Roux said, “Lucas? Virgil?”
Virgil said to Lucas: “Go.”
Lucas looked at Belen and said, “We’ve been investigating a member of your staff. Amanda Fisk. We have serious reason to believe that she may be a serial killer.”
“What!” Belen was wearing dark-brown horn-rimmed glasses, and he fumbled at them, knocking them skittering onto the tabletop, where he left them. “What!”
He was shocked, his mouth open, turning to each of the people in turn around the table. “What in the hell are you talking about?”
Lucas laid it out:
“Amanda Fisk has been associated with a number of violent and tragic deaths, and has directly benefited from some of them, although benefits in others are not so clear.”
Reading from a legal pad, he listed them: the death of Becky Watson, a young schoolmate when she was in ninth grade. The murder of Carly Gibson, a law school competitor. The murder of Doris Grandfelt, a marriage competitor. The unusual death of her mother, which resulted in a near million-dollar payoff. The death of herhusband, which she actually witnessed, and which also provided her with an extraordinary inheritance benefit. The murder of Marcia Wise, probably mistaken for Lara Grandfelt, which was apparently an effort to eliminate the reward package. The burning of Virgil Flowers’s stable was an attempt to move him off the case, and resulted in injuries to Florence Nobles and her son Sam.
Lucas provided some details for each of the deaths and gave Belen a printout of additional details, including the fact that Fisk had grown up a block from the obscure site where Doris Grandfelt’s body had been left, her employment at Bee, her lie about the timing of her courtship with Timothy Carlson. Virgil had brought his laptop to the meeting and played the video of Fisk buying gasoline in the early morning hours before the stable fire.
In the end, Belen rocked back in his chair and said, “I believe you. I think she’s guilty as sin. I hope you all see the problem with a prosecution.”
Roux nodded and said, “Unfortunately, we all do. The lack of specific evidence. Though in the case of the nonexistent DNA from her husband, that would suggest a guilty knowledge that she was trying to erase.”
“But it’s an effort to erase information that could have led to a prosecution of her husband, not of Amanda,” Belen said.
—
“We still havesome ground to cover,” Lucas said. “In the case of her mother, we need to speak to her doctor to find out whether there had been any other overdose issues. We need to go back to Fisk’s house to nail down the DNA evidence. She might very well have gotten almost all of it, but we’ll find some.”
Belen said, “She’s currently on compassionate leave. I suggest we don’t change that, for the time being. When we’ve compiled everything in an…executable form, I’ll formally suspend her from her job and ask for a search warrant to go back in her house for DNA. Then the cat will be out of the bag.”
Henderson: “Russ, I’ve never been a prosecutor, but I can’t see any possible way that your office could handle this, if it’s prosecutable at all.”
Belen nodded. “There’sno waywe could handle it. I know the guy down in Dakota County, he’s good. I’ll talk to a judge and request that the case be sent to Dakota for a grand jury investigation.”
Moore, the BCA director, said, “I think we should pull Virgil off the case. I don’t want to, but since he believes he’s been directly attacked, by Fisk, I think it would be best.”
“I think it would be mandatory,” Belen said.
Virgil: “I agree.”
Belen turned to Lucas: “How soon could we get all the material compiled as a complete investigative report that we could act on?”
Lucas said, “We’ve got a bunch of clerical work to do. You know, names, dates and places, motive and opportunity, medical examiner’s reports, all that. It’ll probably take a month to get all that done. I would like to keep that process as secret as possible, although a number of true crime bloggers have Fisk’s name. It will leak. And soon.”
He explained how that had happened, and Belen slapped his forehead and said, “You used the true crime people to do investigative work? You leaked some of the progress of the investigation? That’s…that’s…”
Lucas leaned in hard: “Nonstandard. We asked these people to do paper research that the BCA wasn’t equipped to do,” Lucas said.“With the exception of the discovery of the knife, they didn’t do any actual investigation.”
“It’s worse than nonstandard,” Belen argued. “It could be contaminating.”
“I don’t see why,” Lucas said, leaning away. “What they found for us was basically material available through open public records. Anybody could have found it. For the BCA to do it, it would have had to assign twenty investigators with no surety that there’d be any kind of positive outcome, while the bureau’s regular work would have been effectively sidelined. That simply wouldn’t have happened.”
Moore, the BCA director, said, “Lucas is correct. We couldn’t have done that, unless…well, we could have assigned two people to work it, I guess, but it might have taken months. Or years.”
Belen, fuming, said to Lucas, “I don’t like it. I’ll give you the fact that you may have needed these people, but you know when Fisk is indicted, if she is, she’s going to argue that the jury pool is poisoned by all the publicity and by your leaks…and we’ll wind up having the trial in Cornbread, Oklahoma, or something.”
“You won’t, Dakota will,” Henderson said.
“I’m speaking on behalf of any prosecutor, Senator,” Belen snapped.
