Timothy hadn’t murdered the woman, but if his sexual contact with Grandfelt became known, he most likely would be charged with murder, in her legal opinion. He also certainly knew that.
From a nonlegal point of view, Timothy’s legal jeopardy wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Much worse, it might impoverishher. Fisk’s work as a prosecutor covered their basic expenses for any given year, while Timothy’s money bought the house, the cars, and stacked up a tidy amount in two different wildly successful hedge funds. He’d been doing that since the ’90s.
From the outside, they looked small rich; from the inside, they were wealthy. A lot of that money would go away if he needed high-end legal talent to defend him in a murder trial, especially if that trial was followed with a lawsuit by Grandfelt’s still-surviving parents.
(Fisk was familiar with a Twin Cities murder trial story in which the accused, a wealthy woman, had asked the Cities’ best defense attorney how much of her fortune he’d take if she hired him. He’d replied, “All of it.” Fisk believed the story to be true, because the woman had been acquitted and wound up living in a mobile home.)
Alternatively, if neither of the criminal or civil trials took place, and Timothy wasn’t around to get his DNA tested, their accumulated fortune could be used to sustain quite a nice lifestyle on, say, the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
—
Timothy got homebetween three-thirty and four o’clock on most days. Amanda got home between five and six. When she got home that night, he was in the kitchen and had just finished microwaving fast-food onion rings.
They didn’t usually speak much, but this evening, she said, “You gotta come up to the bedroom and see what those goddamn dogs did.”
“They’re not goddamn dogs,” he said, taking a bite out of a hot onion ring.
“Yes, they are, you gotta come up and look at this…”
She’d gotten up, she told him, at her usual time of seven-thirty. Because it looked like a nice day, she’d opened the balcony doors, and the little fuckers had rolled Chuckit! balls between the balusters that supported the railing. The balls were now stuck in a gutter.
“I tried to get them out,” she said, “but I couldn’t reach them. I could touch them, but not get them in the cup…”
At the balcony, she showed him the mop handle with the attached launcher arm. “See if you can reach. It’s supposed to rain and this is the gutter we had the problem with.”
He should have thought about it, but instead, he popped the last of the onion ring, took the mop from her, and bent over the balcony railing, reaching far over for the balls. When he was fully extended, she grabbed his belt and the back collar on his jacket and heaved him over.
Timothy screamed, “No!” and then he was gone, the scream truncated as he hit headfirst on the back patio, fifteen feet below the balcony. Fisk left the balcony doors open, and said to the bouncing dogs, “Go find Timothy! Where’s Timothy?”
Out the back door, the dogs rushed over to his body, for a body it was: he’d crushed his skullandbroken his neck, Fisk thought. She knelt beside him, careful not to get her pants in the widening pool of blood. She could see some brains, she thought. She hovered, just to make sure, and when satisfied that he was gone, she went back inside to call 9-1-1 and to start practicing her grief.
The grief would be a stretch for her, because Amanda Fisk was a psychopath, and didn’t feel much at all about Timothy’s departure from this mortal coil. But, she’d pull something together, grief-wise.
And though she was a lifelong psychopath with a taste for fresh blood, Timothy was only her sixth kill, and possibly not the last.
Doris Grandfelt had been number three, and, so far, the most gratifying.
—
So the copscame, and then a medical examiner’s investigator, who looked at the Chuckit! balls in the gutter, and two more on the patio near the body. He had the body bagged up and sent to the morgue.
The cops, who knew who Fisk was, were sympathetic, but not too, because they’d seen any number of dead bodies, and as long as they, the cops, weren’t related to the body, they didn’t much care.
She was eventually left alone: she had no close friends who might be inclined to come over and sympathize with her. She spent time with a garden hose, washing blood off the patio. Blood, she found,was not easily rinsed out of flagstone. The goddamn dogs, for once subdued, sat and watched.
That night, in her bed—she and Timothy slept in separate queen-sized beds in the same bedroom; Timothy liked having the dogs on the bed with him, and she didn’t—she fell to sleep as quickly as she did on any other night, the dogs sitting on the other bed, staring at her.
Usually, she slept through dreams, and never remembered him. On this night, she kicked and twisted and sometimes groaned, and she remembered…
Don at the top of the stairs, on his way down, green plastic bowl in one hand, beer in the other. “I made some buttered popcorn for us. We can watch a movie.”
11
Neither Virgil nor Lucas had mentioned to anyone outside the BCA that the knife found by the true-crimers was identical to the knives used in the Bee executive dining room at the time of Grandfelt’s murder. Nevertheless, all the major true crime blogs had the story within hours of the discovery, with Charles Light’s face smiling out at the readers, posed beside his metal detector.
Since the major media outlets were all monitoring the true crime sites, the news had gone everywhere by midafternoon.
“They were tipped off by somebody inside the company, or somebody inside the BCA,” Lucas said. Virgil was sitting across from him, stocking feet up on the desk. “Had to be one or the other—I didn’t see you making any phone calls.”
