Page 10

10

Amanda Fisk drove her silver Mercedes SL550 too fast through the gym’s curb cut, deliberately parked so the stripe for a parking space ran directly down the middle of the car: she hated door dings. Ding her doors and she might kill you.

She climbed out, brushed a cookie crumb off her blouse, and headed for the entrance. Fisk was of middle height for a woman, at five-seven, strongly built—Pilates three days a week, hard singles tennis two evenings. She had a straight nose and a long chin, gray-green eyes, thighs and calves beautifully rounded. She was naturally blond and pink-skinned, with hair falling down to her shoulder blades; Renoir (if he were still alive) would have given his left nut to get her as a model.

She pulled her sports duffel off the passenger seat, pushed through the gym door, waved her membership card at a card reader that beeped green and unlocked the interior door. Inside, she turned left to the women’s locker room, where one of her oldest acquaintances—not exactly a friend—was emoting.

Emoting had been on Fisk’s vocabulary calendar— displaying emotion in an excited or theatrical manner— so she had the word handy, and Rebecca Jones was definitely emoting.

Jones spotted Fisk and said, “Oh my God! Mandy! Have you heard about Bee?”

“Bee?”

“Bee! Those true crime people found a knife they say is the murder weapon, and it came from Bee’s cafeteria!”

On a scale of one to ten, Fisk’s emotional response ran from one to one-and-a-half. She said, “Really?” and used her key to open her locker.

“Doesn’t that freak you out?” Jones demanded. “Weren’t you there when Delores got murdered? There’s five million bucks on the line!”

“Doris, not Delores. And I was,” Fisk said. “I didn’t know the woman—she was a clerk and I was in the legal department.”

Jones, in her workout shorts and Athleta sports bra, innocent eyes wide, moved closer: “You must have known her at least a little .”

“Actually, no,” Fisk said, looking over her shoulder at the other woman. “We were all worried when she got killed, because we wondered if the killer might be somebody at Bee. The police were all over the place, but I guess they decided that she’d been hanging out with some rough people over on Hennepin Avenue. There’d been rumors that she’d been turning tricks for spending money. At the time, I couldn’t have told you what she looked like.”

“I read on True Crime Triple-X, about turning tricks,” Jones said. “I heard her twin sister is threatening to sue anybody who says that!”

“Then don’t say that; that’s my official recommendation,” Fisk said. Fisk was an assistant county attorney in the criminal division, which was appropriate, she sometimes thought, because technically, she was a criminal, even if never caught or convicted.

Other members of the Pilates class had been listening, and as Fisk began changing into her shorts and top, one of them said, “I didn’t know you worked there.”

“Right out of law school,” Fisk said. “A nightmare of unrelieved boredom and miserable pay. Quit, and never looked back.”

An older woman said, “Wasn’t there some other sex scandal over there?”

“There was, I guess, before my time,” Fisk said. “A gay thing, with the married CEO.”

“Wow. Doesn’t sound like an accounting firm.”

“Why not?” Jones asked, eyes even wider. “Sex stuff goes on everywhere. My sister is a schoolteacher, and you should hear the stories she tells. You know there are teachers’ bars, where teachers go to get drunk and laid?”

“Not in St. Paul…” said the older woman.

“Yes! Right here in St. Paul! You know what it’s called? Randy’s Brew House. Randy’s. Isn’t that a great tipoff?”

After some more chatter, Fisk said, “I’m gonna go stretch.”

—

Fisk had worked at Bee as a contracts attorney, and when she began looking for a way out, she was initially hired to work in the civil division of the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office. Within a year, the county attorney shifted her over to the criminal division, where she quickly became a star. She never met a rapist she wasn’t willing to burn at the stake.

When she finished her workout—she didn’t look like it, but she was a brute, who absolutely murdered the kettle bells after the tough Pilates session—she called the office and told her immediate subordinate that she’d hurt her knee at Pilates. She’d talk to her husband about it, probably get a knee brace of some kind, and would be late getting back to work.

That done, she drove home to her pale-yellow mansion on St. Paul’s fashionable Summit Avenue.

