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Roger Jepson got hit in the mouth by a squirt of transmission fluid, wiped it away with a shirt sleeve, spitting, got some blue paper towels to mop up around his chin and neck. Nobody laughed, because it had happened to all of them, and it wasn’t that funny. Jepson went into Loco’s restroom, washed his face with the gritty yellow soap that was all they currently had, looked at his wet face, neck, and tee-shirt in the mirror, and said, “Fuck it.”

Five minutes’ research on the office computer got him the number of the biggest true crime site working the Doris Grandfelt murder, along with the phone number of a woman named Anne Cash.

He went back outside where one of the other employees was drinking a beer and said, “Roy, borrow me your phone. I gotta make a call.”

Roy was sullen, as always, but not a bad guy. “Use your own phone. I ain’t got the minutes.”

“I’m not gonna make a call. I’m gonna record one I’m making on my own phone.”

Still grumbling, Roy fished his phone out of a pocket and handed it over.

Jepson set the phone to “record,” tested it once, then reset it to record and called Anne Cash.

Cash answered, sounding harried: “This is Cash.”

“I got the biggest break in this murder case. I want a piece of the reward, if you get it,” Jepson said.

“How do I know you’re not some retard wasting my time?” Cash asked.

“I was just interviewed by two cops named Davenport and Flowers and they went tearing out of here like their asses were on fire. That interest you?”

Empty air, then: “Tell me. You get a chunk of anything we get.”

“I want more than a chunk,” Jepson said. “I want at least fifty-fifty when this upsets the apple cart.”

“We’ll see. What is it?”

“I’m recording this call, you just said I’d get fifty-fifty.”

“No, I didn’t. I said, ‘We’ll see.’ That’s not a promise.”

“Fuck it, then. I’ll call somebody else,” Jepson said. “There are lots of you people. What I got is killer.”

Cash said, “Okay. Fifty-fifty of what we get, if this leads to something.”

Jepson told her everything he’d told Lucas and Virgil, and when he was done, she said, “Holy crap. You sound for real.”

“Yeah. When I was on your website, I seen you put up the cops’ phone number. Call and ask them. Ask the Virgil guy. What I told you is the whole truth.”

“Okay, I’ll do that for sure.” Now she sounded excited. “I got your phone number. What’s your name? And gimme a little background on yourself. This will blow the whole investigation sky-high.”

—

Cash called the number Virgil had given Blair.

Lucas picked up the phone from the truck’s center console, looked at the screen, let it go to voicemail. Anne Cash with a short message: “Call me. Now. Important.”

He did, and asked, “What?”

“Is this Davenport? I want to talk to Flowers. I need some answers from him.”

“What’s the question?” Virgil asked, as Lucas held the phone up.

“Did you interview a man named Jepson who told you that Doris Grandfelt was selling sex at a bar in Minneapolis? A place called the Lite House?”

Virgil: “We can’t talk about our investigation at this point.”

“So you did.”

“We cannot talk about our interviews,” Lucas said. “I will tell you, if you go with this, you could get sued by Lara Grandfelt.”

“We’re not talking about Lara,” Cash said. “She sues me, it’ll keep the story in the news for months, and in the end, she’ll lose out.”

“We won’t say anything more,” Lucas said. “We can’t. We don’t know any Roger Jepson.”

Cash laughed out loud and said, “I didn’t call him Roger. So you know him and you talked to him—and you just confirmed it. See you in an hour. Goodbye.”

She rang off and Virgil smiled and said, “Shit storm.”

“Every time I work with you, I’m amazed by your treachery,” Lucas said.

Virgil: “Me? You’re the one who said ‘Roger.’ Made me laugh.”

—

Lucas tidied up the family room and brought two chairs in from the study, while Virgil lay on a couch, talked to Frankie and then the twins, checked an online newspaper, plugged in headphones and listened to Bob Seger songs.

The true-crimers arrived in a scrum. Lucas sat them in the family room and brought in glasses and a jug of lemonade. Dahlia Blair: “You have a grand piano.”

“My wife’s,” Lucas said.

“Still. This is quite the house.”

Cash said, “This is quite a house…for a cop.”

There was a tone to the comment, and Virgil said, “Lucas is rich. Started a computer company back around the time Doris was killed and made a huge wad of money. Also, his wife is a plastic surgeon, and she makes a huge wad of money every year. So they’ve got lots of wads.”

“And you’re still a cop?” Cash said, with a slightly different tone.

