Still grumbling, Roy fished his phone out of a pocket and handed it over.
Jepson set the phone to “record,” tested it once, then reset it to record and called Anne Cash.
Cash answered, sounding harried: “This is Cash.”
“I got the biggest break in this murder case. I want a piece of the reward, if you get it,” Jepson said.
“How do I know you’re not some retard wasting my time?” Cash asked.
“I was just interviewed by two cops named Davenport and Flowers and they went tearing out of here like their asses were on fire. That interest you?”
Empty air, then: “Tell me. You get a chunk of anything we get.”
“I want more than a chunk,” Jepson said. “I want at least fifty-fifty when this upsets the apple cart.”
“We’ll see. What is it?”
“I’m recording this call, you just said I’d get fifty-fifty.”
“No, I didn’t. I said, ‘We’ll see.’ That’s not a promise.”
“Fuck it, then. I’ll call somebody else,” Jepson said. “There are lots of you people. What I got is killer.”
Cash said, “Okay. Fifty-fifty of what we get, if this leads to something.”
Jepson told her everything he’d told Lucas and Virgil, and when he was done, she said, “Holy crap. You sound for real.”
“Yeah. When I was on your website, I seen you put up the cops’phone number. Call and ask them. Ask the Virgil guy. What I told you is the whole truth.”
“Okay, I’ll do that for sure.” Now she sounded excited. “I got your phone number. What’s your name? And gimme a little background on yourself. This will blow the whole investigation sky-high.”
—
Cash called thenumber Virgil had given Blair.
Lucas picked up the phone from the truck’s center console, looked at the screen, let it go to voicemail. Anne Cash with a short message: “Call me. Now. Important.”
He did, and asked, “What?”
“Is this Davenport? I want to talk to Flowers. I need some answers from him.”
“What’s the question?” Virgil asked, as Lucas held the phone up.
“Did you interview a man named Jepson who told you that Doris Grandfelt was selling sex at a bar in Minneapolis? A place called the Lite House?”
Virgil: “We can’t talk about our investigation at this point.”
“So you did.”
“We cannot talk about our interviews,” Lucas said. “I will tell you, if you go with this, you could get sued by Lara Grandfelt.”
“We’re not talking about Lara,” Cash said. “She sues me, it’ll keep the story in the news for months, and in the end, she’ll lose out.”
“We won’t say anything more,” Lucas said. “We can’t. We don’t know any Roger Jepson.”
Cash laughed out loud and said, “I didn’t call him Roger. So you know him and you talked to him—and you just confirmed it. See you in an hour. Goodbye.”
She rang off and Virgil smiled and said, “Shit storm.”
