The Surrogate Thief Read online

  Gail settled down before musing, “This is so bizarre. Normally, I’d just be horrified that someone had murdered somebody else. Now all I can see is how this might affect my chances. I’m starting to wonder what this is doing to me.”

  Joe briefly returned to his own thoughts along similar lines. For the moment, though, he merely comforted her. “You’re fine, Gail; being realistic doesn’t diminish your integrity. It’s not like you made this happen.”

  She burrowed in more comfortably, clearly struggling to dismiss the matter for the time being. “Okay,” she said in an artificially light tone, “I think I’ll just wait and see. Thanks for the heads-up, though.”

  “Sure,” he said, his mind already stretching ahead. He didn’t believe for a second that Gabe Greenberg had acted on his own, and he knew for a fact that the present political race was but one aspect of all this. Greenberg was just a button man. The trick was to find out who’d pushed him—and why.

  The next morning, Sammie Martens met Joe in the Municipal Building’s parking lot as he was getting out of his car. It was cold, but in her enthusiasm, she’d come out in her shirtsleeves only.

  “Hey, Sam,” he said, collecting paperwork from his passenger seat. “What’s up?”

  “I couldn’t sleep last night, so I did some extra poking around on the computer, taking a closer look at all the players we have going.”

  He smiled at her eagerness. “Don’t tell me. You found something interesting.”

  “Laugh all you want, boss. I did a background check on Tom Bander.”

  Gunther paused. This wasn’t what he’d expected. “And?”

  She cocked her head slightly to one side. “He changed his name thirty years ago.”

  Now he straightened to stare at her, his paperwork abandoned.

  She continued, “It used to be Ralpher. Sound familiar?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly, the word forming a thin cloud as it hit the cold air. “T. J. Ralpher—he was Sandy Conant’s alibi in the deposition Hannah recorded. The same night Klaus Oberfeldt was beaten into a coma.”

  Gail’s earlier concerns about Tom Bander suddenly came back to him in full force. And he’d thought at the time she was being paranoid.

  Chapter 20

  Kathy Bartlett was the VBI’s prosecutor, attached to the attorney general’s office but permanently assigned to the Bureau or, as Kunkle was fond of saying, “for as long as this turkey can fly.”

  Kunkle wasn’t along on the trip Joe took to Montpelier to meet with her, however. Willy wasn’t among the VBI assets Gunther liked to trot out for review, especially to a no-nonsense person like Kathy, who’d been dealing with hardheads long enough to have lost all sense of humor about them.

  Instead, Joe had brought Lester Spinney. A completely different sort from Willy, both physically and temperamentally, Lester had also once worked as an investigator for the AG right after leaving the state police, and therefore knew Kathy Bartlett personally. There was no particular strategy in having Spinney there, but Joe was of a mind that the larger the number of friendly faces around a table, the better.

  All the more so when the topic to be discussed was a political hot potato.

  After offering coffee, exchanging pleasantries, and otherwise settling her guests in, Kathy leaned back in her office chair and eyed the two of them watchfully. “So, right now, Mr. Greenberg’s under lock and key for assaulting a police officer, possession of a lethal weapon, and other assorted junk, correct?”

  “Yes,” Joe concurred. “The local SA figured that would hold him in place until a better plan was cooked up.”

  “Yeah,” she dragged out. “I talked to him on the phone. Seemed pretty eager to unload this one. That got my antennae quivering. You got an explanation?”

  Spinney and his boss exchanged looks.

  “Cute,” Bartlett commented. “What’ve you handed me this time?”

  “Right now,” Joe answered, “it looks like Greenberg works for Thomas Bander.”

  “Okay,” she said, holding up a finger. “That’s money.”

  “Who’s working overtime,” Joe added, “to finance Ed Parker’s campaign for the senate.”

  “That’s politics.” She held up another finger.

  “Whose Democratic opponent,” he continued, “is Gail Zigman.”

  Bartlett stared at him in silence for a split second before saying, “That’s awkward. And it explains the SA’s cold feet, since Gail used to work for him. Big-time conflict.”