“I like shooting assholes,” Lucas said. “Everybody got a lemonade? Anybody want a mint leaf?”

“Do you have any mint leaves?” Ruby Weitz asked.

“No, but I thought it’d be polite to ask.”

Ruby Weitz was a tall, square woman with hair that was neither red nor purple but something in between; Karen Moss had narrow rounded shoulders and blond hair with a gray streak down the part; Sally Bulholtz was short, dark-haired and -eyed, and was wearing a tennis hat that read “Quiet Please” with an embroidered tennis ball bouncing above the words; Mary Albanese was owl-like, pale, with big glasses and dark hair pulled back in a bun. They all had spiral notebooks or legal pads and pens.

Cash asked, “What’s up?”

Lucas explained that the officially routed information coming through Michelle Cornell was basically static, and that he and Virgil were not well coordinated with the investigation being done by the BCA. “We’re supposed to be doing something entirely different, and the BCA guys sort of resent us sticking our noses in. We’ve decided we need a new tactic.”

Moss: “That’s us?”

Virgil: “Yes. You guys can do things that the BCA really can’t, and Lucas and I can’t do on our own. We need to use your brighter readers and researchers to hit public information sources looking for anything that might…mmm…be useful.”

“Any online newspapers you can find, public records, that sort of thing. Virgil has a list of all the employees at Bee Accounting back when Doris Grandfelt was murdered. We want to run down everything we can find on all of them. We also have a BCA list of the people they contacted during the investigation. We want those run down.”

“We also want somebody to check the newspapers for unsolved murders for a few years before Grandfelt was murdered, looking for similar unsolved murders,” Virgil said. “Stabbings, and now with Bud being murdered, people who were beaten to death. It’d probably only be the Star-Tribune , they’ve got everything online. If there’s a subscription fee, we’ll pay it.”

Virgil told them that he suspected the body had been dumped in the park because the killer was intimately familiar with it. “Did he come from that neighborhood? Run all the names we’ve got, and that we’ll get, against property tax records back around the time Grandfelt was killed.”

“That’s a lot of work,” Bulholtz chirped.

“Yes. Guess who’ll be in line for big payoffs if you come up with something,” Lucas said. “Your researchers could have fun with it. This is, like, a real criminal investigation.”

Virgil looked at Cash: “Did you put up anything on Jepson yet?”

“I wrote it and sent it off to one of my editors to look at. She might have put it up—if she hasn’t, it’ll be soon.”

The other women demanded to know what that was about, and Cash said, “Don’t tell them—yet. Let me check and see if we got it up. “

She pulled out her phone and fifteen seconds later she was reading the site: “Yep, it’s up,” she said. To the other women, “Read it and weep.”

They did, and that touched off angry arguments, which Virgil shut down: “You’ll all have it up in fifteen minutes anyway.”

“Yeah, but she got the headline on FirstStabAtIt,” Albanese said. “Not fair.”

“Fair is something losers whine about,” Cash said.

“You’re such a bitch,” Weitz said.

“Everybody shut up,” Lucas said. “Listen to me: Virgil and I are the referees for this whole reward business. If you find anything, we want to know about it. If anyone else gets a tip from an anonymous source, we want to know about it. If somebody does and they don’t tell us, and we find out, they’ll be automatically banned from any reward and I will personally arrest her—or him—for interfering with a police investigation.”

Weitz: “When will we get the names?”

“If you agree to this, you’ll have them before you get back to your cars. Leave your emails with Virgil, he’ll send them to you.”

“And I’ll give you all a piece of information that nobody has leaked yet,” Virgil said. “It appears that the knife was sharpened immediately before the murder, not with a whetstone or knife sharpener, but on a piece of red stone or red brick. Reddish grains were found in the sharpening grooves at the point of the blade. Bee is a redbrick building. So is the bar that Doris may have been going to. Does it seem likely that a Bee executive—only the executive dining room had metal silverware—would try to sharpen a knife on a brick? Maybe he did. Then again, most of the buildings down there, in Lowertown, are redbrick, and it was also a hangout for street people. Addicts, mentally disturbed guys, like that. We’re wondering…anyone down there make the papers for violence involving knives?”

“Lots of street people have knives,” Albanese said. “Maybe most of them. But would they have a car to take the body to the park?”

“Good point, but who really knows?” Virgil said. “The particular kind of knife found by Bud might be one of the most common knives in the whole country. I’ve got no idea how many cafeterias and restaurants must have been using them back when Doris was murdered.”

