They were in a temporary office at BCA headquarters in St. Paul. “I suspect it came from here,” Virgil said, looking out the officewindow. “Not everybody here likes me and even more of them don’t like you. Somebody’s fucking with us, probably for their own amusement…though they’re taking a hell of a risk. They could get their ass fired.”
“Or it could have been from somebody at Bee. No way to know,” Lucas said. He was sitting behind the borrowed desk, going through the true crime sites in a desultory way, and had made notes.
He finished, and Virgil asked, “Well? Who put the word out first?”
Lucas looked at his notes. “Anne Cash. She’s the one who’s been ragging on us the most and she was the one who talked to theStar-Tribune, which is where the tipster probably got her name. She had the break about the Bee silverware forty-five minutes after we walked out of the Bee building, and thirty minutes after we got here and talked to Jon. The other sites copied her.”
—
They were stilltalking when Michelle Cornell called from the law office, and Lucas poked the speaker button on his phone: “Who found the knife?” she asked.
“Guy named Bud Light—real first name is Charles,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if it’ll lead to anyone, but if it does, he’s first in line for the money.”
“Is it going to lead to anything? Lara is excited,” Cornell said.
“We don’t know—we’d need to talk to people who had access to the dining room, and the BCA has sent some investigators over to start doing that,” Lucas said. “This is the first significant break they’ve had in twenty years, so they’ll hop all over it.”
“What are you guys doing?”
“Mostly listening to people talk,” Lucas said. “We’re supposed tobe looking at tips and leads coming from you, and there haven’t been any—the BCA is doing the up-front investigation.”
“Everything I’m getting is crap,” Cornell said. “I don’t need your opinion to know that.”
“Thanks for being a filter,” Lucas said. “We both appreciate it.”
—
When Cornell rangoff, Virgil took his feet off the desk and asked, “What are we doing?”
Lucas grimaced: “You know that big pile of shit we haven’t been reading?”
“Not that! All fourteen hundred pages of it?”
“Yeah. We’ve got to read it now,” Lucas said. “The whole drift has changed. I hope that knife wasn’t a plant.”
“Don’t see how it could be,” Virgil said.
“Neither do I.”
“But if it is a plant, the dishwasher did it,” Virgil said.
“Good thought, but unfortunately, it’s not a plant.”
They read the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening, and still hadn’t gotten more than a third of the way though the files. Virgil took a call from a TV reporter named Daisy Jones, saying that she was about to interview Charles “Bud” Light, and she would like a comment from Virgil. “I already got one from Lucas, and I’d like to get one from you, too. Lucas said it would be okay,” she lied.
“That’s weird, since Lucas has been sitting six feet from me for the last three hours and hasn’t taken any phone calls from TV reporters, including you.”
Virgil held his phone out and Lucas said, “Hey, Daisy.”
“Ah, shit,” she said. “Anyway, give me a comment, Virgie.”
“Okay, you ready?”
“I’m ready.”
“No comment,” Virgil said, and he hung up.
“We really ought to watch the interview,” Lucas said.
