“Let’s just say that I wouldn’t necessarily believe everything that Amanda tells me,” Baer said.
“Okay. Thanks, Doc.”
“Don’t call me Doc. You’re not Bugs Bunny, and I’m not Elmer Fudd.”
Virgil called Dahlia Blair and said, “I have another search, if you guys could do it.”
“What?”
“I need to find out when Timothy Carlson got married to Amanda Fisk—whether it was the year Doris was murdered, or the year after.”
“Do you know where he was married?” Blair asked.
“Here, in Ramsey County.”
“Okay, that should be easy. But everything is going to be closed in a few minutes, so it’ll have to be tomorrow.”
“That’s soon enough,” Virgil said.
24
Amanda Fisk saw the DNA samplers out the door, with Flowers a step behind. She thought about Flowers: he was a convivial sort, easygoing, friendly, either naturally or because he’d consciously trained himself to be that way. She recognized it from other detectives she’d worked with over the years, the better ones. They could talk with anyone and get their suspects talking back.
If you were a criminal—Fisk didn’t usually think of herself that way but recognized that technically she was one—talking was one of the worst things you could do. Talking with anyone, but worst of all, a detective.
She’d talked a little too much with Flowers, she thought, though she couldn’t actually pick out any missteps. But she’d been talking. And Flowers was smart. She’d done a search of his name, and learned that he was not only known for his detecting abilities, he wasa bestselling novelist and a magazine writer. Two of the articles she’d found mentioned he was known in law enforcement circles as “that f*ckin’ Flowers” for his unusual insights and nonstandard investigative procedures.
After brooding for a while, sitting alone in the big house, Fisk got up, went to her home office, brought her computer up, and began browsing the true crime sites. The true-crimers were still hunting down the men shown in Grandfelt’s last photos.
And she stumbled over the link between the true-crimers, Flowers, and Timothy. Timothy had been recognized in the old photograph by a man who was apparently suffering from dementia. Flowers had interviewed him, and after he’d left, one of the true-crimers had spoken to the man’s daughter, who confirmed both that her father had recognized Timothy, and that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease.
Reacting as a prosecutor, she would not want to put a demented man on a witness stand to confirm a key piece of information. On the other hand, that’s not what Flowers was doing—he might not know whether or not the demented man’s information was accurate, but it was enough to get him in the house, and a DNA match would stand by itself.
They wouldn’t get a match from the hair in the sink, which came from an anonymous donor at a St. Paul barbershop. If they became suspicious of the negative result on the hair, they could go looking for another sample. That might take them to Timothy’s clinic office, but that office space was shared, so there’d be massive amounts of contaminating DNA, and she’d already collected and disposed of all the personal clothing and equipment he’d kept there.
But the threat remained. Why would anyone be suspicious of the negative DNA result taken from a man’s own sink? Most cops wouldn’t be—but Flowers might be.
From what had become her compulsive reading of the true crime sites, it appeared to her that Flowers was leading the investigation. Davenport had been mentioned in the early days of the investigation, but after that, Flowers had come to the fore. Now, Flowers himself had said that Davenport was off in New Mexico.
If she could interrupt the rhythm of the investigation, perhaps get Flowers diverted to something else, a new man brought in, someone more conventional, someone more likely to take any DNA results at face value…
How to do that without bringing attention to herself?
—
Virgil felt hewas working a couple of angles that could actually produce: the DNA samples, the various bits of research being done by the true-crimers, including the Carlson-Fisk marriage date. At the same time, it wasn’t what he wanted to do. He wanted to work on the novel. He wanted to do it badly enough that he’d begun to worry about his driving. He’d get in his truck and start off for somewhere, but then he’d start thinking about the novel, and later find himself at his destination without really knowing how he’d gotten there.
He was not, he thought, “in the moment,” as the Buddha might have recommended.
He had a laptop with him, but not a printer, and he really needed to see the book on paper, so he could pencil-edit. With the DNA results not available until next week, he decided that if nothing newcame up, he’d go home on Friday afternoon and stay through the weekend, and maybe even take three days off.
—
He’d miss Lucas,for as long as Lucas was gone. He and Lucas thought about the world in different ways. Lucas had the ability to pick up on small, insignificant details in an investigation that were out of sync with how he thought the world worked, and more often than seemed likely, the insignificant turned out to be critical. Virgil tended to think in more global ways, like painting a picture, putting together colors and shapes until he could see an image emerging from the chaos.
And he was starting to sense something. The shapes and colors were coming together. George Baer, for instance, had suggested that Tina Locklin would have had one difficult problem to solve in planning the murder of Grandfelt, if it happened at Bee: how would she get into the building? How would she get a key?
He could think of ways, but they were all complicated and improbable. If Carlson was meeting Grandfelt on a regular basis, at Bee, which seemed improbable all by itself, Locklin might have followed him and perhaps seen him use a key to get into the building…and somehow might have gotten his key and copied it…
