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Neither Virgil nor Lucas had mentioned to anyone outside the BCA that the knife found by the true-crimers was identical to the knives used in the Bee executive dining room at the time of Grandfelt’s murder. Nevertheless, all the major true crime blogs had the story within hours of the discovery, with Charles Light’s face smiling out at the readers, posed beside his metal detector.

Since the major media outlets were all monitoring the true crime sites, the news had gone everywhere by midafternoon.

“They were tipped off by somebody inside the company, or somebody inside the BCA,” Lucas said. Virgil was sitting across from him, stocking feet up on the desk. “Had to be one or the other—I didn’t see you making any phone calls.”

They were in a temporary office at BCA headquarters in St. Paul. “I suspect it came from here,” Virgil said, looking out the office window. “Not everybody here likes me and even more of them don’t like you. Somebody’s fucking with us, probably for their own amusement…though they’re taking a hell of a risk. They could get their ass fired.”

“Or it could have been from somebody at Bee. No way to know,” Lucas said. He was sitting behind the borrowed desk, going through the true crime sites in a desultory way, and had made notes.

He finished, and Virgil asked, “Well? Who put the word out first?”

Lucas looked at his notes. “Anne Cash. She’s the one who’s been ragging on us the most and she was the one who talked to the Star-Tribune , which is where the tipster probably got her name. She had the break about the Bee silverware forty-five minutes after we walked out of the Bee building, and thirty minutes after we got here and talked to Jon. The other sites copied her.”

—

They were still talking when Michelle Cornell called from the law office, and Lucas poked the speaker button on his phone: “Who found the knife?” she asked.

“Guy named Bud Light—real first name is Charles,” Lucas said. “I don’t know if it’ll lead to anyone, but if it does, he’s first in line for the money.”

“Is it going to lead to anything? Lara is excited,” Cornell said.

“We don’t know—we’d need to talk to people who had access to the dining room, and the BCA has sent some investigators over to start doing that,” Lucas said. “This is the first significant break they’ve had in twenty years, so they’ll hop all over it.”

“What are you guys doing?”

“Mostly listening to people talk,” Lucas said. “We’re supposed to be looking at tips and leads coming from you, and there haven’t been any—the BCA is doing the up-front investigation.”

“Everything I’m getting is crap,” Cornell said. “I don’t need your opinion to know that.”

“Thanks for being a filter,” Lucas said. “We both appreciate it.”

—

When Cornell rang off, Virgil took his feet off the desk and asked, “What are we doing?”

Lucas grimaced: “You know that big pile of shit we haven’t been reading?”

“Not that! All fourteen hundred pages of it?”

“Yeah. We’ve got to read it now,” Lucas said. “The whole drift has changed. I hope that knife wasn’t a plant.”

“Don’t see how it could be,” Virgil said.

“Neither do I.”

“But if it is a plant, the dishwasher did it,” Virgil said.

“Good thought, but unfortunately, it’s not a plant.”

They read the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening, and still hadn’t gotten more than a third of the way though the files. Virgil took a call from a TV reporter named Daisy Jones, saying that she was about to interview Charles “Bud” Light, and she would like a comment from Virgil. “I already got one from Lucas, and I’d like to get one from you, too. Lucas said it would be okay,” she lied.

“That’s weird, since Lucas has been sitting six feet from me for the last three hours and hasn’t taken any phone calls from TV reporters, including you.”

Virgil held his phone out and Lucas said, “Hey, Daisy.”

“Ah, shit,” she said. “Anyway, give me a comment, Virgie.”

“Okay, you ready?”

“I’m ready.”

“No comment,” Virgil said, and he hung up.

“We really ought to watch the interview,” Lucas said.

“Anything’s better than reading more of this,” Virgil said, dropping a sheaf of printouts on the desktop.

—

Daisy Jones had the best police contacts in the Twin Cities and a way with man-in-the-street interviews. She even liked the man in the street, guys like Bud Light, and they liked Daisy back.

Light had done everything but polish his bald spot and the thin brown hair around it may have been battened down with Vaseline, because it sparkled in the TV lights. He was wearing a blue blazer with an unfortunately red-striped dress shirt and clashing blue-green paisley bow tie. He’d worn steel-rimmed spectacles when Lucas and Virgil had talked to him, but he’d taken them off for the television appearance and was squinting at Jones.

