The Surrogate Thief (8 page)

Still, it took time, and it didn’t compare to being on the street chasing leads, so by the time he called it quits, he was in the mood for some R & R.

In the past, that had usually involved Gail in some way, either by phone or through a visit if she was in town.

He sat in his car, wondering what to do. Dropping by the last time hadn’t been particularly successful. It was later now, of course, after the average dinner circuit or run-of-the-mill Kiwanis or Elks meeting.

He started up the car and drove over to her house.

Again, unsurprisingly, it was a mistake. The lights were all blazing and the driveway as jammed as before. He’d set himself up for an avoidable disappointment. Turning around in the middle of the street to head home, he was angry at his own stupidity. Running for high office had been in Gail’s blood for years, essentially since he’d known her. Events, traumatic and otherwise, had delayed the inevitable, but her time had finally come. And he knew this was only the beginning. An ambitious, hardworking, intelligent woman, Gail was a late starter, which further fueled her need to excel.

Her goals were thus reasonable, expected, even inevitable. But he still found himself resentful. In the midst of revisiting a past he’d assumed was long buried, he was finding the rekindled grief oddly amorphous, as if no longer applicable to just his loss of Ellen.

He was pretty sure this was a result of frustration and exhaustion. But he also knew that sometime soon the doubts it was raising would have to be addressed.

Chapter 8

H
ello?”

“Hi. It’s your firstborn child.”

There was an infectious chuckle at the other end of the line—old, thin, and inordinately welcome. “Joseph. My goodness, it’s been forever.”

“It’s been two weeks, Mom. No guilt trips, please. I hope I’m not calling too late.”

“Guilt’s a mother’s best currency, Joe. You should know that. You’re the detective. And you know the habits around here. Always up until midnight. Hang on. Let me get your brother.”

Joe visualized her backing her electric wheelchair out of the living room docking station she’d created of card tables, shelving, and benches, all laden with books, magazines, and newspapers, and purring toward the back of the house. The need for a chair stretched back years; the need for it to be electric reflected her increasing frailty. It was a sad reality, with an inevitable outcome that Joe did his best not to think about much.

“Leo,” he heard her call out, summoning his younger brother. “Pick up. Joe’s on the phone.”

He also heard the television in the background. The reading material had once been all there was—her window on the world and a symbol of her devotion to the written word. Over the past few years, though, he’d noted sadly that the TV had been growing in dominance. Her eyes weren’t what they had been; her attention span was shortening. She still did read and write, but in shorter spurts and with decreasing retention, more out of hard-won habit than with true enthusiasm.

“Joey,” came the perpetually upbeat voice of his brother. “How’s it hanging? Sorry, Mom.”

“That’s disgusting, Leo,” she countered. “And I didn’t hear it.”

Both of them allowed for that particular leap of logic.

“Okay,” said Joe. “I just figured I hadn’t called in a while. A very
short
while. I was wondering how you were both keeping. Why aren’t you out on a date, Leo?”

Leo was a lifelong bachelor, a popular and skilled deli butcher in Thetford who wooed the local housewives with charisma, humor, and good cuts of meat. He had a passion for less-than-mint cars of the sixties and for women who saw him as having no promise whatsoever, and a habit of shaking your hand and kneading your arm simultaneously, as if judging both your character and your fat content.

“Woulda been, shoulda been, but her husband got home early.”

“Leo,” their mother said sharply. “Enough of that. It’s not even true. He’s not the Casanova he pretends to be, Joe. He spends most of his time with those broken-down cars, making a mess in the barn. If the EPA ever came by for a visit, this place would be on the Superfund list.”

Leo still lived in the home they’d known all their lives, the farm Joe’s father had worked until his death decades earlier. He’d left behind his two boys, his much younger widow, a few buildings, and little else beyond some free-and-clear acreage, which she’d slowly sold off to pay bills and simplify her life. For some reason, whether habit or a comfortable lethargy, Leo had simply stayed on. His mother had made it easy by leaving him to his own devices, a show of respect that was paying off now that she had a built-in and devoted caregiver.

“You working on any big cases, Joe?” Leo asked, clearly hoping to deflect their mother’s attention.

“Not really,” Joe admitted. “Just reopened one that goes back a bit. It’s interesting but probably academic by now.” He generally downplayed his job—a veteran cop’s inbred discretion.

“We heard about the shooting down there,” Leo continued. “The hostage thing that turned inside out? The TV loved that one. You have anything to do with it?”

“Leave him be, Leo.”

“No, that’s okay, Mom,” Joe answered. “The PD handled it, Leo. Remember Ron Klesczewski?”

“God,” Leo said. “He caught that? Poor guy. Sounded like a mess.”

