A woman of average height or slightly shorter would probably have stabbed Grandfelt as shown in the diagram, at a much lower angle. A man or a woman stabbing with an underhand grip on the knife would almost certainly be stabbing with an upward motion…
“Holy shit,” Virgil muttered out loud. “Itwasa woman.”
That decided, he slept like a log until seven o’clock in the morning, when he got a call from the BCA duty officer, who knew a couple of things about a violent change in the direction of the case, but not much, and some of what he knew turned out to be incorrect. One of the things he got wrong was when he referred to Charles “Bud” Light as “Bug Light.”
Off the phone, Virgil called Lucas, who groaned and asked, “What now?”
“Somebody murdered Bud Light last night,” Virgil said. “I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”
—
Lucas walked downthe driveway to Virgil’s Tahoe, looking sleepy, but otherwise sleek as a melanistic mink in black slacks, blackjacket, and white dress shirt, with the top two buttons of the shirt undone. He made Virgil feel like he’d just fallen off a turnip truck.
“What the fuck is this?” Lucas asked when he got in the passenger seat.
“I don’t know,” Virgil said, as he pulled away from the curb. “I had two thoughts—the original killer is back, or one of the true-crimers is trying to eliminate the competition for the five million. Then I had a third thought…”
“Which was?”
“He was staying at the Wee Blue Inn,” Virgil said. “Could have been a routine bump and run that went bad.”
“The placeisa shithole,” Lucas said. “I went there once to talk to a guy who’d bought a boom box we were looking for, and we were sitting in the café and a cockroach crawled across the table. You know, like it was a pet.”
“Whatever. One more thing: the original killer was a woman,” Virgil said.
“Tell me,” Lucas said, and Virgil told him.
“I’m not a hundred percent on that, but I’ll go to fifty-fifty like Weather was arguing for,” Lucas said. “I don’t think a woman would have thought of those shoes. Some things are justtoosmart.”
—
Four cop cars,a crime scene unit, and a medical examiner investigator’s car were parked sideways in the Wee Blue Inn’s parking lot, behind a half block of yellow crime-scene tape. A small but growing crowd of true-crimers were gathered on the civilian side.
The Wee Blue Inn had once, long before, been a bad supper club on St. Paul’s east side, later converted to a motor-hotel, as the signoutside still read, with an eight-table café at the far end of it. The café came with a beer license, which kept it solvent. A long, low, narrow building, the inn had a rounded roof, like a Quonset hut. The exterior was covered with rough, dirty, once-white plaster that reminded Lucas of a Dutch painting he’d seen in one of Weather’s art books.
Virgil had been there a number of times as a St. Paul detective, usually for an assault or rape, but never for a murder. He and Lucas got out of the Tahoe and slipped under the tape. Anne Cash, who was in the crowd, yelled at them—“Marshal! Flowers!”—but they ignored her and walked up to the open motel room door where the cops were clustered.
A BCA agent named Carroll Bayes was standing exactly in the doorway and Virgil, coming up behind him, said, “Move over, C.”
Bayes, a tall man wearing a straw-colored Panama hat, looked over his shoulder and said, “Hey, Virgie. Not much to see.”
“Got to look anyway,” and Bayes made room for Virgil and Lucas.
Light was lying flat on his back, arms stretched out to the side. He was wearing knit pajama bottoms and a white V-neck tee-shirt with a slash of blood down his face and onto the shirt. Another small pool of blood had collected under his head. Virgil and Lucas could smell it, the sticky raw meat odor.
They could see blood trails down the side of Light’s face; gravity pulling the blood down through surface veins when the heart stopped beating. If Light looked like anything, he looked sad, rather than angry or frightened.
A St. Paul detective was talking to a medical examiner’s investigator, and they both nodded at Virgil and Lucas.
Lucas said, “Not shot.”
“No. Looks like he was hit hard with something that had acorner,” Bayes said. “A club of some kind. Busted his skull. The blood on the floor is coming out of the head wound—he was hit from behind. His wallet is down on the bedstand, wasn’t touched: I could see the corner of a twenty.”
“No weapon?”
“Haven’t found anything. Looks like he was eating dinner, there’s a plastic bowl with a little chili in it,” Bayes said. “Somebody came in, maybe he knew whoever it was, he turned his back…”
Virgil asked, “Who found him?”
