resulted in a thunderous explosion reverberating all the way to the basement.

“I read up on that old case of yours,” Nash was saying. “Really fascinating. And relevant, too, since I was able to run some newer tests based on your report at the time.”

He reached over to a corner of the desk and retrieved a slim file folder. “Klaus Oberfeldt,” he read, “aged sixty-seven at time of death. The ME said that he’d been beaten, in part or in whole, with a gun gone missing, which gun had discharged accidentally as a result.” He paused and read on. “At least that was the assumption, since the wife heard the shot, the victim had no hole in him, and you found a bullet buried high in the front door casing. Ballistics here took a guess from all that, combined it with the distinctive signature of eight lands and grooves from the recovered bullet, and came up with a .357 Blackhawk revolver, since it had a crucial flaw at the time, where the firing pin rested directly against the cartridge’s primer. The hypothesis was that if the gun was used in a fashion where the hammer came in contact with the victim’s skull, as in a back-handed return motion, the bullet would go off.”

Malcolm Nash looked up suddenly and smiled broadly. “Making my predecessors pretty smart or pretty lucky, since that’s exactly how it turned out. I would love to write this up for one of the journals, by the way. Would that be a problem?”

Gunther paused. His own reminiscences of this case were so personal, he had a hard time seeing it in purely objective terms. “No,” he allowed. “Assuming we come up with a final chapter.”

Nash’s eyes widened. “Oh, sure. I wouldn’t write about an open case. I was just planning ahead.”

“You are sure about the match?” Gunther asked. “I’ve been told that over time old guns leave different impressions on their bullets.”

Nash was dismissive. “That’s mostly NRA babble. They don’t like the gun control lobby’s idea of a bullet and casing record being kept on every factory-fresh gun. In fact, it would take more shooting than you can imagine to alter a gun’s impressions. Talk about carpal tunnel—you’d be blazing away every day for years.”

He pointed to the IBIS machine. “It’s in there if you want proof. Since the beginning of time, this lab used to keep an ‘unidentified ammunition file’—literally a chest of tiny drawers with stray bullets in it. That’s where yours used to live. Didn’t matter where they came from—deer jackings, suicides, murders. If we didn’t have a gun to match them to, we kept them just in case.”

He got up, crossed over to the machine, and turned it on. “When we got this from ATF, one of the conditions was that we use it as much as possible. It costs a quarter of a million dollars, after all. So, along with encouraging everyone across the state to send us anything ballistic, we also made a file of all those old bullets.”

He took the cramped office in with a general sweep of the hand. “It didn’t hurt, either, that we could then throw out the chest of drawers.” He paused. “Although part of me is a little nostalgic about that. It used to be fun poking through that collection, wondering about all the stories it contained.”

He began typing commands, still talking. “Anyhow, as a result of all the data entry, we got a hit right off when we entered the test-fired bullet from the Blackhawk. The computer does that automatically—scans every new item with what it already has in memory.”

He abruptly sat back and pointed to the screen. “And voilà, see for yourself.”

Joe looked over the scientist’s shoulder at the split screen. There was no denying the similarities between the two color pictures of two matching bullets.

“I see what you mean,” he said softly. “Were you able to raise the gun’s serial number, too?”

Nash made a face and switched off the IBIS. “No, sorry. Whoever ground it down really went for it. Usually, they stop when they can’t see the numbers anymore, not knowing about the visual echo underneath. But either this guy knew his metallurgy or he was just luckily heavy-handed. Anyhow, we couldn’t get a thing. The FBI might give it a try, if you’d like. They have fancier methods than we do.”

“You think it would be worth it?” Gunther asked.

Nash was appropriately equivocal. “I wouldn’t dream of answering that, Joe. Could come home to roost. It ain’t cheap, if money’s a concern. Whose case is this, by the way? Bratt PD’s or yours?”

Gunther looked at him in surprise. “Good point,” he admitted. “I better clear that up. I’ll let you know later if we should send the gun to the FBI.”

Nash gave him a conspiratorial smile and asked, “You’re not leaving right off, are you?”

“Why? You have something else?”

“Nothing earthshaking, but it’s a nifty confirmation. Something they love in courtrooms, assuming this gets that far.”

He returned to one of the desks, from which he extracted a white paper bag. What he laid out on the table was the Ruger Blackhawk, now disassembled.

