“I’ve seen what they’ve got, and it’s strong, Amanda,” Belen said, in a trying-to-be-reasonable voice. Two assistant county attorneys were pushing through the door but he waved them back. “I’ve got no choice but to suspend you. I can’t pay you during your suspension, but if this turns out to be nothing, you’ll get your full salary.”
“Suspending me? You’re suspending me all right. You’re lynching me,” Fisk shouted at him.
“Not me, not me,” Belen said, a notch quieter. “The BCA is taking the information to Dakota County. Bob Christianson will be making the decisions.”
“Christianson? You know what I think of Bob Christianson? He’s a goddamned right-wing fool and he’s already said he wouldn’t have prosecuted Harrison.”
Belen held his hands up, a blocking gesture. “Look. I can see you’re angry, and if you’re innocent, I can certainly understand why. But this doesn’t have anything to do with Harrison. And I’m going to have to ask you to leave. If you need anything from your desk, I’ll have Clark escort you…”
“Escort me? You sonofabitch…”
In the end, she was back on the street with two banker’s boxes full of personal effects. She carried them across to the Victory Parking ramp where she’d left her car. She thought about the Saint Paul Hotel,which was around the corner, but decided against it. She needed somewhere a little more anonymous, a traveler’s hotel, a Holiday Inn or the equivalent, as a bolt-hole if she needed it. She’d go back to her home after dark, feed the dogs again. The dogs. The little fuckers would probably be shitting all over the living room carpet…
She wrenched herself straight again. She had to think, and not about the dogs.
One thing: they didn’t know about Don.
And for just an instant, a smile flickered across her face. Even Don hadn’t comprehended what she was going to do to him, until she’d already done it.
—
Belen managed thetransfer to the grand jury investigation to Dakota County, which would be done under the supervision of a longtime assistant county attorney named Dick Roller. Virgil knew him and said he was very good.
Lucas and Duncan coordinated the data collection on the case, pinning down times, dates, autopsies when they were available, interviews with people who’d known both Fisk and the victims. They attempted to document the links between them, and possible motives.
Roller pushed hard for any physical evidence of a murder that could be connected to Fisk. The video of Fisk buying gasoline was good, but not definitive, because she did have a gasoline lawn mower at her house.
—
A BCA agentnamed Evelyn Harvey was placed in charge of tracing Don Schmidt. She visited his last known residence in amanufactured home outside Harris, Minnesota, north of the Twin Cities, and called Lucas from there.
“The house is a wreck. I mean, literally, it’s collapsing. It hasn’t been lived in since 2008. But: it’s not really in a trailer park. It’s in a wooded area, with a few more of these homes scattered around, originally on four-acre lots. Most of them are wrecks, now. If you’re thinking that Fisk might have come up here and killed Schmidt, it would have been a heck of a lot easier to kill him and bury him right here, than to haul him away and bury him somewhere else. Plenty of privacy.”
“I worked a case down in Louisiana where we used ground-penetrating radar to look for grave sites…”
“That was exactly my thought. We can do that, we’ve got the GPR gear. I don’t think it’d be a big problem here, unless she actually buried him under the house. There are little clearings and openings in the trees where I think she’d have put him. In the heavy woods, there are so many roots that digging would have been really hard, so there’s a limited amount of area where we’d have to use the radar.”
“Good. See if you can get that going, Ev, and I’ll talk to people here to support the request.”
“Great. I’ll tell you what happens.”
—
The compiling ofthe available information took a month. In the middle of the month, Harvey called Lucas at home, and said, “You better get up here. We think we’ve got a grave, or at least a burial of some kind. We’re printing radar images now, but there appears to be a lot of junk on top of what could be a body.”
“Are you excavating now?”
“We’ve got a crime scene crew on the way…”
“Those guys know this stuff better than I do, but emphasize to them that if there is a lot of junk, that’s evidence. If she killed him and buried him there, she may have wanted it to look like he left voluntarily, so she piled personal effects on top of the body before she filled the grave.”
“I will mention that to them. When can you get here?”
“I’ve got some stuff I’m putting together right now. I can leave in an hour. How long does it take to get there?”
“Forty minutes from the BCA office.”
“I’ll see you in two hours, then. Or less.”
