“I know that, Russ, and I see the problem. We all do. We do have to consider that without the work by Lucas and Virgil, you’d have a serial killer on your staff until she retired with a nice pension. And she might not yet be done with the killing.”
—
As he saidthat, there was a soft knock at the conference room door, which popped open and a young woman stuck her head in. Shehad a sheet of paper in her hand, and she said, “Agent Flowers asked me to do a computer search and to report here if I got a result.”
“What’d you get?” Virgil asked.
“Don Schmidt renewed his driver’s license up through 2009. He was unemployed and living in a mobile home park near Harris, off I-35. I talked to the son of the man who owned the park at the time, and he said he remembers Schmidt talking about going to California, and one day, he did. I can find a lot of Don Schmidts around the country, hundreds of them, but none seem to track back to our Don Schmidt. None with the same birth date and location. I need to do more work on that, but so far, I’m not finding him. We need to talk to somebody about Social Security contributions. That might locate him.”
“I can help with that,” Henderson said.
“Who is Don Schmidt?” Belen asked Virgil.
“A man we think might have sexually abused Amanda Fisk as a child,” Virgil said.
Belen groaned: “Great. That’s just great. We really didn’t need to create any sympathy for the woman.”
Virgil: “Yeah, well. I think that’s one more item in the hit list. I’ll bet Don Schmidt hasn’t contributed a nickel to Social Security since he went to California. Because he’s in a hole in the Northwoods.”
“Prove it,” Belen said. “Is there anything else ongoing that might provide some direct proof?”
Lucas said, “One thing. We were going to ask some of the true-crimers to take a look, but now that we’re at this point…We want to get a couple of crime scene people to go back to Bee and crawl along the wall where Fisk apparently had an office, and the otherwalls around there, and see if they can find any evidence that a knife had been sharpened on the red bricks.”
He explained about the red grains found in the point of the apparent murder weapon.
“If you could match grains, that would be important,” Belen said. “Maybe even critical. It’d be something physical, instead of circumstantial. Though it could still be blamed on her husband, I suppose.”
There was a long silence, and then Henderson said, “Well, Russ. Now you know our problem.”
30
Amanda Fisk woke in the morning to the sound of people shouting in the street, not a common occurrence on Summit Avenue. She put on a robe, went to the front balcony, and looked out. A cluster of compact SUVs was parked illegally in front of the house, and a group of women, and one man, were making movies, and the man pointed at her and shouted something that might have been, “That’s her!”
“What the hell?”
But she had a feeling that she knew. She’d locked the dogs out of the bedroom, but the little fuckers were waiting for her to emerge and began ricocheting around her feet as she hurried down the stairs to her home office. The office had only a small window that looked out to the back of the house; she peeked, and none of the people at the front had ventured around back. The yard was empty.
She opened Anne Cash’s website and there it was: “Prosecutor Investigated for Murder of Doris Grandfelt and Others, Including Husband.”
She scanned the attached story, her lips moving with the words: Becky Watson, Carly Gibson, Doris Grandfelt, Alma Fisk, Timothy Carlson, Marcia Wise.
The story mentioned the burning of Virgil Flowers’s stable, and injuries to his girlfriend and her son, and to two horses.
“There’ll be more jackasses mad about the horses than about the people,” she muttered to herself. “You really want to get me, you should have focused on the horses.”
She stared at the screen for a moment, calculating, brushed past the caroming mutts, ran back up the stairs, showered, did her makeup, dressed carefully in a blue-checked dress and low heels. She packed clothes and a lot of underwear, got her business purse, and headed down to the garage.
The dogs were barking at her; they wanted breakfast, and she couldn’t remember if she’d fed them the night before. She dumped about three days’ kibble into their two dishes, gave them a full bowl of water, and left them. The garage, though attached, was partly behind the house, so she was out, turned and rolling down the driveway before the true-crimers spotted her. She hit the street and turned right and in the rearview mirror, saw true-crimers running for their cars. She had a good lead, made several turns, then headed downtown.
—
Russ Belen wasin his office, saw her coming, and half stood, crouched over a pile of papers on his desk. She banged inside and shouted, “Have you seen what they’ve done to me?”
Belen pointed at a chair, said, “Some of it,” and “Sit down! Sit down!”
“The goddamn cops are framing me for Harrison,” she shouted at Belen, saliva spraying across his desk; she didn’t sit down.
Harrison was a cop who shot a Black woman at exactly the wrong time, in exactly the wrong place, and without anywhere near enough justification. Fisk had sent him to prison.