He was good at being interviewed.

“I thought, okay, let’s think about this some more,” he said. “The body was back in the trees, but I’d gone over that scene inch by inch and didn’t find anything back there. Just outside the trees, where people walked, I found a nickel…”

Jones: “A nickel?”

“Yes. It was useless. It was a 1995, so it could have been dropped by the killer, but it could have been dropped anytime between ’95 and last week.”

“He’s quoting us,” Lucas said to Virgil.

“Without attribution,” Virgil said.

“…so I thought, where else would the killer have been? I decided he wouldn’t have driven across the ballfields, because people would have seen him doing that from the houses around the park,” Light continued. “More likely, he parked in the parking lot, and carried Doris Grandfelt’s body to the trees. She was a small woman, her body weighed ninety-two pounds according to the medical examiner, and so…mmm…it was estimated that she probably weighed a hundred and five pounds when she was alive. Something around there. She’d bled out, lost all her blood, and a typical woman has a little over a gallon of blood in her body.”

“How do you know all this?” Jones asked.

“Medical examiner’s report, which is online, and the blood part, I googled.” He seemed pleased with himself.

“Googled.” Jones looked faintly amused. “So you speculated that the killer carried Doris Grandfelt across the ballfields…”

“Yes. I thought, if he was in a big hurry, who knows what he might have dropped around the parking lot. I was right—except that he didn’t drop the knife, he hid it, by pushing it down into the ground. The butt end of the knife was a half-inch wide and no more than an eighth of an inch thick, so if you pressed it point down into the ground, nobody would ever see it. He was getting rid of evidence in case he got stopped by the police as he escaped the scene.”

They talked about the knife, and how Light had extracted it from the ground without actually touching it himself. “Like picking up doggy poop.”

Jones: “Doggy poop?”

“Yes. We had a plastic evidence bag and I put my hand inside it, grabbed the end of the knife, then folded the bag over it as I pulled the knife out of the ground. Sealed the bag, the knife untouched by human hands.”

“Smart,” Jones said.

“He’s really good at this,” Virgil observed.

“Everybody in America is good at it,” Lucas said, leaning his chair back. “Look at casual street interviews, or fan interviews after a game. Everybody knows what to do when you get a shot at being on TV.”

Jones said, “Well, thank you very much, Bud…”

Light: “Can I say one more thing? Might be important.”

Jones said, “Sure.”

“We’ve been talking this whole interview about the killer being male, calling him ‘he.’ I’m not so sure. If you read the medical examiner’s report, you see that Doris Grandfelt was stabbed in the back, just once, and that was fatal,” Light said. “The blade went into Doris’s heart. I believe that was the first strike, the first attack. I mean, after you did all the other knifings, more than twenty of them on the front of her body, why would you roll her over and stick her in the back, and only once? No. I think the killer came up behind her and stabbed her, and when she fell, did all the other strikes.”

“And you think a woman…?”

“Well, I think it could have been,” he said. “A man attacking a woman, especially if he’d raped her, would be facing her, wouldn’t he? He’d stab her in the throat or chest or somewhere on the front of her body, just like she was…”

“Maybe she tried to run.”

“Think about that,” Light said. “Doris is running away, it seems like somebody chasing her would be striking down at her, not straight in, like the medical examiner’s report says,” Light said. “That would be hard to do. I think the killer snuck up on her and stuck her. She never saw it coming.”

“I can see circumstances where she could be attacked from behind, and then turned…”

“So can I. Of course, I can,” Light said. “But a number of investigators thought that the sex she’d had was consensual—no sign of sexual violence, no vaginal tearing, just all the knife wounds. Wounds that appeared to be inflicted in a frenzy. Suppose she’d had sex with somebody, that last man who didn’t use a condom, and that guy’s wife stumbled in on them, and she’s the one who did it?”

“An interesting thought,” Jones said, not quite blowing him off. “I’m sure the BCA agents will take that into account as they press on with this investigation. I want to thank you…”

—

“That was an interesting thought,” Virgil said. “That it might be a woman.”

“Did you know that she’d been stuck once in the back and that was the fatal wound? Is that in the papers somewhere?” Lucas asked.

