“You know what I mean. Don’t like the true-crimers? Blow them off if you like,” Lucas said. “But be the man. Let me take care of the suits, and you’re the man the true-crimers call up when they need to.”
Virgil thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “We can give it a try. If it starts eating me up, I might quit right in the middle of everything. Fuck Lara Grandfelt and her dead sister.”
Lucas switched out of pitch mode, settled into the seat, and said, “Thank you.”
—
The Parrot Caféwas a BCA hangout, a low-rent café with decent burgers, mediocre fries, a piss-poor pie, acidic coffee, and an ever-present odor of brown gravy and pencil-thin sliced beef. Two old friends, Jenkins and Shrake, were pushing cheeseburgers into their faces. Jenkins did a fake double take when they walked in, and Virgil said, “You might know it,” and Lucas said, “They’re eating. There’s a surprise.”
Shrake, cued by Jenkins’s double take, turned to look, and started laughing, bits of hamburger and cheese flaking off on his sport coat. “Sherlock and Holmes. You catch the guy yet?”
“We’re making progress,” Virgil said. “It’ll take a week to nail it down.”
“I heard you nailed down a month off, with pay,” Shrake said.
“That much is true,” Lucas said.
“Move your asses over,” Virgil said.
The two extra-large men moved over in the booth, and Virgil and Lucas sat down. Virgil said to Lucas, “I oughta talk to Jon about getting these guys out to the park. They won’t find anything, but they might get dates. They always need dates.”
“Won’t happen,” Shrake said. “We’ve got a runner of our own to find.”
A waiter named Jaxon came over and Lucas and Virgil ordered pie, banana crème and cherry, respectively, with Diet Coke and coffee, also respectively.
Virgil: “So you guys are looking…”
They were looking, Jenkins said, for a semi-outlaw biker who unloaded some bad Chinese fentanyl on his cousin, who subsequently died, albeit with a smile on his face.
Virgil: “Have you checked with the Sturgis cops?”
Jenkins looked open-mouthed at Shrake and said, with a sudden intake of breath, “Oh my God, he might be onto something.”
Lucas: “Okay. You’ve looked in Sturgis.”
“In fact, he just left Sturgis, on his way back here,” Shrake said, checking his Apple iWatch. “Ask us how we know that.”
“You’re tracking his phone,” Lucas said.
“We plan to box him up about the time he hits Coon Rapids,”Jenkins said. “No reason for us to be sweating our butts around SoDak.” He pushed a french fry into his mouth and mumbled around it, “You guys actually find anything yet?”
The pie arrived, looking a little used.
“No, and we won’t,” Lucas said, poking a fork at Jenkins. “This is almost the biggest clown show I’ve been involved in, although, of course, that wouldn’t apply to Virgie.”
“That’s the goddamned truth,” Shrake said, shaking his head. “Did I ever tell you about this chick crawled up a furnace vent and Virgie…”
“About fifty times,” Lucas said.
“So, about this Grandfelt thing,” Jenkins said. “You got nothin’. You got no ideas, you got no moves that haven’t been made, you got nothing but your dick in your hand…”
“One thing,” Virgil said. “There were footprints around the scene, almost certainly made by whoever dumped the body. It’s all in the files, I read about it last night. There was a tread pattern that overlapped scrapes in the dirt apparently made by Grandfelt’s shoes when she was dragged into the trees. Size ten-and-a-half Nikes…”
“We know about that, and that’s not a clue,” Shrake said. “Half the guys in the Twin Cities could have made them.”
“Shut up for a minute, let me finish,” Virgil said. “There were too many footprints. That’s my opinion, not somebody else’s. There were six clean footprints in the dirt around the body, including the one that crossed the scrapes. We got photographs of them all. They shouldn’t have been there. The ground wasn’t that wet at the time of the killing and when Lucas and I were back there this morning, I was hardly making any prints at all. And I’ve got heavy tread on my boots.”
“You’re saying the prints might have been deliberate?” Jenkins asked.
