The Surrogate Thief

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 resumes 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 gently 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?"

"No." The answer came after a moment's reflection.

"Did she mention that she was involved in anything or with anyone that might've been even slightly risky, or which might've caused you concern?"

"No."

"How about just the reverse? Did she seem upbeat lately, perhaps excited about something good coming her way?"

"No."

Gunther paused to rethink his approach. There was nothing hostile in the woman's responses. Her voice was thin but steady, her expression open.

It dawned on him where he might have gone wrong. "When was the last time you saw your daughter, Natalie?"

This time there was a slight frown. "I'm not sure. I think it was about five years ago, but it might have been longer. Time isn't quite the same when you reach my age."

Joe couldn't resist smiling a little. God knows, time had been a little confusing to him, too, lately. "I may be gaining on you, then," he said. "If it's not too personal, were the two of you not close, or was your daughter just very busy?"

This time the small smile was hers. "You have a nice way of putting things. Do you have any children?"

Whether it was the directness he already sensed in this woman, or simply a decision to set the mood by opening up first, he chose to answer her honestly.

"I wish I did. I wanted to, a long time ago, but my wife died of cancer and I never had the heart to try anything like that again."

Natalie nodded thoughtfully and gazed out at the peaceful sylvan view. "That's the struggle, isn't it? Not to have kids and to mourn their absence, or to have them and be forever concerned about their fate."

Joe stared at her. A startling aspect of this job was how often people defied expectations. Before coming here, he'd worried about this person being mentally capable. Now he knew he was dealing with someone whose brains and verbal competence were several notches above the norm. He was grateful he'd broken the ice as he had.

"Was Hannah a challenge along those lines?" he asked.

"She was willful, independent, stubborn, and proud," her mother told him. "All the makings of a corporate tyrant. Unfortunately, she was also lazy, hedonistic, impatient, and arrogant."

Gunther felt a small chill. He didn't doubt the portrait's accuracy, but he would have expected it from someone other than the subject's own mother. It was almost clinically detached. The image of grief-stricken parent was undergoing serious revision.

"Sounds like she might've been a handful now and then," he commented blandly.

Natalie shifted her gaze outdoors once more. "I suppose so. It's a shame you never had children, in a way. They're quite fascinating to watch. You can learn a great deal. The concept that they mimic their elders is quite hopeless, obviously, beyond certain speech patterns and behavioral twitches. Fundamentally, they set their own course pretty early on, which I think is why so many parents become baffled and anxious when the child acts so wholly differently from their memories of themselves."

She stopped. Joe waited, unsure if that constituted her answer in full, or if she was warming up to an entire treatise on children as lab rats.

But she was done.

"You've given it a lot of thought. I'm guessing you've had training in some of this," he suggested, by now ready for anything.

"I was a psychologist at Tufts for thirty years," she answered. "Research work only, of course," she added.

Of course, he thought. Probably a good thing, too-might have cranked up the suicide rate otherwise.

"Did her father play much of a role in her upbringing?" he asked.

She eyed him appreciatively. "You are good. Were we divorced? Yes, early on. His name was Howard, and after we broke up, he moved to Vermont-Norwich. Hannah spent most of her summers with him. After I got her back each fall, it would take me weeks to undo the bad habits he let fester."

Joe opened his mouth to ask the next obvious question, but she anticipated him with, "He died almost fifteen years ago."

He nodded and pretended to consult the notebook he'd pulled from his pocket. At least he was no longer concerned about her falling apart. "She had a lot of different jobs over the years. Why was that, do you think?"

Natalie sighed-not impatiently, Joe chose to think, but perhaps with a touch of melancholy. "Hannah was one of the perpetually discontent. She aspired to wealth, respect, and being admired, but she never worked hard enough to earn them. In purely structural terms, you might say she was too eager to operate at the uppermost tiers to bother constructing the scaffolding that could have gotten her there. She never seemed to either understand that dichotomy or to stop hoping that some shortcut might render it moot."

"Did she ever marry or have any boyfriends?"

She looked straight at him. "Same disability with the same results. No one ever measured up. She tried enough times, but again, with absurd expectations."

"Anyone recently that you know of?"

"I knew little of her life during these last ten years. She grew distant. Perhaps my increasing lack of vitality proved discouraging-too much of a reminder of what she would be facing soon herself."

Joe could have thought of a variety of other, more plausible reasons for Hannah to distance herself from Mom. Lack of warmth, for one. For that matter, Joe was beginning to think that adding vitality to the woman before him might be a horrible idea.

"When I was looking into Hannah's background," he continued, "I noticed she worked as a court reporter for a period. Do you recall that?"

Natalie Shriver nodded slowly. "About thirty years ago. She went to Champlain College in Burlington for training. Took her a couple of years or more. I was quite impressed at the time. I didn't understand the interest, but she seemed very taken with it. Perhaps she thought it would lead to an easy entrance to the legal world and all that might entail. I never asked much about it, because I was afraid she'd take such questioning as interference and quit."

