Later, every true crime site they looked at had the movies. “This is like a fuckin’ carnival,” Virgil said.
Frankie said, “You know, if we were burned out by the Grandfelt killer, an attack on you by a criminal you were hunting, I bet the state would pay for a new stable.”
“Keep dreamin’, babe,” Virgil said. But he thought about it.
—
The farm hada Kubota front-end loader. Virgil and Moses spent the weekend pushing the debris from the fire into a pile. Moses now ran the architectural salvage business that Frankie had started years earlier, and he owned a heavy-duty thirty-foot trailer. They loaded the debris into it, and on Monday made two trips to the landfill.
When they got back after the second trip, another of Frankie’s grown boys, Tall Bear, was wandering around the yard. They answered some of his questions, and saw Frankie coming down the road in her pickup. When she was out of the truck, she told Virgil that she’d gone over to the salvage yard to get the drag magnet.
“There’ll be a thousand nails and screws laying around and we need to pick them up, or we’ll be picking them up with our tires every time we drive around there,” she said.
She was correct. Virgil and Tall Bear spent most of the afternoon dragging the magnet and picked up a half-bucket of nails and screws.
At dinner that night, Frankie asked, “You’ve got to go back tomorrow?”
“I should, but I could probably get another day. I need to get down to the bank tomorrow.”
“Call Lucas: see what he thinks.”
He did that, and Lucas told him that he’d finished with the deposition that afternoon, and that he was catching a very early flight out of Albuquerque. “So early that I’ve checked in to an airport hotel. Italked to Duncan, and he said we now won’t have any DNA results until at least Wednesday, so…I don’t see why you couldn’t take another day. Or two.”
“If we get a match with Carlson, I want to be there when we talk to Amanda Fisk again,” Virgil said. “I’m thinking we get a match.”
On Tuesday, Virgil went to the credit union in Mankato and found that he could get a loan big enough to cover any of the stable kits that Frankie had been researching, but only if they mortgaged the farm as part of the deal. He could get the loan with a fifteen-year pay period, but with a short-term-payoff option, if he wanted it.
He and Frankie talked about it, stressed about it, and decided to go with it—and to contract for one of the bigger kits.
“Now I’vegotto finish the book,” Virgil told her. “And it’s gotta be good.”
Frankie was most interested in what was called a Belkin Building, which had a local rep; the rep could make it to the farm on Wednesday, and Virgil called Duncan and begged for another day off and got it.
“We’ve got more of the guys in the photos, six of them now, they’re all doing gum scrubs,” Duncan said. “Wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but we dinged up a couple of long-term marriages.”
The Belkin Building rep showed up at midmorning, and they spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon with him, looking at the site, talking about what had to be done, getting a timeline, and making a tentative deal.
“You’re going to have to handle this,” Virgil told Frankie. “I’m going to get whoever did this to us, and I gotta focus on that. And the book. When I deliver the book, I’ll pay off the mortgage.”
“I got that.”
“And listen,” Virgil said. “This whole thing would be a hell of a lot easier both in terms of getting the mortgage and paying it off with book money, you know, tax-wise, if we were married.”
Frankie scratched her forehead, said, “Yeah, probably.”
“Let’s get it done,” Virgil said. “Next week, maybe. See if you can nail down a judge.”
“That’s so romantic.”
“It is what it is,” Virgil said. “Gimme a kiss.”
26
The Belkin man had been gone for an hour, and Frankie was online with a company that sold saddles and other tack—she’d lost everything that had been stored in the tack room—when Lucas called from St. Paul.
“Guess what?”
“We got a match!” Virgil said.