“I knew she’d been stabbed in the back, but I didn’t think about it,” Virgil admitted. “I knew she’d been stuck a lot, but I wasn’t paying any attention to which might have been the fatal one.”

“Let’s look.”

They went through the stacks of papers, found the ME’s report. “Sure enough,” Lucas said, when he’d found the right section of the report. “Once in the back, into the heart, and she was alive at that point.”

Virgil, feet back on the desk, pointed a yellow pencil at Lucas. “Okay, let’s suppose you’re the attacker. You’ve just had sex, you’ve ejaculated…are you going to be in a murderous frenzy? Usually, wouldn’t you be feeling pretty mellow?”

“Depends on the guy. Women get killed by guys while they’re having sex. Or maybe she wouldn’t do him a second time…”

“Thin,” Virgil said. “If she wasn’t up for a rerun, you’d think he’d try raping her before stabbing her, whatever it was, twenty-some times. There’d be some sign of an attempted rape. Vaginal damage, semen on her leg or wherever. Some defensive evidence, skin under her fingernails, blood in her mouth.”

Lucas nodded: “True, but you have to keep in mind that we’re dealing with somebody having a psychotic break. You can’t predict what the killer might do or not do.”

“Also true,” Virgil said. “But I’m thinking now we can’t take women off the table. I’m thinking sixty-forty the killer was male, but forty is a large number.”

“I’d agree, except for one thing: size ten-and-a-half Nike shoes,” Lucas said. “That’s a goddamn big woman, and she was wearing men’s shoes. Even goddamn big women wear women’s shoes.”

—

That evening, they took Weather to dinner. She disagreed with Virgil’s sixty-forty, arguing that it might be closer to fifty-fifty, a woman as the killer. “If you close your eyes and think about the totality of what was done to Doris, and how it was done…I can visualize a woman doing it, as much as a man. I think a man could have stabbed her, but I think he’d also batter her, and as I understand it, she wasn’t battered or choked.”

“A big woman, wearing those ten-and-a-half Nikes,” Lucas said.

“What about the man who discovered the body? What was he wearing while he was trampling around the scene?” Weather asked.

“He was eliminated—he was wearing eleven-and-a-half Adidas,” Lucas said.

“A smart woman, to get away with this without leaving a single clue,” Weather retorted. “She planned it all out, and very carefully. Nothing was spontaneous. You don’t know where Doris was killed, or exactly when. The killer didn’t leave any DNA, anywhere. The BCA didn’t recover a murder weapon, all they knew was that the killer used a knife of some kind. She must have scouted the dump site, must have known she’d leave footprints. Hence, the shoes.”

“I could use the word ‘hence’ in a novel,” Virgil said.

Weather: “Shut up.”

They talked about it for a while, then Lucas and Weather went home and Virgil checked in to the Radisson Blu Mall of America.

After dropping his luggage in the room, he walked down to the mall, to Barnes a man of any height at all, anything five-eight or taller, would almost always be stabbing downward, assuming an overhand grip on the knife. More sharply downward than Grandfelt had been stabbed.

A woman of average height or slightly shorter would probably have stabbed Grandfelt as shown in the diagram, at a much lower angle. A man or a woman stabbing with an underhand grip on the knife would almost certainly be stabbing with an upward motion…

“Holy shit,” Virgil muttered out loud. “It was a woman.”

That decided, he slept like a log until seven o’clock in the morning, when he got a call from the BCA duty officer, who knew a couple of things about a violent change in the direction of the case, but not much, and some of what he knew turned out to be incorrect. One of the things he got wrong was when he referred to Charles “Bud” Light as “Bug Light.”

Off the phone, Virgil called Lucas, who groaned and asked, “What now?”

“Somebody murdered Bud Light last night,” Virgil said. “I’ll pick you up in half an hour.”

—

Lucas walked down the driveway to Virgil’s Tahoe, looking sleepy, but otherwise sleek as a melanistic mink in black slacks, black jacket, and white dress shirt, with the top two buttons of the shirt undone. He made Virgil feel like he’d just fallen off a turnip truck.

“What the fuck is this?” Lucas asked when he got in the passenger seat.

“I don’t know,” Virgil said, as he pulled away from the curb. “I had two thoughts—the original killer is back, or one of the true-crimers is trying to eliminate the competition for the five million. Then I had a third thought…”

“Which was?”

