“Anything’s better than reading more of this,” Virgil said, dropping a sheaf of printouts on the desktop.
—
Daisy Jones hadthe best police contacts in the Twin Cities and a way with man-in-the-street interviews. She evenlikedthe man in the street, guys like Bud Light, and they liked Daisy back.
Light had done everything but polish his bald spot and the thin brown hair around it may have been battened down with Vaseline, because it sparkled in the TV lights. He was wearing a blue blazer with an unfortunately red-striped dress shirt and clashing blue-green paisley bow tie. He’d worn steel-rimmed spectacles when Lucas and Virgil had talked to him, but he’d taken them off for the television appearance and was squinting at Jones.
He was good at being interviewed.
“I thought, okay, let’s think about this some more,” he said. “The body was back in the trees, but I’d gone over that scene inch by inch and didn’t find anything back there. Just outside the trees, where people walked, I found a nickel…”
Jones: “A nickel?”
“Yes. It was useless. It was a 1995, so it could have been dropped by the killer, but it could have been dropped anytime between ’95 and last week.”
“He’s quoting us,” Lucas said to Virgil.
“Without attribution,” Virgil said.
“…so I thought, where else would the killer have been? I decided he wouldn’t have driven across the ballfields, because people would have seen him doing that from the houses around the park,” Light continued. “More likely, he parked in the parking lot, and carried Doris Grandfelt’s body to the trees. She was a small woman, her body weighed ninety-two pounds according to the medical examiner, and so…mmm…it was estimated that she probably weighed a hundred and five pounds when she was alive. Something around there. She’d bled out, lost all her blood, and a typical woman has a little over a gallon of blood in her body.”
“How do you know all this?” Jones asked.
“Medical examiner’s report, which is online, and the blood part, I googled.” He seemed pleased with himself.
“Googled.” Jones looked faintly amused. “So you speculated that the killer carried Doris Grandfelt across the ballfields…”
“Yes. I thought, if he was in a big hurry, who knows what he might have dropped around the parking lot. I was right—except that he didn’t drop the knife, he hid it, by pushing it down into the ground. The butt end of the knife was a half-inch wide and no more than an eighth of an inch thick, so if you pressed it point down into the ground, nobody would ever see it. He was getting rid of evidence in case he got stopped by the police as he escaped the scene.”
They talked about the knife, and how Light had extracted it from the ground without actually touching it himself. “Like picking up doggy poop.”
Jones: “Doggy poop?”
“Yes. We had a plastic evidence bag and I put my hand inside it,grabbed the end of the knife, then folded the bag over it as I pulled the knife out of the ground. Sealed the bag, the knife untouched by human hands.”
“Smart,” Jones said.
“He’s really good at this,” Virgil observed.
“Everybody in America is good at it,” Lucas said, leaning his chair back. “Look at casual street interviews, or fan interviews after a game. Everybody knows what to do when you get a shot at being on TV.”
Jones said, “Well, thank you very much, Bud…”
Light: “Can I say one more thing? Might be important.”
Jones said, “Sure.”
“We’ve been talking this whole interview about the killer being male, calling him ‘he.’ I’m not so sure. If you read the medical examiner’s report, you see that Doris Grandfelt was stabbed in the back, just once, and that was fatal,” Light said. “The blade went into Doris’s heart. I believe that was the first strike, the first attack. I mean, after you did all the other knifings, more than twenty of them on the front of her body, why would you roll her over and stick her in the back, and only once? No. I think the killer came up behind her and stabbed her, and when she fell, did all the other strikes.”
“And you think a woman…?”
“Well, I think it could have been,” he said. “A man attacking a woman, especially if he’d raped her, would be facing her, wouldn’t he? He’d stab her in the throat or chest or somewhere on the front of her body, just like she was…”
“Maybe she tried to run.”
“Think about that,” Light said. “Doris is running away, it seems like somebody chasing her would be striking down at her, not straight in, like the medical examiner’s report says,” Light said. “That wouldbe hard to do. I think the killer snuck up on her and stuck her. She never saw it coming.”
“I can see circumstances where she could be attacked from behind, and then turned…”
