Fisk’s mother was the fifth.
Listen: her parents had divorced after her father had an affair with a woman in his shop at 3M. Her mother had never remarried, and ten years after the divorce, Fisk’s ancient grandmother had died and left a substantial estate to her daughter, Fisk’s mother.
It seemed unfair, somehow, that her mother, then in her sixties, would simply burn through that estate, and the money and house she’d gotten in the divorce, in her declining years. Her mother, in fact, was largely a waste of good air, an inert devotee of social media and streaming services.
Also a diabetic and insulin dependent. A couple of sleeping pills in a cup of late-night tea, followed by an overdose of insulin, moved the two estates right along to Fisk.
She didn’t think about her mother. She never had. It never occurred to her that she should, except in the context of a fully stuffed Fidelity account.
The sixth was Timothy.
—
Lara Grandfelt.
The problem was right out front: she was driving the research by the true crime enthusiasts, and so far, that research had turned up the only clues in Doris Grandfelt’s murder: the knife, the photos of Grandfelt’s customers, including Timothy. If the five-million-dollar reward package were to disappear, so would the true-crimers…she thought.
She wasn’t entirely sure about that. It was theoretically possible that the reward was somehow incorporated in Lara Grandfelt’s will. But Fisk thought that idea simply wouldn’t have occurred to Grandfelt, who was in her forties. She wanted toknowwho killed her twin. To have the murder solved after she was dead herself wouldn’t satisfy that quest, so it wouldn’t occur to her to put the reward in a will.
Even if Grandfelt did put it in her will, it would take a while for the will to be settled. Fisk had dealt with enough murder investigations to sense the movement in them…sense when an investigation was either moving forward or was dead in the water. The Doris Grandfelt investigation felt as though it were gaining momentum, running downhill.
If she could stop it, even temporarily, gain some time, get Timothy’s death well into the past, that could be critical.
—
With the memorialservice over, Fisk went to her home office and started the basic research she’d need to kill Grandfelt. As a prosecutor, she had routine computer access to driver’s license files, and she went out for Grandfelt’s license information. That gave her an address: Grandfelt lived in the upscale Lake of the Isles neighborhood in Minneapolis, on a parkway that ran along the east side of the lake.
It also gave her Grandfelt’s cars: an older BMW sport utility vehicle, and a flashy, heart-stopping black Jaguar convertible.
From Google, she got a satellite view of the lakeside houses and the garages and parking spaces behind them. Access to the parking was through an alley that ran behind the waterfront homes. There was on-street parking all around the neighborhood, so she could getclose in a car. She’d have to check for district parking restrictions. She noted, on the satellite view, a jogging trail around the lake.
In forty-five minutes, she’d worked out a credible approach to Grandfelt’s house. She would scout it by car and then on foot. She would pose as a jogger, on the lakeside trail. Why would she be running there when she lived in St. Paul? Because running in St. Paul had begun to frighten her. Any long running loop in St. Paul would take her through some rough neighborhoods, a woman alone, a new widow. She couldn’t run during the day because she worked.
Lake of the Isles was quiet, pretty, and very, very safe.
That should work, if the improbable happened, and she was stopped by the police for an ID check.
Her bigger problem was that Minneapolis had a lot of cops. If there was some kind of alarm, the response would be quick. She kicked back in her chair and thought about that. What if there were to be some kind of incident that would pull the cops to another location?
She couldn’t help thinking,Fire?
Or was that too ambitious? What about a swatting? If there were a swatting on the other side of the lake, another affluent neighborhood, all the local patrol cars would be pulled in…
A year before, she’d prosecuted a high schooler who’d had the bad judgment to be over eighteen—a legal adult—when he swatted his physics teacher. Swatting was a bit of a plague: call 9-1-1, screaming that there was a man in the house with a gun, that you’d locked yourself in a closet but he was coming, that you had a gun of your own, call out the address and then…Bang!The gunshot. And hang up.
You’d have the SWAT squad there in twenty minutes, along with every other cop in the area.
She could easily swat somebody, but if she made a 9-1-1 call, which would be recorded, then, when the swatting call was proven fraudulent and Lara Grandfelt was found murdered at the same time as the SWAT call, she’d be giving away the fact that the probable Grandfelt killer was female.
Was there any way she could make it seem like a male voice calling in?
More online research: yes, AI made it possible to create something that sounded like a male voice saying anything you needed it to say, but the voices she heard didn’t sound real. Further, they were flat. She could find no way to make a voice sound panicked.
There were also apps that could change the pitch of a voice, make it lower, but the samples she heard didn’t sound convincing.
And to make the call, she’d have to buy a burner phone. She knew as a prosecutor that many of the places that sold burners also had serious video surveillance. She couldn’t afford to be on camera buying the phone.
—