He picked up the gun’s frame and pointed to the slot where the hammer fit when the gun wasn’t cocked. “We figured the misfire occurred because the hammer spur came in contact with Mr. Oberfeldt’s head, thereby depressing the pin. That would’ve caused a vicious wound, resulting in a lot of blood coating the gun. At least that was the reasonable assumption.” He held up the frame so Joe could see right into the empty hammer slot. “You can’t see anything with the naked eye, but I thought that even if the gun had been wiped off later, some blood probably worked its way into the inner workings here.” He straightened and smiled again. “And that’s just where the folks up the hall found a sample. Its DNA matches the old samples on file from Mr. Oberfeldt.”

Joe nodded appreciatively. “Nice work, Malcolm.”

Nash poured the gun back into the envelope. “There’s more, although now we’re wandering into the land of speculation. I don’t know if you fully appreciate what I just told you. Blood samples dating back thirty years are pretty rare; getting them in good enough shape to retrieve DNA is telling.”

Gunther appreciated the other man’s sense of drama. He’d clearly hit a home run and was hoping to stretch out the applause. “Telling in what way?” he prompted.

“Guns see a lot of action, no pun intended,” Nash explained. “They get carted around, often get shot and cleaned on a regular basis. They get wet; they’re exposed to heat; they’re left out in the cold. Especially over a course of decades.”

“All of which raises hell with any blood sample,” Joe suggested.

“Correct.” Malcolm Nash looked at him meditatively. “Which leads me to say that if I were a betting man, which I emphatically am not, I’d venture that up until the time Mrs. Purvis ended her marriage with that gun, it had been leading a peaceful, protected, sheltered life.”

He stood up and shook Joe’s hand, adding, “I give you that for what little it may be worth.”

Chapter 4

I
t felt as if Tony Brandt had been Brattleboro’s police chief since Christ wore shorts, although he’d actually joined the department a few years after Joe. So long a tenure was rarely healthy. Even chiefs once considered innovative and far-thinking seldom managed to maintain that reputation as the years took their toll.

Brandt was the exception. A tall man who wore glasses and tweed jackets and had once smoked a pipe continuously until workplace rules prohibited it, he’d always seemed more like Mr. Chips than a lifelong cop. But a cop is all he’d ever been, and a cop who’d managed to avoid the trends in favor of changes that truly worked, from community policing to use of nonlethal weapons, to streamlining paperwork. It was he who’d made sure the department had a trained hostage negotiator, and despite the outcome of the Purvis shooting, no one was arguing that such programs hadn’t improved law enforcement in Brattleboro.

He now sat in his corner office, his feet up on the cubbyhole-equipped desk he’d built himself in his garage, watching Gunther quietly as he had through the years, listening to what his old friend had on his mind.

For his part, Joe always felt comfortable in this role, knowing Brandt to be a thoughtful sounding board, although the absence of the fog of pipe smoke still threw him, apparently more than it did the ex-smoker in question.

“So,” Joe concluded, having detailed his recent activities, “it looks like the Klaus Oberfeldt case is open again, or at least deserving of more digging.”

“And you want to know if you can have at it or if I want to keep hold of it?”

“Something like that.”

Brandt stretched his arms high above his head and let his hands come to rest behind his neck. “There’s a no-brainer. It was your case to begin with, felony crimes is what VBI is supposed to do, and I don’t have the time, money, or manpower to spend on it. I give it to you with my best wishes, and with full access to all our records.”

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

“I do have a question, though,” Tony said, “which has nothing to do with the actual investigation, then or now.”

Joe felt a stirring in his chest, knowing where this was headed. He’d been there a dozen times himself ever since Oberfeldt’s name had first resurfaced.

“Case or no case, that was a bad time for you, Joe, at least according to what little you’ve told me. You sure you’re comfortable revisiting that ground? Someone else could check it out without a worry—leave you to get on with your life. You told me yourself you worried that the case went cold because you were sidetracked by what was happening at home. That somehow you felt you dropped the ball.”

Leave it to Tony to put his finger right on it, Joe thought. He got to his feet and moved to the door, pausing there to answer. “That’s one reason I want it.”

“You didn’t, for what it’s worth,” Tony added. “I wasn’t around then, but I know that much.”

“Drop the ball?” Joe asked.

“Yeah.”

Joe smiled wistfully, all the memories so fresh. “With any luck, maybe I’ll get to find that out for myself.”

Back when Joe was playing catch-up on an assault that became a robbery and finally a murder six months later, he was married to someone he deemed the love of his life: a kind, gentle, funny, passionate woman named Ellen.

