Nobody argued that Klaus’s beating was wrong, but few were surprised, and no one besides Maria grieved for him.
She greeted Joe at the store’s locked door—she hadn’t opened that morning—and gave him an earful for thirty minutes straight. Then she stopped, fell apart, and collapsed crying into his arms.
It turned out that not only was Klaus comatose, but they’d been robbed of $12,000—a small fortune in earned savings that they’d kept under a floorboard in the back room.
Joe finally led her back upstairs to where she and Klaus shared an apartment, and convinced her to take a small drink and lie down for a rest. He then returned to the store, grateful that it hadn’t been overly contaminated since the attack, and began treating it as it should have been from the start: as a major crime scene.
Joe left the interstate at Exit 10 and entered the town of Waterbury, best known for its proximity to Ben and Jerry’s ice cream plant and as the home of the Vermont State Police.
The latter’s headquarters were located in the vaguely named State Office Complex, a large gathering of redbrick buildings that had slowly grown around the original state mental hospital, built in the 1890s and now almost empty. All of it looked to Joe like some manic-depressive architect’s vision of a college campus for the imaginatively impaired.
The Department of Public Safety building was located off to one side of the campus, as institutionally bland as the rest although bristling with antennas and microwave dishes.
Joe abandoned his car on the grass bordering the chronically full parking lot. He entered the building’s lobby, was buzzed through by the dispatcher behind her bulletproof glass, and began climbing the staircase to the top floor.
The building’s top, or third, floor hosted the crime lab, Criminal Justice Services, a couple of meeting rooms, and the office of VBI’s director, Bill Allard. As a result, while the lab was Joe’s destination, he knew it would be impolitic not to drop by Bill’s office first.
This wasn’t a chore by any means. They were good friends, a couple of warhorses who’d come up through the ranks riding the learning curve that transformed so many law enforcement leaders from hot dogs into problem solvers—an evolution that had made both of them attractive to the creators of VBI. The Bureau was a bit of a thorn to the law enforcement community. A statewide major-crimes investigative unit culled from the best of each agency across Vermont, it had seriously rocked the boat when the governor and a compliant legislature had given it birth. The state police, which still had its own plainclothes unit, saw it as an unnecessary rival, while every municipal department complained it would lure away their most talented personnel.
Being accurate made both views hard to dismiss, although the politicians kept trying. Gunther and Allard, the latter of whom had spent his whole career in the state police, didn’t bother. They just kept proving, in case after case, that the VBI was there for the overall good as a highly qualified, well-funded support unit that only came into a case by invitation, did its job discreetly and competently, and then disappeared, making sure the credit always went to the host agency. It had been a successful tactic so far, and a small but growing number of former critics had been heard to admit—if only off the record—that maybe VBI wasn’t as bad as had been feared. So far.
Allard was sitting at his desk in an office so small it barely allowed for two folding guest chairs. He was gazing with apparent wonderment at some cluttered document on the computer screen, his large, stubby fingers poised over the keyboard as if frozen.
His face lit up as Gunther crossed the threshold.
“Joe. I didn’t know you were coming up. Have a seat. You’re not hand-delivering bad news, are you?”
Joe sat down, shaking his head. “Nope, no fouls, no errors, and no need to ask forgiveness as far as I know. I’m just up here checking on something at the lab.”
Allard raised his eyebrows. There were five VBI outposts across the state, including a unit downstairs, and Bill Allard made it his business to be at least aware of every case they were working on. “From your neck of the woods?”
Gunther waved his concern aside. “No, the Bratt PD had a domestic a couple of days ago—ex-wife shot her husband. But the gun was missing its serial number, so they had the lab run a check. Turns out the same gun was used in an old case of mine.”
“No kidding?”
“Yeah. I never solved it. It’s bugged me ever since.”
“A killing?”
“Didn’t start out that way. It was a robbery-assault at a mom-and-pop grocery store. Nobody liked the victim, an old grouch named Oberfeldt, and at first we didn’t even bother finding out their life savings had been stolen. The bad old days with a vengeance. The guy wasn’t dead; he was just in the hospital—although the word ‘just’ doesn’t do it justice. He was in a coma. But the selectmen were on the rampage for us to clean up the bars and get the kids off the street to make the town more appealing. The case pretty much fell to me on my own.”