“Aw, it’s not his fault,” Virgil said. “He didn’t do it. And he made a good point toward the end.”
“What was that?”
“Listen and learn,” Virgil said. He was back on his phone, calling his BCA boss, Jon Duncan, who worked late.
Duncan said, “They’ve got a picture of you on CNN. You and Lucas. You’re on a witness stand and your hair is too long and you’re wearing cowboy boots and a suit that looks like it came out of Sears Roebuck’s sub-basement. Or Hitler’s bunker. You look like the defendant.”
Virgil: “What can I tell you? Grandfelt and her lawyers were supposed to get the publicity. They were supposed to sort out all the bullshit that comes in, and then if anything showed up, pass it along.”
“That no longer seems to be the case.”
“I know. Henderson and the governor are gonna be pissed if we don’t get results they can take credit for. You’re gonna have to take me off the books until this thing is over. I’m thinking at least a month.At least. Probably more.”
Duncan: “What about your caseload?”
“Put Jimmy over in Rochester,” Virgil said. “He knows the territory. Even better, I could get a rate for him at a motel in Mankato. I’ll link him to the current files.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” Duncan said.
“Or, you could get some guts up, and tell the governor to go fuck himself. Keeping in mind that Lara Grandfelt is a major moneyman. Woman.”
“Let’s agree that I won’t be telling the governor to go fuck himself,” Duncan said. “I’ll figure out something. I’ll cut you free. Let me know when you go full time on this.”
“I’m full time now,” Virgil said. “The Grandfelt files were downloaded a hundred and sixty thousand times, worldwide, as of now.”
“My God!”
“Yeah.”
—
Virgil rang off,smiled a sneaky smile, and said to Frankie, “Done deal. I’m off for a month. I’ll get another thirty thousand good words, and at that point, I’ll be running for home.”
“Unless Lucas manipulates you into taking the lead,” Frankie said. “He sounds unhappy…”
“No chance of that.” Virgil took a turn around the kitchen table, avoiding Honus’s tail. He looked in the refrigerator, at nothing in particular, then closed it. “Isn’t this the goddamnedest thing you ever heard of? Doris Grandfelt has been dead for more than twenty years.”
“I think it’s interesting,” Frankie said, putting down her pen and setting the checkbook aside. Honus the Yellow Dog stopped chewing on his bull penis to look up at them. “In fact, I was going to download those files and see if I might come up with an idea or two. I could usethe five million. I could build a full-sized heated dressage barn and ride all winter. You and Sam could practice pitching in there.”
“Download the files twice and save a copy for me,” Virgil said. “Listen: maybe you could handle my end of it. You’ve always been a cop groupie. You read true crime sites. You know about this stuff. I could start doing two-a-days on the book.”
“Poor old Doris,” Frankie said, shaking her head. “Pushing up sod for more than twenty years and you cops just don’t care.”
—
If the copsdidn’t care, Amanda Fisk did.
The new publicity was astonishing, the ghost of Doris Grandfelt risen from the grave to haunt her. Switching from network news to cable news to streaming services to YouTube, she found it all over the place. Five million dollars didn’t seem likethatmuch anymore, but the reward and circumstances had gone viral.
Sure, five mil was a nice house, a nice car, no debt, money in the bank…but not so much that an entire city full of people should stampede into the search. Now, late in the evening, more than a hundred and seventy thousand people had downloaded the files. Of course, some of them were in Mumbai and Kiev, but still…
The photos were especially out there. Done on film, because digital hadn’t been good enough back in the day. Most of the shots were in color, but they’d been backed up in black-and-white. Because some of it was shot at night, there was a whole file of black-and-white images taken with flash, which doubled the harshness.
In the black-and-whites, blood was black, instead of red, so Grandfelt’s blood-clotted eyes were black holes, and her lips, painted with red lipstick, were black. Her face was white as paper, lashed withblack streams of blood, and the green weeds, where her head lay, were as black in the photos as the blood, like Medusa hair.
Some vicious little pervert had made a cosplay mask of her face, had posted a death dance to TikTok, and had gotten more than a million hits, most of them from China.
—
