Bayes turned to the parking lot and nodded at a couple of uniformed cops talking to Dahlia Blair. “His partner, name of Dahlia Blair. I understand that you guys met her. The victim worked for her…more or less worked. She didn’t pay him, he wasn’t an employee. He’s retired, former post office employee. He volunteered to come along on herinvestigations.”
“We saw him on TV yesterday, on Daisy Jones’s talk show. Talking about the knife he found.”
“Really,” Bayes said. “Does that go anywhere?”
“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Is Blair staying in the same room?”
“No. She’s down at the other end. She says she walked down here to get him this morning, and the door was open an inch or two. Blood on the inside doorknob, like maybe he tried to get away from whoever hit him,” Bayes said. “Anyway, when she knocked, the door moved, and she saw a foot. That’s what she says. No video cameras on the motel. They have enough trouble here that they don’t want to provide evidence against their customers and maybe have to go to court.”
“You think she might have done it?” Virgil asked.
Bayes said, “She’s on the list, but she didn’t do it. We’ll talk to her some, but, no. She’s harmless.”
“All right,” Lucas said. He and Virgil had both known Bayes for years, and he was competent. Lucas took a last look around, and said to Virgil, “Let’s go talk to Dahlia.”
—
They stepped awayfrom the door and Virgil paused, looked left and said, “Lara Grandfelt.”
“That’s all we needed,” Lucas said. Grandfelt was behind the crime scene tape with Wise, her personal assistant. “We should talk to her first.”
They went that way, told a cop on the crime scene tape to let Grandfelt and Wise through, and took them far enough into the parking lot that the true-crimers couldn’t hear the conversation, although they were making movies.
Grandfelt said, “I guess it’s true? One of the true crime people is dead?”
“Clubbed to death, it looks like, murdered,” Lucas said. “Seemed like a harmless guy. He’s the one who found the knife yesterday.”
“So my reward wound up getting somebody else murdered,” Grandfelt said. She wanted to hear a denial.
She didn’t get it from Virgil, who said, “Maybe. We don’t know much yet.”
Grandfelt turned away from him, staring at the cops around the motel room door, and then said, “I never wanted…”
“We warned you that people could get hurt,” Lucas said. “Now, somebody has. There’s a possibility that he was killed by an addict or a robber, but he had money that was easy to see and it’s still there.”
“Oh, God. Oh…God.”
“We don’t have anything more to tell you at this point,” Lucas said. “We won’t be running the investigation, that’ll be the St. Paul cops, with the BCA looking in because of the connection to your sister’s murder.”
“Should we stop this?” Wise asked.
“That’s up to you,” Lucas said. “The discovery of the knife and now the murder are shaking things loose. We might actually be able to find out who killed Doris, if this murder was done by the original killer. But…who knows?”
Virgil plucked at Lucas’s jacket sleeve and said, “Let’s go talk to the witness. Miz Grandfelt, we gotta put you guys back on the other side of the line.”
They did that, and Grandfelt and Wise headed for a waiting car, some of the crowd of true-crimers hurrying after them, cameras up.
—
As they walkedtoward Dahlia Blair, Lucas asked quietly, “Do you know what a shotgun mike is?”
Virgil half-turned, then shook his head. “Ah, shit.”
“Yeah, when I saw it, I thought, Is that a suppressor? It wasn’t,” Lucas said. “But it might have been pointed at us when we were talking to Lara.”
—
Dahlia Blair wasa thin, tense brunette with short-chewed nails. She kept reaching two fingers toward her lips like she’d quit smoking the week before. Lucas knew both of the St. Paul cops who were with her, and they said, “Lucas,” and “Big guy.”
