The Surrogate Thief Read online

  And that wasn’t all. Reliving Ellen’s death, hearing his mother’s take on why he’d remained single and childless, and comparing it to Gail’s current disappearance into her campaign had made him ponder his past—even amid the present chaos—and consider what might be waiting in the near future.

  If Stanley Katz was right about Gail, and she did pull that rabbit out of the hat, then Joe would soon be involved with a high-profile politician. Not because being a state senator amounted to that much—Vermont had a citizen legislature that worked for only a few months of every year—but because Gail would treat her new post as the proverbial bully pulpit. Becoming a senator would mark only the beginning of her ambitions. She wouldn’t be lost to him forever, as Ellen had been, but he sensed that they might undergo a permanent change.

  For that alone, he saw his present workload as a blessed distraction.

  The biggest logjam was the photographs of the Tunbridge Fair. Considering both the popularity of the event and the egregious nature of the crime, the publicity surrounding Hannah’s death had become statewide and constant, creating yet another pull on Joe’s time in terms of daily press conferences and endless phone calls in which nothing new was ever revealed.

  Pictures came in by mail, were dropped off in person, or arrived via e-mail, and covered the gamut from professional near masterpieces to barely discernible snapshots. Sizes varied, too. The standard four-by-fives and five-by-sevens made up the majority, but added to them in surprising numbers were tiny thumbnail shots in the form of miniature stickers, produced, Joe was told by a savvy Lester Spinney, by the latest teenage rage of point-and-shoot camera. But however they came, and in whatever format, there were thousands of them, each one demanding the utmost scrutiny.

  The response to Hannah’s picture in the Reformer was an entirely different matter. Joe had made sure that the photograph was roughly contemporary to the era in question, but perhaps as a result, both the command center and the Reformer’s letters-to-the-editor column were quickly filled with any number of reactions—as much to her as to other young women who might have simply resembled her. To a startlingly large number of people—despite her name being printed right under the photograph—the smiling girl in the quaint hairdo served as a substitute for loved ones now long gone.

  It wasn’t all for naught, however. As the days slipped by, Joe began to construct a mental home movie of Hannah Shriver as she practiced her newly learned profession, found an apartment on Main Street, and began integrating herself into the community after her two years of schooling in Burlington.

  Lawyers, friends, a landlord, a bartender, an old lover—all began adding their own brushstrokes to the portrait begun during Joe’s conversation with Natalie Shriver. What emerged was a more detailed version of the elderly woman’s recollection, given more immediacy by many of the portrayers’ having been of Hannah’s age.

  Lou Boxer was one of them. A quiet, serious, bespectacled man given to extensive pauses between sentences, he came by Joe’s office one afternoon and confessed in a muted monotone that he and Hannah had once been lovers.

  “Was this when she was working as a court reporter?” Gunther asked after offering him a seat and a cup of coffee.

  Boxer turned down the coffee as he settled into a chair. “Yes. Not that she did that full-time.”

  “Oh?” Joe asked.

  “She was a freelancer. Little tough to find jobs right out of the starting gate.”

  “That’s reasonable,” Joe conceded. “Did things improve over time?”

  “A little. Never to the point where she made a living.”

  “How did she pay the rent, then?”

  Boxer smiled wistfully. “She got people to help her out. Like me. Hannah could be persuasive.”

  Gunther raised his eyebrows. “Interesting comment. Tough relationship?”

  The other man considered that before asking, “Aren’t those two words synonymous?” He fell silent for a moment and studied the ceiling in contemplation. Joe let him think.

  “Those were different times,” he finally said. “We worked harder at being cool and detached, trying not to be possessive.”

  “She had other lovers.”

  Boxer nodded silently.

  “You know who any of them were?”

  “Oh, sure. That was part of it, wearing those kinds of things on your sleeve. Very countercultural.”

  “Sounds like you’ve gotten a little cynical over time.”

  Boxer sighed. “I shop at the Co-op, protest against the government, and always vote pro-union. Let’s just say I’ve either gotten wiser or too tired to cover much beyond the basics. Right now all the posturing we indulged in sounds as self-focused as anything the movie stars do in the tabloids.”

  Gunther moved on. “How soon after Hannah hit town did you two hook up?” He pulled a calendar from a file of the right year. “Maybe this’ll help nail down the date, more or less. Anytime around then?” He flipped to the month Oberfeldt was attacked.

  Lou Boxer glanced at the calendar. “About two weeks earlier.”

  “Pretty good memory.”

  Boxer reacted to Joe’s doubtful tone. “Not really. I celebrated my birthday with her shortly after we met.” He reached out and tapped a date with his finger. “Then.”

  One day after the attack. “You recall how she was that day, since it’s clear in your mind?”

  Boxer looked at him quizzically. “How she was? Meaning what?”

  “Was she nervous, distracted, in any way unlike herself?”

  Again the nostalgic smile. “No. What little I do remember is pretty pleasant.”

  Joe changed his approach. “Do you remember reading about an assault on a storekeeper around that time?”

  “Yeah, vaguely. That may be because it’s been in the news, though. You guys are supposed to be looking into it again. Is that connected to Hannah?”

