“So can I. Of course, I can,” Light said. “But a number of investigators thought that the sex she’d had was consensual—no sign of sexual violence, no vaginal tearing, just all the knife wounds. Wounds that appeared to be inflicted in a frenzy. Suppose she’d had sex with somebody, that last man who didn’t use a condom, and that guy’s wife stumbled in on them, and she’s the one who did it?”
“An interesting thought,” Jones said, not quite blowing him off. “I’m sure the BCA agents will take that into account as they press on with this investigation. I want to thank you…”
—
“Thatwasaninteresting thought,” Virgil said. “That it might be a woman.”
“Did you know that she’d been stuck once in the back and that was the fatal wound? Is that in the papers somewhere?” Lucas asked.
“I knew she’d been stabbed in the back, but I didn’t think about it,” Virgil admitted. “I knew she’d been stuck a lot, but I wasn’t paying any attention to which might have been the fatal one.”
“Let’s look.”
They went through the stacks of papers, found the ME’s report. “Sure enough,” Lucas said, when he’d found the right section of the report. “Once in the back, into the heart, and she was alive at that point.”
Virgil, feet back on the desk, pointed a yellow pencil at Lucas. “Okay, let’s suppose you’re the attacker. You’ve just had sex, you’veejaculated…are you going to be in a murderous frenzy? Usually, wouldn’t you be feeling pretty mellow?”
“Depends on the guy. Women get killed by guyswhilethey’re having sex. Or maybe she wouldn’t do him a second time…”
“Thin,” Virgil said. “If she wasn’t up for a rerun, you’d think he’d try raping her before stabbing her, whatever it was, twenty-some times. There’d be some sign of an attempted rape. Vaginal damage, semen on her leg or wherever. Some defensive evidence, skin under her fingernails, blood in her mouth.”
Lucas nodded: “True, but you have to keep in mind that we’re dealing with somebody having a psychotic break. You can’t predict what the killer might do or not do.”
“Also true,” Virgil said. “But I’m thinking now we can’t take women off the table. I’m thinking sixty-forty the killer was male, but forty is a large number.”
“I’d agree, except for one thing: size ten-and-a-half Nike shoes,” Lucas said. “That’s a goddamn big woman, and she was wearing men’s shoes. Even goddamn big women wear women’s shoes.”
—
That evening, theytook Weather to dinner. She disagreed with Virgil’s sixty-forty, arguing that it might be closer to fifty-fifty, a woman as the killer. “If you close your eyes and think about the totality of what was done to Doris, and how it was done…I can visualize a woman doing it, as much as a man. I think a man could have stabbed her, but I think he’d also batter her, and as I understand it, she wasn’t battered or choked.”
“A big woman, wearing those ten-and-a-half Nikes,” Lucas said.
“What about the man who discovered the body? What was he wearing while he was trampling around the scene?” Weather asked.
“He was eliminated—he was wearing eleven-and-a-half Adidas,” Lucas said.
“A smart woman, to get away with this without leaving a single clue,” Weather retorted. “She planned it all out, and very carefully. Nothing was spontaneous. You don’t know where Doris was killed, or exactly when. The killer didn’t leave any DNA, anywhere. The BCA didn’t recover a murder weapon, all they knew was that the killer used a knife of some kind. She must have scouted the dump site, must have known she’d leave footprints. Hence, the shoes.”
“I could use the word ‘hence’ in a novel,” Virgil said.
Weather: “Shut up.”
They talked about it for a while, then Lucas and Weather went home and Virgil checked in to the Radisson Blu Mall of America.
After dropping his luggage in the room, he walked down to the mall, to Barnes & Noble, and found that they had three copies of his third novel and one of his second. They were shelved spine-out, so he surreptitiously moved some books around, then replaced his so the covers were face-out.
That done, he bought a Cinnabon, ate it, went back to his room, tried to work for a while, and talked to Frankie, who agreed with Weather: “You idiots should have figured this out a long time ago,” she said.
“We’re not the idiots, we weren’t on the case,” Virgil said.
“Well,someidiots should have figured it out,” Frankie said.
When Virgil went to bed, he closed his eyes like Weather had suggested, and created the attack in his mind. After a few minutes ofthat, he got up, dug out the ME’s report, and looked at a diagram of the wounds.
The back wound began slightly above the level where the knife tip entered Grandfelt’s heart—but only slightly, perhaps a half-inch. Picking up a pen, he tried to replicate how a man would have stabbed Grandfelt, and how a woman would.
Grandfelt was short; a man of any height at all, anything five-eight or taller, would almost always be stabbing downward, assuming an overhand grip on the knife. More sharply downward than Grandfelt had been stabbed.
