“There was, I guess, before my time,” Fisk said. “A gay thing, with the married CEO.”
“Wow. Doesn’t sound like an accounting firm.”
“Why not?” Jones asked, eyes even wider. “Sex stuff goes on everywhere. My sister is a schoolteacher, and you should hear the stories she tells. You know there are teachers’ bars, where teachers go to get drunk and laid?”
“Not in St. Paul…” said the older woman.
“Yes! Right here in St. Paul! You know what it’s called? Randy’s Brew House. Randy’s. Isn’t that a great tipoff?”
After some more chatter, Fisk said, “I’m gonna go stretch.”
—
Fisk had workedat Bee as a contracts attorney, and when she began looking for a way out, she was initially hired to work in the civil division of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. Within a year, the county attorney shifted her over to the criminal division, whereshe quickly became a star. She never met a rapist she wasn’t willing to burn at the stake.
When she finished her workout—she didn’t look like it, but she was a brute, who absolutely murdered the kettle bells after the tough Pilates session—she called the office and told her immediate subordinate that she’d hurt her knee at Pilates. She’d talk to her husband about it, probably get a knee brace of some kind, and would be late getting back to work.
That done, she drove home to her pale-yellow mansion on St. Paul’s fashionable Summit Avenue.
Fisk had two dogs; or rather, her husband did. Jack Russell terriers, who, if you didn’t know better, you might think were perpetually on doggy amphetamines. They jumped and yapped and ran in circles, and outside, in the fenced yards, chased blue-and-orange rubber Chuckit! balls with a manic intensity, to the amusement of the pair of Belgian Malinois that lived on the other side of the chain link. The Malinois, also known as land sharks, looked upon the Jack Russells as potential hors d’oeuvres.
If Amanda Fisk had had her way, she might have heaved the little fuckers over the fence—she identified more with the Malinois than with the Jack Russells—but her husband would simply have bought more, and if he’d found out what she’d done, would have divorced her.
The marriage had never been on solid ground, although they’d managed to hang together for twenty years. Both had an essential streak of cruelty—valuable to both lawyers and surgeons—which created an unspoken understanding that new partners might be hard to find.
On the other hand, while Fisk was forty-eight and might eventually find someone, Dr. Timothy (not Tim) Carlson had slipped pastsixty-five, and if they split, he might have to go it alone, without half or more of their accumulated wealth.
Timothy.
Fisk got a green drink from the refrigerator, a special blend of alfalfa, artichoke, and spirulina, with dashes of ashwagandha, shiitake mushroom, and St. John’s wort. The drink may have counted for a certain level of her meanness, although she’d had a flinty soul from the time she was a child.
She sat in the breakfast nook, looking out the window at the city of St. Paul down the bluff, and thought about Timothy. She’d been thinking about him quite a lot the last two or three years. If there was one single thing about him that drove her berserk, it was the goddamn dogs.
—
Timothy had tobe in the operating theater at six-thirty most mornings, leaving the house at six o’clock. He was up at five o’clock, efficient in his morning routine, showering, shaving, popping his blood-pressure pills, eating a breakfast of granola and orange juice while checking stock market futures and theWall Street Journal. He’d be done with all that by five-forty, and then he’d go out in the back with the goddamn dogs and he’d bounce a Chuckit! ball off the back of the house so the dogs could do their acrobatic midair catches, thrilling both Timothy and the dogs.
It was the irregular thump of the ball against the house that drove her to the edge, and now, probably, over it.Thump! Thump-thump(both dogs!)Thumpity-thump!(Long pause; was he done?)Thump!No, he wasn’t. This went on for twenty minutes before he brought the dogs in and left for work.
—
Fisk finished thegreen drink, dropped the bottle in the garbage sack, walked around the dogs, who were ricocheting through the kitchen, got kitchen gloves and a sponge mop from the laundry cupboard, duct tape from the junk drawer in the kitchen, and the orange-and-blue Chuckit! ball launcher. The ball launcher was a plastic arm little more than two feet long with a cup at one end to hold a Chuckit! ball. Using the launcher, Timothy could heave a Chuckit! ball fifty or sixty yards through the air.
Wearing the gloves, she taped the ball launcher to the end of the mop handle and carried the handle and four Chuckit! balls up to the bedroom and out onto the narrow balcony, the dogs following behind. They were curious little fuckers.
There was a three-foot-wide sharply slanting eave under the balcony, meant to shelter the first floor’s yellow siding from rain stains, with a gutter at the edge of the eave. Fisk reached through the balcony railing with a Chuckit! ball in her hand, put it on the shingles and let it roll down to the gutter. When it got there it was moving so fast that it shot off onto the backyard’s flagstone patio.
Okay, that didn’t work.
She looked left and right, but unless somebody was hiding in a hedge, nobody could see her. She extended the sponge end of the mop over the railing until it was flat on the shingles, then stooped and put a ball behind the sponge head. Leaning over the balcony, she eased the ball down to the gutter, and then into it.
Good. She added one more, then left the mop handle, with attached ball launcher, on the balcony, checked left and right again, and closed the balcony doors and told the dogs, “Shut the fuck up.”Finally, she went into her closet and dug out a knee brace, in case anybody at the office was solicitous about the injured extremity, pulled it on, and headed back to work.
—
The thing aboutTimothy.
Though they’d never spoken of it, Fisk knew, of course, that Timothy had been the last male to deposit DNA in Doris Grandfelt’s waiting vagina. She also knew from reading the now-online Grandfelt investigation files that they did not have hers, from the cut on her hand.
