The Surrogate Thief (5 page)

Chapter 5

J
oe Gunther unlocked the door with the borrowed key and paused before switching on the light, reflecting on the dark stillness before him. He was in the basement of the municipal building, on the threshold of the police department’s storeroom. A windowless, airless black cave, it was the endpoint for everything from old parade uniforms to forgotten files, to pieces of hardware that hadn’t quite made it to the dump. It also housed hundreds of past case files, labeled by date and name, each box containing records, reports, photographs, and even items of evidence, often as casually tossed together as the contents of a dorm room just before vacation.

The smell of the place was dry and dusty, slightly enhanced by something so subtle, he could only ascribe it to ancient memories. His mind drifted to how many investigations he’d reduced to such a container now tucked away in the gloom before him. It seemed he and his colleagues had unconsciously created a museum of humanity’s clumsy chaos in the process, replicating Pandora’s box with dozens of tiny, less dramatic facsimiles, rendered all the more poignant for their mundane contents. Drunken brawls, jealous rages, venal dreams—and all the mess they implied—now silenced, defeated, and forgotten, row on row.

He turned on the lights and began walking by the chronologically arranged metal shelf units, counting off the years and heading toward the dawn of his own career. He eventually paused, turned into an aisle, and came to two dust-coated boxes at eye level marked “Oberfeldt.”

He piled one atop the other, finding them disappointingly light, and headed upstairs to his office.

Klaus Oberfeldt never returned home after that night, and he never awoke to say who had assaulted him. He made one trip in his remaining half year of life up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to Mary Hitchcock Hospital, for some tests and an evaluation, but it was done out of courtesy or curiosity, or more likely because of Maria Oberfeldt’s endless haranguing. Everyone treating him knew what the outcome would be, and when his last breath was expelled, it was accompanied by a collective sigh of relief.

Young Joe Gunther witnessed that with a conflicting mixture of understanding and outrage. Typical of his nature, while he hadn’t been spared Maria’s generalized contempt, Joe had sympathized with both her sorrow and her fury. She and her husband might have been short on social graces, but neither had deserved what they’d been delivered. Joe happened to be at the hospital when Maria was told of Klaus’s death, and he’d seen the last remnant of hope drift from her eyes. The fact that he was at the same place and time because his own mate was dying a couple of doors down both exacerbated his desire to bring closure to Maria’s grief and confronted him with his own impotence. The fusion of their separate sorrows seemed merely to create a void, leaving the case that had united them listless and without chance of resolution.

Joe sat at his desk in the otherwise deserted VBI office, the overhead lights extinguished in favor of a more intimate desk lamp, and spread out the contents of the two Oberfeldt case boxes.

The old photographs told the story best, not surprisingly, if for reasons beyond the mere images they conveyed. They were in black-and-white, for one thing, and large—eight-by-tens. Nowadays crime scene photos were often color Polaroids, or quasi-amateur snaps taken by whatever detective was nearest a digital camera. But, as was common back then, these had been shot by the owner of the local camera store, and they reflected his intuitive feel for lighting, angle, and depth of field. They were creepily cinematographic in their perfection, as if snipped from a moody film noir of the fifties, and they produced a certain artificial immediacy, being at once too good to be true and so real as to be palpable. Looking at them brought Joe fully back to when he’d been standing just to one side of the frame.

The fact that they were monochromatic reminded him of the passage of time, and of the distance he’d traveled in the intervening decades. “Feeling old” was too maudlin to capture the emotion. Joe took the aging process as simply one of life’s by-products—something to be undertaken with few complaints and as much decorum as possible. But he didn’t dismiss his experience as lightly, and his experience had been to witness such scenes as now littered his desk more times than he could count. That these were old enough to be in black-and-white was a sad and telling reminder of his journey’s length.

The Oberfeldts’ store had been long and narrow, with the counter and two freestanding shelf units running perpendicular to the back storage room and the staircase beyond. In a fanciful way, it was reminiscent of a bowling alley, if smaller, a bit wider, and far more cluttered—a truly tiny, old-fashioned mom-and-pop market. In truth, the photographs made it look like a frontier store out of the Wild West, the black pool of blood on the floor only heightening the impression.