Fisk had two dogs; or rather, her husband did. Jack Russell terriers, who, if you didn’t know better, you might think were perpetually on doggy amphetamines. They jumped and yapped and ran in circles, and outside, in the fenced yards, chased blue-and-orange rubber Chuckit! balls with a manic intensity, to the amusement of the pair of Belgian Malinois that lived on the other side of the chain link. The Malinois, also known as land sharks, looked upon the Jack Russells as potential hors d’oeuvres.

If Amanda Fisk had had her way, she might have heaved the little fuckers over the fence—she identified more with the Malinois than with the Jack Russells—but her husband would simply have bought more, and if he’d found out what she’d done, would have divorced her.

The marriage had never been on solid ground, although they’d managed to hang together for twenty years. Both had an essential streak of cruelty—valuable to both lawyers and surgeons—which created an unspoken understanding that new partners might be hard to find.

On the other hand, while Fisk was forty-eight and might eventually find someone, Dr. Timothy (not Tim) Carlson had slipped past sixty-five, and if they split, he might have to go it alone, without half or more of their accumulated wealth.

Timothy.

Fisk got a green drink from the refrigerator, a special blend of alfalfa, artichoke, and spirulina, with dashes of ashwagandha, shiitake mushroom, and St. John’s wort. The drink may have counted for a certain level of her meanness, although she’d had a flinty soul from the time she was a child.

She sat in the breakfast nook, looking out the window at the city of St. Paul down the bluff, and thought about Timothy. She’d been thinking about him quite a lot the last two or three years. If there was one single thing about him that drove her berserk, it was the goddamn dogs.

—

Timothy had to be in the operating theater at six-thirty most mornings, leaving the house at six o’clock. He was up at five o’clock, efficient in his morning routine, showering, shaving, popping his blood-pressure pills, eating a breakfast of granola and orange juice while checking stock market futures and the Wall Street Journal . He’d be done with all that by five-forty, and then he’d go out in the back with the goddamn dogs and he’d bounce a Chuckit! ball off the back of the house so the dogs could do their acrobatic midair catches, thrilling both Timothy and the dogs.

It was the irregular thump of the ball against the house that drove her to the edge, and now, probably, over it. Thump! Thump-thump (both dogs!) Thumpity-thump! (Long pause; was he done?) Thump! No, he wasn’t. This went on for twenty minutes before he brought the dogs in and left for work.

—

Fisk finished the green drink, dropped the bottle in the garbage sack, walked around the dogs, who were ricocheting through the kitchen, got kitchen gloves and a sponge mop from the laundry cupboard, duct tape from the junk drawer in the kitchen, and the orange-and-blue Chuckit! ball launcher. The ball launcher was a plastic arm little more than two feet long with a cup at one end to hold a Chuckit! ball. Using the launcher, Timothy could heave a Chuckit! ball fifty or sixty yards through the air.

Wearing the gloves, she taped the ball launcher to the end of the mop handle and carried the handle and four Chuckit! balls up to the bedroom and out onto the narrow balcony, the dogs following behind. They were curious little fuckers.

There was a three-foot-wide sharply slanting eave under the balcony, meant to shelter the first floor’s yellow siding from rain stains, with a gutter at the edge of the eave. Fisk reached through the balcony railing with a Chuckit! ball in her hand, put it on the shingles and let it roll down to the gutter. When it got there it was moving so fast that it shot off onto the backyard’s flagstone patio.

Okay, that didn’t work.

She looked left and right, but unless somebody was hiding in a hedge, nobody could see her. She extended the sponge end of the mop over the railing until it was flat on the shingles, then stooped and put a ball behind the sponge head. Leaning over the balcony, she eased the ball down to the gutter, and then into it.

Good. She added one more, then left the mop handle, with attached ball launcher, on the balcony, checked left and right again, and closed the balcony doors and told the dogs, “Shut the fuck up.” Finally, she went into her closet and dug out a knee brace, in case anybody at the office was solicitous about the injured extremity, pulled it on, and headed back to work.

—

The thing about Timothy.

Though they’d never spoken of it, Fisk knew, of course, that Timothy had been the last male to deposit DNA in Doris Grandfelt’s waiting vagina. She also knew from reading the now-online Grandfelt investigation files that they did not have hers, from the cut on her hand.

Timothy hadn’t murdered the woman, but if his sexual contact with Grandfelt became known, he most likely would be charged with murder, in her legal opinion. He also certainly knew that.