“He was staying at the Wee Blue Inn,” Virgil said. “Could have been a routine bump and run that went bad.”

“The place is a shithole,” Lucas said. “I went there once to talk to a guy who’d bought a boom box we were looking for, and we were sitting in the café and a cockroach crawled across the table. You know, like it was a pet.”

“Whatever. One more thing: the original killer was a woman,” Virgil said.

“Tell me,” Lucas said, and Virgil told him.

“I’m not a hundred percent on that, but I’ll go to fifty-fifty like Weather was arguing for,” Lucas said. “I don’t think a woman would have thought of those shoes. Some things are just too smart.”

—

Four cop cars, a crime scene unit, and a medical examiner investigator’s car were parked sideways in the Wee Blue Inn’s parking lot, behind a half block of yellow crime-scene tape. A small but growing crowd of true-crimers were gathered on the civilian side.

The Wee Blue Inn had once, long before, been a bad supper club on St. Paul’s east side, later converted to a motor-hotel, as the sign outside still read, with an eight-table café at the far end of it. The café came with a beer license, which kept it solvent. A long, low, narrow building, the inn had a rounded roof, like a Quonset hut. The exterior was covered with rough, dirty, once-white plaster that reminded Lucas of a Dutch painting he’d seen in one of Weather’s art books.

Virgil had been there a number of times as a St. Paul detective, usually for an assault or rape, but never for a murder. He and Lucas got out of the Tahoe and slipped under the tape. Anne Cash, who was in the crowd, yelled at them—“Marshal! Flowers!”—but they ignored her and walked up to the open motel room door where the cops were clustered.

A BCA agent named Carroll Bayes was standing exactly in the doorway and Virgil, coming up behind him, said, “Move over, C.”

Bayes, a tall man wearing a straw-colored Panama hat, looked over his shoulder and said, “Hey, Virgie. Not much to see.”

“Got to look anyway,” and Bayes made room for Virgil and Lucas.

Light was lying flat on his back, arms stretched out to the side. He was wearing knit pajama bottoms and a white V-neck tee-shirt with a slash of blood down his face and onto the shirt. Another small pool of blood had collected under his head. Virgil and Lucas could smell it, the sticky raw meat odor.

They could see blood trails down the side of Light’s face; gravity pulling the blood down through surface veins when the heart stopped beating. If Light looked like anything, he looked sad, rather than angry or frightened.

A St. Paul detective was talking to a medical examiner’s investigator, and they both nodded at Virgil and Lucas.

Lucas said, “Not shot.”

“No. Looks like he was hit hard with something that had a corner,” Bayes said. “A club of some kind. Busted his skull. The blood on the floor is coming out of the head wound—he was hit from behind. His wallet is down on the bedstand, wasn’t touched: I could see the corner of a twenty.”

“No weapon?”

“Haven’t found anything. Looks like he was eating dinner, there’s a plastic bowl with a little chili in it,” Bayes said. “Somebody came in, maybe he knew whoever it was, he turned his back…”

Virgil asked, “Who found him?”

Bayes turned to the parking lot and nodded at a couple of uniformed cops talking to Dahlia Blair. “His partner, name of Dahlia Blair. I understand that you guys met her. The victim worked for her…more or less worked. She didn’t pay him, he wasn’t an employee. He’s retired, former post office employee. He volunteered to come along on her investigations. ”

“We saw him on TV yesterday, on Daisy Jones’s talk show. Talking about the knife he found.”

“Really,” Bayes said. “Does that go anywhere?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Is Blair staying in the same room?”

“No. She’s down at the other end. She says she walked down here to get him this morning, and the door was open an inch or two. Blood on the inside doorknob, like maybe he tried to get away from whoever hit him,” Bayes said. “Anyway, when she knocked, the door moved, and she saw a foot. That’s what she says. No video cameras on the motel. They have enough trouble here that they don’t want to provide evidence against their customers and maybe have to go to court.”

“You think she might have done it?” Virgil asked.

Bayes said, “She’s on the list, but she didn’t do it. We’ll talk to her some, but, no. She’s harmless.”

