“If I were going to burn down Virgil’s stable, and needed gas, I wouldn’t put it on a credit card. Maybe you should check some gas station security videos,” Mitford said.
“Lot of gas stations,” Lucas said. “And everybody buys gas.”
“Not many gas stations near her place,” Henderson said. “My house is a mile down the street from hers. There are two Speedways and a SuperAmerica that are handy. It would be interesting to see when she last tanked up.”
“We’ll look,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Virgil and get him started.”
He did that.
—
There were threegas stations that were more or less handy to Fisk’s home. Virgil reasoned that if she were to tank up the car, she wouldn’t have gone to the closest one. Of the other two, one would require a turn away from a main route to Mankato and the farm; the other would put her on the main route.
He’d gone to that one.
The assistant manager at SuperAmerica said they did, in fact, have video of the pump area, but he didn’t know exactly how to rewind the video and display it, but he knew it went back thirty days. He also knew a woman who worked for TC Surveillance who could do all that, but would charge for it.
“She’s not cheap, she’d probably want two hundred bucks to come over right away.”
“The state of Minnesota has two hundred bucks,” Virgil said.
“They should, what with the taxes here,” the manager said. Virgil didn’t answer, but stared at him, and when it was about to become awkward, the manager said, “I’ll call her.”
Virgil was waiting for the woman to show up, and eating a bag of peanuts, when Lucas came through the door: “Got anything?”
“Not yet.”
“Big meeting at four o’clock. We could use another thing. As many things as we can get.”
Virgil was telling him about waiting for the woman from TC Surveillance when a call came in on Virgil’s burner. Mary Albanese, another of the true-crimer researchers. Lucas listened in.
“We’ve got something weird, could be nothing,” Albanese said. “But it’s curious. We found a cold case in St. Paul, a woman named Carly Gibson, who was beaten to death in 1998. With a lead pipe, if you can believe that. I mean it’s such a cliché. Anyway, it was never solved. The murder wasn’t.”
“And…”
“She was going to law school at William Mitchell. She was in the same class as Amanda Fisk.”
Lucas peered at the phone, then at Virgil, then asked, “What’s the woman’s name again?”
He got it, and asked, “How’d you find this?”
“We were reviewing murder reports in theStar-Tribune. When we saw the date and the law school thing, it rang a bell.”
Lucas: “You’re a genius.”
“I certainly think so.”
Off the phone, he said to Virgil, “I’m going downtown. I’ll get with the chief and pull the case file. Then I’ll be over at William Mitchell.”
“While I wait here for the Surveillance chick.”
—
The woman fromTC Surveillance, Jane Gou, was short, heavy, harassed, late. Before she’d done anything, she wanted to know who to bill. Virgil gave her Jon Duncan’s name and phone number at the BCA, and she took Virgil into the station’s tight back room and a small video screen.
She rolled the memory back to the night before the fire, then ran it forward at double speed. At one o’clock on the morning of the fire, Amanda Fisk drove into the station in her Mercedes SUV and gassed up the car. The car was parked sideways to the camera, so he couldn’t see the license plates. Fisk was dressed for the country in jeans, a jean jacket, and a Twins baseball cap. She kept her head tilted down, under the ballcap bill, so the camera couldn’t see her face, but Virgil was certain that it was her. The surveillance tape showed a running total of gallons dispensed. Toward the end, the total stopped for thirty seconds, and then started again, dispensing exactly one gallon.
Virgil said, as calmly as he could manage, which wasn’t entirely calm, “I’m going to need a copy of this.”
