The Surrogate Thief

by Archer Mayor

  Joe smiled at him. “You like her.”

  Willy frowned. “I understand her. She did what she had to do, or so it seems.”

  “Which was . . . ?”

  Willy sat back. “Well, it’s not like she had her life cataloged and waiting for us, but from what I found, she tried her hand at teaching, bookkeeping, secretarial work, housecleaning, dispatching for a trucking company, and even did a stint as a court secretary or whatever it is where you use those goofy-looking typewriters you see in Perry Mason movies.”

  “Court reporter,” Joe said, his interest sharpened. “They’re called steno machines. When did she do that?”

  “Beats me,” Willy answered. “All that’s here is the machine and a bunch of the paper rolls that come out the far end of it, all bundled up. Looks like Sanskrit.”

  “What about family, husbands, boyfriends, anything like that?”

  “A few pictures, some letters. Nothing recent, though. No diary I could find. No address book.” He paused and then added, “Off the top of my head? I get the feeling of somebody whose batteries were running low. She kept the place up, did her laundry, washed the dishes, made sure the bathroom was clean, but that’s about it—maintenance-level stuff. That’s the dignity I was talking about. But three years from now, I wouldn’t have been surprised to hear a 911 call for a suicide here.”

  “A life of quiet desperation?” Joe asked, gazing about, struck by his colleague’s insight—the very thing that kept Joe playing interference for the man.

  Willy covered with a dismissive laugh, probably worried that he’d revealed too much sensitivity. “Shit, no. That’s me. This broad was just going crazy.”

  Joe nodded quietly, allowing Willy his pretense. “Well, if you think you’re done, let’s collect what we’ll need and move it to where we can work on it. I better beg the PD for their basement room—set up a data center. I get the feeling that before we’re done, this’ll just be the tip of the iceberg.”

  Willy stood up and stretched his one good arm, looking oddly like a man hailing a cab. “Sounds like a pain in the ass to me.”

  He then paused and fixed his boss with a pleased expression Gunther had grown to expect. “There is something else.”

  “Ah—I was wondering.”

  Kunkle’s smile broadened. “The place was tossed before we got here—very carefully.”

  Gunther stared at him. “I thought that was the two of you. I was going to compliment you on being so neat and tidy.”

  Willy was clearly insulted. “Neat and tidy? Shit, if I’m left on my own, I guarantee you’ll never know I was there. These guys weren’t that good. If you did notice something—assuming you’re not bullshitting me—it was the people who came before us.”

  “You think they found what they were after?”

  Willy was back to looking superior. “What did I say? No diary, no address book.”

  Gunther waited for the standard premeeting chatter to peter out. They were in a windowless room in the basement of Brattleboro’s municipal center, designed to serve as an emergency command post when needed, and thus equipped with phones, copiers, computer hook-ups, and the rest. It was used only sparingly, and mostly during drills or serious storms. For the VBI, with its one office upstairs, it had come in handy more than once as a conference or training room.

  Joe watched as the stragglers got their coffee and doughnuts at a table lining one wall and searched out an empty chair. In attendance were his three squad members, Paul Spraiger and two more from up north, several BCI officers from the state police, and a couple of Brattleboro’s finest, Ron Klesczewski and J. P. Tyler, both of whom had worked for Gunther when he was chief of detectives.

  “I’d like to thank you all for coming,” he said as the last chair scraped into position. “I think everybody knows everybody else, if only by reputation.”

  “Guess that covers Willy,” Spraiger said to general laughter.

  “Some of you,” Joe continued after a pause, “are here because of the death of Hannah Shriver in Tunbridge. Others because of a thirty-two-year-old Brattleboro homicide. What connects them is an old gun that surfaced during a hostage negotiation several weeks ago here in town, along with the recent deaths of a woman in Orange and a man in Gloucester, Massachusetts, both of whom, like Hannah Shriver, were living in Brattleboro years ago when a shopkeeper named Klaus Oberfeldt was beaten to death and he and his wife were robbed of their life savings.”