From a nonlegal point of view, Timothy’s legal jeopardy wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. Much worse, it might impoverish her . Fisk’s work as a prosecutor covered their basic expenses for any given year, while Timothy’s money bought the house, the cars, and stacked up a tidy amount in two different wildly successful hedge funds. He’d been doing that since the ’90s.

From the outside, they looked small rich; from the inside, they were wealthy. A lot of that money would go away if he needed high-end legal talent to defend him in a murder trial, especially if that trial was followed with a lawsuit by Grandfelt’s still-surviving parents.

(Fisk was familiar with a Twin Cities murder trial story in which the accused, a wealthy woman, had asked the Cities’ best defense attorney how much of her fortune he’d take if she hired him. He’d replied, “All of it.” Fisk believed the story to be true, because the woman had been acquitted and wound up living in a mobile home.)

Alternatively, if neither of the criminal or civil trials took place, and Timothy wasn’t around to get his DNA tested, their accumulated fortune could be used to sustain quite a nice lifestyle on, say, the island of St. Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

—

Timothy got home between three-thirty and four o’clock on most days. Amanda got home between five and six. When she got home that night, he was in the kitchen and had just finished microwaving fast-food onion rings.

They didn’t usually speak much, but this evening, she said, “You gotta come up to the bedroom and see what those goddamn dogs did.”

“They’re not goddamn dogs,” he said, taking a bite out of a hot onion ring.

“Yes, they are, you gotta come up and look at this…”

She’d gotten up, she told him, at her usual time of seven-thirty. Because it looked like a nice day, she’d opened the balcony doors, and the little fuckers had rolled Chuckit! balls between the balusters that supported the railing. The balls were now stuck in a gutter.

“I tried to get them out,” she said, “but I couldn’t reach them. I could touch them, but not get them in the cup…”

At the balcony, she showed him the mop handle with the attached launcher arm. “See if you can reach. It’s supposed to rain and this is the gutter we had the problem with.”

He should have thought about it, but instead, he popped the last of the onion ring, took the mop from her, and bent over the balcony railing, reaching far over for the balls. When he was fully extended, she grabbed his belt and the back collar on his jacket and heaved him over.

Timothy screamed, “No!” and then he was gone, the scream truncated as he hit headfirst on the back patio, fifteen feet below the balcony. Fisk left the balcony doors open, and said to the bouncing dogs, “Go find Timothy! Where’s Timothy?”

Out the back door, the dogs rushed over to his body, for a body it was: he’d crushed his skull and broken his neck, Fisk thought. She knelt beside him, careful not to get her pants in the widening pool of blood. She could see some brains, she thought. She hovered, just to make sure, and when satisfied that he was gone, she went back inside to call 9-1-1 and to start practicing her grief.

The grief would be a stretch for her, because Amanda Fisk was a psychopath, and didn’t feel much at all about Timothy’s departure from this mortal coil. But, she’d pull something together, grief-wise.

And though she was a lifelong psychopath with a taste for fresh blood, Timothy was only her sixth kill, and possibly not the last.

Doris Grandfelt had been number three, and, so far, the most gratifying.

—

So the cops came, and then a medical examiner’s investigator, who looked at the Chuckit! balls in the gutter, and two more on the patio near the body. He had the body bagged up and sent to the morgue.

The cops, who knew who Fisk was, were sympathetic, but not too, because they’d seen any number of dead bodies, and as long as they, the cops, weren’t related to the body, they didn’t much care.

She was eventually left alone: she had no close friends who might be inclined to come over and sympathize with her. She spent time with a garden hose, washing blood off the patio. Blood, she found, was not easily rinsed out of flagstone. The goddamn dogs, for once subdued, sat and watched.

That night, in her bed—she and Timothy slept in separate queen-sized beds in the same bedroom; Timothy liked having the dogs on the bed with him, and she didn’t—she fell to sleep as quickly as she did on any other night, the dogs sitting on the other bed, staring at her.

Usually, she slept through dreams, and never remembered him. On this night, she kicked and twisted and sometimes groaned, and she remembered…

Don at the top of the stairs, on his way down, green plastic bowl in one hand, beer in the other. “I made some buttered popcorn for us. We can watch a movie.”