“I was just thinking that I wasn’t doing much good up here anymore. Maybe I ought to go back to Bratt-help Susan out.”
“Would that make you feel better?”
She slipped her shoulders from under my hands and turned away again. “I don’t know. I’ll take a nap first.”
I almost skipped the soaps that day. After my workout with Leo, I returned to my paper piles and began to discover that nostalgia had played no part in my need to review what we’d done. Things no longer felt as solid to me as they had before Vogel stuck me with his knife. I still had no palpable evidence leading me anywhere, but I did have a growing list of questions that needed definite answers.
None of which eclipsed my concerns about Gail. Her abrupt emotional nose dive shouldn’t have been unexpected. But it reminded me too much of the days immediately following the rape, when she’d been absorbed by her friends, and I’d ended up on the outside.
My mother turned down the sound before I even reached my chair.
“So what’s going on?” she asked me bluntly.
I quoted Gail. “It’s a process that has its ups and downs.”
She shook her head impatiently. “I know that. Did you talk to her about that idiocy this morning?”
“I’ve tried… ” I stopped, and thought about the question more carefully, countering with a question of my own. “What about this morning? She’s a politician herself. She may have thought it was a lousy thing to do, but she knows the game.”
Again, my mother looked disgusted. “I thought you’d missed the point. I could see it by the way you handled things.”
I rubbed my forehead in exasperation. “What are you driving at?”
She looked at me closely. “Where’s Gail’s award?” She then squeezed my hand supportively, sat back in her chair, and hit the remote, her message delivered. The earnest murmurings of insincere people filled the room.
I sat there beside her, stunned by my own shortsightedness. I was no longer in the mood to watch TV; nor did I want to further aggravate Gail by waking her up just to be contrite and make myself feel better. So I did what I’d done for most of my life when the complexities of human nature outpaced me-I went back to work.
My weeks in a coma had given me distance from the case, allowing my mind to float free of the momentum and prejudice that had grown as we’d gotten closer to Bob Vogel. Now, that passion had been supplanted by an analytical coolness, granting me the chance to play devil’s advocate with many of the clues we’d collected with indiscriminate enthusiasm.
For example: the rape itself. We had built strong, credible bridges linking Gail’s account, the evidence found at the scene, and Bob Vogel’s MO. My perusal of Tony’s selected documents told me that these bridges had been strengthened by corroboration and tailored for clarity.
So where was the problem?
While attempting to fit a person to a crime, police officers are supposed to probe for the loopholes, no matter how flimsy. Much of this falls into the “vagaries of human nature” department, such as, in our situation, the assumption that Bob Vogel had continued to learn from each of his previous assaults, altering the way he blocked his victims’ vision, restrained their movements, and protected his hands by using gloves when he beat them.
My concern was that we hadn’t questioned hard enough, instead caving in to the weight of attractive evidence and increasingly turning our backs on a significant number of apparently minor questions.
Such as: Why, after stealthily entering the house and removing his clothes-presumably to help shield his identity-did Vogel climb onto Gail before bagging her head? By so doing, he’d woken her up prematurely and had run the risk of being identified.
Why did he whisper, when the two of them had never met, and there was no way she’d recognize his voice?
During the rape, he’d taken the time to go on a rampage, breaking lamps and tearing apart Gail’s drawers and closet. But why had he been so methodical, working his way around the room in a clockwise direction? Why had he spared the fancy TV set-the largest target in the room-and why had he said, “Shit,” when the expensive Mexican plate she’d had hanging on the wall fell and broke? Surely such destruction was the whole point of the exercise. Hadn’t he called her a “snotty god-damn bitch,” implying a sense of social and financial inferiority-a factor which had played no apparent part in Vogel’s previous rapes? It was an odd choice of words from someone whose vocabulary tended to wallow among the truly obscene-a phrase that sounded even vaguely effeminate.
And what about the means of entry? It had been easy to effect-the simple sliding of a knife blade across a window’s loose lock-but that had been the only such vulnerable window in the house. An unlikely coincidence unless Vogel had been inside before, scoping things out-a supposition for which we had no evidence. Murchison, the glass man, had been a good suspect there, but according to a forensics report from Waterbury-the blood-stained knife found in Vogel’s trailer was a perfect match for the scratch marks on the lock.
And what about Vogel’s presence in the area shortly before the attack? The neighbor who’d hired him to work on her lawn had positively identified him, but to our knowledge, Vogel had never staked out his intended victims before in that fashion. Furthermore, assuming that he’d set fire to the regular yard man’s equipment so he could legitimately get close to Gail’s house, why hadn’t he gone door to door afterward, pretending to offer his services to others? That simple ploy could have put him right at Gail’s doorstep, and-if he’d properly conned her-might have gotten him inside.
I hadn’t lost sight of all the evidence we had against Bob Vogel, or of the fact that his own actions, once he’d been accused, had hardly been those of an innocent victim. But I was troubled by what I was finding.
With the sun having surrendered to the room’s overhead light, and the sounds of dinner being prepared in the kitchen below, I sat back from my research and stared at the floor in contemplation, Tony Brandt’s words of caution echoing in my ears. If you’re going to kick over the apple cart, he’d implied, do it now and don’t be wrong.
What I needed was a sounding board, and of the two best ones I’d used in the past, one-Tony Brandt himself-was in Brattleboro, while the other was downstairs, slowly drifting away from me on a raft of her own misery.
18
I went downstairs, lost in thought, rationalizing how my problem and Gail’s might be mutually redressed. I wanted someone to help me untangle-or at least confirm-the questions I’d been struggling with all afternoon. And Gail, as I saw it, needed some mental handhold she could use to help pull herself out of her depression.
Perhaps mercifully, I never got to put my theory to the test. By the time I walked into the living room, all three of them had been pulled out of the kitchen by the evening news and were fanned out in front of the television in silence. I joined them quietly, standing to the rear, looking over the top of my mother’s head.
After a brief, noncommittal smile at the camera, the anchorwoman behind the curving desk fixed us all with a serious look. “Earlier today, in Thetford, Vermont, Brattleboro Police Lieutenant Joseph Gunther was presented the State’s Attorneys’ Association’s annual Outstanding Achievement Award. Last month Gunther was stabbed with a knife while apprehending the alleged rapist of Brattleboro Selectwoman Gail Zigman. Gunther spent three weeks in a coma at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and is currently recuperating at his mother’s home in Thetford. News at Six’s Tony Coven covered the ceremony.”
The anchorwoman was replaced by a young man in a ski parka standing in bright sunshine in front of our house, a microphone gripped in his hand like a relay-race baton. “The Outstanding Achievement Award was presented by State’s Attorney James Dunn to Lieutenant Gunther on the heels of one of the most publicized sexual-assault cases this state has seen in years-a case still awaiting trial, and which is of particular concern to James Dunn, who is currently in a neck-and-neck reelection bid against Brattleboro attorney Jack Derby.”