  Spinney smiled and held up a finger of his own. “Don’t quit yet.”

  Joe sighed and explained, “Bander was born T. J. Ralpher, who was a Brattleboro bad boy when I was starting out. I’ve got a pretty strong notion that Ralpher grubstaked both his name change and his new life with the twelve thousand dollars he stole from a mom-and-pop store after beating pop to death with a pistol.”

  Kathy’s eyes widened. “Jesus Christ, Joe. What the hell is this?”

  “I think,” Joe said, emphasizing the word, “it’s two killers and three murders, one of which happened before you left grade school.” He removed a file folder from the briefcase he’d arrived with and laid it on her desk. “Those’re the basics. I didn’t want to send them to you without being here in person.”

  Bartlett let out a sigh and reached for the file. “How thoughtful.”

  She flipped it open and leafed through a few pages, getting a feel for its contents. She then glanced at them and said, “It’s a pretty day—fall in Vermont. Why don’t you two go out and catch the sights for an hour? Let me dip my toe into this mess.”

  It was a pretty day, the air sharp but not too cold. Kathy’s office was directly adjacent to the capitol building and the sloping expanse of slightly weather-beaten grass surrounding it. The bright, cool sun made the capitol’s golden dome sparkle like an oversize Christmas ornament, complemented by the bowl of surrounding hills burning with the vibrant hues of a New England fall.

  “You gotta admit, it is going to be complicated,” Spinney commented as they walked the grounds.

  “And that’s just on the surface,” Joe agreed. “Tack on the possibility that Ed Parker is even vaguely inside the loop, and you’ve got something with real teeth on it.”

  “Does Gail know anything about this?” Spinney asked reasonably enough.

  This was potentially explosive—pillow talk indiscretions that could end a career. Wisdom and self-preservation dictated silence or evasion right now. As was his style, however, Gunther chose neither. It wasn’t the kind of precedent he wished to set, especially with a trusted colleague.

  “I gave her a heads-up. She said she’d keep it to herself.”

  Spinney took the confidence in stride. “I can see that. She must’ve been surprised.”

  Gunther remembered the moment in more detail than he would ever share with Lester. “‘Stunned’ might be a better word.”

  When they returned to Kathy Bartlett’s office an hour later, they found her standing by her window, looking down on the same scene they’d just left.

  She faced them as they entered. “How solid are you on Bander being Ralpher and Ralpher being good for the Oberfeldt thing?”

  “Very on the first, still putting it together on the second,” Joe told her.

  “What about Greenberg?” she asked. “I saw you have the bartender’s ID, a gas charge receipt from Gloucester dated the day Shea was killed—presumably as Greenberg was leaving town—the photo of him at the Tunbridge Fair, the witness statements about how Hannah Shriver seemed to be running from him and his pals . . . By the way, any luck rounding them up?”

  Spinney answered, having been assigned precisely that. “We’ve got some names—haven’t put our hands on anyone yet, but I think we’re close.”

  “What else?” she asked rhetorically. “How ’bout the knife he was found with?”

  “At the lab right now,” Joe said.

  “And how’s he connected to Bander?” she continued, gaining stea
m. “What was his job?”

  Joe glanced at Lester. “Full-time staff,” Spinney answered, “complete with health and bennies—listed as head of internal security. His job description, from what we’ve put together, was to coordinate the security at all of Bander’s various enterprises, meaning everything from hiring rent-a-cops to getting buildings wired against break-ins, to running checks on employees. A sort of generalized Mr. Fix-it.”

  “I bet,” Kathy commented. “He have any kind of record?”

  “Military background, some fancy training there and a few comments about being prone to violence, but either he kept out of trouble as a civilian or nobody ever caught him.”

  Bartlett pulled on her earlobe. “Okay,” she said. “We’ve got a mishmash here. I know you think everything’s connected, Joe, and I won’t argue with that. But right now we have one strong case—Greenberg—which looks like it’ll only get stronger, and a second, much older one—Bander/ Oberfeldt—that still needs a lot of work. I suggest you look at these two the way I am, and divide and conquer.”

