“Every time I work with you, I’m amazed by your treachery,” Lucas said.
Virgil: “Me? You’re the one who said ‘Roger.’ Made me laugh.”
—
Lucas tidied upthe family room and brought two chairs in from the study, while Virgil lay on a couch, talked to Frankie and then the twins, checked an online newspaper, plugged in headphones and listened to Bob Seger songs.
The true-crimers arrived in a scrum. Lucas sat them in the family room and brought in glasses and a jug of lemonade. Dahlia Blair: “You have a grand piano.”
“My wife’s,” Lucas said.
“Still. This is quite the house.”
Cash said, “This is quite a house…for a cop.”
There was atoneto the comment, and Virgil said, “Lucas is rich. Started a computer company back around the time Doris was killed and made a huge wad of money. Also, his wife is a plastic surgeon, and she makes a huge wad of money every year. So they’ve got lots of wads.”
“And you’re still a cop?” Cash said, with a slightly different tone.
“I like shooting assholes,” Lucas said. “Everybody got a lemonade? Anybody want a mint leaf?”
“Do you have any mint leaves?” Ruby Weitz asked.
“No, but I thought it’d be polite to ask.”
Ruby Weitz was a tall, square woman with hair that was neither red nor purple but something in between; Karen Moss had narrow rounded shoulders and blond hair with a gray streak down the part;Sally Bulholtz was short, dark-haired and -eyed, and was wearing a tennis hat that read “Quiet Please” with an embroidered tennis ball bouncing above the words; Mary Albanese was owl-like, pale, with big glasses and dark hair pulled back in a bun. They all had spiral notebooks or legal pads and pens.
Cash asked, “What’s up?”
Lucas explained that the officially routed information coming through Michelle Cornell was basically static, and that he and Virgil were not well coordinated with the investigation being done by the BCA. “We’re supposed to be doing something entirely different, and the BCA guys sort of resent us sticking our noses in. We’ve decided we need a new tactic.”
Moss: “That’s us?”
Virgil: “Yes. You guys can do things that the BCA really can’t, and Lucas and I can’t do on our own. We need to use your brighter readers and researchers to hit public information sources looking for anything that might…mmm…be useful.”
“Any online newspapers you can find, public records, that sort of thing. Virgil has a list of all the employees at Bee Accounting back when Doris Grandfelt was murdered. We want to run down everything we can find on all of them. We also have a BCA list of the people they contacted during the investigation. We want those run down.”
“We also want somebody to check the newspapers for unsolved murders for a few years before Grandfelt was murdered, looking for similar unsolved murders,” Virgil said. “Stabbings, and now with Bud being murdered, people who were beaten to death. It’d probably only be theStar-Tribune, they’ve got everything online. If there’s a subscription fee, we’ll pay it.”
Virgil told them that he suspected the body had been dumped in the park because the killer was intimately familiar with it. “Did he come from that neighborhood? Run all the names we’ve got, and that we’ll get, against property tax records back around the time Grandfelt was killed.”
“That’s a lot of work,” Bulholtz chirped.
“Yes. Guess who’ll be in line for big payoffs if you come up with something,” Lucas said. “Your researchers could have fun with it. This is, like, a real criminal investigation.”
Virgil looked at Cash: “Did you put up anything on Jepson yet?”
“I wrote it and sent it off to one of my editors to look at. She might have put it up—if she hasn’t, it’ll be soon.”
The other women demanded to know what that was about, and Cash said, “Don’t tell them—yet. Let me check and see if we got it up. “
She pulled out her phone and fifteen seconds later she was reading the site: “Yep, it’s up,” she said. To the other women, “Read it and weep.”
They did, and that touched off angry arguments, which Virgil shut down: “You’ll all have it up in fifteen minutes anyway.”
“Yeah, but she got the headline on FirstStabAtIt,” Albanese said. “Not fair.”
“Fair is something losers whine about,” Cash said.