Lucas: “So you see why we really need to crowdsource this case, looking for information. I don’t know how you could do it, but maybe you could find out what other places used those knives back then. Virgil will send you the exact model.”

They talked for another fifteen minutes. At the end, Virgil took a deck of business cards out of his pocket. “The cards have my direct number. For my real phone. The top is an office number, and you won’t get far with it. If you have a legitimate tip, or a real need to reach me directly, use the second number. Don’t burden me with bullshit or silly questions—this is for real information.”

—

Late that afternoon, Amanda Fisk paused in the process of arranging her husband’s funeral to check the major true crime sites, found several that claimed the report on AnneCashInvestigations was completely spurious, while others hinted that Cash’s information was probably good, but she must have slept with the witness to get it.

Fisk went to the site and found a story about a man named Roger Jepson, an auto mechanic at a place called Loco’s Body no shoes, please.”

That’s because she knew, from an acquaintance, that the shoes’ next stop would be a dumpster, and from there, a landfill; but somebody at Goodwill might remember nine pairs of good shoes, if the cops should go looking for them.

She’d get back to the dry cleaners the next day and drop the clothes off at another Goodwill store, near the house; dry cleaning fluids were generally good at destroying DNA and sending them twice through baths of tetrachloroethylene should get rid of all of it, if the cops should ever go looking for the clothing. As a newly bereaved widow, she simply couldn’t stand to look at Timothy’s clothes hanging in the shared dressing room…

Still sitting at the drop box where she left the shoes, she rubbed her forehead: getting rid of all of Timothy’s DNA might be impossible, but she wouldn’t make it easy for anyone looking for it. She’d soaked the dogs’ collars in rubbing alcohol, then washed them with soap. Timothy watched television from a special recliner chair, and she’d dumped the chair and bought a similar used one from a high-end used furniture dealer all the way across town in Minnetonka.

She’d cleaned the drains in the shower and poured Drano down the trap of the sink he used. She collected all his hats, bagged them, and threw them in a garbage can at a shopping center. Everything he touched got soaked or wiped with heavy-duty household cleaner, including all three of his Rolex watches, his shirt studs, and a turquoise cuff he’d bought in Colorado.

What had she missed? She’d worked sixteen hours a day, getting rid of every trace of him, in the house, in the cars, everything.

And in two days, she’d have at least a hundred people wandering through the house, at the memorial service, leaving behind copious amounts of their own DNA, further confusing things for any possible investigators.

Most likely, none of that work would be absolutely necessary; but she was psychotic and driven and so she did it anyway. She’d keep doing it, over and over again, until any possibility of investigation was gone.

A car drove in behind her at the drop box. She glanced in her rearview mirror and pulled away.

She was on her way home when she passed the strip mall and saw the red, white, and blue barber pole on the outside of one of the storefronts. The idea rang in her head like a bell. She slowed, turned into the parking lot.

She had the idea, but how would she pull it off? She got out of the car, walked over to the barbershop, and went inside. There were three chairs, but only one barber; and the barber was sitting in one of the chairs, reading a free newspaper. He looked over the paper, pushed his eyeglasses up with an index finger, and asked, “What can I do you for?”

“Do you give haircuts to children?”

“Sure…if they’re old enough to sit still.”

“He’s seven,” she said.

“That should be okay.”

“Would it be all right if I sat in that chair for a minute?” she asked. “I want to see what he would see, if he could see himself in the mirror. He’s sort of…a sissy. He’s afraid of things. If he could see himself in a mirror…”

“Go ahead,” the barber said.

Fisk climbed into the chair and spun it around until she could look in the mirror. The barber moved over behind her. “That’s what he’d see.”

“I’ll talk to him. Would we need a reservation?”

“Does it look like he’d need a reservation?” he asked.

Fisk glanced around the empty shop, smiled, and said, “We’ll drop in.”

“Do that. We have a special rate for kids.”

“Higher or lower?”

He smiled at her—she was being a little flirty. “Lower,” he said. “Come back. Anytime. With or without him.”

As she was on the way out, the barber said, “Oh, hey—you got some hair on your jacket sleeve.”

She looked and said, “No problem. I’ve got a tape roll that will take it right off.”

In the car, she carefully picked a pinch of gray hairs off her jacket and rolled them up in a piece of notebook paper.

Now: new mattress to buy. Jepson to think about.

Busy, busy, busy.

—

Lucas and Virgil said goodbye to the true-crimers and hello to Weather, who said she was going back out with a neighbor to a Pilates class. She changed, came down to say that their daughter had called from summer camp to say that she could extend for a week and take the trail riding option. “I told her I’d call her back after I talked to you.”

