Lucas spent a few minutes contemplating the list. It was, he thought, thin. Nothing on it would definitively pin down one person. They had the DNA of the last person to have sex with Grandfelt, but after looking at the investigative files, he was feeling more and more uncertain about whether the DNA actually belonged to the killer.
If they could find the DNA donor, though, they might have a line on the killer, since the sex and the murder were very close in time.
—
From his hotelroom, Virgil sent out invitations to the six true crime blog owners who were doing the online research for them. Two of them got back within minutes—pulling all-nighters, Virgil thought, which might be their routine.
And the next morning, as a thunderstorm pounded the streets with a downpour of the kind normally reserved for the tropics, the six true-crimers settled in with them at Lucas’s house, bringing withthem cups of coffee, tea, and bottles of Coke. Virgil had included Michelle Cornell in the invitation, and she’d brought a stack of yellow legal pads from the law firm’s office supply cabinet, along with a clutch of ballpoint pens, which she handed out to everyone.
Anne Cash started things by asking, “Is this about the five million?”
“Well, no, not exactly—though I suppose it could be, if everything works out,” Lucas said. “Let me start out by saying that Lara Grandfelt’s assistant was murdered last night, after apparently being mistaken for Grandfelt herself.”
Three of the six true-crimers simultaneously blurted, “What!”
“You can post it—later,” Lucas said. “It’s not on the TV news channels yet, so you’re not getting beaten with the news, but it will be on TV this afternoon. You’ll have it first, so let’s settle down while I give you some more information.”
“But this is amazing,” Sally Bulholtz said.
“It’s tragic, is what it is,” Virgil said. “That woman is dead by mistake. Beaten to death.”
“Where did this—”
“We’ll fill you in later, okay?” Lucas said. “Right now, and the reason we’re here, is we need some more help from you. If you help us out, you’re welcome to take credit for it.”
“What do you want?” asked Karen Moss. She was wearing a different tennis hat, this one reading “Kiss My Ace,” with a yellow tennis ball below the inscription.
“Tell us quick, I want to get the murder on my site,” said Mary Albanese.
“We haven’t gotten anything good from you guys,” Lucas said. “You need to jack up the pressure.”
“Everything you gave us was too flimsy…too vague,” Ruby Weitz said. “I got a couple of friends trying to organize those property tax records, but there are hundreds of different owners and people buying and selling…it’s a mess, and we really don’t know what we’re looking for.”
“I got the list of year 2000 doctors from the medical association, but there are twenty thousand names on the list,” said Bulholtz. “I don’t know what I can do with them. There are like ten thousand more medical-type personnel: dentists, pharmacists, like that, not including nurses.”
“We’re going to get more specific this morning,” Lucas said. “In the next day or two, Virgil is going to send you a list of all Bee Accounting clients at the time Doris Grandfelt was killed. Bee is compiling that information now, for the BCA, and we’ll have access to the list. There’ll apparently be several thousand names. We need to figure out which ones were doctors—”
“You think the killer is a doctor?” Cash blurted. “Can we put that up?”
“Please, not yet,” Lucas said.
“We’re giving you early breaks on the good stuff, like the murder for Marcia Wise. You’ll be able to beat all the other true crime sites on that. Some stuff, we’ll talk to you six about, but you have to hold it close,” Virgil said. “If you don’t, you’ll be out. We won’t talk to you anymore.”
“We need to sort out the doctors,” Lucas said. “And anyone else you think might be considered to be in a medical profession. Dentists? Whatever. We need to compare those names against a list of DVS records to see which of the medical people were driving Porsche 911s.”
“I don’t even know what those look like,” Dahlia Blair said.
“You could look them up online, but you don’t need to—you just need to look at the record and see if it says Porsche,” Lucas said. “I talked to the head of the DVS this morning, early, and they’re seeing what they can do about printing out all the Porsche records from the years around 2000. There’ll be several hundred of them.”
“So you’re asking us to compare lists of thousands of people against lists of hundreds of people. You know how long that will take?” Cash asked.
“Not too long, I hope,” Lucas said. “I want you to sort out which are the doctors from among the Bee clients and compare those to an alphabetized list of Porsche owners. Once we get the lists, it should be smooth sailing.”
“But you want us to sort out a few dozen doctors from thousands of names from Bee—that’ll be the hard part.”
“Well, that’s true,” Lucas said. “But that’s why we’ve come to you—you have the juice to do that.”
“Anything else?” Cash asked.