“All right,” Lucas said. He and Virgil had both known Bayes for years, and he was competent. Lucas took a last look around, and said to Virgil, “Let’s go talk to Dahlia.”

—

They stepped away from the door and Virgil paused, looked left and said, “Lara Grandfelt.”

“That’s all we needed,” Lucas said. Grandfelt was behind the crime scene tape with Wise, her personal assistant. “We should talk to her first.”

They went that way, told a cop on the crime scene tape to let Grandfelt and Wise through, and took them far enough into the parking lot that the true-crimers couldn’t hear the conversation, although they were making movies.

Grandfelt said, “I guess it’s true? One of the true crime people is dead?”

“Clubbed to death, it looks like, murdered,” Lucas said. “Seemed like a harmless guy. He’s the one who found the knife yesterday.”

“So my reward wound up getting somebody else murdered,” Grandfelt said. She wanted to hear a denial.

She didn’t get it from Virgil, who said, “Maybe. We don’t know much yet.”

Grandfelt turned away from him, staring at the cops around the motel room door, and then said, “I never wanted…”

“We warned you that people could get hurt,” Lucas said. “Now, somebody has. There’s a possibility that he was killed by an addict or a robber, but he had money that was easy to see and it’s still there.”

“Oh, God. Oh…God.”

“We don’t have anything more to tell you at this point,” Lucas said. “We won’t be running the investigation, that’ll be the St. Paul cops, with the BCA looking in because of the connection to your sister’s murder.”

“Should we stop this?” Wise asked.

“That’s up to you,” Lucas said. “The discovery of the knife and now the murder are shaking things loose. We might actually be able to find out who killed Doris, if this murder was done by the original killer. But…who knows?”

Virgil plucked at Lucas’s jacket sleeve and said, “Let’s go talk to the witness. Miz Grandfelt, we gotta put you guys back on the other side of the line.”

They did that, and Grandfelt and Wise headed for a waiting car, some of the crowd of true-crimers hurrying after them, cameras up.

—

As they walked toward Dahlia Blair, Lucas asked quietly, “Do you know what a shotgun mike is?”

Virgil half-turned, then shook his head. “Ah, shit.”

“Yeah, when I saw it, I thought, Is that a suppressor? It wasn’t,” Lucas said. “But it might have been pointed at us when we were talking to Lara.”

—

Dahlia Blair was a thin, tense brunette with short-chewed nails. She kept reaching two fingers toward her lips like she’d quit smoking the week before. Lucas knew both of the St. Paul cops who were with her, and they said, “Lucas,” and “Big guy.”

Blair was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and kept rubbing her arms and said, “You know what I can’t get over? Charles didn’t have anyone. No one. No brothers or sisters and his parents are dead. He was never married. He was like a lonely little church mouse. There’s no one in the world who will…will, you know, mourn for him, except me and a couple other people who didn’t…pay much attention to him.”

She rubbed her arms and finished: “I don’t know.”

“Where were you overnight?” Virgil asked.

She pointed: “Down there. Last room.”

“From what you said before, you and Charles didn’t have a relationship,” Virgil said.

“No, no, not at all. He’s from the same town I’m from,” Blair said. “We’re from North Platte. Nebraska…it’s…Ah, jeez.”

Tears trickled down her cheeks and Virgil asked, “How did you wind up here? I mean, at the Wee Blue Inn?”

“Cheap,” she said. “What with gas and everything, from North Platte, we didn’t have much money for other things. Charles used to deliver my mail before he retired, that’s how I knew him. He thought I was kind of a big deal because I’ve got sixteen thousand followers on my blog, but I’m nothing like Anne Cash. All the money I make barely pays for the Wi-Fi. I thought this could be my big break and Charles wanted to come along. He was lonely, I guess, and he had the metal detector and I thought what the heck…”

“Why do you think…” Lucas gestured toward the room where Light was killed.

“Oh, it’s definitely linked to the Grandfelt murder, one way or another.”

“Why do you think that?” Virgil asked.

“Didn’t that other officer tell you? Officer Baily?”

“Bayes.”

“Bayes,” she said. “Didn’t he tell you about the tip?”

Lucas and Virgil looked at each other, and Virgil asked, “What tip?”

