Rolvaag gave themthree sets of prints, an envelope with a glassine sleeve with the original negatives, and a thumb drive with the digital photos. “I will send the bill to the usual, and I have to include the price of the software,” he said. “You guys getting anywhere with this thing? I went out to one of the true crime sites, seems like some stuff is coming up.”
They talked about that on the way up the stairs, where they said goodbye to Mrs. Rolvaag, who was skinning grapes.
Out in the truck, Lucas said, “I would have seen the car sooner or later.”
“Yeah, like next month,” Virgil said. “Man, is it possible that Klink called it? A doctor with a Porsche?”
“Possible, if unlikely,” Lucas said. “But it was one of her last recorded dates, at the end of the film roll…if they were actually dates.”
“The question is, what do we do now?” Virgil said. “If we give the photos to Jon, and he passes them on to the main team, they’ll never find the guy. They don’t have the resources. If we give them to the true-crimers, we could get crucified, but they might find him.”
Lucas said, “I think we push Jon into a crack. Tell him we want the one photo. The team can have all of them, but we get to leak the Porsche shot to the crimers. He could go for that.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
Lucas shrugged. “We give it to them anyway. Fuck a bunch of bureaucrats. If they give us any trouble, we’ll have the governor go down and chat with them.”
“And what if the governor won’t do it?”
“We’ll have Lara chat withhim. The guy would sell his children for a hundred-dollar campaign donation.”
Virgil nodded. “That observation might help Jon make the correct decision, without us having to push him that far.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Lucas said.
—
At BCA headquarters,they didn’t have to push Duncan at all. He quickly agreed that they could release all the photos to the true-crimers, as long as they did it anonymously—and if they kept the BCA out of it.
“Hell, I’ll give it to them, keep Virgil completely out of it,” Lucas said. “My real boss is in Washington. He’ll never even hear about it.”
“Big of you,” Virgil said. To Duncan, he said, “I thought you’d resist.”
“No. Releasing them makes sense, even if some of the guys won’t like it. This is exactly the kind of stuff you might want to crowdsource,” Duncan said. “The crimers have shown they could do that. Besides, Iwillblame it on Lucas.”
“I was just telling Virgil that you weren’t nearly as bad an investigator as people used to say you were,” Lucas said to Duncan. And to Virgil, “Let’s call Dahlia.”
—
They called DahliaBlair, who instantly agreed to put the photos up.
Over the next two days, several tips came in, and they identified two of the men in the most recent photos, but not the man with the Porsche.
On the third day…
18
Amanda Fisk was running about fifty-fifty on whether to pay the caterer or kill her. The food was okay, though it seemed to focus on the aromatic: sauteed chicken livers in sesame oil? Smoked salmon crostini?
But the caterer, whose name was Joyce, instead of sticking close to the food, seemed to be more focused on the house and whether or not Fisk was going to put it up for sale. Fisk found her wandering through every room on both floors, including the bedroom, where she’d been peering out the window where Timothy had taken his fall. She wasn’t trespassing, exactly, because there were a lot of people wandering around, and Fisk had put up a sign, with an arrow, pointing up the stairway, that read “More bathrooms.”
Joyce had even asked, “Is this where…IT…happened?”
Fisk avoided an answer, instead asking, “Do we have another pan of the baked brie bites? There seems to be a demand.”
Fisk had begun to suspect that the woman was scouting for a real estate agent; but no matter, there were at least a hundred other people all over the place—from Timothy’s practice, from the hospitals where he was on staff, from the county attorney’s office, along with, Fisk suspected, gate-crashers there for the food.
She would be expected to give a tearful eulogy in the not-too-distant future, and she’d prepared for it. Could she squeeze out a few tears? She doubted it, but she was prepared even for that. She’d make a last-minute trip to the bathroom, hit both eyes with some Systane eye drops, and with flooded eyes, would make her way downcast through the living room where she’d ring her little bell. With any luck, some of the Systane would trickle down her cheek…
