But again he was disappointed. Halfway up, he saw her appear on the landing above, clipboard in hand, accompanied by her oldest friend and now campaign manager, Susan Raffner. They were deep in conversation and didn't even see him until after they'd started down.
Gail's face broke into a wide smile. "Joe. What a sweet surprise. I didn't know you were coming by." She stooped forward and kissed him awkwardly as Susan looked on. Returning Gail's embrace, he noticed Susan check her watch.
"You know what they say," he answered, trying to sound upbeat, "I happened to be in the neighborhood-not hard in this town."
Gail rolled her eyes. "A town with a lot of people, though. I'm starting to feel like I'll meet every one of them before this is over."
"It's going okay, though, right?" Joe asked. In an attempt to sound both savvy and supportive, he added, "I heard about Parker."
She made a face. "He's such a screwball. Problem is, nobody knows it, despite what he says. Anyhow, he's not my problem. I have to beat all the Democrats in the race first, and nicely enough that they don't take it personally. Such a weird process. Makes running for selectman a total breeze." She paused and touched his cheek. "God, I haven't seen you in days. Feels like forever." She furrowed her brow. "Are you all right? You look tired."
"Just a case I'm on," he said vaguely.
"Gail," Susan's voice dropped between them.
Gail stepped back against the railing and glanced up at her friend. "I know, I know." She looked at Joe again and shrugged helplessly. "I gotta go."
He smiled halfheartedly. "Brenda told me-big powwow."
Her expression was torn. "Right. You want to listen in? God knows I could use the input."
But he begged off. "Too much homework at the office."
Susan took two steps down, pressuring them to take the hint. They did, Gail leading and talking over her shoulder. "God, don't talk about homework. That's all I do anymore-that and eat vegetarian rubber chicken."
She paused again at the foot of the stairs. "Come back later?" she asked, placing her hand on his chest as he drew near.
He took her hand and kissed it as Susan took her other elbow and began steering her along the hallway. "If I can. Good luck."
Joe watched them go and then left by the front door, not wanting to walk through the house again.
Chapter 5
Joe Gunther unlocked the door with the borrowed key and paused before switching on the light, reflecting on the dark stillness before him. He was in the basement of the municipal building, on the threshold of the police department's storeroom. A windowless, airless black cave, it was the endpoint for everything from old parade uniforms to forgotten files, to pieces of hardware that hadn't quite made it to the dump. It also housed hundreds of past case files, labeled by date and name, each box containing records, reports, photographs, and even items of evidence, often as casually tossed together as the contents of a dorm room just before vacation.
The smell of the place was dry and dusty, slightly enhanced by something so subtle, he could only ascribe it to ancient memories. His mind drifted to how many investigations he'd reduced to such a container now tucked away in the gloom before him. It seemed he and his colleagues had unconsciously created a museum of humanity's clumsy chaos in the process, replicating Pandora's box with dozens of tiny, less dramatic facsimiles, rendered all the more poignant for their mundane contents. Drunken brawls, jealous rages, venal dreams-and all the mess they implied-now silenced, defeated, and forgotten, row on row.
He turned on the lights and began walking by the chronologically arranged metal shelf units, counting off the years and heading toward the dawn of his own career. He eventually paused, turned into an aisle, and came to two dust-coated boxes at eye level marked "Oberfeldt."
He piled one atop the other, finding them disappointingly light, and headed upstairs to his office.
Klaus Oberfeldt never returned home after that night, and he never awoke to say who had assaulted him. He made one trip in his remaining half year of life up to Hanover, New Hampshire, to Mary Hitchcock Hospital, for some tests and an evaluation, but it was done out of courtesy or curiosity, or more likely because of Maria Oberfeldt's endless haranguing. Everyone treating him knew what the outcome would be, and when his last breath was expelled, it was accompanied by a collective sigh of relief.
Young Joe Gunther witnessed that with a conflicting mixture of understanding and outrage. Typical of his nature, while he hadn't been spared Maria's generalized contempt, Joe had sympathized with both her sorrow and her fury. She and her husband might have been short on social graces, but neither had deserved what they'd been delivered. Joe happened to be at the hospital when Maria was told of Klaus's death, and he'd seen the last remnant of hope drift from her eyes. The fact that he was at the same place and time because his own mate was dying a couple of doors down both exacerbated his desire to bring closure to Maria's grief and confronted him with his own impotence. The fusion of their separate sorrows seemed merely to create a void, leaving the case that had united them listless and without chance of resolution.
Joe sat at his desk in the otherwise deserted VBI office, the overhead lights extinguished in favor of a more intimate desk lamp, and spread out the contents of the two Oberfeldt case boxes.
The old photographs told the story best, not surprisingly, if for reasons beyond the mere images they conveyed. They were in black-and-white, for one thing, and large-eight-by-tens. Nowadays crime scene photos were often color Polaroids, or quasi-amateur snaps taken by whatever detective was nearest a digital camera. But, as was common back then, these had been shot by the owner of the local camera store, and they reflected his intuitive feel for lighting, angle, and depth of field. They were creepily cinematographic in their perfection, as if snipped from a moody film noir of the fifties, and they produced a certain artificial immediacy, being at once too good to be true and so real as to be palpable. Looking at them brought Joe fully back to when he'd been standing just to one side of the frame.
The fact that they were monochromatic reminded him of the passage of time, and of the distance he'd traveled in the intervening decades. "Feeling old" was too maudlin to capture the emotion. Joe took the aging process as simply one of life's by-products-something to be undertaken with few complaints and as much decorum as possible. But he didn't dismiss his experience as lightly, and his experience had been to witness such scenes as now littered his desk more times than he could count. That these were old enough to be in black-and-white was a sad and telling reminder of his journey's length.
The Oberfeldts' store had been long and narrow, with the counter and two freestanding shelf units running perpendicular to the back storage room and the staircase beyond. In a fanciful way, it was reminiscent of a bowling alley, if smaller, a bit wider, and far more cluttered-a truly tiny, old-fashioned mom-and-pop market. In truth, the photographs made it look like a frontier store out of the Wild West, the black pool of blood on the floor only heightening the impression.
The body didn't feature in any of the photographs-it had yet to become a body. For that matter, given that this was initially a robbery-assault, photographs of this quality shouldn't even have been taken. It wasn't standard protocol. Gunther had requested the camera store owner to drop by, and his chief at the time gave him hell for it later. Such a waste of money during tight fiscal times was not looked upon kindly.
Joe had acted on instinct and didn't mind the reprimand. He'd seen Klaus at the hospital, after all, and had been told by the man's physician that he probably wouldn't last long. As things turned out, the pictures had been an extravagance. Although they were requested on the assumption that Klaus would die, his killer would be caught, and such evidence would be needed at trial, only the first had come to pass-and way too late for these images to be of much use, regardless of any clues they contained.