Virgil said, “Okay. What we’re trying to do here is build a little history. Tell us about her.”
Harlan pushed out a lip, then, “Like I said, she had a tough row to hoe. Alma had a bad time in her pregnancy, and right after Mandy was born, she took off. Went back to her family and wouldn’t take Mandy with her, so I had to put her with a neighbor lady to take care of her, because I had to work. That went on for almost two years and then Alma came back but she and Mandy were never right. And then, oh, must have been seven or eight years later, Alma’s brother Don moved into what had been Mandy’s room, and Mandy moved down the basement. It was finished, and everything, with her own little bathroom, so we thought it was pretty good. Mandy called it ‘the dungeon.’ I don’t know for sure, but I think Don might have messed with Mandy.”
“Messed with…what does that mean?” Lucas asked.
“Messed with her. You know, while I was working. I don’t know what he did, and Alma said he didn’t do anything, and Mandy said he didn’t do anything, but I didn’t believe them. Still don’t. He didsomething.”
Virgil: “And you knew that…how?”
“Just the way she acted around him. Like, sometimes, she acted scared, and sometimes, she was a little too friendly. I finally told the sonofabitch that he had to get out of the house. That was the beginning of the end for me and Alma, when I threw her brother out. We started fighting…Then, in there, I met Ruth, and we got it together, and Alma and I got divorced. Alma got everything I had. I had to start over, but 3M gave me and Ruth—we met at work—a transfer to the plant in Menomonie so I got to keep my pension. Ruth’s folks come from here in Eau Claire, so that’s where we settled. We commuted to work until we retired.”
“Did Amanda live with Alma until her mother died?”
“Oh, no, she was long gone before that happened. She moved out when she went to college, never looked back. That must have been in the mid-90s. She was born in ’76, so she would have graduated from high school, I guess, in ’94.”
Ruth: “We paid for her college.”
Harlan: “Part, anyway. She got good grades in high school, she’s a smart one. She got scholarships to cover her college tuition, but her mother wouldn’t help, so we chipped in—mostly for a room in St. Paul, you know, and some extra bucks along the way.”
Ruth snorted: “Extra bucks? Like a hundred dollars a month besides the room, and that was real money back then.”
“Yeah, and she had part-time jobs, too,” Harlan said. “Then she wanted to go to law school, and I told her we couldn’t help much with that, so she got a full-time job working in a supermarket and went to law school…it took her like an extra year, but she went to one of those schools that were flexible about it, so she graduated and got a good job. Then, she went to work for the county. That’s the last I heard.”
“What happened to Alma?” Virgil asked.
“Well, she got all our savings and the house, and the savings was considerable. I had to give her all that to save my pension, but she had rights to part of my Social Security if she’d lived. But, she didn’t. She had diabetes. She died real sudden. I got involved because there was a termination of her share of the Social Security benefits.”
“Was there an autopsy? Do you know?” Virgil asked.
“I guess, because we were told that she might have gave herself too much insulin. That’s all I know about that.”
—
They talked fora while longer but got nothing more that was substantive. They said goodbye, and as they pulled on the rain jackets and stepped out on the porch, Harlan said, “Whatever you’re doing, remember that the kid had a hard time growing up, a hard time, especially with that sonofabitch Don.”
In the car, Lucas said, “She had a hard time growing up. She also had a classic serial killer childhood. The Don guy. Messing with her? He was probably fucking her. She was around a lot of early death: the girl hit by the truck, her mother, her husband, Doris…”
“And still: not a single piece of hard evidence that implicates her.”
They drove in silence for a while, then Virgil asked, “Who do we know who could get a look at her credit cards? Without a warrant, without tipping her off?”
Lucas said, “Letty knows a woman at the National Security Agency who can look at them in real time. It would probably be illegal. If anybody ever found out. Why do you want to look?”
“I want to see when she last bought gas before my stable burned.”
“I could ask Letty to check with her source. Then we’d know if we should go after her with a subpoena, all legal-like.”
“It would be worth knowing,” Virgil said.
“I’ll make the call, tonight, when she’s not at work,” Lucas said.
—
They stopped ata McDonald’s in Hudson, Wisconsin, for lunch, then drove the rest of the way into the Cities. On the way, Virgil called Duncan to ask about the DNA samples, and Duncan said that he’d checked, and the Chicago testing firm was still saying it’d be the next day.
“Grandfelt has been calling, she wants to talk to you guys. Where are you?”
“I-94 coming into St. Paul. Did she say if she was at home?”
