“Well, poop,” Virgil said. To Lucas: “Think we should bring in the DNA guys and scrub the locker?”
“Man, I don’t know. Maybe,” Lucas said.
“Did she get his clubs?” Virgil asked Young.
“Same day she cleaned out the locker,” the manager said. “I was there for that because that’s when she notified us that she was out. She was a club member by being married to Tim, and she let us know that she didn’t want to be a member. Tim, of course, was gone. So…”
Wint spoke up. “You know…I wasn’t here when she came in, Marv was filling in. I wonder if he gave her all his other shoes?”
Lucas: “Other shoes?”
“He had three pairs of shoes in his rotation,” Wint said. “I wonder if he left some shoes with Marv? Let me go look…”
He walked around a counter and into a back room, reappeared a minute later with some brown and white golf saddle shoes. “These are his…We put ID tags in them so we don’t mix them up. I guess Marv didn’t polish them because, you know…Dr. Carlson was dead.”
“Gone,” said Young.
“Yup, dead and gone,” Wint said.
Virgil took the shoes, carefully lifted the tongue, and looked inside. To Lucas, he said, “Ten and a half.”
Lucas, worried about the current ownership of the shoes, and what Young might think of that, said to Wint, “Could you put those in a bag? We’ll take them with us.”
Young said, “I’m not sure…”
“It’s perfectly okay, really,” Virgil said, stepping between Young and the shoes, which he handed to Wint. “We’ve done this for a long time.”
Five minutes later, in Virgil’s truck, speeding down the tree-lined driveway, Lucas laughed and mimicked him: “It’s perfectly okay, really, we’ve done this for a long time.”
“What I think is, we gotta get back to the office right now, and get these things scrubbed, in case Young calls Fisk and she gets all legal on us,” Virgil said.
“Get them scrubbed and get a subpoena sent up to Young,” Lucas said. “Not exactly the right order, but it’d confuse things.”
—
At the BCA,Duncan wanted to know the odds that Carlson’s DNA would match the DNA from the Grandfelt murder.
“I would bet lots of money on it,” Virgil said. “Amanda Fisk has scrubbed that house clean. Our own people have never seen anything like it.”
“We got the hair from the sink…”
“Hundred dollars says the hair from the sink doesn’t match the DNA from Carlson’s shoes,” Virgil said.
“Then let’s get it done,” Duncan said. “Right now.”
27
Duncan took charge of the shoes, and when he asked what Virgil and Lucas were planning to do next, Virgil said, “Okay, we’re going to sic a couple of our true crime people on Amanda Fisk. We need to background her. We know she was dating Carlson around the time Grandfelt was killed, and maybe…maybe…well before she was killed. She could have had access, one way or another, to a key that would get her into Bee after hours. Her husband died a really curious death after Lara Grandfelt offered the five million reward and a bunch of true-crimers showed up. We need to get serious about looking at her.”
“Man, she’s a county prosecutor. She’s sorta like one of us.”
“She might be a serial killer, unlike us,” Lucas said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m starting to get a tingle here.”
“Don’t tell me what’s tingling, I don’t want to hear about it,”Duncan said. “So: quietly, boys. Carefully. We don’t want any of this bleeding out on the true crime sites prematurely.”
“Why not?” Lucas asked. “A good way to jack up the pressure.”
Virgil: “Yeah, but, Jon’s right. She knows everything there is to know about evidence. I’d like to put something together before she has a chance to screw with it. Or to start some kind of PR campaign against us.”