  Gunther answered him truthfully. “We don’t know, but we’re looking at everything right now. Did you and she ever talk about that case?”

  Boxer shrugged. “God, I don’t know. Some things I remember better than others—chitchat isn’t one of them.”

  Which at least meant it hadn’t been a major topic of conversation. “All right,” Joe continued. “Let’s step back a little, then. How long were you two an item?”

  “About half a year, give or take.”

  “Okay. So you met, you hit it off, had some good times, did all the right cool things. Then what? A falling-out? What changed?”

  “She did,” Boxer answered, without hesitation for once.

  “Could you elaborate?”

  The other man removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’d fallen in love with her. I knew it was a bad idea. Hannah was a free spirit—there’s a phrase from the old days. Groovy. Now I guess I’d call her flighty and selfish and maybe a little cruel. It was pretty much her way or the highway. At the time, I saw it as feminism and free expression and all that other crap, but it was what it was. In hindsight, or maybe just because I am more cynical now, I don’t think she ever gave a damn about the feminist cause, or any other cause, for that matter—just herself.”

  “So, she gave you your walking papers because she wasn’t ready to commit?” Joe asked.

  But Lou Boxer was clearly still struggling to define a specifically sharper memory. “Partly. There was something else, too. She wouldn’t own up to it, but it was almost like I was suddenly superfluous—like she’d caught a sudden gust in her sails and I was just slowing her down.”

  “Suddenly?” Joe repeated, struck by the word. “What do you think happened?”

  Boxer replaced his glasses carefully. “I don’t know. She dumped the whole court reporter thing right afterward, so maybe it was tied to that.”

  “After two years of study,” Gunther mused, remembering Natalie’s mention of the same thing. “Makes you wonder why. She come into some money?”

  “She didn’t tell me one way or the oth
er. I didn’t get hit for any more financial favors, but I assumed that was because I was old news.”

  “So, she wasn’t living high on the hog that you could tell?”

  “She might’ve been,” he admitted. “I wouldn’t have known. To be honest, I took this pretty hard. Wandered off to lick my wounds. Lived in California for a couple of years. I never heard from her again. Not,” he added ruefully, “until I saw that photo in the paper. That was a real shock.”

  Gunther let a moment of silence pass before asking, “You mentioned you knew her other lovers, or at least some of them. You remember any names?”

  Lou Boxer scratched his forehead. “So long ago. One of them was named Travis. I never knew his last name. Another . . . Jesus . . . Bob comes to mind. That’s useful, right?” He sighed. “I’m not going to be much help there. They were faces to me, you know? Rivals. I didn’t want to know who they were. It was bad enough they existed. I was never as cool as I pretended. Just a middle-class kid undercover.”

  Gunther nodded sympathetically, but with visions of Hannah and Pete Shea and Katie Clark and even himself as a young man in his head, he was thinking that there was quite a bit of pretense taking place back then.

  Slowly and sporadically, another piece of the puzzle that was Hannah Shriver fell into place from her incoming transcriptions. Task force members started uncovering old documents from the court archives, and a couple of law offices pitched in with yellowed depositions and other interviews. It was haphazard and erratic, done by the private lawyers only in the hope that it might curry favor with law enforcement, but even so, it resulted in a tremendous pile of reading. Transcribed conversations average one page per minute of dialogue, depending on how they’re typed up, and every “uh,” “ah,” and “you know” is faithfully and excruciatingly recorded. Staring at page after page of vacuous meanderings, baffling phrasing, and—in Hannah’s case—a stunning number of typos and misspellings helped Joe understand why she might have left the business so quickly, and why she’d been hard up for work while she lasted. Considering many of her efforts as professionally produced documents almost seemed ludicrous at times.

  On one such day of overexposure, he was leaning back in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his aching eyes, when Sammie Martens walked in from downstairs. Finding the windowless basement claustrophobic, Joe had temporarily fled to his top-floor office.

  “Got something that may be a total dead end,” she told him, dropping yet another transcript onto his desk. “But the date in it is the same night Oberfeldt got whacked. I figured you’d want to see it. I marked the section.”

  Joe straightened and picked up the document, leafing to the page with the yellow Post-it note.

  Sam continued speaking. “It’s a deposition Hannah typed from someone named Sandy Conant. He was a coworker of a guy named Mitch Blood, whose wife claimed she was being abused and had been beaten in front of Conant, making him a witness. Problem was, Sandy claimed ignorance and had an alibi to back him up. He was collecting his mail in the lobby at exactly the same time the wife said she was being clobbered across town.”

  Joe focused on the words before him.

  MR. CONANT: I pick up my mail same time every day, right after I get off work. 9:30 on the dot. Been doin’ it for years.

  MR. JENNINGS: I understand that, Sandy, but without corroboration, we only have your word. Did any . . .

  MR. CONANT: Corra-what?

  MR. JENNINGS: We need to know if anyone saw you doing that. Getting your mail.

  MR. CONANT: T. J. was there. Came in just as I opened the box.

  MR. JENNINGS: Does T. J. have a last name?

  MR. CONANT: Sure. Everybody does.

