"So, she gave you your walking papers because she wasn't ready to commit?" Joe asked.
But Lou Boxer was clearly still struggling to define a specifically sharper memory. "Partly. There was something else, too. She wouldn't own up to it, but it was almost like I was suddenly superfluous-like she'd caught a sudden gust in her sails and I was just slowing her down."
"Suddenly?" Joe repeated, struck by the word. "What do you think happened?"
Boxer replaced his glasses carefully. "I don't know. She dumped the whole court reporter thing right afterward, so maybe it was tied to that."
"After two years of study," Gunther mused, remembering Natalie's mention of the same thing. "Makes you wonder why. She come into some money?"
"She didn't tell me one way or the other. I didn't get hit for any more financial favors, but I assumed that was because I was old news."
"So, she wasn't living high on the hog that you could tell?"
"She might've been," he admitted. "I wouldn't have known. To be honest, I took this pretty hard. Wandered off to lick my wounds. Lived in California for a couple of years. I never heard from her again. Not," he added ruefully, "until I saw that photo in the paper. That was a real shock."
Gunther let a moment of silence pass before asking, "You mentioned you knew her other lovers, or at least some of them. You remember any names?"
Lou Boxer scratched his forehead. "So long ago. One of them was named Travis. I never knew his last name. Another… Jesus… Bob comes to mind. That's useful, right?" He sighed. "I'm not going to be much help there. They were faces to me, you know? Rivals. I didn't want to know who they were. It was bad enough they existed. I was never as cool as I pretended. Just a middle-class kid undercover."
Gunther nodded sympathetically, but with visions of Hannah and Pete Shea and Katie Clark and even himself as a young man in his head, he was thinking that there was quite a bit of pretense taking place back then.
Slowly and sporadically, another piece of the puzzle that was Hannah Shriver fell into place from her incoming transcriptions. Task force members started uncovering old documents from the court archives, and a couple of law offices pitched in with yellowed depositions and other interviews. It was haphazard and erratic, done by the private lawyers only in the hope that it might curry favor with law enforcement, but even so, it resulted in a tremendous pile of reading. Transcribed conversations average one page per minute of dialogue, depending on how they're typed up, and every "uh," "ah," and "you know" is faithfully and excruciatingly recorded. Staring at page after page of vacuous meanderings, baffling phrasing, and-in Hannah's case-a stunning number of typos and misspellings helped Joe understand why she might have left the business so quickly, and why she'd been hard up for work while she lasted. Considering many of her efforts as professionally produced documents almost seemed ludicrous at times.
On one such day of overexposure, he was leaning back in his chair, pressing the heels of his hands against his aching eyes, when Sammie Martens walked in from downstairs. Finding the windowless basement claustrophobic, Joe had temporarily fled to his top-floor office.
"Got something that may be a total dead end," she told him, dropping yet another transcript onto his desk. "But the date in it is the same night Oberfeldt got whacked. I figured you'd want to see it. I marked the section."
Joe straightened and picked up the document, leafing to the page with the yellow Post-it note.
Sam continued speaking. "It's a deposition Hannah typed from someone named Sandy Conant. He was a coworker of a guy named Mitch Blood, whose wife claimed she was being abused and had been beaten in front of Conant, making him a witness. Problem was, Sandy claimed ignorance and had an alibi to back him up. He was collecting his mail in the lobby at exactly the same time the wife said she was being clobbered across town."
Joe focused on the words before him. MR. CONANT: I pick up my mail same time every day, right after I get off work. 9:30 on the dot. Been doin' it for years. MR. JENNINGS: I understand that, Sandy, but without corroboration, we only have your word. Did any… MR. CONANT: Corra-what? MR. JENNINGS: We need to know if anyone saw you doing that. Getting your mail. MR. CONANT: T. J. was there. Came in just as I opened the box. MR. JENNINGS: Does T. J. have a last name? MR. CONANT: Sure. Everybody does. MR. JENNINGS: And what is T. J.'s last name? MR. CONANT: Ralpher. T. J. Ralpher. I have no clue what the T. J.'s for, so don't bother askin'. MR. JENNINGS: Did you and T. J. talk? MR. CONANT: Nope. We're not like friends. He said hi, I said hi. We live in the same building. That's about it, but he could vouch for me. I don't know shit about Mitch and that cow he calls a wife. Never seen him lay a hand on her, and if she says different, well, then she's full of it. MR. JENNINGS: Thank you, Sandy. I think we get the idea.
Joe turned the page, but Sam interrupted him. "That's really it. A little more about where he worked and what he knew of Mitch's marital problems, and then it's over."
Gunther closed the transcript and returned it. "Any alarms go off?"
She shrugged. "I called the lawyer who gave us this-Jennings. He didn't remember the case, but he had one of his slaves look it up for me. It never went anywhere. I guess it all hinged on Conant being a witness, so once he faded, that was it."
"You look up T. J. Ralpher?" Joe asked. "That rings a faint bell."
Sam equivocated. "I ran him by VCIC on the computer. Some ancient stuff, dating to back then. After that, nothing. Like I said, I only showed you this because of the timing."
"What about Sandy Conant?"
"Yup. Checked on him, too. Died an alcoholic about ten years ago."
Joe cupped his chin in his hand and gazed at the wall a moment. "How 'bout the other stuff Willy and I found at her house? All those paper rolls from the steno machine. Do we have one that matches this?" he held up the document.
"Yeah," she admitted. "But you'd have an easier time reading hieroglyphics."
The phone rang beside Joe. He picked it up and answered.
"Joe," Lester said. "You might want to come downstairs. We found something in the Tunbridge pictures."
The basement room had lost the neat and tidy appearance of its inception. The squared-away tables equipped with phones and computers were piled high with paperwork, the floor was strewn with debris, and the air was close and vaguely unpleasant. Men and women either sat at their stations drinking coffee and squinting at screen or page or wandered back and forth comparing notes. A low buzz of continuous conversation, both face-to-face and on the phone, filled the air like a mechanical hum. In one corner, Lester Spinney had commandeered two folding tables he'd lined up catty-corner and covered with folders and piles of photographs that had fallen to him for analysis. In the center of it all was another computer, designated solely for e-mail downloads. This is where Joe and Sam found him sitting.
He looked over his shoulder as they approached. "It ain't like in the movies, but it's still pretty cool."
They peered at the screen. Before them was a slightly blurry picture, enlarged as far as it could stand, of the fair's interior midway, the one enclosed within the racetrack. It was a crowd shot, with a smiling child in the foreground holding an enormous cotton candy, his cheeks already smeared bright pink.
Lester tapped the screen, where his two colleagues were already looking. "That's her, moving fast, so she's out of focus and almost out of the picture, but look at this guy."
Framed by the entrance gate and still clearly in midstride, the person he'd indicated appeared to be directing two men to go elsewhere, while a third continued after Hannah. Their expressions were grim, in stark contrast to the child's, and there seemed no doubt that they were staring straight at the woman in the cowboy hat and bright red shirt.