Without getting out, she looked toward the camera pole—and could see nothing of it at all. Not the pole, not the cameras.
And she sat for a full five minutes, watching the lot. Watching people come and go. Watching the routes that they walked to their cars.
Satisfied that she could pull this off, if she did it right, she picked up the wrench she’d kept on the passenger seat, got out of the driver’s seat, walked around the car, and got in the back seat next to the Jaguar. She didn’t quite close the door—kept it closed, but not latched. She pushed it open, pulled it back, did it again.
The door made no noise at all.
Ten minutes later, Grandfelt walked out of the Whole Foods carrying the grocery bag. Fisk was kneeling on the back seat of the Range Rover, scanning the parking lot. Grandfelt was getting closer and closer, and Fisk hovered behind the Land Rover’s D-pillar, her eyes flicking again and again toward the camera pole, never catching even a hint of it, as much out of sight as she could be.
Grandfelt went to the passenger side of the Jag, opened the door, put the grocery bag on the passenger side floor, and walked back around the car to the driver’s side. As she was doing that, Fisk sank deeper into the back seat of the Range Rover.
Looking up, she saw Grandfelt pass the Range Rover window. She got a firm grip on the wrench, pushed the door open with one foot and slipped out. Grandfelt had the Jag’s door open and had one leg thrust out so she could slide into the tight interior…
Grandfelt never saw Fisk. Fisk hit her on the back of the head with the eighteen-inch-long piece of steel, and Grandfelt dropped to the ground as though struck by lightning.
Fisk, now caught up in the kill, hit her again, and again and again, and then, breathing hard, teeth bared, ready to fight anyone else who needed it, she half-turned, half-stood, looked around the lot like a wary lion.
No alarm. Grandfelt was dead on the ground. Fisk sat down and pushed the other woman as far under the Jag as she could, using her feet. That done, she walked back around the Range Rover, wiped the wrench with a damp wash cloth left on the driver’s seat just for that purpose, and dropped both the wrench and the cloth in a garbage bag.
Two minutes later, she was gone. Saw no cameras.
—
Lara Grandfelt gotcaught up in a documentary on global warming, which showed, among other things, a polar bear mired in mud that was once solid permafrost. At some point, she glanced down at her watch: Wise had been gone for an hour. The Whole Foods store was ten minutes away.
She went back to the documentary, glanced at her watch again. Where was she? Joyriding in the Jag? Now worried that Wise had been in an accident, she called her, but got no response. Fifteen minutes and three more calls after that, she was very worried, but didn’t know exactly what to do.
She called Whole Foods, and somewhat to her surprise, the call was answered. She told the woman who answered the phone that she was worried about her friend, and the woman said she’d look for Wise and check the parking lot for the Jag.
The same woman called back and said the Jaguar, black and shiny—she read out the license tag number—was still sitting in the parking lot, but as far as she could tell, there was nobody in the store who resembled the woman described by Grandfelt.
—
Lucas took thephone call from Grandfelt. “Marcia’s disappeared!”
“What?”
Grandfelt described the sequence of events: Wise’s departure for Whole Foods, her failure to return, the unanswered phone calls, the call to the supermarket and the response—the car still in the parking lot.
“Is there a restaurant there?” Lucas asked. “Somewhere she could have gone for a bite to eat or a drink?”
“She doesn’t drink and we were planning to watch a movie and eat popcorn,” Grandfelt said. “I’m going over there.”
“No. No. Lara, I want you to make sure all your doors and windows are locked, and I want you to hunker down there,” Lucas said. “If there’s actually a threat, I don’t want you wandering around helpless. I’ve got a good friend on the Minneapolis force, I’ll call her, get some cops over to the store, and I’ll go over myself. I can be there fast. I don’t want you exposed.”
The fear clutched at her heart: “I’ll lock the doors and wait here,” Grandfelt said. “I’ll keep trying to call her.”
—
Lucas gave Weathera one-minute explanation and headed for his car. In the car, he called Margaret Trane, once a lead homicide cop and, after three heavily publicized murder convictions, now a deputy chief. He explained the problem, said he was on the way, and asked her to do what she could to route some cops to the store.
The first Minneapolis cops arrived nine minutes later. They got out of the patrol car and walked up to the Jaguar and one cop said to the other, “Is your phone ringing?”
“If it was, it sure as shit wouldn’t be playing ‘Tiny Dancer.’ Is it coming from under the Jag?”
When Lucas arrived a couple of minutes later, he was told that the woman under the car was definitely dead. Homicide was on the way.
20
