“Where’d everybody go?” Virgil asked.
“Scattered around. Some went over to the park, they’ve got two metal detectors now. Some other ones went over to Bee, to see if they could catch employees coming out.”
“Stay there. We need to talk to you and Cash. Separately from the others.”
“I’ll tell Anne, though I don’t like her very much. She doesn’t like me, either. We stole some of her readers when Bud found the knife and then got killed.”
—
There was stilla small crowd of true-crimers and a few locals watching the crime scene processing when they got back to the motel. They pulled to the side of the street, and watched as Blair nudged Cash, and the two women started walking over.
Lucas dropped the passenger-side window and when they came up, said, “Hop in the back.”
They did, and Cash asked, “What’s up?”
Virgil said to Lucas, “You talk.”
Lucas: “Most of the true crime hints and suggestions are going through Michelle Cornell. She’s supposed to filter what we get from you guys, find anything that might be good, and send it on to us.”
“We know all that,” Cash said.
“Shut up and let him talk,” Blair said.
“You shut up!” Cash snapped back.
“Both of you shut up,” Lucas said. “Michelle hasn’t sent us one thing that even remotely seems to be a possibility—she hasn’t sentanything that we haven’t thought of, or the BCA hasn’t investigated already. You guys might be a resource for us, but the present arrangement isn’t working. We’d like to get the biggest website owners together at my place this afternoon. Talk about what you could really do for us, and what we could do for you.”
Blair said, “A lot of us don’t get along that well. We’re competitors.”
“You could tamp down the competition if we gave you big sites an equal edge against all the little ratshit sites that are starting up,” Lucas said. “I looked and there are about a thousand of them.”
Cash said, “I’ll talk.”
Blair said, “I’ll come, but I don’t think I’m staying here. After Bud.”
“Everything you do here, you could probably do from your home,” Lucas said. “Standing around behind the police tape isn’t getting you anything.”
“Pictures. On-the-scene commentary,” Cash said.
“All right. But. If you’d be interested in doing this, we don’t want a crowd, because a crowd is impossible to talk to. We’d want the owners of five or six of the biggest sites…”
Blair and Cash looked at each other, then Blair said, “Ruby Weitz is here. Karen Moss.”
“Sally Bulholtz,” Cash said. “Everybody else is small.”
“Mary Albanese,” Blair said. “She was here this morning for a little while, I think she went over to the park.”
“She’s smart, she’d be good,” Cash said. “She used to be a professor or something.”
Virgil had been making notes and he said, “That’s six, including you two. That’s about all we can handle. Could you guys get them together?”
“They’ll jump at it,” Cash said. “Where do you want us to come?”
Lucas gave them his address, and said, “Don’t pass the address around. I’m nervous giving it to you two.”
Cash popped the door on her side and said, “We’ll see you there. Three o’clock.”
—