Joe couldn’t argue. “Just another offering from our so- called dominant species.”

“Ouch. That doesn’t sound good.”

“How’s Gail?” Joe’s Mom asked, revealing her intuition.

Leo wasn’t as sensitive. “Yeah. Boy, she’s really making headlines. You think she’ll pull it off? That Parker guy could smile the chrome off a fender, and he’s well funded, too. I heard what’s-his-name—Tom Bander—has thrown in with him. Isn’t he, like, the richest guy in the state?”

“I don’t think he’s that big, Leo,” Joe answered. His heart wasn’t into talking politics, although he would have had to admit he knew little about the man, aside from his wealth. “It’s a famously liberal county. She might have a shot.”

“Not much of one, from what the pundits’re saying. But hey. I’d vote for her. Guess that’s not kosher, though, right?”

“No. Probably not. I’ll tell her you offered, though.”

“Say good night, Leo,” his mother said quietly. “I need to speak with Joe alone.”

Leo took no offense. “You got it, Ma. I’m in midautopsy with a carburetor anyhow. Come up and visit, Joe.”

“Will do, Leo. Keep out of trouble.”

“Ha. That’ll be the day.”

There was a click on the phone, a momentary pause that often followed Leo’s departures, before his mother said, “You don’t sound well, Joe.”

“I really am. Promise. Maybe a little tired.”

“Then what is it?”

Joe’s mother had been a parent and a half to him and Leo, since their taciturn and older father had spent most of his days working the fields in stolid silence. He’d been a generous and gentle man, not at all cold, but he waited for people to come to him, and then responded only to direct questions he felt he could answer. It fell to his wife to fill in the blanks, something she did with animated conversation, an avalanche of good books, and an honesty that combined respect with openness.

Joe conceded defeat, which he now realized was why he’d called in the first place. “The old case I mentioned was the one I was running when Ellen died. It’s brought a lot of stuff back.”

Her voice softened. “Oh, Joe. I’m so sorry. That’s got to be very tough, especially with Gail being so busy.”

She’d put her finger on it, as she so often did. Years before, after Gail had been raped and her life turned upside down, Joe had almost died trying to bring the perpetrator in. Then, as now, Joe’s mother had helped him see clearly through the tricky emotional maze.

“Does Gail even know what you’re working on?” she asked.

“No,” he confessed. “I haven’t had a chance to tell her.”

“Because of her schedule or because it involves Ellen?”

He hesitated. “Both, maybe. Mostly the schedule, but I do feel a little weird about this. I haven’t thought about Ellen so much in a long time.”

“Her death changed your life, Joe. It took years before you allowed someone like Gail to get close, and even then it only worked because she didn’t replace what Ellen was for you.”

“A wife?”

“More than that,” his mother pursued. “Ellen would have been the mother of your children, if you two had chosen to adopt. You’ve been mourning that all this time, too, whether you admit it or not.”

Joe remained silent, pondering the truth of her argument, looking for flaws he realized might not be there.

“Are you feeling a little widowed all over again?” she asked after a few moments.

Joe was caught off guard. “I’m not sure I’d put it that way.”

“Maybe you should. It might help you see things more clearly.”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

“Is it? You’re not married. You live apart. Your quiet moments together are shoehorned in. What’s left if you lose those? I wouldn’t downplay the importance of this.”

Joe hesitated again, somewhat at a loss. “I can’t tell her to stop running. She wouldn’t do it, anyway.”

“That’s not the debate to have. There may not even be a debate. But this has got to be put on the table between you, Joe. You’re not going to be able to settle this in your own head. People don’t have good conversations in the mirror, not ones that count, anyway.”

This time the ensuing silence was respected by both of them, allowing her words to find their proper nesting place.

Finally, Joe sighed. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I love you, sweetheart.”

Willy Kunkle pointed through the windshield. “That’s your man.”

Sitting behind the wheel, Joe watched as a thin young hustler with a struggling beard swung off the porch of one of Brattleboro’s ubiquitous decrepit wooden apartment houses on Canal Street and began walking west, his body language at odds with itself, hovering between watchfulness and cool indifference.

“John Moser?” Joe asked.

“The one and only.”

“You have anything we can use to squeeze him?”

“Not much. Like I told you before, he’s cagey that way. I do have a bluff that might work, though. Remember Jaime Wagner?”

Gunther thought back, his brain, like those of most in his profession, filled with a gallery of people no one else would choose to know. “Pimply guy who ripped off the Army Navy store a few years back?”

Kunkle nodded. “I’ve got him parked at the PD right now on something unrelated. But he works for Moser off and on, and I hear he helped Moser on a job just a few days ago. I’m thinking we can use him for that bogus lineup thing old Frank used to pull.”