The body didn’t feature in any of the photographs—it had yet to become a body. For that matter, given that this was initially a robbery-assault, photographs of this quality shouldn’t even have been taken. It wasn’t standard protocol. Gunther had requested the camera store owner to drop by, and his chief at the time gave him hell for it later. Such a waste of money during tight fiscal times was not looked upon kindly.

Joe had acted on instinct and didn’t mind the reprimand. He’d seen Klaus at the hospital, after all, and had been told by the man’s physician that he probably wouldn’t last long. As things turned out, the pictures had been an extravagance. Although they were requested on the assumption that Klaus would die, his killer would be caught, and such evidence would be needed at trial, only the first had come to pass—and way too late for these images to be of much use, regardless of any clues they contained.

And they did contain clues: a bullet hole near the front door, the violent pattern of Oberfeldt’s blood spatter, the open hiding place in the back room’s floor where the couple’s life savings had been, and—most interesting of all—a trail of smaller blood drops leading away from the scene, along with an open switchblade found lying in Klaus’s gore, both presumed to be the assailant’s.

Joe selected a picture showing the knife in close-up, the lighting arranged to best reveal the ridges of a single thumb-print on the blade, peering out from under a thin smear of blood.

There certainly was a nagging anomaly. Why the knife? It was found open, had clearly been taken out for some use, while all of Klaus’s injuries had been due to the pistol-whipping.

And yet the knife proved useful. The thumbprint was carefully lifted and compared to the thousands on file at the police department. The officer who fancied himself a forensics man spent weeks poring over endless cards with a magnifying glass, as intent as a spider weaving a web against all odds, until he finally hit pay dirt in the name of a local thief named Peter Shea. Pete was a relatively low-profile bad boy, had a problem with alcohol, and was generally considered one of the usual suspects when that phrase was still common currency.

Unfortunately, he was not to be found. Nor had he been found to this day.

In a truly ironic paradox, that disappearance hadn’t turned out to be all bad news. Clearly, it wasn’t good that Pete had vanished, but at least they now had a name to pursue. Until that thumbprint had yielded an identity—and the person owning it had fled—Joe had been getting nowhere.

And he had worked the problem hard—persistent even in his youth. At least, for the first couple of months. He’d conducted several canvasses, chased down every complaint the Oberfeldts had ever filed, checked out all the local crooks with even vaguely similar MOs. He’d interviewed Maria three times, hoping to extract a memory of someone who might have wished them far more than simple ill will. And he’d pushed her aggressively on who could have known about the nest egg’s hiding place.

But it hadn’t led to anything concrete—besides the unsettling suggestion that the hiding place had been known to several past employees, all of whom subsequently swore they’d kept mum. By the time Peter Shea was identified, Joe’s devotion to the cause had flagged. After all, Oberfeldt was still alive, the case was still a robbery, and Ellen was still dying.

Near the end, Joe had to admit that he really didn’t give a damn about the Oberfeldts or their presumed assailant. It was his chief who recognized this first and forced his young detective to take some leave. Joe put up a halfhearted protest. The chief back then was a laid-back, unruffled sort, more mindful of his “boys” than of the public they served, and Joe knew that no one would be asked to put much effort into the case, Shea or no Shea, until Joe himself returned to duty. But honestly, he was grateful to be taken off the hook. Toward the end, every conversation he had, every place he went, all he could see in his mind’s eye was Ellen, pale and emaciated, slowly blending into the white sheets encasing her.

Inflammatory breast cancer is a fast-acting killer. Chances of recovery have improved over the years as both treatment methods and drugs have modernized, but it’s a toxic disease and, when Ellen had it, a guaranteed death sentence. Chemotherapy, now such a mainstay, was generally considered a last-ditch tactic and most often wasn’t even employed.

She’d laughed at the cancer’s discovery, when Joe had noticed it during an intimate nuzzle. He’d felt its heat against his lips and pulled back to question her, noticing at the same moment its flushed color. There’d been jokes about how poison ivy could get in a place like that, before they resumed making love.