  Gunther gestured to Ron. “Could you fire up that projector?”

  The room’s lighting dimmed, and the white screen beside Joe became one of the black-and-white images he’d studied upon first revisiting this case.

  “The Oberfeldt store, taken from the entrance looking toward the back room. You’ll note the large bloodstain on the floor, belonging to the victim, who died of his injuries six months later, and a small string of droplets heading toward the rear exit. The working theory, then as now, is that during the beating, the assailant was also wounded and left those smaller bloodstains behind on his way to the storage room, where he removed the money from under the floorboards before escaping out the back door.”

  “Were samples collected of both?” J. P. Tyler, the PD’s forensics expert, asked from the darkness.

  “Yes,” Joe answered, “and they both still have viable DNA, one matching the victim, the other unmatched to date. There was also blood on . . . next slide.”

  The shop was replaced by a close-up of the knife.

  “This switchblade,” Joe continued, “which matched Mr. Oberfeldt’s. It also had a thumbprint on the blade, the only solid clue we managed to get at the time. The print belonged to a young repeat offender—primarily a thief—named Peter Shea. We went after this kid for the robbery-assault—Mr. Oberfeldt hadn’t died yet—but Shea had already left town, we think because of this.” He nodded to Ron, who brought up a slide of the Blackhawk.

  “According to Shea’s girlfriend, Katie Clark, Pete found this under his mattress in the apartment they shared. The papers at the time were told that Oberfeldt was pistol-whipped, but not about the switchblade, so Shea apparently figured that the gun, covered with blood when he found it, was the one we were looking for. Already being a penal system graduate, he assumed we’d connect the gun to him and throw away the key. So he ran.”

  “Wasn’t he right?” asked one of the troopers. “If the knife was his and the gun was under his bed, didn’t that make him the bad guy? Did he have an alibi?”

  “No,” Joe conceded, “which is why we liked him, not to mention that the blood type of those droplets matched his, as they did most of us in the pre-DNA days. But you’ll see the real problem in a bit. This takes a little explaining. Next, Ron.”

  This time the slide was of Katie Clark, looking fast asleep, just as he’d left her. Except that this was a medical examiner’s photograph.

  “This is the girlfriend I mentioned—Katie Clark—found dead a few days ago in her apartment in Orange. So far, she’s been ruled a natural, although obviously I have my doubts. In any case, after Pete left Brattleboro, Katie gave the Blackhawk to her brother, who hid it in his Dummerston house, probably forgot all about it, and then died a few years later. In the last couple of months, a young couple bought the place and began fixing it up. During that process, a floor refinisher found the gun, stole it, and sold it, indirectly, to the guy who died in that hostage negotiation. That’s how it resurfaced. It had been so well preserved over the years that the lab was able to match the blood on it to Klaus Oberfeldt’s.”

  Joe paused to let everyone absorb what he’d told them so far, before resuming, “Now here’s one of the first problems I mentioned: if Katie told the truth, and Pete did find the gun planted under his mattress, who planted it? One of you already suggested it wasn’t planted at all, implying Katie was covering for her boyfriend. That’s fair enough—God knows we’ve seen that before—but a second problem then presents itself. Next slide.”

  This showed a body floatin
g in the water at night, wedged between a boat and a dock piling. “This is the late Peter Shea, who’d been living under an assumed name in Gloucester for several years. He was murdered just hours before I could talk to him, just as Katie Clark died one day after I spoke with her. Needless to say, if Shea was Oberfeldt’s killer, then who killed him and why? And here’s the kicker: The knife wound that did in Shea is a carbon copy of the one the ME found in Hannah Shriver.”

  Predictably, there were a few muted comments exchanged among the audience.

  “All right,” Joe went on. “Let’s allow for several explanations, the first being that Shea was good for the Oberfeldt killing, that Katie lied about his finding the gun under the mattress, and that he died the death of any number of drunks who hang around the rough part of town. That would also mean that Katie did in fact die of natural causes and that Hannah Shriver’s wound looking a lot like Pete’s is pure coincidence.”