“Somebody called Bud yesterday evening. Six o’clock or so, after dinner. At McDonald’s. Said he had important information that would lead to the killer. Bud asked the guy why he was getting the call, and the guy said because he’d seen Bud on TV with Daisy Jones. He looked at our site and found our phone numbers. We listed our phone numbers for tips.”

“What was the tip?”

“The man didn’t say. He asked if we got the money, if we’d share it, and if we would, if we could keep his name out of it. Bud told him we could try. The man said he had to think some more and would call us back this morning. Bud told him to call either one of us and he said he would. He hasn’t.”

“Did you actually hear the call?”

“Yeah, I was sitting right across the table from him in McDonald’s, he put his phone on speaker.”

“And you told all this to officer Bayes?” Lucas asked.

“Yes, all of it. Why didn’t he tell you?”

“He told us to talk to you—I guess he wanted us to hear it firsthand,” Virgil said.

“If this guy calls you back, don’t mess around,” Lucas said. “It might be messing around that got Bud killed. Call us. Immediately.”

Virgil: “Did you see anything at all that worried you last night? See anything that, you know, might give us something to work with?”

She ticked a finger at him and said, “Yes! I told the other officers. I saw a white SUV three times, and it looked…” She straightened and said, “Like that one!”

She pointed at Virgil’s Tahoe. “That’s mine,” Virgil said.

“Well, it looked like that…kinda.” She was peering at Virgil’s truck. “But yours isn’t really white, is it? It’s more cream color. This one was white-white, like a business panel van, but it was big like yours, not a small SUV. We were coming from the park and I saw it behind us, and then when we got into town—we weren’t familiar with St. Paul so we got off at the wrong place and went across a bridge into downtown and had to circle back—and I saw it again, and I didn’t think anything about it, then. But then it passed us, I think it was the same one, when we got here. I was in the parking lot and saw it go past, and that time, I remembered the other times, and I thought, That’s odd. Maybe somebody was following us to see where we were going, or maybe if we had contacts with the police or something. I didn’t see it after that.”

Virgil: “You didn’t see any license plate numbers…”

“No.”

“You think whoever it was might have seen which rooms you went in?” Lucas asked.

“I don’t know,” Blair said. “After the call from the tipster guy, we came over here and checked in, and I wanted to talk to the desk clerk for a minute about possible…amenities…and Charles went down to his room by himself. The last time I saw him was when he walked out of the motel office. Just his back. I didn’t even say good night because I was talking to the clerk. About amenities.” She looked at the motel and said, “I’m such an idiot. We were lucky we got hot water.”

—

When they’d finished talking to Blair, they walked back over to Bayes and Lucas asked, “You bag his phone?”

“Yup. It’s on the way to the lab. The St. Paul guys got the incoming, but it was incoming from Caccamano’s pay phone.”

Lucas: “The restaurant? Down on Seventh?”

“Yeah, they actually got a coin-op pay phone, down a hall, around a corner by the back entrance,” Bayes said. “St. Paul is telling me they haven’t found anyone who saw a guy making a phone call there last night. They’re still looking.”

“Have to be a regular, to even know the phone was there,” Virgil said.

“They probably got five hundred regulars and a couple of thousand casuals, and nobody knows anybody else’s name. So…”

Lucas said, “I eat there occasionally. I’ve seen a camera by that back door, coming in from the parking lot.”

“There’s a camera, but it’s on the wall above the phone, and it’s pointing at the door,” Bayes said. “Doesn’t pick up phone users at all.”

“That’s convenient,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. That was our big hope, for a while,” Bayes said. “We still got a chance. It was raining pretty hard at the time of the phone call, lot of people coming in from the parking lot. Trouble is, most of them were wearing hats and rain hoods…might ID a few of them. The phone call only lasted for about a minute and five seconds, so…the guy wasn’t on the phone long.”

“Fingerprint on the coin? There couldn’t be many people using the phone.”

“Coins have been bagged. That’s our other big hope.”

They talked for a few more minutes, and Lucas looked at Light again. He was still dead. “Didn’t bleed much,” he said.

“Looks to me like he was only hit once,” Bayes said. “Maybe the killer didn’t actually mean to kill him.”

“Dahlia told you about the van?”

“Yeah, St. Paul’s got two guys walking the street, looking for cameras. Nothing yet.”

