—
Back in theborrowed office, Lucas asked, “With the fire and all, did you ever get back to Dahlia Blair about when Fisk and Carlson got married?”
“No. She called me Friday, there was some kind of computer complication that she was trying to work around. I told her I was out of it because of the fire. The next thing I knew, there were six true-crimers taking videos of the ashes. Haven’t talked since.”
“I saw the videos,” Lucas said. “Who was the hulk in the black tee-shirt?”
“Moses, one of Frankie’s kids. By the way, Frankie and I are gonna get married, maybe next week. Or next month. Or whenever Frankie can set it up.”
“About time,” Lucas said. “We’re coming, of course.”
“Yeah, you’re gonna be best man,” Virgil said. “Anyway, we need to call Dahlia.”
—
They did that.“We didn’t know if you still wanted us around after all the fire videos we did,” Blair said.
“Yeah, okay, but when…”
“Amanda Fisk and Timothy Carlson got married in September, four months after Doris was murdered.”
“Hot damn,” Virgil said.
“This is something, isn’t it?” Blair asked.
“It might be,” Virgil said. “But please, please don’t do anything with it. Not yet. We will feed you some really good stuff when we get it, and it should be coming soon. Maybe early next week.”
Off the phone, Lucas said, “Let’s think about this. Let’s suppose that Fisk killed Doris, Carlson, and Wise. She didn’t leave any hard evidence behind. Minneapolis got no foreign DNA from Wise’s body and there’s nothing from her on Doris. Carlson she had cremated and nobody looked.”
“If there was anything in my stable, it went up in smoke,” Virgil said.
“We’re building a case on nothing but circumstantial evidence. Other than that, we got nothing.”
“So we’ve got to pile it up, the circumstantial stuff,” Virgil said. “The trouble being, we could be wrong.”
“We need to get the best true-crimers off all the other shit they’re looking at and have them research Amanda Fisk from the time she was born until a half hour ago.”
“I’ll call them,” Virgil said.
—
They spent therest of the afternoon and most of Friday talking to true-crimers, but nothing of interest turned up. Some of the true-crimers were anxious to be first with Amanda Fisk’s name as a person of interest, and Virgil was reduced to pleading with them to keep it quiet. That wouldn’t last long.
Government offices were closed on the weekend, though online sources were still up. With the problems at the farm, Virgil went home Friday night.
Karen Moss called Virgil on Saturday while he was eating lunch and said, “I want a piece of the five million when we hang Fisk.”
“We’ve got nothing to hang her with,” Virgil said.
“I got something,” she said. “It’s good.”
“What?”
“Guess where Amanda Fisk grew up…”
“C’mon,” Virgil said.
“She graduated from Woodbury High School.”