This wasn’t exactly objective. She had been all those things, but she’d had her flaws, too. He just couldn’t recall them. The adage has it that you can’t compete with the dead. Over time, they just keep growing in stature.

And Ellen was definitely dead, killed by cancer over the same six months that Klaus Oberfeldt lingered in a coma.

Joe and she were married for several years and couldn’t have children. She worked at the local bank, and whenever possible, they had lunch together. It wasn’t a complicated life. They lived in a rented apartment, didn’t have pets, thought a drive to Keene was a trip to the big city. There was an ease to their existence that in hindsight seemed like tempting fate, although even now he didn’t see enjoying a little peace as anything deserving of punishment. He sure as hell hadn’t back then, when, after a tour of duty in combat and a few years lost in confusion and soul-searching, he’d viewed Ellen’s arrival in his life as a gift.

What killed her was inflammatory breast cancer. Very rare, very lethal, and very fast.

Joe’s next stop after leaving Brandt should have been his own office, above the PD in Brattleboro’s municipal building. It was late in the day. He doubted that the other three special agents on his squad would be in, which was part of the appeal. Peace and quiet beckoned, especially valuable in the planning stages of a new or, in this situation, revived case.

But he walked out into the parking lot instead and drove west toward Gail’s house, as if drawn by the need to compare a love he’d come to idealize with the one he enjoyed now.

He didn’t think how doing this instead of going to work highlighted precisely the emotional ambiguity that Tony Brandt had just questioned.

Gail and Joe were an odd pairing, at least to most of their friends: he, the son of a farmer, a native Vermonter, and a lifelong cop; she, an urban child of privilege, an ex-hippie, a successful businesswoman. Theirs was a union in which the emotional integrity, though tested, had never faltered. Through the turmoils they’d shared, the one constant had been that love—placed on a different plane by the hard work and faith supporting it.

Which had created a curious paradox: As a result of that trust, their love had been unhitched from the standard vehicles most couples used for its care and feeding. Joe and Gail were not married, had no children, shared few common interests, did not live in the same house, and didn’t even work in the same part of the state for over half of each year. Gail was a lawyer/lobbyist for Vermont’s most powerful nonprofit environmental organization and spent months on end in Montpelier representing her cause.

Although, as Sheila Kelly had touched on earlier, this last detail was facing a challenge. On the heels of the retirement of one of the county’s white-haired political icons, Gail had announced her intention to occupy his newly opened state senate seat.

This had hit Joe like the news that an old and crumbling dam had finally yielded to the pressures behind it. So many of her intimates had been urging Gail for years to run for statewide office—believing, quite rightly, that she’d take to it as a bird does to flight—that its occurrence had the feel of inevitability about it.

Joe’s problem was that while he honored this conceptually, as he had her previous career choices, it was taking place on a whole different level. Unlike any of its forerunners, this campaign was demanding her undivided attention—forcing her to be surrounded virtually around the clock by a flock of supporters, strategists, staffers, and fund-raisers who had helped transform her from an interesting human being into someone who now ate, drank, and lived the pursuit of a single goal.

To Joe, who so cherished their few shared times alone, this sudden and complete myopia had been unsettling. From once having felt that together he and Gail could batten down the hatches during hard times, he was now feeling a bit like a partisan spectator on the fringes of a crowd.

This had been the status quo ever since she’d announced her intention to enter the primary weeks earlier. And up to now Joe had been philosophical about putting his personal needs aside. After all, this was merely a process, and not without some interesting and possibly exciting ramifications.

But that was before Matt Purvis had appeared in his life, carrying a gun from a past so laden with baggage.

For the first time in quite a while, Joe was sufficiently thrown off balance that his usual stoicism was in real need of Gail’s company.

A few hundred yards beyond the I-91 overpass, he turned right onto Orchard Street and began driving uphill, his eyes to the left, hoping her broad driveway would be empty.

It wasn’t, and as soon as he saw the half-dozen cars tightly packed as if awaiting a ferryboat, he wondered why he’d hoped otherwise. Had he set himself up for this disappointment on purpose, to reward his perfect memories of Ellen by contrast? He pulled over to the roadside opposite the driveway and killed the engine, silently shaking his head. These were just the kind of emotional gymnastics he usually tried to avoid.

As if to render it all moot, he swung out of the car and wended his way toward the house, looking forward to—if nothing else—being temporarily absorbed into Gail’s current maelstrom of a life.

