“I will do that.”
“Uh, I have some more news—I’ve gotta go out to New Mexico, to Santa Fe. I’m being deposed in the virus case, the murders. I’ll be gone for a few days. Leaving tomorrow afternoon, so…you got it.”
“A few days? What’s a few days?” Virgil asked.
“A few days,” Lucas said. “They’re talking about the depositionhappening on Friday, but it’ll probably slop over until Monday, so I’ll be there over the weekend. I’m sorry, but I gotta go.”
“Will Letty be there?” Letty, Lucas’s adopted daughter, was an investigator for the Department of Homeland Security and had worked the virus case with Lucas.
“No, she’s already come and gone,” Lucas said. “She was deposed a couple of days ago. Anyway…”
“I’ll hold the fort,” Virgil said.
—
Lucas thought aboutgetting something to eat, because he was both sick and hungry. When he stood up, he got dizzy, so he sat back down again. His phone rang, an unknown number, and when he answered it, “Hello?” a man said. “This is Big Dave.”
“Hey, Big. We’ve got a question. The guys who hung around with Doris, were any of them doctors? As far as you know?”
“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think I met anyone who said he was a doctor, but it was a long time ago.”
“All right. Listen, you want to tell me your real name?”
“Not yet. How’s the money thing coming along?”
“I think you may be in line for a chunk of it, but we’d need your real name, of course.”
“Send the bat signal up when you know for sure, and I’ll call you back.”
“I will do that.”
—
Two BCA techswere sitting in a car on the street outside the Carlson/Fisk house when Virgil arrived and pulled into the driveway.They were finishing Subway sandwiches and Cokes, and Virgil waited while they tidied up the wrappers and crusts and put them in a sandwich bag, which they threw into the back seat.
He’d worked with both of them before—Linda Esselton and Carl Smith. Both were easy to get along with, and competent.
“Nice place,” Smith said as they climbed the front steps. He asked Esselton, “What do you think? Buck and a quarter?”
“Maybe a little more,” she said. “Depends on what’s inside.”
“You going for a real estate license?” Virgil asked.
“My husband does custom cabinetry,” Esselton said. “I’ve been in a lot of places like this. Mostly over in Minneapolis, or out on Minnetonka.”
“Wouldn’t have painted it yellow, myself,” Smith said, as he pushed the doorbell.
—
Amanda Fisk answeredpromptly, a solid-looking blond woman, pretty in a hard way, intelligent eyes: but she didn’t look good, Virgil thought. She looked ragged, tired, stressed, as she probably should, a couple of weeks after her husband died in an accident she’d witnessed. Her eyes seemed to be glittering with tears.
And now the same husband was being investigated to see if he might have paid for sex with a woman who he might have murdered immediately after the sex.
She didn’t bother to smile, but said, quietly, “Yes, come in, please.” To Virgil: “You’re Agent Flowers?”
Virgil nodded. “Yes. Thanks for letting us do this. We’ll try not to bother you any more than we absolutely have to.”
“I admit that it doesn’t make me happy, but it is what it is.” Shelooked past him to the street. “I understood you were working with Marshal Davenport.”