  “Right,” Willy commented caustically.

  “Another explanation,” Joe said, “is that Shea was framed, like he claimed, and that the recent resurfacing of the gun had the effect of pounding a fist on a chess table and rearranging the pieces. The person who framed him was forced to cover tracks he didn’t think he’d ever have to worry about again.”

  “Isn’t that a bit of a reach?” asked Tyler. “The evidence still points to Shea.”

  “Yes and no,” Joe answered. “The circumstantial case is the same, but now, with DNA analysis, we know that those blood droplets, although of the same group, aren’t actually his. To my mind, they represent the one unplanned aspect of this whole thing. You could see someone stealing Shea’s knife, which he did say he’d lost; you could see the same person planting the gun on Shea later. But who could predict that Oberfeldt might land a lucky punch as he was being beaten? It’s the spontaneous nature of those droplets that gives them credibility.”

  There was a moment’s silence as everyone considered the point.

  “You can hit the lights, Ron. Thanks.”

  They all blinked in the sudden brightness as Joe continued. “Okay, for the time being, I’d like you to just tuck this away—an old anomaly needing closer scrutiny. Our primary job right now is the murder of Hannah Shriver. If nothing else, it’s a spanking new case, which should help. Let’s not forget, though, that she was roughly the same age as Katie and Pete; she lived here the same time they did; she died pretty close to when they both died, and precisely the same way Shea did. In addition, for what it’s worth, Willy’s pretty sure her house was searched before we got to it. We have no idea what may have been taken, if anything, but whoever did it was thorough and tried covering their tracks.”

  He rose from where he’d been sitting on the edge of a desk and began pacing before them. “My proposal is that we divide and conquer, concentrating on Hannah now and on Hannah thirty-two years ago, ’cause if I’m right about there being a connection between these three people, Hannah is officially the wild card. It’s looking like Pete was framed for the murder; Katie was definitely his girlfriend, helped ditch the incriminating gun, and might’ve been killed because she knew of his whereabouts. But Hannah? Who knows? If we really dig into her history, both recent and past, my instinct tells me we’ll find the common denominator that pulls everything together.”

  He motioned to Sam, who stood up and began distributing packets.

  “This is what we’ve got so far. You’ll find photos, crime scene sketches, witness interviews, an inventory of Hannah’s house contents, and anything else we thought might be helpful. The top sheet outlines everyone’s assignments and responsibilities. As you proceed with your separate investigations, there will be daily briefings down here at four p.m. unless or until an alternate time is announced. I would like to stress that if any of you uncovers something clearly fitting someone else’s job description, please make sure that person gets the information ASAP. Sam will be the designated gathering point for everything, and she will be apprising me on a continual basis. Also, if I’m unavailable, she will run the daily briefings. Are there any questions?”

  He waited for a slow count of five while they each studied the cover sheets before them, no doubt judging their own ranking in the perceived pecking order of assignments—territoriality being the incurable rash that it is—before he concluded, “All right. Thank you all, and best of luck.”

  Chapter 17

  In fact, Joe was as guilty of being as territorial as anyone else. The assignment he chose for himself—after scrutinizing the employment timeline that Willy had reconstructed from Hannah Shriver’s files and financial records—was to analyze her activities at the time he’d been trying to solve the Oberfeldt robbery-assault. Despite his statement at the meeting that Hannah’s murder should take priority over all else, there was no doubt in his mind that every aspect of this recent mayhem was rooted in that ancient case.

  Willy’s timeline was by no means complete. Some of the documents removed from Hannah’s place were helpful—old tax returns, copies of résumés where she’d outlined her professional history, and a few pieces of correspondence. But Willy had shown his mettle by also digging into the town clerks’ offices in both Townshend and Brattleboro, checking tax records, property transfers, and the like, and filling in a few additional holes.