Certainly, that was alive and well, as he discovered hitting a wall of voices upon opening the back door into the kitchen.

There were three women before him, moving between restaurant-size salad fixings and a cauldron of soup and using the phone on the wall—Gail had installed four additional lines since announcing her intentions

One of them stopped talking and smiled at him as he entered. “Hi, Joe. You joining the dinner powwow?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Knew nothing about it, Brenda. Not sure I’d be of much use, anyhow. Is Gail around?”

Brenda gestured vaguely at the door leading into the rest of the large house. “We wouldn’t be here without her.” She paused suddenly and stared at him. “Actually, the way things are heating up, we might be. You hear about Ed Parker?”

“What about him?” he asked. Parker was a Republican drum banger and local businessman—disarmingly charming, charismatic, and popular at places like the Elks Club, Rotary, and others—who was always writing letters to the editor and talking on the radio about how the state was going to socialist hell in a handbasket. A man who’d married a seductive and appealing style to a rock-ribbed conservative message.

“The Republicans have finally sorted out their differences and made him their choice for the senate. Pretty extreme, if you ask me.”

“No primary?” Joe asked.

Brenda looked amused and explained with that odd pride the Democrats have in their particular political dysfunction, “Oh, you know them: one man, one race. God forbid they give the people a choice. Anyhow, Gail is here someplace—check the living room.”

He followed the growing noise—still more voices, but supplemented by the plastic tapping of keyboards and the ringing of phones.

He paused at the living room entrance, watching the activities of at least five more people. The comfortable furniture he associated with his moments with Gail—including the couch they sometimes made love on—had been replaced with desks, work tables, and a scattering of office chairs.

A young man frantically clacking on the computer stopped long enough to stare at him inquiringly. “May I help you?”

Another woman, drawn by the comment, looked up and smiled. “Joe,” she said as she crossed over and gave him a hug. “I haven’t seen you in ages.” She nodded toward the young man. “This is my son, Aaron.”

Joe shook hands, still looking around, which Aaron’s mother correctly interpreted. She touched his shoulder and glanced overhead, murmuring, “She’s upstairs. Go on up.”

He left the living room and the noise, walked down the long hallway to the foot of the stairs, and began climbing, thinking that against all odds he might get some time with Gail after all.

But again he was disappointed. Halfway up, he saw her appear on the landing above, clipboard in hand, accompanied by her oldest friend and now campaign manager, Susan Raffner. They were deep in conversation and didn’t even see him until after they’d started down.

Gail’s face broke into a wide smile. “Joe. What a sweet surprise. I didn’t know you were coming by.” She stooped forward and kissed him awkwardly as Susan looked on. Returning Gail’s embrace, he noticed Susan check her watch.

“You know what they say,” he answered, trying to sound upbeat, “I happened to be in the neighborhood—not hard in this town.”

Gail rolled her eyes. “A town with a lot of people, though. I’m starting to feel like I’ll meet every one of them before this is over.”

“It’s going okay, though, right?” Joe asked. In an attempt to sound both savvy and supportive, he added, “I heard about Parker.”

She made a face. “He’s such a screwball. Problem is, nobody knows it, despite what he says. Anyhow, he’s not my problem. I have to beat all the Democrats in the race first, and nicely enough that they don’t take it personally. Such a weird process. Makes running for selectman a total breeze.” She paused and touched his cheek. “God, I haven’t seen you in days. Feels like forever.” She furrowed her brow. “Are you all right? You look tired.”

“Just a case I’m on,” he said vaguely.

“Gail,” Susan’s voice dropped between them.

Gail stepped back against the railing and glanced up at her friend. “I know, I know.” She looked at Joe again and shrugged helplessly. “I gotta go.”

He smiled halfheartedly. “Brenda told me—big powwow.”

Her expression was torn. “Right. You want to listen in? God knows I could use the input.”

But he begged off. “Too much homework at the office.”

Susan took two steps down, pressuring them to take the hint. They did, Gail leading and talking over her shoulder. “God, don’t talk about homework. That’s all I do anymore—that and eat vegetarian rubber chicken.”

She paused again at the foot of the stairs. “Come back later?” she asked, placing her hand on his chest as he drew near.

He took her hand and kissed it as Susan took her other elbow and began steering her along the hallway. “If I can. Good luck.”

Joe watched them go and then left by the front door, not wanting to walk through the house again.