“Not in my files, but maybe one of the others has him. Helen, probably. I’m sex offenders only.”
“Could you find out? Now?”
There was a moment’s surprised hesitation. “Sure. Hang on.”
I spent the five minutes he left me hanging getting tiredly out of bed. Just before he returned, I wondered how Gail had fared through the night-and what use I was going to be to her if I kept up this pace. I realized now that, despite the promising end results, last night’s marathon had been more than a little self-indulgent, triggered by some subtly pervasive urge to vaguely mimic Gail’s ordeal with one of my own making. It had been exactly the type of display I’d been struggling to avoid.
Nevertheless, Lou sounded duly impressed when he got back on the line. “I got him. How the hell did you dig this guy up?”
“He mowed the lawn of one of Gail’s neighbors a couple of weeks ago. You free for the next hour?”
“Next half hour, yeah.”
“I’m on my way.”
The local probation and parole branch of Vermont’s Department of Corrections was located a mere stone’s throw from where Mary Wallis had hammered Jason Ryan with her shoe-down among a cluster of buildings bunched together on the flats between the water’s edge and the high bank on which the Putney Road was perched. Fifteen minutes after hanging up on Lou Biddle, I pulled into his parking lot.
I found him in his office, comfortably settled in an ancient tiltback office chair, a cup of coffee cradled in his hands and his feet propped up on his desk.
He pointed to a coffee machine by the door. “Help yourself. You look like you need it.”
I gratefully followed his suggestion. “Did you get a chance to read that file?”
He leaned forward and pulled it off his desk. “Yup. You may have a hot one here. Three rape charges, the last one with a sentence. He served the rape in full and is doing the burglary on probation.”
“I take it they were connected?” I asked, clearing his guest chair of a stack of books and sitting down.
“Yeah. The burglary kicked in because he was witnessed entering the apartment window of the woman he assaulted.”
“She lived alone?”
“Yeah. He attacked her in her bedroom in the middle of the night-tied her down using slipknots, threatened her with a knife, blindfolded her… The whole ball of wax. I’m sorry I didn’t hand him over to you yesterday.”
I reached for the file, my exhaustion turning to adrenaline. “Not to worry-who’d you say his probation officer was?”
“Helen Boisvert.”
“What’s her reading on him?”
“Dunno-I just ran in and grabbed the file. She’s in, though, which is just as well, ’cause I’ve got to hit the road.”
I took the hint and stood up, thanking him again for the coffee.
Helen Boisvert had worked for the Department of Corrections for over twenty years. Originally from the state’s so-called Northeast Kingdom region-remote, sparsely populated, and proudly independent-she’d been brought up on society’s fringes, one of six kids of a dirt-poor logger and his wife. Her highly regarded abilities as a probation officer were due in part to the fact that only her own moral strength and determination had stopped her from becoming one of her own clients. Half her siblings had spent time in jail, and two of her brothers had met violent deaths. But as she’d told me once, extracting herself from that environment and ending up in corrections, after earning an M.A. in psychology, was as natural to her as an Eskimo training to be a cold-weather scientist.
She was nestled in an office just like Lou’s, which looked more pleasant but smelled a lot worse, due to its occupant’s lifelong addiction to cigarettes. She was lighting one up as I walked in.
“I hear you’re interested in one of my boys,” she said through the smoke. I returned her file to her. “Bob Vogel-but not for burglary.”
She raised her eyebrows, immediately following my lead, and tossed me that morning’s Brattleboro Reformer. “You think he did that?”
Knowing that it was coming, even with Gail’s blessing, didn’t make the front-page story any easier to take. “Selectwoman Raped at Home” ran from one edge of the page to the other, across several related articles and a photograph of Gail at a recent meeting. I returned the paper without reading it further. “It’s a possibility.”
“Interesting.”
“Why do you say that?” I asked, struck by her tone of voice.
“Because this took place night before last, and he missed his meeting with me yesterday morning.”
“Have you talked to him since?” I was suddenly worried he’d already taken off.
“Oh, yeah-he came in later. Said he overslept, that his alarm didn’t go off. Interesting coincidence.”
“How did he seem?”
“A little nervous I might nail him for messing up, but otherwise he was the same as always.”
“Which is?”
She took a deep drag, finishing the cigarette, and ground it out in an already half-full ashtray. I imagined her forceful personality allowed her to flaunt the state’s no-smoking rules.
“Bob Vogel is an unrepentant shit,” she finally said. “He toes the line with me because I can pull his chain, but we both know it’s a waste of time. As soon as he’s free and clear, he’ll be back in trouble-unless he’s already jumped the gun.”
I removed the jacket I’d been wearing against the fading morning chill and placed it on the floor next to my chair. “Lou said Vogel’s last assault fit the MO of the guy who raped Gail-what about the two rapes he didn’t get prosecuted for? Were they the same?”
Helen pulled another cigarette from the pack lying on her desk and lit up. “I couldn’t say for sure. I only know about the last one, and even there I don’t have all the details. He moved up here ten months ago, and we only got this preliminary file about four months back, which is par for the course-they’re either drowning in cases down there or they don’t give a damn, depending on the office.
“Anyhow, the outline you got from Lou about sums up what I’ve been told-the big difference being that he used a nightgown to blind his victim instead of a pillowcase. Which helped nail him, as it turned out-not only was he seen going in through the window by a neighbor, but the nightgown slipped off enough so the victim got a look at him. She pulled him out of a lineup.”
“Lou mentioned a knife.”
Boisvert made a face. “Yeah-he cut her nipples a little, I guess to get her attention. A real bastard.”
“What else did he do?”
“Everything shy of killing her, as far as I can tell. The rape lasted several hours, with intermissions for the knife play and beatings. The woman ended up having her jaw wired.”
“Did he trash the bedroom also?”
She looked uncertain. “I suppose-there was mention of a lot of destruction.”
I changed subjects slightly, realizing I was nearing the limit of her knowledge. “Did all three rape victims live in the same area?”
“Two in Greenfield, one in North Adams. None of them knew one another, and none of them knew Bob. He’s a stalker.”
That made me think of Vogel’s one-day employment at Mrs. Wheeler’s. “Was part of his technique getting handyman jobs near where the victims lived?”
She shrugged and shook her head. “I don’t know. Like I said, we actually don’t have all that much on Bob yet. What I do know mostly comes from my conversations with him. The file only highlights the bare bones on the last assault-the one that landed him in the pokey.”
“How did he get off on the first two?”
“Screwups; technicalities. You’d have to check it all out with the Massachusetts people, but from what he told me, the system served him well. For that matter, four years for what he did to his last victim was a slap on the wrist.”
There was a pause, during which I digested some of what she’d told me. There was no longer any doubt in my mind that we had a “hit”-someone who, from a distance at least, fit our profile to a gnat’s eyelash.