“Yeah. We’ve asked you to look at murders in the metro area reported in theStar-Tribune. How is that going?”
“My group is looking at that,” Albanese said. “So far, there aren’t too many that meet your criteria, but there are some. I’ll send them over. We started in 1990 and we’re up to 2012. The problem is, the reporting can be thin on murders outside of Minneapolis. We have names and addresses and that sort of thing, but not always exactly what happened, unless the person was stabbed or shot.”
“How many cases so far?” Virgil asked.
“Including all the questionable ones—we’ve marked those out—we have forty-two in the twenty-two years. The ones we think are specifically good, we have twelve.”
“Send them to Virgil,” Lucas said. “Now, how many of you guys have…assistants, or colleagues, or whatever you’d call them, here in the Twin Cities?”
Between the six of them, they had eight associates in town.
Moss: “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m going to talk to the CEO at Bee. I’d like to send a group of people over to their offices, and have people get down on their hands and knees in all the offices with redbrick walls and have them looking for whetting marks. Sharpening marks.”
The women looked at each other, and Weitz asked, “Could we film them doing that?”
“Don’t care,” Lucas said. “It’ll get out one way or another. If they find anything, they have to back off and call me immediately and we’ll get some CSI people over there. But don’t do anything until I talk to the CEO and give you the go-ahead.”
Moss: “I can ask my friends to do that…”
They talked—argued and speculated—about what else might be done, then Lucas pushed them to get more serious about the research.
“Yeah, we’ll push, but this is pretty boring work,” Cash said.
“Pretty boring until we nail the guy,” Cornell said. “Then it’s going to be a five-alarm fire. You’ll be the most famous true crime bloggers on earth.”
As the meeting was breaking up, Blair asked, “So we can post the Marcia Wise murder? Tell us what happened and how you found out.”
Lucas gave them some details, asked that they not be attributed to him or Virgil, and they all left in a rush.
21
When the true-crimers were gone, Lucas and Virgil picked up glasses and carried them to the kitchen. Cornell, who was not in a hurry, followed them and asked, “Are you guys going to sit on your thumbs and wait for the returns to come in?”
“We’ve got a couple of irons in the fire,” Virgil said. “We don’t want to talk about them, no offense.”
“If you’re not going to tell me about them, I want my legal pads back,” Cornell said. “And my pens.”
When Cornell had gone, Lucas asked, “What irons do we have in the fire?”
“The guy who tipped us about Jepson. We need to put up a note and have him call us, and we need to talk to Jepson again, about doctors. We should have done it before now, but we’ve been running around.”
“We really ought to talk to everybody we’ve identified as Doris’s customers and ask about doctors.”
“Of course, we might be a little overfocused on the doctor thing,” Virgil said.
“I know that, but what else have we got? I should talk to Maggie, see if the Minneapolis guys came up with anything.”
“A license plate would be good,” Virgil said.
Lucas frowned: “I don’t think we’ll get one. The way Doris was killed, the way Marcia Wise was killed—fast, efficient, brutal, without a trace of him. The killer is no dummy.”
“You’re right. Think about that while I send a note to Dahlia Blair and have her put up a note to Big Dave.”
—
While Virgil wastyping on his iPad, Lucas’s phone rang. He took it out, looked at the screen: “Michelle Cornell.”
