“I am. He won’t be with us. He’s out of sorts today, food poisoning, and tomorrow he’s flying down to New Mexico. He’s being deposed in a case down there.”
“That thing about the viruses? From last year?”
“Exactly. Federal court, they’re going for the death penalty. Gonna be a tough deposition.”
“Interesting,” Fisk said. “I hoped he’d be here. I’ve never met him, and I’d like to.”
“On stuff like this, there’s not really much for us to do. It’s mostly the lab folks, Linda Esselton, Carl Smith.”
Fisk looked at the two techs and said, “You might have a problem…we have been cleaning the heck out of the house the past two weeks. Getting ready to sell it. Timothy was talking about retiring and we’d been discussing the possibility of downsizing here in Minnesota and buying a place in Southern California. Santa Barbara, actually. He loved golf. Now, after…what happened…I’ve decided to keep going on that. I don’t want to be here anymore.”
She looked so downcast that Carl shuffled his feet and said, “It must have been awful. We’ll find something and we’ll try to be quick. Did he have a closet that we could look at?”
“We have a closet, but I got rid of his clothing. Everything. It’s all at Goodwill. They might still have some of it. A friend of his bought one of his cars, the other is still here…”
Linda: “Did you have separate sinks in the bathroom? A shower he routinely used?”
“Of course. Let me show you.”
“Thank you. And we’ll need a scrub from you, so we can differentiate your DNA from his. I’m sure you know all about that.”
“Of course.”
—
Fisk took themup the dark walnut stairs, through a series of rooms done in carefully coordinated shades of off-white accented with beige, to a bedroom with a walk-in closet showing a line of empty clothes racks on one side, and the other crowded with a woman’s clothes and shoes.
“I had professional cleaners in to do the floors and clothes racks,” Fisk said. “Anyway, Timothy’s clothes were all along here…” She waved at the empty racks. “He didn’t have much in the way of jewelry, but what he had…we have a safe in his home office, down the hall, and the watches are there…”
Linda said to Carl, “Why don’t I take a look at the jewelry while you check the bathroom.”
Virgil followed Carl and Fisk into an expansive bathroom with two sink basins, but no sign of a man’s presence. “All of his stuff…deodorant, lotion, shaving cream, razors…all gone to the trash,” Fisk said. “The left sink was his, I was on the right.”
“Let me take a look at the drains,” Carl said.
While he did that, Virgil followed Fisk and Linda down a hallway to Timothy Carlson’s home office, which featured a desk that must have been eight feet long and four deep. There were four shallow drawers on either side of the leg hole; the drawers were shallow because the back of both sides of the desk were actually concealed safes.
Fisk opened them both, but said one and a half of the two safeswere purely her things—necklaces, bracelets, rings, watches—while the top half of one side had a sparse collection of male jewelry, including four watches, a cuff, and two sets of tuxedo cufflinks and studs.
“Okay,” Linda said. “Let me settle in here for a bit.” She opened her briefcase and took out a box of full of sealed swabs.
—
They watched herunwrap the swabs, then Virgil asked Fisk, “Is there somewhere we could talk for a minute? I have a few questions about Timothy.”
“Sure. We could go back to the bedroom…there are comfortable chairs…”
They walked back to the bedroom, heard Smith making scraping noises in the bathroom, and then dropped into two matching easy chairs that faced a pair of queen-sized beds. As they sat down, two Jack Russell terriers jumped on the far bed and peered at them.
“They love to sleep with me,” Fisk said.
“I’ve got a yellow dog, does the same thing,” Virgil said.
Fisk smiled and said, “Can’t get through life without dogs…You know I’m a Ramsey County prosecutor, I assume?”
“Yes. I’m not sure, but you may have been an assistant when I was working with the St. Paul police. That would have been twelve years ago, or a little more. When I saw you at the door today, it kind of rang a bell.”
She shook her head: “That could well be true. I’m sorry, I don’t remember you. Of course, I’ve seen about a million cops since then.”