"But she did quit, didn't she, not long after starting?"

The woman's brow furrowed. "Yes. I never understood that. It was an odd period in her life, generally-I suppose as it was for so many her age. Society in a turmoil, the country running without a rudder. Her behavior was quite erratic."

"Can you go into a little more detail?" Gunther asked, at this point milking the professional viewpoint for all it was worth.

"Not really. One of her patterns then was to be quite secretive. At one moment she was working as a court reporter, complaining as usual about how difficult it was to get ahead, and the next she was footloose and fancy-free, not working at all and living like a bohemian. That lasted about a year before she settled down to yet another job."

Joe's interest sharpened at this. "How did she support herself during that year?"

"I don't know. I assumed she'd either saved up or done something lucrative enough to once again short-circuit her potential."

"But in either case, she acted as if she'd come into some money?"

"I don't know that I'd put it that way, but she had no job that I knew of." She sighed once more. When next she spoke, her voice was higher, more distressed. "Poor child never seemed able to get a grip. Do you know what I mean?"

She'd closed one narrow, angular hand into a fist and was looking at him again in that pleading way he'd mistaken for heartbreak at the start.

But now, to his own surprise, he was no longer so sure he was wrong. In her detached, academic way, Natalie Shriver appeared to be genuinely grappling with the abruptness of her daughter's death-not just the news of it, but with the unexpected effect it was having on her. It was as if the scientist was trying to understand why emotion was interjecting itself in the midst of an analysis.

"Natalie," he asked softly, "when Hannah was working as a court reporter, did she do any jobs that affected her personally-something she mentioned to you?"

Natalie spoke to her hands. "It was so long ago. You tell yourself that everything your child does will be locked in your memory forever. It comes as such a shock, that first time you discover it isn't so. Shouldn't there be a special capacity there? An exception that places a son or daughter apart from everyone else you meet?"

She glanced up, and he could see that at last her eyes were moist. "The first time Hannah left me for any period of time," she continued, "was to live up here in Vermont with her father for a few months as a teenager. Not for the summer, as before, but to finish out the school year. We'd had a falling-out, and we all three thought a short separation might help. And it did, to a degree. At least the arguments abated. But when she returned, I remember looking at her face once, as she was reading and unaware, and thinking to myself that for the first time in her life, things had happened to her on a daily basis that I would never know about. Influences, encounters, thoughts, even a fragment of evolution I'd never share with her. It struck me with such force, it almost made me cry on the spot."

She was trembling. Embarrassed that he'd so misread her, Joe slipped off his chair to kneel by her side and hold her hand in his own.

"I didn't recognize that moment as just the beginning," she said, "Nor did I realize that it would lead to a time when her entire life-everything she'd ever experienced as a living human being-would be as void as what existed before she was born. A mere figment in my mind."

The tears were flowing freely as she added, "Once she was only the dreams and hopes of a young and happy childless couple. Now she's now a patchwork of memories to an old, tired, and childless woman. How fair is that?"

"It's not," Joe could only agree. But he added, hoping it might help, "Is there any chance you could spend some time with a relative, even for a few days?"

She took a deep breath. "They're all gone. There weren't many of us to begin with, and longevity is not our strong suit. I envy them," she concluded after a pause.

Sensing there was nothing he could say or do to lessen her pain, Joe rose helplessly and murmured, "I'm sorry I've put you through this, Mrs. Shriver. It was not my intention."

Her eyes met his one last time. "Don't apologize. It actually felt good, getting it out. I've become such a closed box of all I've known. Without someone to share it with, what good is it finally?"

He nodded and moved toward the door, ready to take his leave, when he suddenly turned and asked her, "Would it be all right for me to visit you again?"

She'd produced a handkerchief from her sleeve and was wiping her eyes. She stopped and gave him a surprised look. "To ask about Hannah? I don't know how much more-"

He interrupted her with an upheld hand. "No, no. Just to visit."

She paused to consider the offer before smiling slightly and saying, "Thank you."

"Okay," he told her. "I'll see you later, then."

The offices of the Brattleboro Reformer occupied a flat, bland, modern building adjacent to the interstate at the far north end of town. This was a shame, in Joe's opinion. He remembered when they used to be on Main Street, on the first floor of one of the cluttered, ancient redbrick behemoths that made of the town's heart an architectural museum of a bygone era. Before the move, it seemed to him, there was more of a sense of the reporters and editors belonging to the town's social fabric. It was understandable that cramped quarters, lousy parking, and occasionally iffy electricity had proved too much to bear, but ever since the paper's relocation to Brattleboro's outer fringe, Joe felt that a vital though intangible connection had been severed.

It had become a hard-luck place, too. Changes of ownership had taken a toll, and staff turnover was so routine, he'd all but given up remembering who worked there. Also, arching over all, money was such a continual grind that it had become a more frequent topic between him and the paper's editor, Stanley Katz, than the crime rate, politics, and the state of law enforcement combined.

