“Something like that.”
“We need to look at an autopsy. Get everything you’re looking at in print. Everything, and your source for it. I’ll be in my car heading over to the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office.”
“We got her? Fisk?”
“Not yet, but…keep quiet for another day. Please.”
“Pressure’s building up. Something’s gonna blow.”
“Hang on for twenty-four hours.”
—
Virgil called Lucas,who was still in Henderson’s Cadillac, and told him what he’d gotten from Cash.
“That’s another stick,” Lucas said.
“What?”
“Mitford’s with us, said we needed another stick to throw on the fire.”
“I’m on my way over to the ME’s office, see if they did an autopsy and if they did, what they found.”
“Must have been one, sudden unexpected death with no witnesses,” Lucas said.
When Virgil rang off, Lucas told Henderson and Mitford about Fisk’s double inheritance.
“She’s starting to sound like a bad, bad person,” Henderson said. He had been looking at himself in a visor mirror and smiled in the mirror at Lucas.
—
Darrell Richardson, themedical examiner, met Virgil in his office and a clerk brought in the autopsy report. Richardson looked at it, frowned, and said, “Before my time…There’s not much to it. It looks like an accidental overdose. She was insulin-dependent, and the chemistry says she overdosed herself on insulin and also had a pretty heavy dose of zolpidem in her bloodstream. Zolpidem’s a sleep aid…”
“I know, it’s Ambien,” Virgil said. “How big a dose?”
“She apparently took two ten-milligram tabs. The usual dose for a woman is seven and a half milligrams, but she had a prescription for ten-milligram tabs. We did recover the pill bottle, there were still seven tabs left. So, she’d been using them right along, apparently. From what we could tell, it seemed likely that she’d done her insulin, then a tab of Ambien, or two tabs, and that may have left her confused about whether she’d taken her insulin, and she took another shot. It happens…”
The two of them went over the investigator’s report, and there was no indication that she’d had visitors the night of the overdose, but to Virgil’s eye, it didn’t appear that anyone had looked very hard.
—
Virgil called Lucaswith information about the autopsy. Lucas, Henderson, and Mitford were in Grandfelt’s living room, and Lucas passed the information on to the others.
“This is now a case,” Mitford said.
“I think so, too,” Henderson said.
Grandfelt, who had been wandering around the room with brief perches on one of her high-fashion chairs, asked, “Can we tell the truecrime people to go ahead and use her name? That would put pressure on her. We might see if she’s inclined to do something precipitous.”
“Well, I can tell you, from what Virgil said, his impression of Fisk and from Dr. Baer, she’s not going to kill herself,” Lucas said. “If we manage to indict her, she’ll fight it. She’s got the money.”
They all thought about that, then Grandfelt asked, “Do you really think she burned down Virgil’s stable?”
Lucas nodded. “We do.”
Henderson said, “If she drove all the way to Mankato and back, she probably bought gas.”
“We’re trying to get a person to look at her credit cards,” Lucas said.