  “I see what you’re saying, Kathy,” Joe replied. “But I’m not sure I can nail down the older without cherry-picking from the newer. The connection is Greenberg’s motive. I know you guys don’t like to mess with that, but I’m almost positive Shriver and Shea—and Katie Clark, for that matter—are all dead because of the Oberfeldt killing. If we only hang Greenberg for Hannah’s death, we’ll be missing the bigger boat.”

  “I’m not saying that’s what we will do, Joe,” she countered. “I’m saying I want at least one guaranteed bird in hand. If we get that, I’m not opposed to casting a wider net. For one thing, I wouldn’t mind using Greenberg to roll on Bander.”

  But Joe wasn’t ready to so quickly give second billing to a case that had played such a big role in his life.

  “I’d like to get hold of some of Bander’s DNA—try matching it to the drops of blood found at the Oberfeldt scene,” he said almost stubbornly. “There are ways I could do that without him even knowing it—people leave their DNA all over the place.”

  Kathy surprised him by turning his proposal around, a good example of her practical thinking. “All right, then, try this on: If you go after his DNA, don’t go sneaking for it—hit him straight on. All you need is reasonable suspicion for a judge to sign for it. You pull that off, it might put a little extra heat under him from an unexpected quarter. Trick is, you have to satisfy that judge. Can you do it?”

  Joe had been pondering the same problem, and hoped he’d come up with a possibility. “I think so.”

  “Good luck on getting Greenberg to talk, much less roll over on anybody,” Lester commented, still on Kathy’s first topic of interest. “So far, he hasn’t said a peep.”

  “I wouldn’t have, either,” she agreed. “His lawyer’s probably told him to sit tight and wait to see what we’ll spring. What I’d like to do, assuming we get enough ammunition, is to threaten him with the death penalty and then bargain down.”

  Gunther and Spinney didn’t immediately respond. Vermont had no such penalty, nor did Massachusetts for the moment.

  “You want to go federal?” Joe asked.

  Kathy smiled. “Maybe. Mostly I want his lawyer to know we’ve got the urge and the ability. If I and the Massachusetts DA and someone from the U.S. attorney’s office all show up to that first meeting together, the message should be pretty clear.”

  “Does that mean we build our case using federal rules?” Lester asked. The question had merit, since the feds allowed for much broader latitude with rules of procedure.

  But Kathy looked at him sharply. “I’m only threatening federal. No cutting corners here, okay?”

  Both cops nodded in response.

  “Good,” she concluded, pushing herself away from the window ledge she’d been leaning against. “Go round up some ammunition.”

  “That sounded pretty good,” Spinney said later in the car, clearly sounding out his silent boss.

  “Yeah.”

  Spinney hesitated, pretending to watch the multihued panorama of trees painted across the string of low mountains of the valley they were traveling.

  “You want us to do a full-court press on Shriver, then? Nail that down so Kathy can use it to squeeze Greenberg?”

  “Yup.”

  Lester nodded to himself. “Right. Like she said, better that than digging around ancient history.”

  Gunther remained silent.

  “Or maybe not?” his partner suggested.

  Joe blinked a couple of times, as if trying to pay attention. “No, that’s right. That’s what you should do.”

  Spinney smiled. “While you dig into ancient history.”

  Joe cast Lester a rueful look. “Yeah.”

  The younger man smiled. “I thought so. Could I ask you a personal question?”

  “Sure. You can ask.”

  “This is like a private thing, right? The whole who-killed-Oberfeldt deal.”

  Gunther didn’t answer at first, and Lester thought for a moment that he wouldn’t, that it ran too deep.

  He was wrong.

  “You know my wife died while I was chasing that case?”

  “I’d heard that,” Spinney said cautiously. In fact, he’d heard Willy ranting that Joe had become a “fuckin’ Ahab” on the matter.

