“They’re all making videos,” Carney said. “Some of them with their phones, but some of them have these big Nikons and Sonycameras. The branches were in the way. They thought they were filming the murder scene, but they weren’t. It’s over this way.”
They followed Carney along the narrow path into the trees, low branches swatting at their faces, raspberry canes scratching at their pants, trailed by a line of true-crimers. They passed a strong stench, and Carney said, “Somebody took a dump last night.”
Lucas: “No kidding.”
They went on, until Carney stopped and said, “It was right about here.”
—
There was littleto see but trees and brush. Virgil took out his GPS receiver, moved a dozen steps away to a spot with more open sky, and waited. A few yards back, the women were taking pictures and video of him, with a variety of cameras.
When Virgil had four satellites, he walked back to Lucas and Carney and said, “I think we’re actually about ten yards that way.” He nodded to the west, to a spot a few feet off the narrow trail, and they went that way and looked around. Still nothing to see except a clump of nettles.
The women closed in on them, and one of them took a small can from a pocket on her denim travel vest and quickly sprayed Day-Glo orange paint on a tree trunk.
Carney said, “Hey! Stop that.”
“It wears off,” the woman said. She turned to the other women and asked, “Anyone seen Bud?”
“He’s coming, he had to run to the car.” The speaker had a Sony camera mounted on a complicated upright handle that read “SmallRig” on the front, and also mounted a Røde microphone. She pointed the camera at the woman who sprayed the tree and said, “You’re live.”
The painter turned to Lucas and said, “So this is the exact spot, Marshal, where, twenty-one years and ninety-eight days ago, Doris Grandfelt suffered an agonizing death at the hands of an unknown…”
Lucas turned his back and walked away, and the woman shouted, not looking at him but at the camera, “Marshal! Marshal! I’m talking to you.”
Lucas, joined by Virgil, kept walking, and the camera tracked them.
“That’ll be worth a few clicks,” Virgil said.
“I don’t want to get involved in any sensational YouTube shit,” Lucas said. “We gotta take care, man.”
They could hear Carney arguing with the women about the spray paint. A man hustled toward them with an instrument over his shoulder, a hand grip on one end and what looked like a basketball hoop on the other, with a video screen mounted in the middle. He was carrying it in a way that seemed designed to obscure exactly what it was. Lucas stepped in front of him and asked, “What’s that thing?”
“Metal detector,” the man grunted. He sidestepped Lucas, who let him go.
“Metal detector,” Virgil mumbled as they walked away. “What the hell?”
Carney caught up with them at the cars: “Chief Bacon would like to talk to you guys, when you’re done here.”
“Where’s he at? City hall?” Virgil asked.
“No, he’s here somewhere, over in the other parking lot,” Carney said. “I’ll find him for you, but I won’t stay around to listen. He’s in a pissy mood.”
“So are we,” Lucas said.
—
Bacon was arotund man, maybe fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a red face. “I don’t know whether I want you guys to come up with something or not. The council is all over me, bad publicity for the city and all that. It’d be nice to find the person who killed Doris, but there’s a cost to it.”
He went on for a while, on the one hand this, the other hand that, and when he turned away for a minute, to talk to another city cop, Virgil muttered to Lucas, “Let me handle this.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Hit him with my justifications.”
Virgil did that. When Bacon turned back to them, he said, “We know you guys have your daily concerns to keep up with, there’s not a lot of investigation to be done here, we’ll try to keep the focus on the BCA, we don’t think this mission will amount to much, maybe a day or two, Miz Grandfelt’s law office is handling the paperwork, blah blah blah…”
When he finished, Bacon said he appreciated all that, he’d leave an officer for crowd control, then got in his car and disappeared down the road.
