In the meantime, the mourners, all of them, collectively, were laying down a blanket of unidentifiable DNA, while mumbling regrets through a mouthful of spinach puffs; the mourning seemed perfunctory, the eating not so much.
Timothy was still present, in his solid silver urn. She planned to dump him over the fence into the Belgian Malinois’ yard as soon as the crowd had gone and it got dark. If anyone asked, he’d gone in the Mississippi, where he’d spent many hours happily wandering the overgrown shores with the goddamn Jack Russells.
“You know, the thing I liked about Timothy was his joie de vivre…”
Yeah. You could take your joie de vivre and your bad French accent and stick them where the sun don’t shine…
As for the urn, maybe she could have it melted down? But that was for later. For now, dressed in a dark blue knee-length dress, with a double string of pearls, she wanted to get as many people as possible sitting in chairs, opening doors, handling Timothy’s tools—she’d hada lowball offer on the tools, and would accept it before the bidder left the premises.
And from people not gauche enough to actually inquire (yet) there had been noticeable interest in Timothy’s 911 and the Range Rover. She’d been hinting to those people that the cars were actually available after she’d given them a thorough cleaning.
All of this was splattering through her mind like random raindrops when she passed a group of prosecutors from the county attorney’s office, and heard one of them saying, “…a bunch of new photos taken by Doris Grandfelt, supposedly her last dates…”
And she thought,What!
The caterer, Joyce, was forgotten. She couldn’t kick a hundred people out of the house, when they’d barely dented the antipasto skewers, but she desperately needed to look at the true crime sites, andright now. She walked back to the library, got her laptop, and locked herself in the guest bathroom.
AnneCashInvestigations had the new photos. Fisk had no idea who the men were in four of the photos, but the fifth one…
Timothy. And Timothy’s fucking 1998 Porsche, with that funny tail fin thing, the wing. The photo was not a good one and was old and murky. It could be a shot of any tall, slender, sharp-nosed balding man in what looked like a blazer and slacks combination, standing on a sidewalk outside a bar. With a Porsche.
On the other hand, if you knew him at the time…
Something, she thought, sitting there on the toilet seat, had to be done. And the only thing she could think of was the elimination of the prize for finding the killer of Doris Grandfelt. The cops, as far as she knew, had made no progress whatever in solving the case. The true crime people had been another story altogether.
Out of the bathroom, she made her Systane-eyed speech about Timothy, reliving some of the good times from Timothy’s point of view, even got a few laughs. Cleared the house out, including the caterer and the gate-crashers, and left the urn of ashes for later.
It occurred to her that she ought to feed the dogs, and she did. The dogs were another problem that would have to wait for later. Too many people knew how much Timothy loved the mutts, so she’d have to keep the little fuckers around until any questions about their fate might no longer be asked. Like maybe she gave them to a passing troupe of dog lovers.
But Lara Grandfelt had to go.
—
Fisk was thoroughlyversed in the theory and practice of murder, having, over the years, sent four dozen murderers to prison as a prosecutor, and having killed six people herself, including Timothy.
Her personal kills included a fourteen-year-old ninth grader, tripped and shoved in front of a moving truck. The girl had been ejected from behind a tree and the driver said he never saw her before he hit her, and even after he hit her, wasn’t sure what he’d hit.
When he’d stopped to look, he’d found a horrified Amanda Fisk standing over the body of her crushed schoolmate. Fisk told cops that the girl had started to step out from behind a tree and had tripped and fallen over the curb and under the oncoming wheels.
She’d cried real tears at the funeral. Not because she mourned the young girl, but because she was so frightened for herself—how poorly and impulsively she’d done it. If the girl hadn’t died, she would have told everyone about the hand in her back.
But she had died; and that had been strangely satisfying.
Over the following years, at the University of Minnesota and the William Mitchell College of Law, she’d analyzed the ways of murder, and when the time came to kill the second woman, she thought she’d worked it all out. The hardest kind of murder to solve was the random attack where the killer escaped from the scene without being seen. Any murder with an obvious motive would be a problem: cops loved motives.
A second thought: obvious motives could also be misleading.
—
With one exception,Fisk wouldn’t kill for entertainment. That was simply stupid. But any gain on her part had to be non-obvious, as was the situation with Rose McCauley, a very pretty and very smart classmate at William Mitchell. One of them was going to be the top woman in the class, and after making a realistic assessment of the possibilities, Fisk was almost certain that it wouldn’t be her. Being top woman meant something at the time.
She killed McCauley one dark night—they went to the Mitchell night school—with a classic lead pipe that she found on a demolition site. She’d decided on the pipe because McCauley’s death would be fast and silent.
She hit McCauley as the other woman walked along a sidewalk to her car. Fisk stepped from behind a dense bridal wreath bush on the warm autumn evening and hit the other woman three times: once knocking her down, twice to make sure, crushing her skull. She took McCauley’s purse—robbery, the misleading motive—put the lead pipe inside it, and it all now resided safely at the bottom of the Mississippi.
Doris Grandfelt was the third kill.
The fourth kill…better not to think about that one. That one was over the top, even for Fisk; but entertaining. Just thinking about it, she could smell the buttered popcorn.