  “That was a bad time,” Joe continued. “I was earning my spurs as an investigator, coping with my wife’s cancer, struggling to do my best as a cop and a husband, and feeling like I was failing at both.” He paused, as if witnessing it all over again. “And I did fail. Maria Oberfeldt told me so.”

  Lester opened his mouth to ask the obvious question. He wasn’t up to speed on the Oberfeldt case.

  “The wife,” Joe explained, cutting him off. “She rode us like a tyrant while her own husband was dying down the hall from where Ellen was doing the same thing. She’d call, drop by the PD, even bushwhack me in the hospital corridor.”

  “Jesus,” Spinney muttered. “That’s pretty tasteless. Didn’t she know what you were going through?”

  Joe nodded, but only with sympathy. “Sure she did. All the better, as far as she was concerned. I more than anyone should have shared her pain.”

  “I don’t see that.”

  “I did,” Gunther told him. “I did then and I do now. We were both on a death watch, but where cancer was killing my spouse, she didn’t know who’d killed hers. It wasn’t fair, and it was up to me to level the playing field.”

  Spinney’s response was gently put. “Isn’t that being a little unrealistic? On both your parts?”

  Gunther thought about that for a moment before admitting, “That was our reality. I doubt either one of us was ever able to let go of it.”

  A mile fled under the car’s wheels before Lester suggested, “So, you’ll be trying to connect Bander to Oberfeldt while the rest of us go after Greenberg.”

  “Yeah.”

  Chapter 21

  Kathy Bartlett had asked Joe if he had anything against Tom Bander—born T. J. Ralpher—beyond his past history as a bad boy and the fact that his rags-to-riches story had been born following Klaus Oberfeldt’s death. Instinctively, he thought he did, and that it also connected the past with the present. But his hoped-for evidence, unlike Poe’s in “The Purloined Letter,” wasn’t hidden in plain sight. If he was correct, it was the only thing actually missing from plain sight.

  Upon returning to the VBI office that afternoon, he called the one contact he had in an arcane and much misunderstood profession.

  “Court Reporters Associates,” the woman answered on the other end.

  “Hi. This is Joe Gunther, of the Vermont Bureau of Investigation. Is Penny Johnson there?”

  Court Reporters Associates was a well-known Burlington-based firm with employees who worked all over the state. Joe’s knowledge of them had been peripheral at best until he’d met the current owner, Penny Johnson, at a party thrown by the Windham County state’s attorney several years back.
For some reason, they’d both ended up in the same corner of the room and had passed the time trading résumés. It was a habit he’d practiced for as long as he could recall, and one he was blessing right now.

  “Joe, how are you?” Penny’s voice eventually said on the phone. “It’s been quite a while.”

  “We haven’t been wallflowers together in quite a while. Guess we both need to get out more.”

  She laughed. “After my average workday, the closest thing I want to see to a human being is on TV. What can I do for you?”

  “I have some questions about your profession, actually. During a search recently, we came across some old . . . I don’t know what you call them . . . the things that come out the end of your steno machines.”

  “Paper tapes,” she said. “Is it indiscreet to ask who typed them?”

  “Someone named Hannah Shriver.”

  “Oh.” A shocked silence followed her reaction.

  “Did you know her?” Joe asked, hardly believing his luck.

  “No,” was the slightly stammered reply. “But I read the papers, Joe. She was the poor woman killed at the fair, wasn’t she?”

  “Yes,” he said, disappointed.

  “And she was a court reporter?”

  “Used to be, over thirty years ago. That’s how far back these tapes go.”

  “Oh,” Penny repeated, but this time he could hear the relief in her voice, as if by placing Hannah in a time long past, he’d also put her at a safe distance.

  “I wanted to ask you how those tapes are produced,” Gunther continued. “They’re completely verbatim, right? Word for word?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Just like the typed transcription that follows? Every ‘ah’ and ‘um’ included?”

  “Every one, yes, painful as it is to read sometimes.”

  “So,” he surmised, “if the typist chose to leave something out of the tape, then there’s no one who would know it had ever been said, unless they were asked to recall the conversation from memory.”