They left Bayes in the doorway, and Lucas said, “We should get out of here. All these cameras and microphones are making me nervous.”

“I want to talk to Blair again. Just take a minute.”

Virgil spotted her on the edge of the crowd, waved her under the tape, and he gave her his business card. “My personal cell phone number is on the back. I want you to post it on your site—ask the tipster to call me.”

“Fat chance,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, but it’s a chance,” Virgil said.

She said she would do it right away. They put her back under the tape and walked over to Virgil’s truck.

“You’re gonna get a million crazies,” Lucas said.

“It’s my backup phone. Basically a burner. I can throw it away when the case is over.”

“Huh. That’s not bad. Maybe I’ll get one myself.”

“What now? BCA?” Virgil asked.

“Let’s get some coffee, so we can think.”

—

They wound up in a Caribou Coffee in downtown St. Paul, got a coffee for Virgil and a hot chocolate for Lucas, sat at a table where Virgil asked the key question: why would somebody risk murdering a man who seemed like a nonentity? It wouldn’t be the tipster—the tipster wanted to use Light, not kill him.

“I can see three motives—probably the same ones you see,” Lucas said. “And they are…”

Virgil considered for a moment then said, “One: money. He was the leading contender to get the five million. Somebody killed him to eliminate competition for the money.”

“That’s one,” Lucas said.

“Is this an IQ test? If it is, I can think of four possible motives. So, two. Despite appearances and what Dahlia Blair said, Bud actually had a little more on the ball than people knew. Maybe the tipster called him again, and something was said that gave away an identity. Bud stupidly makes a call to the wrong person—the Grandfelt killer.”

“That’s two. We don’t have to worry about that one, because the BCA has his phone.”

“Three: his murder has nothing to do with anything,” Virgil said. “He was in a bad motel that was used by druggies and street people. Somebody tried to rob him, he fought back, and got hit with a stick or a club of some kind but didn’t go down completely—he crawled at least as far as the door. Rather than fight someone who might fight back, or even scream—and maybe he did scream—the killer ran.”

“That’s my three,” Lucas said. “What’s your fourth one?”

“He’s a true-crimer with a metal detector. What if there’s something else out there? In the park? What if Doris’s killer knows he—or she—lost something during the attack, and doesn’t know where, but it could be used to identify him? A cuff or a ring or something. Or maybe Doris had something he gave her, and when he tried to find it on her body, he couldn’t.”

“Nah,” Lucas said. “That’s too TV.”

“Yeah, you’re right. Forget it.”

Lucas took a sip of his hot chocolate and squinted out at the street. The street was empty, a concrete canyon. He said, “I don’t like the money motive much. Those women are a little goofy and very competitive, maybe even money-hungry, but I don’t think they could do that.”

“You haven’t met them all,” Virgil said. “You haven’t even met very many of them.”

“True. Still. I don’t think any of them could do that. They’re a bunch of slightly barmy ladies. And I don’t think it’s Grandfelt’s killer. How would Grandfelt’s killer even know about a tip? Even if he did know about it, how would he know how to find Bud? And I have to think that whoever killed Grandfelt would be a lot more lethal than going after a guy with a club.”

“A club’s quiet,” Virgil said.

“So’s a hammer or a knife or an axe,” Lucas said. “Kill him with one whack, Lizzie Borden notwithstanding.” After another moment of silence, he continued: “Street people, a junkie, a robbery…A meth freak is a possibility. Maybe the strongest. But that’s not what we’re doing. Right now. You and I.”

Virgil leaned into the table. “I don’t see us investigating Bud’s murder at all. St. Paul and the BCA got the troops, and we’re supposed to be on the Grandfelt cold case and watching the true crime people. I read the interviews with Stephanie Brady…”

“Who’s that again?” Lucas asked.

“Didn’t spend enough time with the paper, huh?” Virgil asked. “She’s Grandfelt’s last roommate. I’d like to wring her out. See if there’s anything that got missed.”

“That’s a thought,” Lucas agreed. “Something else. When you look at these true crime sites, they’ve got a lot of readers. The readers are out there doing their own research, and they’re kicking into the whole online discussion. That could be a resource for us. I’d like to get together with the owners of the biggest sites, see if we could set up something.”

“Resource for what?”

