“I’m saying it’s possible,” Virgil said.
Lucas scratched his head, nodded, said, “It’s possible.”
“You know what you just did?” Jenkins asked Virgil. “You just peed on the only clue you had.”
“Got the DNA,” Lucas said.
Virgil: “If she was raped.”
“There was a question about that at the time,” Jenkins said. “The boys thought she was raped, and the girls didn’t. The girls thought she was pushing pussy.”
“I know,” Virgil said. “But that possibility wasn’t something that was talked about much. Maria Jimenez was death on rape but thought that Grandfelt’s sexual contacts may have been voluntary.”
“I remember,” Shrake said. “That’s about the same time Maria started suppressing her intense attraction for me.”
“I do remember that, her suppressing it,” Virgil said.
“If the sex was voluntary, I feel sorry for the guy who left the DNA behind. If you find him, his ass is going to prison for rape and murder,” Jenkins said.
Shrake said, “Yeah,” without sounding happy about it.
Lucas’s phone buzzed, and he looked at the screen. “Sergeant Carney.”
He answered, listened, and said, “We’ll be right over. Don’t let anybody touch it.”
Jenkins, Shrake, and Virgil looked at him as he rang off. Virgil asked, “What?”
Lucas: “Finish your pie, author-boy. Carney says the metal detector guy might have found the murder weapon.”
9
When they’d been at the park earlier in the day, there’d been a dozen true-crimers; now there were twice as many, standing in a bunch near the corner of a parking lot, with a half-dozen cops mixed in with them.
“They look like movie explorers digging up an Egyptian temple,” Virgil said, as he eased the truck into the parking lot. And it was true. With a few exceptions, the crowd was dressed in vaguely military khaki and one of them was wearing an Aussie hat with an upturned brim on one side. “You think they found the knife?”
“I dunno what I think,” Lucas said. “They’re all the way across the field from the dump site.”
They got out of the Tahoe and walked across the parking lot, where the man with the metal detector saw them coming and held up a transparent plastic bag with a table knife in it. “Found it right here by the edge of the parking lot,” he said.
Virgil took the bag and held it up to the sky so he and Lucas could look at it.
A too-thin woman, who’d filmed them earlier in the day, said, “I’m Dahlia Blair. I was a witness to the discovery and so were a whole bunch of other people, including police officers. By the way, none of us touched the knife. Nothing has touched it except the inside of the evidence bag. If you look at the back of the knife, it says ‘stainless steel,’ but it’s all pitted up, so it’s been here for a while.”
“Like twenty years,” Anne Cash chipped in. She and a half-dozen other true-crimers were making videos.
Lucas, looking at the knife, and its sharp whetted point, muttered to Virgil, “They might have something.”
“Yeah.”
Lucas turned to the man with the metal detector and asked, “Why were you all the way over here?”
Blair began, “We deduced…”
“I want to talk to this guy,” Lucas said, nodding at the guy with the metal detector.
The man grabbed at the spotlight. “We deduced, or deducted…deduced? that the reason there were no vehicle tracks that could be attributed to the killer is that he never drove a vehicle across the grass and that’s why nobody saw him come or go,” he said. “He pulled up to the parking lot, which was, at the time, surrounded by shrubbery, turned off his headlights, and carried the body across the outfield and into the trees. The neighbors here say kids sometimes park here, you know, romancing, so it’s not unusual to have a car stopping in the night. Anyway, since nothing more was showing up around the body scene, I thought I’d scan around the parking lot. I was only at it for fifteen minutes, when this popped up.”
His statement was filmed by everyone who had a camera, then one woman, who’d been at the front of the group with a big Canon, turned and casually walked around the crowd to the back of it, then began stepping away, walking backwards.
