Archer Mayor - The surrogate thief

And they did contain clues: a bullet hole near the front door, the violent pattern of Oberfeldt's blood spatter, the open hiding place in the back room's floor where the couple's life savings had been, and-most interesting of all-a trail of smaller blood drops leading away from the scene, along with an open switchblade found lying in Klaus's gore, both presumed to be the assailant's.

Joe selected a picture showing the knife in close-up, the lighting arranged to best reveal the ridges of a single thumb-print on the blade, peering out from under a thin smear of blood.

There certainly was a nagging anomaly. Why the knife? It was found open, had clearly been taken out for some use, while all of Klaus's injuries had been due to the pistol-whipping.

And yet the knife proved useful. The thumbprint was carefully lifted and compared to the thousands on file at the police department. The officer who fancied himself a forensics man spent weeks poring over endless cards with a magnifying glass, as intent as a spider weaving a web against all odds, until he finally hit pay dirt in the name of a local thief named Peter Shea. Pete was a relatively low-profile bad boy, had a problem with alcohol, and was generally considered one of the usual suspects when that phrase was still common currency.

Unfortunately, he was not to be found. Nor had he been found to this day.

In a truly ironic paradox, that disappearance hadn't turned out to be all bad news. Clearly, it wasn't good that Pete had vanished, but at least they now had a name to pursue. Until that thumbprint had yielded an identity-and the person owning it had fled-Joe had been getting nowhere.

And he had worked the problem hard-persistent even in his youth. At least, for the first couple of months. He'd conducted several canvasses, chased down every complaint the Oberfeldts had ever filed, checked out all the local crooks with even vaguely similar MOs. He'd interviewed Maria three times, hoping to extract a memory of someone who might have wished them far more than simple ill will. And he'd pushed her aggressively on who could have known about the nest egg's hiding place.

But it hadn't led to anything concrete-besides the unsettling suggestion that the hiding place had been known to several past employees, all of whom subsequently swore they'd kept mum. By the time Peter Shea was identified, Joe's devotion to the cause had flagged. After all, Oberfeldt was still alive, the case was still a robbery, and Ellen was still dying.

Near the end, Joe had to admit that he really didn't give a damn about the Oberfeldts or their presumed assailant. It was his chief who recognized this first and forced his young detective to take some leave. Joe put up a halfhearted protest. The chief back then was a laid-back, unruffled sort, more mindful of his "boys" than of the public they served, and Joe knew that no one would be asked to put much effort into the case, Shea or no Shea, until Joe himself returned to duty. But honestly, he was grateful to be taken off the hook. Toward the end, every conversation he had, every place he went, all he could see in his mind's eye was Ellen, pale and emaciated, slowly blending into the white sheets encasing her.

Inflammatory breast cancer is a fast-acting killer. Chances of recovery have improved over the years as both treatment methods and drugs have modernized, but it's a toxic disease and, when Ellen had it, a guaranteed death sentence. Chemotherapy, now such a mainstay, was generally considered a last-ditch tactic and most often wasn't even employed.

She'd laughed at the cancer's discovery, when Joe had noticed it during an intimate nuzzle. He'd felt its heat against his lips and pulled back to question her, noticing at the same moment its flushed color. There'd been jokes about how poison ivy could get in a place like that, before they resumed making love.

The image of their naked bodies entwined, moving as one, lost in pleasure and ignorant passion for the last time-the presence of the cancer already hot but unknown between them-plagued him like a nightmare for years afterward.

The following day, she went to the doctor to begin the countdown on their lives together.

It wasn't bad to begin with. Ellen drove daily up the new interstate to Mary Hitchcock Hospital for five-minute radiation treatments. She played it as a lark, ribbing Joe that she'd take advantage of being in what she called "precious Hanover" to do some upscale shopping and destroy their budget. But it became a thin con quickly made tinny by her growing exhaustion.

There wasn't any pain, thankfully-not at first-and her appetite remained normal. For what now seemed an impossibly brief twilight, both of them began thinking there'd been a misdiagnosis, or that she'd be the one that made this disease only 99 percent fatal.

But that didn't last. Joe became so tired of grim-faced people dressed in white lab coats, their eyes at once clinical and sympathetic, telling them nothing but bad news. Ellen and he became experts in the language of disease, speaking in Latin-based polysyllables with an ease they'd once reserved for happier conversations. Ellen and he turned to each other for small moments of pleasure and intimacy in the midst of it all, while feeling like two pieces of flotsam refusing to sink into the sea.

When they made love now, their previous joyful abandon was stained by too much knowledge, as if neither of them wanted to risk rupturing the virulent capsule cradled between them.

Surgery was next-radical, dehumanizing, utterly transforming. Not only was Ellen's breast removed, but, in an effort at what they blandly called hormonal therapy, her ovaries as well. The doctors recommended this in hopes of "an objective response."

She did not respond objectively, perhaps because, Joe once suggested, no one had bothered to tell her what the hell that meant.

Not that it mattered, finally. As momentous as had been their concerns about the surgery, they withered to nothing after the pain kicked in.

It first appeared in the right upper quadrant of her abdomen, and in what both she and Joe had come to expect as the norm, its cause was optimistically misdiagnosed as being related to the surgery.

It wasn't. The disease had spread to the liver. The pain came from the tumor growing faster than the liver could stretch to accommodate it. With Ellen's now rapidly shrinking frame, Joe began to fantasize at night about the cancer becoming larger than the two of them put together.

Of all the horrors he'd seen in combat, the self-doubt and confusion he'd suffered growing up, nothing he'd experienced had prepared him for this metamorphosis of the woman he'd planned to grow old with, into a pain-racked, sutured, wan-eyed vessel of an army of pestilent cells. Every visit to Ellen's bedside reinforced the sensation that a yawning distance was growing between them, as if she were slipping below the surface, and all he could reach-plunging as deeply as he could-were the tips of her fingers.

When she died, just two days after Klaus Oberfeldt, she weighed barely seventy-five pounds-a parody of Joe's nightmares about the creature growing within her. In the end, all that was left-all that escaped-was the smile she gave him just before she fell asleep for the last time.

Joe put aside the crime scene photographs and swiveled his desk chair around to face the darkness of the night outside. It was starting to turn cool, creeping toward September, and people had already begun commenting on how summer's grip on the region was beginning to slip.

"Working late, boss?"

He looked over his shoulder at the office entrance. He saw the small, slim profile of his one female squad member, Sammie Martens, barely visible in the gloom, "Hey, Sam. You, too? Feel free to hit the lights."

She approached his desk and settled into his guest chair instead. Of his three younger colleagues, Sam held a special place in his heart. She'd worked so hard to get here, essentially from childhood, that the concept of struggle had become not only second nature but a self-fulfilling prophecy. This wasn't just ambition, although she had that, too. It was more reminiscent of the punch-drunk boxer who can't see the other guy has thrown in the towel. Sam's fate, it appeared, was to keep on swinging without clearly knowing why.