Lucas had typed up interviews with several former William Mitchell law students who had known Fisk and Carly Gibson, and who remembered the competition between the two. He was doing a precise editing to make sure the transcripts were exact. The work was tiresome, but had to be done.
When he finished, he got a jacket, some bottles of Diet Coke that he put in a cooler, left a message for Weather, found his son, who was with a male friend and about to go scouting for female friends, told him where he was going, and headed north.
He wasn’t too worried; the kid would have a driver’s license in a year, and then he would worry.
Although it was almost impossible to get lost, Lucas got turned around for a few minutes after he left I-35 and got to the site a little more than two hours after he left home.
The abandoned house itself was only partially upright; the roof had collapsed to the inside, though the back and one side wall were still standing. A broken sink was visible in what would have been a bathroom, but the toilet seemed to be missing, and the towel racksand medicine cabinet had been pulled off the walls and taken away. There were long slashes in the wall where somebody had pulled out the wiring.
The house was set on a wooded lot with a stake out front, and a rusty chain attached to the stake, apparently for a long-gone dog. Trees pressed close around the wreckage, mostly oaks and sugar maples, but here and there were grassy openings. Evelyn Harvey and a three-person crime scene crew were working in one of the openings.
Harvey was a tall, dark-haired jock-o woman wearing a plaid shirt and jeans; she looked like she could run down a coyote. And she was excited: “First time for me, pulling a body out of the ground.”
The crime scene crew, dressed in now-filthy white coveralls, were removing dirt from the possible grave site with trowels and sifting every trowelful. “The GPR guys say that the first of the junk is about a foot down, and we’re about there. They think the body, if it is one, is down at least another foot.”
The GPR crew had already left, taking their radar with them. Lucas asked, “Why do they think it’s a body? Can they see bones?”
“There’s some kind of metal thing down there, they think it’s part of some cooking equipment, pans or something, but under it, one of the printouts—I could show you…”
“Tell me, that’s good enough.”
“Under the metal thing, they can see something hard and curved and they think it’s part of a cranium. Only problem with that is, it’s in the middle of the grave, instead of at one end. And there’s so much junk down there…”
“And we’re getting to it,” said the woman who was running the CSI team. “We’re right on top of…mmm…could be the cuff of a jean jacket.”
A van pulled into the lot, and a Ramsey County medical examiner’s investigator got out, walked over, introduced himself, and looked in the hole. “How long has it been there?”
“Probably fifteen years or something like that,” Harvey said.
“With that kind of dirt, the dampness, won’t be much left,” the investigator said.
Over the next three hours, enough junk came out of the hole to partially furnish a house: clothing, cooking equipment including a cast iron skillet, a toaster and a microwave, glasses, cups, silverware.
“Tried to prove he’d skipped out on rent, rather than disappeared,” Lucas said.
They found a plastic wallet, and inside, Don Schmidt’s driver’s license.
Eventually they cleared away enough junk to see the remains of the body. That’s when they found out why the head was not at the end of the grave: the killer had cut it off and placed it between the body’s slightly splayed legs.
They found a pair of handcuffs, which were no longer quite fastened around the wrist bones, which had collapsed in the damp earth; and a plastic rope, around the ankles.
“Bag the handcuffs, don’t touch them,” Lucas told the CSIs. “It’d be nice if they came out of the Ramsey County Attorney’s office.”
“Why would they have?” Harvey asked.
“They wouldn’t have; it’d just be nice,” Lucas said.
There was leathery skin around some of the bones and the spine. The investigator had a laser pointer and pointed it at the groin area. “Seems to be missing a penis and testicles, but not the skin on the thighs around them. See those straight edges on the skin that’s left? It looks to me like he was castrated.”
The investigator was fascinated; Lucas was repulsed.
“So now we know,” Lucas said to Harvey, as the ME’s investigator handed down tools to begin lifting bones. “I’m out of here. You should put in for overtime.”
“I will do that,” she said. They were standing side by side, and she squeezed his arm. “Thanks for coming, Lucas. Honest to God, I’m kinda getting off on this.”
Lucas called Virgil at home, and filled him in.
“Not just a bitch; a witch,” Virgil said.
