The Surrogate Thief(8)
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 union s 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.