“You’re such a bitch,” Weitz said.
“Everybody shut up,” Lucas said. “Listen to me: Virgil and I are the referees for this whole reward business. If you find anything, we want to know about it. If anyone else gets a tip from an anonymous source, we want to know about it. If somebody does and they don’t tell us, and we find out, they’ll be automatically banned from anyreward and I will personally arrest her—or him—for interfering with a police investigation.”
Weitz: “When will we get the names?”
“If you agree to this, you’ll have them before you get back to your cars. Leave your emails with Virgil, he’ll send them to you.”
“And I’ll give you all a piece of information that nobody has leaked yet,” Virgil said. “It appears that the knife was sharpened immediately before the murder, not with a whetstone or knife sharpener, but on a piece of red stone or red brick. Reddish grains were found in the sharpening grooves at the point of the blade. Bee is a redbrick building. So is the bar that Doris may have been going to. Does it seem likely that a Bee executive—only the executive dining room had metal silverware—would try to sharpen a knife on a brick? Maybe he did. Then again, most of the buildings down there, in Lowertown, are redbrick, and it was also a hangout for street people. Addicts, mentally disturbed guys, like that. We’re wondering…anyone down there make the papers for violence involving knives?”
“Lots of street people have knives,” Albanese said. “Maybe most of them. But would they have a car to take the body to the park?”
“Good point, but who really knows?” Virgil said. “The particular kind of knife found by Bud might be one of the most common knives in the whole country. I’ve got no idea how many cafeterias and restaurants must have been using them back when Doris was murdered.”
Lucas: “So you see why we really need to crowdsource this case, looking for information. I don’t know how you could do it, but maybe you could find out what other places used those knives back then. Virgil will send you the exact model.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes. At the end, Virgil took adeck of business cards out of his pocket. “The cards have my direct number. For my real phone. The top is an office number, and you won’t get far with it. If you have a legitimate tip, or a real need to reach me directly, use the second number. Don’t burden me with bullshit or silly questions—this is for real information.”
—
Late that afternoon,Amanda Fisk paused in the process of arranging her husband’s funeral to check the major true crime sites, found several that claimed the report on AnneCashInvestigations was completely spurious, while others hinted that Cash’s information was probably good, but she must have slept with the witness to get it.
Fisk went to the site and found a story about a man named Roger Jepson, an auto mechanic at a place called Loco’s Body & Tire who’d worked as a bartender as a younger man. He claimed to have set up Doris Grandfelt with customers who would pay her for sex.
Timothy had sex with Grandfelt on the evening she’d been murdered, but Fisk didn’t know he’d been paying for it—if he had been. When the Grandfelt murder hit the newspapers, he’d been shocked. He lied to her at the breakfast table, saying that his only contact with Grandfelt had come when she’d worked on his tax returns. Now, Fisk wondered if hehadpaid her. He would have been a big fish for Grandfelt. Maybe she had done him for free, hoping to land him.
—
Although Timothy wasgone—and with his death, she didn’t have to worry about diminishing financial assets—you can’t prosecute the dead, even if the cops learned that their DNA belonged to him.
And she was working hard to diminish the chances of that.
Another problem had popped up. She’s seen a news report about a man named Charles “Bud” Light, who’d told a local television interviewer that he thought Doris Grandfelt’s killer might have been a woman. He was right, but where he came up with that thought, she had no idea.
If that became a hot new idea, the cops could ride it like this: DNA man has sex with Doris Grandfelt, jealous wife, or lover, freaks out and murders her rival. If somehow they tracked down Timothy, even dead, might they then look at his wife, an employee at Bee Accounting at the time of the murder? They would. They would push hard.
She was turning a silver funerary urn in her hands, thinking about it, and unconsciously muttered, “Jesus Christ.”
The funeral director had stepped into the room a half-second earlier and heard her reference to Jesus: “The Lord can be a comfort in the most trying of times,” he said.
Fisk showed him a shaky grief-stricken smile, thought,What a dipshit, and said, aloud, “I often find it comforting to appeal to him. Now that the medical examiner…”
“We have a full release, so we can proceed,” the funeral director said.
“Thank you. When will it be done?”
“Tomorrow morning. I understand that you are arranging a private home memorial service with our memory manager and would like to have the vase there.” He pronounced itvaz.
“Yes, thank you again. Timothy didn’t want a church service,” Fisk said. “He was a believer, but unconventional. Unlike myself. I’m actually an Anglican.”
“It’s wonderful that you have that to fall back upon, in tragic timeslike these,” the funeral director purred. She was buying a twelve-hundred-dollar solid silver urn, into which she’d put three thousand, five hundred dollars’ worth of ashes. The funeral home had to do exactly nothing except some light paperwork and drive the ashes from the crematorium back to the funeral home.
Ka-ching.
—
Fisk was takinga thirty-day mourning period away from work and was in a hurry.
When she got out of the funeral home and back to her car, she glanced at her watch, drove to the first of the four same-day dry cleaners, and recovered a batch of her husband’s suits. She continued to the other three, and recovered dress shirts, golf shirts, sweatshirts, and everything else he wore that might reasonably be taken to a dry cleaner’s.
