“Was Doris involved?” Virgil asked.
“Oh, no, no, but there was a terrific shock when this all started coming out. There was even a brawl down on the first floor, involving the wife and McCann. For several years after that, there was nohanky-panky at Bee Accounting. The partners at the time made it very explicit that if we had people getting friendly, they’d quickly be getting friendly at some other company. They told us that they would send us packing if we misbehaved, even if the misbehavior was consensual.”
“Sounds a little harsh,” Virgil said.
“Reputation is extremely important in this business,” Donner said. “Clients want sober, industrious, cautious people working on their taxes and payrolls.”
They talked for a few more minutes, and Donner told them they were welcome to take the silverware with them, for inspection by the BCA’s crime lab.
—
On the wayback down to the lobby, Sweeney said, “I hope we can hold all this confidentially, you know, like Cory said, the reputation…”
In the lobby, Lucas and Virgil stopped to put on their sunglasses and check with Terry the door guard on the Twins game—now seven-zip in the sixth. “We’re toast,” Terry said.
As they told Sweeney, they wouldn’t be talking about what they found, but when Lucas and Virgil walked out through the front door, they were caught by Anne Cash and two other women, who were pointing cameras at them. When they were sure they had them both on video, the three women all panned their cameras over to the Bee Accounting sign above the door.
Cash called, “That’s right. We followed you. What’d you find out, Marshal? What’s in the box under your arm?”
Virgil: “Ah, fuck me.”
Lucas: “You did itagain.”
10
Amanda Fisk drove her silver Mercedes SL550 too fast through the gym’s curb cut, deliberately parked so the stripe for a parking space ran directly down the middle of the car: she hated door dings. Ding her doors and she might kill you.
She climbed out, brushed a cookie crumb off her blouse, and headed for the entrance. Fisk was of middle height for a woman, at five-seven, strongly built—Pilates three days a week, hard singles tennis two evenings. She had a straight nose and a long chin, gray-green eyes, thighs and calves beautifully rounded. She was naturally blond and pink-skinned, with hair falling down to her shoulder blades; Renoir (if he were still alive) would have given his left nut to get her as a model.
She pulled her sports duffel off the passenger seat, pushed through the gym door, waved her membership card at a card reader that beeped green and unlocked the interior door. Inside, she turned leftto the women’s locker room, where one of her oldest acquaintances—not exactly a friend—was emoting.
Emoting had been on Fisk’s vocabulary calendar—displaying emotion in an excited or theatrical manner—so she had the word handy, and Rebecca Jones was definitely emoting.
Jones spotted Fisk and said, “Oh my God! Mandy! Have you heard about Bee?”
“Bee?”
“Bee! Those true crime people found a knife they say is the murder weapon, and it came from Bee’s cafeteria!”
On a scale of one to ten, Fisk’s emotional response ran from one to one-and-a-half. She said, “Really?” and used her key to open her locker.
“Doesn’t that freak you out?” Jones demanded. “Weren’t you there when Delores got murdered? There’s five million bucks on the line!”
“Doris, not Delores. And I was,” Fisk said. “I didn’t know the woman—she was a clerk and I was in the legal department.”
Jones, in her workout shorts and Athleta sports bra, innocent eyes wide, moved closer: “You must have known her at least alittle.”
“Actually, no,” Fisk said, looking over her shoulder at the other woman. “We were all worried when she got killed, because we wondered if the killer might be somebody at Bee. The police were all over the place, but I guess they decided that she’d been hanging out with some rough people over on Hennepin Avenue. There’d been rumors that she’d been turning tricks for spending money. At the time, I couldn’t have told you what she looked like.”
“I read on True Crime Triple-X, about turning tricks,” Jones said. “I heard her twin sister is threatening to sue anybody who says that!”
“Then don’t say that; that’s my official recommendation,” Fisk said. Fisk was an assistant county attorney in the criminal division, which was appropriate, she sometimes thought, because technically, she was a criminal, even if never caught or convicted.
Other members of the Pilates class had been listening, and as Fisk began changing into her shorts and top, one of them said, “I didn’t know you worked there.”
“Right out of law school,” Fisk said. “A nightmare of unrelieved boredom and miserable pay. Quit, and never looked back.”
An older woman said, “Wasn’t there some other sex scandal over there?”
