I wearily got back to my feet and crossed over to Ron’s long file-covered table. The young patrolwoman looked up as I approached. “Hi, Lieutenant-how’re you doin’?”
“Hi, Patty-hanging in there. Found anything interesting?”
She made a small face. “I’m just cross-indexing witnesses with things they saw, to see if anything shows up hinky. I’m working on UPS trucks and garbage pickups and what-have-you. I guess they’re lookin’ for someone casing the place out, but so far I don’t see it.”
I went around the table and sat next to her, my interest pricked.
“I didn’t know we’d rounded up that kind of information yet.”
She paused in riffling through a folder, happy to be interrupted. “Oh, yeah. Billy turned half the afternoon shift over to this-we’ve had people all over town. Everyone’s really psyched, you know, because… Well, you know,” she finished lamely, knowing of my ties to Gail and suddenly embarrassed by her own enthusiasm.
“I appreciate it,” I said for her benefit and patted a pile of folders she’d put to one side. “These the ones you’re finished with?”
“Yeah.”
I pulled them over in front of me and opened the top file. Patty glanced at me, obviously disappointed at being left with no other option besides getting back to work.
Folder by folder, down through the pile, I began to reconstruct activities I’d known nothing about-all credits to Ron’s efficiency. Fanning out from the immediate canvass of Gail’s neighbors, the investigation had reached far afield to reconstruct a whole month’s prior activity on her street. There were interviews of rural-route postal carriers, utility-company employees sent out to remove a broken branch from the wires, a Federal Express driver from Keene, New Hampshire, who’d delivered a package two weeks ago. Residents had been queried about any parties they’d held recently, guests or visitors they might have had, or any unusual occurrences that might have caught their attention-from strangers lurking to dogs barking at odd hours. Wherever possible, names had been taken down to be checked against the computer networks available to us.
While I’d never panned for gold, it struck me as being a similar process-patiently washing through thin covering layers, watching for the tiniest glint.
I struck such a glint at 2:35 in the morning, long after Patty had abandoned me to find some company by the coffee machine across the hall.
I’d been going over files covering events over two weeks old, and I was by now pretty thoroughly immersed in the neighborhood’s residents and their habits. Like an overeager new arrival on the block, I’d made the effort to remember everyone’s name, whose pets and children belonged to whom, what their hobbies and interests were, and even which ones I tended to like or dislike, for whatever reason. Their voices, as reflected in the canvass transcripts and notes, took on individuality, and over the hours I grew familiar with the neighborhood’s daily cadence.
It stuck out, therefore, when cranky old Mrs. Wheeler hired a one-time yard man to give her lawn a final mowing before the frost settled in.
He hadn’t done anything to bring attention to himself, hadn’t gone up and down the street drumming up additional business, hadn’t sat in his car at lunch and watched people’s comings and goings. He’d merely appeared one day in a beaten-up, ancient station wagon, unloaded some hand tools and an old mower from the back, done the job, and left, never to be seen again.
And that’s what caught my eye. In a neighborhood with a regular, predictable rhythm, his appearance-as mundane and uneventful as it had been-was nevertheless unusual.
The interview with Mrs. Wheeler, neatly indexed in another of Ron’s folder boxes, revealed two other things: that Mrs. Wheeler’s regular yard man had suffered a garage fire a few weeks back, destroying much of his equipment and forcing all his customers to fend for themselves until the insurance came through; and that the temporary, one-time replacement had been named Bob Vogel. The tantalizing possibility that the fire, Vogel’s appearance, and Gail’s rape were interrelated was inescapable, if as yet totally unfounded. Unfortunately, the name of the regular yard man, seemingly incidental at the time of the interview, had not been recorded.
I crossed the room to where Ron had set up a computer terminal and unleashed the machine onto Bob Vogel’s scent. I began with a quick name search of our own criminal files, although I was pretty sure that if Vogel had been a client of ours, I would have remembered him. I was therefore not too surprised to come up empty-handed. I switched to Meadowbrook Road-Gail’s street-and launched a query for complaints originating from there that might have featured either Bob Vogel or his vehicle within the last month. Again, I found nothing, and again, I wasn’t too surprised. I moved next to the Vermont Criminal Information Center’s databank for an overview of all the state’s criminal offenders. This time, the absence of Vogel’s name was a little more troublesome-it meant either I was barking up the wrong tree, pursuing an alias, or that Bob Vogel had appeared from out of state.
I paused to rub my eyes. Despite the adrenaline that had accompanied my little discovery, I was beginning to fade and knew I’d have to call it quits soon. I straightened my back, stretched, and called up the FBI’s National Criminal Information Center to gain access to the Interstate Identification Index-the Triple I-a listing, by state and/or municipality, of most people with felony records.
Realizing this was my last swing at getting any quick results-and that lots of legwork lay ahead if it failed-it was with a small sigh of relief that I finally saw, “Vogel, Robert” appear on the screen. I called up his file and sat back, admiring how close we’d come to missing him, even while doing all the right things.
Robert Vogel was on probation in Vermont on a Massachusetts burglary charge, which explained why Lou Biddle hadn’t thought to bring his file to our intelligence meeting, and why I hadn’t found him in my search of Vermont law breakers-a non-Vermonter, his name had never come up.
My real satisfaction, however, lay in what the computer showed Vogel to be. It turned out that although he was still paying society for burglary, he’d already paid his legal dues for rape by serving a full four-year term in a Massachusetts penitentiary; he’d also been previously charged with two additional rapes, neither resulting in conviction.
I stared at the screen for several minutes, its fluorescent green letters hypnotic in their intensity, before I suddenly realized that despite my excitement I was on the brink of falling asleep. Soon, I thought, soon, as I switched off the computer and slowly walked over to the fax machine. I typed up a brief note for Lou Biddle to call me as soon as he got to his office, punched up his number, and sent it off over the wires.
At that I straightened, stretched, and gave in to exhaustion, satisfied that the day had at least ended with a shred more hope than it had begun.
Four hours later I rued the enthusiasm that had prompted the sending of that fax. Lou Biddle’s voice on the other end of my phone not only gave me no joy, it was even, for the first few moments after I picked up, a complete mystery to my sleep-clotted brain.
“Joe, what the hell’s the matter? You sound sick.”
I cleared my throat and struggled to open my eyes against the light from my bedroom window. “Sorry-long night. Do you have a Robert Vogel in your files, on probation here for a Massachusetts burglary?”