The image of their naked bodies entwined, moving as one, lost in pleasure and ignorant passion for the last time—the presence of the cancer already hot but unknown between them—plagued him like a nightmare for years afterward.

The following day, she went to the doctor to begin the countdown on their lives together.

It wasn’t bad to begin with. Ellen drove daily up the new interstate to Mary Hitchcock Hospital for five-minute radiation treatments. She played it as a lark, ribbing Joe that she’d take advantage of being in what she called “precious Hanover” to do some upscale shopping and destroy their budget. But it became a thin con quickly made tinny by her growing exhaustion.

There wasn’t any pain, thankfully—not at first—and her appetite remained normal. For what now seemed an impossibly brief twilight, both of them began thinking there’d been a misdiagnosis, or that she’d be the one that made this disease only 99 percent fatal.

But that didn’t last. Joe became so tired of grim-faced people dressed in white lab coats, their eyes at once clinical and sympathetic, telling them nothing but bad news. Ellen and he became experts in the language of disease, speaking in Latin-based polysyllables with an ease they’d once reserved for happier conversations. Ellen and he turned to each other for small moments of pleasure and intimacy in the midst of it all, while feeling like two pieces of flotsam refusing to sink into the sea.

When they made love now, their previous joyful abandon was stained by too much knowledge, as if neither of them wanted to risk rupturing the virulent capsule cradled between them.

Surgery was next—radical, dehumanizing, utterly transforming. Not only was Ellen’s breast removed, but, in an effort at what they blandly called hormonal therapy, her ovaries as well. The doctors recommended this in hopes of “an objective response.”

She did not respond objectively, perhaps because, Joe once suggested, no one had bothered to tell her what the hell that meant.

Not that it mattered, finally. As momentous as had been their concerns about the surgery, they withered to nothing after the pain kicked in.

It first appeared in the right upper quadrant of her abdomen, and in what both she and Joe had come to expect as the norm, its cause was optimistically misdiagnosed as being related to the surgery.

It wasn’t. The disease had spread to the liver. The pain came from the tumor growing faster than the liver could stretch to accommodate it. With Ellen’s now rapidly shrinking frame, Joe began to fantasize at night about the cancer becoming larger than the two of them put together.

Of all the horrors he’d seen in combat, the self-doubt and confusion he’d suffered growing up, nothing he’d experienced had prepared him for this metamorphosis of the woman he’d planned to grow old with, into a pain-racked, sutured, wan-eyed vessel of an army of pestilent cells. Every visit to Ellen’s bedside reinforced the sensation that a yawning distance was growing between them, as if she were slipping below the surface, and all he could reach—plunging as deeply as he could—were the tips of her fingers.

When she died, just two days after Klaus Oberfeldt, she weighed barely seventy-five pounds—a parody of Joe’s nightmares about the creature growing within her. In the end, all that was left—all that escaped—was the smile she gave him just before she fell asleep for the last time.

Joe put aside the crime scene photographs and swiveled his desk chair around to face the darkness of the night outside. It was starting to turn cool, creeping toward September, and people had already begun commenting on how summer’s grip on the region was beginning to slip.

“Working late, boss?”

He looked over his shoulder at the office entrance. He saw the small, slim profile of his one female squad member, Sammie Martens, barely visible in the gloom, “Hey, Sam. You, too? Feel free to hit the lights.”

She approached his desk and settled into his guest chair instead. Of his three younger colleagues, Sam held a special place in his heart. She’d worked so hard to get here, essentially from childhood, that the concept of struggle had become not only second nature but a self-fulfilling prophecy. This wasn’t just ambition, although she had that, too. It was more reminiscent of the punch-drunk boxer who can’t see the other guy has thrown in the towel. Sam’s fate, it appeared, was to keep on swinging without clearly knowing why.

“Not me,” she said now. “I was working out at home and saw your light on. Made me curious. We have something going?”

Joe smiled in the semi-darkness. Sam’s huge single-room loft apartment, once a post-Civil War dance hall in one of Brattleboro’s ancient building blocks, was directly across the street, the better—so claimed her friends—for her to respond to any call. They were only half kidding, and she only half took it in jest.