  MR. JENNINGS: And what is T. J.’s last name?

  MR. CONANT: Ralpher. T. J. Ralpher. I have no clue what the T. J.’s for, so don’t bother askin’.

  MR. JENNINGS: Did you and T. J. talk?

  MR. CONANT: Nope. We’re not like friends. He said hi, I said hi. We live in the same building. That’s about it, but he could vouch for me. I don’t know shit about Mitch and that cow he calls a wife. Never seen him lay a hand on her, and if she says different, well, then she’s full of it.

  MR. JENNINGS: Thank you, Sandy. I think we get the idea.

  Joe turned the page, but Sam interrupted him. “That’s really it. A little more about where he worked and what he knew of Mitch’s marital problems, and then it’s over.”

  Gunther closed the transcript and returned it. “Any alarms go off?”

  She shrugged. “I called the lawyer who gave us this—Jennings. He didn’t remember the case, but he had one of his slaves look it up for me. It never went anywhere. I guess it all hinged on Conant being a witness, so once he faded, that was it.”

  “You look up T. J. Ralpher?” Joe asked. “That rings a faint bell.”

  Sam equivocated. “I ran him by VCIC on the computer. Some ancient stuff, dating to back then. After that, nothing. Like I said, I only showed you this because of the timing.”

  “What about Sandy Conant?”

  “Yup. Checked on him, too. Died an alcoholic about ten years ago.”

  Joe cupped his chin in his hand and gazed at the wall a moment. “How ’bout the other stuff Willy and I found at her house? All those paper rolls from the steno machine. Do we have one that matches this?” he held up the document.

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “But you’d have an easier time reading hieroglyphics.”

  The phone rang beside Joe. He picked it up and answered.

  “Joe,” Lester said. “You might want to come downstairs. We found something in the Tunbridge pictures.”

  The basement room had lost the neat and tidy appearance of its inception. The squared-away tables equipped with phones and computers were piled high with paperwork, the floor was strewn with debris, and the air was close and vaguely unpleasant. Men and women either sat at their stations drinking coffee and squinting at screen or page or wandered back and forth comparing notes. A low buzz of continuous conversation, both face-to-face and on the phone, filled the air like a mechanical hum. In one corner, Lester Spinney had commandeered two folding tables he’d lined up catty-corner and covered with folders and piles of photographs that had fallen to him for analysis. In the center of it all was another computer, designated solely for e-mail downloads. This is where Joe and Sam found him sitting.

  He looked over his shoulder as they approached. “It ain’t like in the movies, but it’s still pretty cool.”

  They peered at the screen. Before them was a slightly blurry picture, enlarged as far as it could stand, of the fair’s interior midway, the one enclosed within the racetrack. It was a crowd shot, with a smiling child in the foreground holding an enormous cotton candy, his cheeks already smeared bright pink.

  Lester tapped the screen, where his two colleagues were already looking. “That’s her, moving fast, so she’s out of focus and almost out of the picture, but look at this guy.”

  Framed by the entrance gate and still clearly in midstride, the person he’d indicated appeared to be directing two men to go elsewhere, while a third continued after Hannah. Their expressions were grim, in stark contrast to the child’s, and there seemed no doubt that they were staring straight at the woman in the cowboy hat and bright red shirt.

  “What do you think?” Lester asked.

  Joe studied the leader. Medium height and build. Brown hair and mustache.

  “I think I better drive back to Gloucester.”

  It was early evening when Gunther stepped through the bar’s door. The usual hangers-on were still there, seemingly unmoved since he’d left them—in fact, barely looking alive. The one exception, as before, was back playing gin with Evelyn, both of them chatting quietly. Out of deference to the place’s clear traditions, Joe took his own usual seat and gazed down the length of the bar at the woman he hadn’t been able to chase from his mind as easily as he’d hoped.

  She cast him a smiling glance, slap
ped down a final card, patted her old rival on the shoulder, and slowly walked in Joe’s direction, pausing only long enough to draw him a Coke. She placed it before him with a napkin and leaned on the bar.

  “Couldn’t keep away, huh?”

  “Don’t I wish,” he said, taking a sip.

  She pushed out her lips slightly. “Interesting answer. Could go either way.”

  He laughed. “No, no. Don’t take me wrong. I’d love to be back here for pleasure only.”

  “That would suit me, too.”

  Even with the kiss she’d given him last time, her response came as a surprise and made him blush. Sammie Martens had asked if he wanted company on the trip, and he’d turned her down, citing the enormous workload confronting them all. That was true enough, but he knew in his heart that efficiency had played no role in his wanting to travel alone.

  And now that he was here, that knowledge was making him feel awkward.

  Nevertheless, he heard himself say, “You on a full shift tonight?”

  She nodded slowly, watching him carefully. “Yup. What were you thinking of?”

  He smiled, hot and uncomfortable. “Just a question. I know you don’t like me acting like a cop in here.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That what you want to do? Act like a cop?”

  He knew she was enjoying herself—self-confident behind her bar—which had the funny effect of lessening his embarrassment. In that way, he started feeling he could trust her, regardless of where this led. Which was comforting, given his own confusion.