  To Joe’s relief, however, the few remaining gaps fell outside his scope of interest, if just barely. At the time of Klaus Oberfeldt’s assault, Hannah Shriver was working as a self-employed court reporter, although by six months later, she’d apparently moved on to something else as yet unknown.

  His biggest problem was in how to proceed. So much elapsed time was going to be difficult to backtrack. Hannah’s contemporaries would be middle-aged at best, possibly far afield, and probably have only vague and faulty memories of her. And that was if he found them. He’d brightened when he first heard of the court reporter job, hoping that such a connection to the judiciary, however vague, might hold some promise, but a trip to the county court building revealed that reporters’ names weren’t indexed to the jobs they’d completed, and that locating any such past efforts would require a case-by-case review of everything in the archives. An onerous effort, which, even if successful, still wouldn’t address any jobs she might have done for the various private attorneys across town. The term “court reporter,” after all, wasn’t restricted to the people Willy alluded to when he’d conjured up his vision of Perry Mason. Reporters functioned in all sorts of capacities, transcribing depositions, sworn statements, and any conversations where the participants wanted a full and accurate rendering of what was said. The fruits of their labors weren’t always filed with the court.

  If Hannah Shriver had been killed because of something related to her job, it was going to be a neat trick finding it.

  There was another possible avenue. At the Tunbridge Fair, Nick Letourneau had mentioned that Hannah had a mother residing just outside Brattleboro, who hadn’t yet been approached for questioning. Generally, Joe liked having such conversations with more facts in hand, but it was clearly time to start hoping for a little dumb luck.

  Natalie Shriver lived at Pleasant Acres, a sprawling complex south of town. Part home for the elderly, part straightforward nursing home, it was the only such facility of its size in this entire corner of Vermont, its brethren having been mauled to death in the never-ending and always changing struggle among the powers of Medicare, Medi-caid, the health care industry, and the state.

  Mrs. Shriver, he happily discovered, lived in the independent wing, meaning, he hoped, that she might be more helpful than he’d feared upon first learning of her address. On the other hand, he knew that she’d learned of her daughter’s death by now, and while he’d never had children, Joe had witnessed the grief of parents outliving their youngsters. Such misery was hard to imagine, even after his own experience with loss.

  A cheery LPN escorted him down a series of hallways, eventually delivering him to the open doorway of a large, bright room overlooking a ge
ntly sloping lawn and some manicured trees. Sitting by the large window, looking out, was a small, slight woman with a full head of white hair, who turned toward them as the nurse gently knocked on the door.

  “Natalie?” she said gently. “You have a visitor.”

  The old woman merely watched them with a vacant expression.

  “It’s okay,” the nurse whispered to Joe. “Just sit with her awhile. She needs the company.”

  In a louder voice she added, “Okay. I’ll leave you two alone. If you need me, you know how to get me coming.”

  Joe waited until she’d left before entering the room a few feet. “Mrs. Shriver? Is it okay that I’m here? I don’t want to disturb you. I know you’ve just been through a huge shock.”

  Natalie Shriver tiredly waved a hand toward the other chair by the window. “It’s all right.”

  Joe sat opposite her. “I’m a police officer, Mrs. Shriver.”

  “Natalie. Everyone calls me that.”

  “Okay. I’m Joe. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I’d like to ask you a few questions about Hannah.”

  Natalie’s tired, pale blue eyes studied him as if searching for salvation. “That would be fine.”

  “Before we start, is there anything I can get for you, or would you like to ask me about what happened?”

  She blinked a couple of times, he thought perhaps translating his words into something she could decipher.

  “No.”

  “Okay. If you don’t mind, then, I’ll be direct, only because I don’t want to drag this out more than I have to. But if anything I say upsets you, or if you want to stop at any time, please just tell me. Times like these are tough enough without people like me making them worse.”

  She continued looking at him, and finally acknowledged his speech with a barely perceptible nod.

  “All right,” he began, unsure of what to make of her silence. “Do you know of anyone who might’ve wished Hannah harm?”