That was all Lucas knew about the Grandfelt murder at the time it happened.
Lucas stayed with the new company for three years, then sold all the stock in a management buyout financed by San Francisco venture capitalists. He became a dot-com multimillionaire and went back to being a cop, because what he really liked in life was chasing killers.
The actors and programmers, who had between five hundred (a janitor) and ten thousand (the lead programmer) stock options each, were cashed out at twenty-one dollars a share, which left them even more amazed than they were delighted, and theyweredelighted.
—
Every year orso after the murder, state investigators checked with public DNA databases for any DNA that correlated with the killer’s. Nothing turned up, which led investigators to believe that the killer didn’t care about his ancestry, and perhaps was at the end of his particular genetic line.
The BCA investigators also suffered through extended face-to-face contact with Lara Grandfelt, the twin, whom they unofficially classified as one of the biggest pains in the ass that they’d ever encountered.
The twin was smart, tough, and eventually affluent enough to hire private investigators and lawyers. She delivered a monthly telephone harangue to whichever investigator was unlucky enough to answer the phone, questioning whether it was stupidity, incompetence, or simple laziness that kept the BCA from finding the killer.
One investigator, often the butt of her accusations, admittedduring lunch at the Parrot Café that he hated her. And then, after all of that, after all the shouting, after all accusations of incompetence, cupidity, cover-ups, and possible corruption, twenty-one full years after the murder…Lara Grandfelt threw gasoline on the case and set it on fire.
5
Present Day
Lucas was sprawled on a king-sized bed in the Holiday Inn Express on the outskirts of Marshalltown, Iowa, hands linked across his stomach, as he gloomily contemplated the blank screen of the television. Nothing on—nothing good. Dressed in boxer shorts, a tee-shirt, and dark blue athletic socks, he thought about getting off the bed to do some pushups, but he’d already done that and the carpet smelled funky.
Masturbation was a possibility, but he was an older guy now, and was saving himself for a double-header when he got back home.
He could go after the slow, extra fat bluebottle fly that was buzzing around the room, with a rolled-up newspaper, but that idea was both trivial and boring.
He had been reading a thriller novel that had annoyed himwith: (1) heroes who were bulletproof, and (2) repeated references to “flat-screen TVs.”
He thought, “No, dummy, they’re just TVs. There are millions of people living in the United States who wouldn’t know what a non-flat-screen TV would even look like.”
He confirmed both his annoyance and his boredom by looking up “flat-screen TVs” on his flat-screen telephone and found that old-style CRT TVs hadn’t even been manufactured for fifteen years.
He got up and looked out the window. If he pressed his face against the cool glass, which he didn’t, he could see a soybean field across a highway to the south. Straight ahead, a Menards, a Midwestern version of Home Depot. He was vaguely hungry and considered walking over to a Culver’s diner for a piece of pie, but he really wasn’t that hungry.
Or, he could walk over to Menards and look at building stuff and tools, which he had already done twice.
Lucas would be sixty years old at his next big birthday, still a few years away, but he had a depression gene, which had gotten on top of him a couple of times in his life, and which he feared. He’d been feeling melancholy for months. Not good. His adopted daughter, Letty, had almost died in a New Mexico case the year before, which had been profoundly disturbing. He thought about it too much.
And the years were going by. Unexpectedly, they never stopped. Not only did they not stop, they even seemed to have speeded up, one sloppy winter piling into the next, with only a sliver of summer between them.
He hadn’t had any compelling jobs since one he’d shared withLetty; mostly just chasing around after dirtballs, who, while they were sometimes dangerous, were not interesting in themselves.
Both Letty and his wife were telling him he had to find something besides chasing dirtballs. Find a hobby, they said. Try something arty, or musical. Write more games, as he’d done when he was younger. Take some money out of his investment accounts, which returned a reliable five percent, and see if he could blow the money up into something really large.
He didn’t want to do any of that. He did like going over to Menards and looking at tools: he’d considered finding a congenial contractor and designing and building a spec house, just to see what he could do.
But what he really wanted was to chase down serious, intelligent, violent criminals instead of the dirtballs he’d been pursuing over the last year.
—
The case thatbrought him to Marshalltown was one of those. Two outlaw brothers, the Bergstroms, Boy and Andy, were selling counterfeit vodka made from corn alcohol. The Marshals Service got involved because the brothers were both under indictment for passing counterfeit twenty-dollar bills, their previous business venture. When Secret Service agents had tried to arrest them, the brothers had shot their way past them, and escaped.
No one had been injured, but you couldn’t let a couple of clodhoppers get away with that stuff.
The Bergstroms gave up on the twenties, which weren’t all that good anyway, made with a scanner and printer that had the anti-counterfeiting chips cleansed by an Iowa State University hacker. Thecurrency looked okay at a glance, but the paper it was printed on sucked, and a couple of months after their venture launched, every convenience store on the plains had been on the lookout for the crappy paper.
As criminals searching for another source of income, the Bergstroms had begun printing fake liquor labels and pasting them to recycled bottles, which they filled with corn alcohol and artificial flavors. They bought bulk alcohol out of the backdoor of Iowa corn-based distilleries that normally sold it to oil companies as a gasoline additive. They resold the rebottled booze to less-than-ethical alcohol distributors.
Their biggest problem, it turned out, was finding the bottles to hold the liquor.