That hadn't always been so. Katz had been the courts-and-cops reporter when Joe had run the PD's detective squad, and as such, he'd only been contemptuous of the paper's own management issues. His sole mission in life then, it had seemed to Gunther, had been to pester the PD like a cold sore. Katz had always had integrity, though, had never been spiteful, and, now that he was finally inhabiting the editor's chair, had even mellowed in his dotage.

Of course, it also didn't hurt that Joe had left the police department behind. Nowadays he rarely had cause to deal with the Reformer except as just another Vermont press outlet.

Not this time, however. As he pulled into the paper's large parking lot off the Black Mountain Road, he had a very specific idea in mind, which definitely played to the Reformer's strength.

He opened the building's front door, passed through the glass-enclosed antechamber-reminiscent of an air lock-and stepped into a large, open room full of desks and filing cabinets and service counters, a room vast enough to make the ceiling look low and oppressive. He glanced around, briefly thinking of how many times he'd been here over the years, usually on the brink of some sparring session with Katz or his ilk, before he set off for the corner office of the man himself.

Looking older and more worn than Joe remembered, Stanley was sitting, elbows on his desk, staring through half glasses at a pile of financial reports. He looked up wearily as Joe tapped gently on the doorframe.

He removed the glasses and smiled. "Joe Gunther. My God."

He rose and circled around to shake hands, escorting his guest to a chair and then choosing one next to it. Joe had never been so warmly greeted before.

"How the hell are you? It's been a dog's age."

"I'm doing well, Stan. You keeping out of trouble?"

Katz laughed. "Don't I wish. I never thought I'd actually look forward to retirement, but there are days… and I have years to go before qualifying. Goddamned depressing."

He took a breath and added, "Pretty exciting about Gail, huh? Finally going for the big leagues-relatively speaking."

Not being as glib with such comments, loaded as they were with double meanings in his own mind, Joe merely stammered, "Yeah. Well, we're all keeping our fingers crossed."

Katz looked at him for a moment, pretending to be caught off guard. "Come on. She's got a decent chance. If she totally nails Marlboro, Newfane, Putney, and Brattleboro, and works overtime to paint Parker as Bander's lapdog, she could pull it off. It also wouldn't hurt if every Republican in the county came down with the flu on election day, but still, if I were her, I'd make room for some champagne in the fridge. Hey," he added with the cynical lift of an eyebrow, "she's got our endorsement, after all."

He waited for a response and got only a half smile in return, followed by "Nice try, Stanley."

Katz shook his head. "Such a hard-ass. Well, you've never been so desperate you came here just to shoot the shit. What're you hoping to squeeze out of me this time? Or am I about to hear some spin on a screwup we don't even know about yet?"

Gunther let out a moan and held his forehead. "Jesus, Stan, do you practice that in the shower? The lowly press as Christian martyr, suffering for the public good?"

"Not with my last name, I don't," the newsman hedged. "I do think we fulfill a service, though."

Joe held up his hand. "All right, all right. Let's not go there, especially since I am about to ask a favor."

"That old case you're working on?" Katz guessed.

Joe nodded. "Very good. The showoff gets lucky. You know the details?"

"No thanks to you people. Old man Oberfeldt, a thousand years ago, took six months to die from an assault and left a cold case with a vengeance. There was blood, a bullet hole, and the mechanism of death was a pistol-whipping. You had your suspicions, but nothing ever came of them. That much," he added with an upraised forefinger, "is what you gave my predecessors. I doubt things were any different then than they are now, so I'm assuming you kept as much or more to yourselves."

"The gun disappeared at the time," Gunther admitted, "and now it's resurfaced. That's what got me going again."

Katz was clearly interested. "When? How?"

"The hostage negotiation that went bad. Same gun. It'd been hidden under some floorboards all this time, discovered by accident, and put on the secondhand market. That's how Matt Purvis got hold of it. It still had some blood on it. We got lucky-the ballistics matched."

"You do a DNA match as well?" Stanley asked, all management woes behind him now.

"We ran a profile, but no hit."

"So, you're stuck again?"

"Maybe, but I'd like to try a long shot."

Katz smiled broadly. "Which is why you just fed me all that. I better be able to use it."

Joe nodded. "Oh, yeah, and I'll follow it up with some more, within reason, but for the moment, what I'd like to do is have a picture run in the paper of a woman who may have been connected to it all."

"Who?"

Joe figured that the name alone would be enough. "Hannah Shriver."

Katz whistled. "No shit? The Tunbridge woman?"

"We don't know how or why-to be honest, we don't even know if-but I'm thinking she played a part in the Oberfeldt case, although maybe just a small one. If we could find out what that was, it might open things up."

Katz nodded, leaned forward, and pushed the intercom button on his phone. "Get a reporter in here," he ordered. "Preferably Alice, if she's around."

He sat back and gave Joe an appraising look. "You got yourself a deal."