“Like they could go through a zillion old newspaper and magazine stories, look at pictures and hook people together and see who was talking to who, way back then. Look for Doris. The ’net was already getting big back then. I know AOL was around in the nineties…”

“Not a bad idea,” Virgil said, “But when and where? We don’t want them all, that’s a three-ring circus.”

“I sort of hate to suggest it, but the kids are still at summer camp and Weather’s working until late in the afternoon. We could meet at my place.”

“Dahlia Blair isn’t one of the bigger ones, but she knows them all,” Virgil said. “We could ask her to organize it.”

“There’s one other thing that I’d like to look at,” Lucas said. “Your BCA guys should have a list of every single person who had access to Bee’s executive dining room. Including the cooks and the dishwasher guy. I’d like to see the list in case it rings any bells downstream.”

“I’ll get it,” Virgil said. “In the meantime, the true-crimers and then the roommate.”

—

Virgil went out to Dahlia Blair’s website, which was headlining the murder of Charles Light, found her telephone number, and called. She was still at the motel and said eight or ten true-crimers were still there, including Anne Cash.

“Where’d everybody go?” Virgil asked.

“Scattered around. Some went over to the park, they’ve got two metal detectors now. Some other ones went over to Bee, to see if they could catch employees coming out.”

“Stay there. We need to talk to you and Cash. Separately from the others.”

“I’ll tell Anne, though I don’t like her very much. She doesn’t like me, either. We stole some of her readers when Bud found the knife and then got killed.”

—

There was still a small crowd of true-crimers and a few locals watching the crime scene processing when they got back to the motel. They pulled to the side of the street, and watched as Blair nudged Cash, and the two women started walking over.

Lucas dropped the passenger-side window and when they came up, said, “Hop in the back.”

They did, and Cash asked, “What’s up?”

Virgil said to Lucas, “You talk.”

Lucas: “Most of the true crime hints and suggestions are going through Michelle Cornell. She’s supposed to filter what we get from you guys, find anything that might be good, and send it on to us.”

“We know all that,” Cash said.

“Shut up and let him talk,” Blair said.

“You shut up!” Cash snapped back.

“Both of you shut up,” Lucas said. “Michelle hasn’t sent us one thing that even remotely seems to be a possibility—she hasn’t sent anything that we haven’t thought of, or the BCA hasn’t investigated already. You guys might be a resource for us, but the present arrangement isn’t working. We’d like to get the biggest website owners together at my place this afternoon. Talk about what you could really do for us, and what we could do for you.”

Blair said, “A lot of us don’t get along that well. We’re competitors.”

“You could tamp down the competition if we gave you big sites an equal edge against all the little ratshit sites that are starting up,” Lucas said. “I looked and there are about a thousand of them.”

Cash said, “I’ll talk.”

Blair said, “I’ll come, but I don’t think I’m staying here. After Bud.”

“Everything you do here, you could probably do from your home,” Lucas said. “Standing around behind the police tape isn’t getting you anything.”

“Pictures. On-the-scene commentary,” Cash said.

“All right. But. If you’d be interested in doing this, we don’t want a crowd, because a crowd is impossible to talk to. We’d want the owners of five or six of the biggest sites…”

Blair and Cash looked at each other, then Blair said, “Ruby Weitz is here. Karen Moss.”

“Sally Bulholtz,” Cash said. “Everybody else is small.”

“Mary Albanese,” Blair said. “She was here this morning for a little while, I think she went over to the park.”

“She’s smart, she’d be good,” Cash said. “She used to be a professor or something.”

Virgil had been making notes and he said, “That’s six, including you two. That’s about all we can handle. Could you guys get them together?”

“They’ll jump at it,” Cash said. “Where do you want us to come?”

Lucas gave them his address, and said, “Don’t pass the address around. I’m nervous giving it to you two.”

Cash popped the door on her side and said, “We’ll see you there. Three o’clock.”

—

When they were walking away, Virgil said, “Let’s go find the roommate. Brady.”

“The BCA should have an address for her,” Lucas said. “Make a call.”

In the truck, Virgil called Jon Duncan and got Stephanie Brady’s address, workplace, and phone number. When Virgil called her, she said her office was on the south side of St. Paul, near the airport, and that she was eating lunch across the street. She’d be back in fifteen minutes.