"It's a little odd," he answered honestly. "I am happy for her."
Susan looked up at him silently for a moment. "That's good," she said. "You should be. She worked hard to get here."
He didn't respond. That was archetypal Susan: hard as nails, as partisan as they came, and the kind of friend he didn't think they made outside the Marine Corps.
"How are you doing?" she asked.
He smiled. And there was her saving grace. Once she'd established where she stood, she was all heart. He knew the question wasn't frivolous.
"Part of me's doing wonderfully," he told her. "The rest…" he left the sentence unfinished.
She tilted her chin toward the milling crowd. "This have anything to do with that?"
"Ah, yes. The political-widow syndrome, with a gender twist. I guess a little," he conceded. "We sure don't have the private time we once did, and I miss that. But there's something different gnawing at me, too-job related."
"That old case I read about in the paper?" she asked.
He nodded, still regretful that he hadn't gotten out ahead of that story. He'd never contacted Ted McDonald even after the news had broken on the radio, nor had he gone beyond a traditionally bland general press release when the Brattleboro Reformer had followed up soon thereafter. "Yup. Lot of baggage tied into that."
He didn't elaborate, and she didn't push.
"Look," she told him. "I can't help you there, but I've been in politics a while. This'll settle down. You'll get her back. Right now, she's like an outnumbered combat pilot in a dogfight-all focus and adrenaline. What really counts doesn't matter, and what doesn't matter ruins her whole day. There's no perspective beyond the here and now. They all snap out of it after they win." She glanced at him one last time before heading back into circulation, adding with the grim determination of someone hoping a prayer will overcome reality, "And she will win."
Later that night he got a hopeful, pleasant taste of Susan's forecast after he and Gail had made love upstairs and were curled around each other in contented half sleep.
"I can't wait to get us back," Gail murmured.
Joe appreciated her choice of words. "You been missing us, too?"
She burrowed her forehead into his neck. "Like an ache I can't get rid of. November'll never be here soon enough."
"What if you lose?" he asked, not wanting to leave the question unasked.
"Either way." She then glanced up at him. "I won't be as much fun to be with if I do, but either way."
The next morning, the other problem he'd shared with Susan Raffner worsened. Stepping into the office, he was met by Sammie Martens, holding two documents in her hand.
"Hey, boss," she said. "I got bad news and interesting news. Well, I guess it's bad, too, but whatever."
He stuck out his hand. "Let's start with guaranteed bad."
"That's from the Mass State Police," she explained, handing it over. "A sort of after-the-fact advisory that almost got buried in the dailies. Katie Clark, the woman you interviewed in Orange several weeks ago, was found dead in her apartment."
Joe stared at the document. The date of discovery was one day after his visit.
"I was followed," he muttered. "That must be how they got to Pete."
"What?" Sam asked.
Gunther dropped the fax onto his desk and sat heavily in his chair. "I must've been followed from here to Orange and then preceded to Gloucester. Whoever it was probably got out of Katie what I didn't think she had, and went straight to Gloucester to kill Pete, all while I farted around playing 'twenty questions' with his fingerprints." And spending the night with Gail, he thought.
"How would anyone know you were going to Orange?" Sam asked.
"To quote Gail, '"Confidential" isn't even in the lexicon around here.' As soon as that gun surfaced in the hostage negotiation, everybody and his uncle probably started trading tidbits on the latest developments. It's not like we kept it particularly under wraps ourselves. It was three decades old, after all. Or so we thought."
Joe propped his feet up on his desk and rubbed his face with both hands. "Shit. You dig into what the cops found out in Orange?"
He knew his colleague well. She retrieved a thin folder from her own desk. "I had them e-mail me the report. They're writing it off as a natural death, due to complications stemming from what they call a 'preexisting medical condition.'"
Gunther snorted. "She had chronic fatigue syndrome. That makes you feel like helclass="underline" it doesn't kill you."
"You want to give them a call?"
"Oh, I'll call them, all right, but I seriously doubt it'll change anything."
He stood up suddenly and stared out the window, anger and frustration sweeping through him. "Goddamn it."
Sam remained silent. This wasn't the only setback they'd suffered on this case. Following Gunther's return from Gloucester, they'd spent days searching every database they could think of, looking for any mention of a brown-haired lefty with a scar on his hand. They'd come up with nothing, making Joe a pain to work with. And the other piece of news she was bearing wasn't going to improve matters.
"I've rarely seen a person look so vulnerable," he finally said quietly.
"Who?" Sam asked after a pause.
"Katie," he answered tiredly. "She fell asleep in midconversation, she was so worn out. I probably could have killed her myself by just pinching her nose. I doubt she would've quivered. Natural, my ass."
"You want us to do something?"
Joe turned away from the window. "I don't know what else to do, Sam. We've put all our queries out on the wire. The only crimes we can point to happened in other jurisdictions. We're stuck with having to wait-just like we've been doing from the start. Only now we don't even have the suspect we thought we had. 'Cause I'll guarantee you one thing," he emphasized. "We were wrong about Shea, which means the Oberfeldt killing has just been kicked wide open again."
Sam didn't respond. Joe noticed the other sheet of paper in her hand. "Okay, keep the good times rolling. What's the next item?"
She gave it to him. It was a report from the Waterbury crime lab. "When you got back from Gloucester, you asked for Shea's DNA profile to be sent to forensics. It's taken forever, but they finally finished it. Those're their findings comparing his blood to the samples at the Oberfeldt crime scene-the ones you thought were the killer's."
Joe looked up from the report, his face grim. "I knew it. They don't match."
"'Fraid not."
Four days later, Hannah Shriver parked her car in a sunlit field in Tunbridge, Vermont. It was warm for mid-September, a glorious late-summer day, and Hannah was feeling as upbeat as the weather. She got out, locked the door, and surveyed her surroundings. Hers was one of hundreds of parked vehicles glistening in the sun, spread out over eleven acres of precariously uneven pastureland, all sloping toward a flat floodplain beyond a small, rushing river called the North Branch. In the distance, thin and tinny spurts of canned carnival music swam against the air currents emanating from a man-made confection that was adorning the plain like the icing on a wedding cake-the Tunbridge World's Fair, one of Vermont's oldest and most cherished annual agricultural events.
Hannah paused to admire the view, positioned as she was like a scout atop a bluff. The basic, permanent blueprint of the place was simplicity itself: a half-mile-long oval dirt track, pinned in place along one side by a ramshackle wooden grandstand (with beer hall beneath the bleachers), a covered stage for live music facing it across the track's narrow width, and a large, open-ended pulling shed in the oval's center. That, year-round, along with a few low-lying cow, horse, and poultry barns, was all there was, along with a lot of open ground that in the old days was used to grow corn in the summer.
But every September, for the past 130 years, the place was transformed for less than a week-so filled with a Ferris wheel, carnival rides, food stands, equipment trucks, show tents, and trailers that you couldn't even see the ground anymore. Over a span of four event-jammed days, up to 50,000 people came to the tiny village of Tunbridge-most of them Vermonters-to enjoy one of the last truly agricultural events left in the state. Hannah Shriver had been one of those people for forty-one years.