Gunther laughed. “Father Murphy’s rolling, walk-by beauty show? Jesus. God knows what the legalities are of that nowadays.”

“Who cares?” Willy answered, opening the door. “It’s not like we’re busting either one of them.”

Joe didn’t argue, if only because, in one fluid movement peculiar to this very asymmetrical man, Willy Kunkle had launched himself from the car and was already following their quarry down the street.

Joe cranked the engine, eased into traffic, and drove to a second parking spot about a block ahead of John Moser. He waited, watching Moser approach in the rearview mirror, Willy quietly closing the distance behind him, before he, too, got out of the car.

“John Moser?” he asked the young man, whose face instantly froze. “I’d like to ask you . . .”

Predictably, he didn’t get to finish. But he didn’t have to break into a footrace he wouldn’t have won, either. Moser spun on his heel to bolt and ran right into Willy’s powerful right hand, which grabbed him by the throat like a farmer snatching a chicken.

“Be nice, asshole,” was all Willy said.

“So, here’s the thing,” Willy explained to a scowling John Moser sitting on a metal chair in an empty borrowed room down the hall from the VBI office. “We’ve been working that robbery/assault on Chicken Coop Hill four days ago—the one where you wore gloves and a mask and thought you were so good your shit didn’t stink—and guess what? We’ve come up with a solid case. In fact, the SA likes it enough that he thinks he’ll run with it.”

“You’re full of crap,” Moser said flatly.

Which was correct. Willy had only heard that Moser had committed the crime, and he’d read the victim’s statement. But he didn’t have a case. Not only that, it would have been a Brattleboro PD investigation to begin with. So Willy was bluffing twice over. He did, however, have two advantages: First, Moser wouldn’t know how police jurisdictional tap dances got sorted out, and second, he had no idea, in this world of fantasy forensics, what a cop like Willy would be able to conjure up.

“I’m full of something, all right,” Willy agreed, pulling a small plastic bag from his pocket. “Like a strand of fiber we linked to your ski mask.”

Moser squinted at the barely visible thread, in fact something Willy had removed from his own jacket earlier.

“And this,” Willy added, waving a randomly selected crime lab printout in the air so Moser couldn’t read it. “You’re too dumb to know this, but DNA doesn’t just come from blood and semen. We can get it from almost anywhere.” He leaned forward slightly. “Including saliva. Like the little drops of spit you spray when you’re talking. Remember talking to the victim, John? You got right in his face and said some really ugly things to him. And every time you opened your big yap, you nailed him with tiny bits of DNA.” Willy waved the printout again. “Which we retrieved from the poor slob’s face. Amazing, huh?”

Amazing and impossible. Except that Moser’s growing concern was becoming clear.

Down the hall, Joe sat leaning back, his feet up on the windowsill, chatting with a high-strung Jaime Wagner, who was perched on the edge of a folding chair as if it might collapse beneath him.

“You’ve got to know we’ve been watching you, Jaime,” Gunther said in a fatherly tone. “Kid like you, in a rush to spend the rest of his life in jail. It wears me out. You know how many years I’ve been chasing guys like you?”

In the sudden silence, Jaime Wagner felt forced to murmur, “No.”

“Way too many,” Joe said expansively. “I mean, it’s no skin off my butt. It’s what I get paid for. But you know, every once in a while, I play it differently—try to be a little more supportive. Maybe it’s because I’m getting older—beats me—but I like stirring things up now and then.”

Wagner was staring at him as if he were speaking Chinese.

Joe swung his feet off the windowsill and placed his elbows on his knees, scrutinizing Jaime. “That’s why you’re here. I had you picked up so you’d know I’m making a special project out of you—something to make me feel better about myself. I figure if I keep you out of trouble, maybe God’ll look kindly on me at the end, you know what I’m saying?”

Jaime Wagner had no clue. “I guess.”

Joe smiled. “Great. I wouldn’t want to do this without your cooperation, right?”

Joe stood up and took two steps forward, so that he now loomed over the teenager.

“Of course,” he resumed, “I’d need a show of good faith from you so I know I’m not wasting my time.”

Wagner licked his lips. “Like what?”

Gunther shrugged. “I don’t know. Not much—barely anything, really. Just something to make me feel we’re communicating. That you’re going to be straight with me. I mean, I remember when we busted you for the Army Navy heist, you lied your head off, which kind of hurt my feelings, since we all knew you’d done it. See what I mean?”

Another awkward silence stretched between them. “What do I have to do?” Jaime asked in a near whisper.

Joe scratched his head, pretending to think. He’d spent half an hour interviewing the cop who’d dealt with Jaime most recently, learning how best to manipulate him. He suddenly snapped his fingers. “I know.”