The Surrogate Thief

by Archer Mayor

  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?”

  “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.