“Flowers?”
“Yeah.”
“There was a big guy, named, I forget, maybe…Dubuque? He’s a federal marshal, who said you’d be coming. He’s in the woods over there, where those people are.” He pointed.
Virgil thanked him, took a minute with the Windex and paper towels to clean up his windshield, then walked between the two softball diamonds toward the trees. Lucas was standing in a group ofwomen, saw him coming, and broke away with apologies, which Virgil assumed were insincere.
Lucas, smiling: “Holy shit, you’re not wearing a tee-shirt. And I saw you cleaning your windshield. Could you do mine?”
“No, but I could lend you my Windex,” Virgil said. He looked toward the women. “Who are your friends?”
“The lead regiment of true-crimers. We got a problem,” Lucas said.
“Yeah, I can see that,” Virgil said. “They look like a bunch of rabbits nibbling on carrot sticks.”
“I was thinking woodchucks and ears of corn. When you get closer, you’ll see their hair is bristly, more like a woodchuck’s than a rabbit’s. Or, possibly, like a beaver’s,” Lucas said. “Be careful. I caught one woman asking me a question and she had a telephone sticking out of the top of her pocket. I could see the camera lens and I know damn well she was recording. She asked why we’d been sitting on our asses for twenty years, and I gave her two words—‘We haven’t’—and walked away.”
“They’re aggressive.”
“I’ve met both aggressive and sneaky,” Lucas said. “And, aggressive-sneaky. And I’ve only been here for fifteen minutes.”
“Any…clues?” Virgil asked.
Lucas snorted and looked back at the clutch of women: “They wouldn’t know a clue if one jumped up and bit them on their collective ass.”
“Then what exactly are they…”
“They’re looking for clicks on their websites,” Lucas said. “Every one of them has a website and they live on clicks and followers. If they get enough clicks, they can get ads from true crime publishers. Someof them probably make upwards of eight hundred dollars a year. You and I are clickbait.”
—
Virgil turned backtoward the parking lot, waved a hand at it, and said, “I got a clue for you.”
“I could use one.”
“How’d you find the park?” Virgil asked.
“My phone app,” Lucas said.
“That’s how I found it. Without the app, I could have wandered around for an hour and never seen it,” Virgil said. “The killer knew it was here. How’d he know that? How’d he know how to get back here, twenty years ago, in the dark, without an app?”
Lucas looked out at the street. “Good point. He either came from here, or he had some reason to come here. I thumbed through the file this morning and I didn’t see any of your BCA guys saying that.”
“I read some of it last night, and I didn’t see anything either. What are we going to do about that? It’s fourteen hundred pages, for God’s sakes.”
“Dunno.” Lucas pointed to a blacktopped trail that led through a line of burr oaks: “There’s an elementary school back there. Not far. Wonder if a schoolteacher could have done it?”
“We can talk about it,” Virgil said.
“Here’s another thing I was wondering,” Lucas said. “The original investigation couldn’t determine whether the body had been delivered to the dump site with a vehicle, because too many vehicles had been driven back and forth across the field before crime scene got here. Woodbury cops, mostly, and apparently the grass had been mowed recently, so there might have been tracks from the mowers…Anyway, did the killer drive Doris across the field? If he did, it must have been way late at night. Why would he do that? There are places just as good, where he could have dumped her closer to a road.”
“Another excellent question,” Virgil said. “A guy brought that up in a report. Remember Louis Kelly, I think he retired probably ten years ago? He said nobody saw a vehicle in here that night. But if it was late enough…”
“Hard to black out a vehicle anymore,” Lucas said.
“Maybe you could, back then,” Virgil ventured.
Lucas: “Maybe it was a matter of luck. Nobody saw the vehicle because nobody saw the vehicle.”
