—
Outside, on theporch, Virgil said, “Doctor, doctor, give me the news…”
“I thought this case was going to be a joke,” Lucas said. “I’m not laughing anymore.”
“This killer. We know he killed Doris, and almost certainly killed Wise. Is it just those two? Or is he a serial killer? Have there been a bunch of them?”
Lucas said, “When you get back to the hotel, drop a note to our true-crimers. Let’s get them together again tomorrow. There are some more things they could do for us. I’m gonna go home and make a list.”
“Where do we meet? What time?”
“How about where we started? My place. Say, eleven o’clock.”
—
Weather was gettingready for bed when Lucas got home. She did operations almost every morning and hospitals started early. He stuck his head in the refrigerator, came out with a string-cheese single-pack, and told her about Wise as he stripped the plastic wrapper off the cheese. “It could still be a woman, I guess, but she was battered. You said yourself that’s more like something a man would do.”
“I’ll back off to forty-sixty, woman-man,” Weather said.
“Okay. I’ll be up for a while,” he told her. “This thing is complicated. I gotta stop talking and start thinking.”
“Do you have anything at all?” Weather asked.
“That’s what I’ll be thinking about. We do, but it’s all bits and pieces. I’m trying to figure out what we do with them.”
“A puzzle. You’re good at puzzles.”
She kissed him goodnight and went up the stairs to the bedroom. Lucas got a beer, carried it into the den, sat in his favorite chair and stared at a blank TV screen for a couple minutes, then got up, found a legal pad and a pen, and began his list.
Could Klink the Shrink be right? Was the killer a doctor or another medical worker? Drives a Porsche?
BCA now has a list of Bee clients when Doris was murdered. How many doctors on the list? Do DVS files go back that far, to Grandfelt’s murder, to ID doctors with Porsche 911s?
How is the research going on those cockeyed murders in the Twin Cities? The ones with no reasonablemotive, in which the killer left no clues, seemed to be in a frenzy when he stabbed or bludgeoned the victim, between the Grandfelt murder and the present?
Do we have anything on the 2000 time-frame tax collector or assessor lists for neighborhood around the park where the body was found? Any hits of Bee employees there?
Talk to Cory Donner at Bee. The knife was sharpened on red brick. The killer must have sharpened the knife there, if the murder had been there, and that would also have scarred the brick. Could they find the scars? If so, where exactly?