“Horse riding is dangerous,” Lucas said. “I’d worry.”

“Ah, trail riding in a summer camp is not going to be dangerous, not any more dangerous than walking around in St. Paul,” Virgil said. “If you could see Frankie and her horses, you’d say yes.”

“That’s what I think,” Weather said.

Lucas shrugged: “If you all say so.”

Weather left, and they went to the den, where they called up Anne Cash’s website and read the Jepson story. She’d spoken directly to Jepson and had a recommendation for all the other true-crimers: track down all Lite House employees from the early 2000s and interrogate them on the Grandfelt prostitution allegation. Find the names of her customers.

“All good.” Lucas tapped the screen with a greasy finger. “She’s offering to cut people in on the reward. I bet she breaks some loose.”

They were in the family room with the television on the local Channel Three, but muted, when the doorbell rang.

“Better not be Cash,” Lucas said. He went to a window and peeked out past the blinds. “Aw, shit; it’s Lara Grandfelt. Bet she heard about Jepson.”

“All part of the shit storm, man,” Virgil said. “Let her in.”

—

She came in, trailed by Wise, her assistant. Lucas pointed to easy chairs, but Grandfelt stayed on her feet, distraught, crying, which made the two cops feel a little bad, but not too.

“She was a prostitute,” she cried, tears running down her cheeks. “My sister…”

“Was more like an escort,” Lucas said. “Not a prostitute.”

Grandfelt looked at him with anger in her eyes: “Yes? Would you care to explain the difference? Men paid her money for sex.”

Virgil said, “Still…a prostitute, a hooker, generally will take on all potential customers, unless there’s something obviously wrong with him…or her. That’s always dangerous. Doris was more what we’d call a party girl—she’d go out dancing with these guys, and some she’d go home with. Not all of them. Most of them, but not all, would give her money. I mean, they’d say this was a gift, not a payment. That makes both sides feel better, even if it doesn’t seem like much of a difference to you.”

“Then how did she wind up with someone who murdered her, if they were just out dancing?” Grandfelt asked.

Virgil looked to Lucas, who said, “That…we don’t know. This man, this bartender, told us he was careful about who he recommended. Plus, if he knew she was going out with a particular…man…and she turned up murdered the next day, he said he would have gone to the police. And honestly? We believed him. He said she hadn’t gone out with anyone that night, that he knew of. So she was seeing men that she picked up on her own, or former acquaintances. And, I suppose this is a possibility, she was simply going somewhere and was attacked.”

Grandfelt shook her head: “You know that isn’t true, Lucas.”

“Why do I know that isn’t true?”

“Because of the knife,” Grandfelt said. “The knife that killed Doris came from the place that she worked. We need to track down every man who worked there, when she died, and do DNA.”

Lucas shrugged and nodded, conceding the point.

“The DNA search is underway,” Virgil said. “Before the knife was found, the BCA didn’t have any direction to go. They tested some of the men at Bee, but not all. They’ll get as many of them as they can now, but it won’t be perfect, unless they find him. The knife came from the executive dining room, and a lot of the men who had access to it were older—in their fifties and sixties. Several of them are dead.”

“Shit. Shit-shit-shit,” Grandfelt said. She took a turn around the living room, touched the passive Wise on the shoulder. “What happens next? You start hunting down her…dates?”

“If we can,” Lucas said.

“You don’t seem to be doing much right now,” she said, looking around the living room. “You’re eating potato chips.”

“Waiting for another interview, tonight. We’re seeing a woman who might have some information—and some of it might go to Doris’s dates,” Lucas said.

“Who are you interviewing?”

“Can’t say,” Virgil said. “Or won’t say, take your pick. Way too much stuff is leaking out to these true crime sites. But we are seeing someone. The possibilities are thin, but they’re still possibilities that nobody has looked at yet.”

Grandfelt scratched at her lower lip with her upper teeth, then said, “Okay. I have to trust you. This Anne Cash woman…she’s vicious.”

“She is a trial,” Lucas said. “But really, if she’s vicious, she’s yours. This whole thing is not our idea, it’s yours.”

“But we’ve actually turned up new evidence,” Grandfelt snapped back. “Opened up a whole new path of investigation. Not Anne Cash: you two. And this Bud Light.”

Lucas said, “I’ll give you that. It’s possible that we’ll actually catch Doris’s killer; or if he’s dead, identify him.”

Grandfelt turned down the offer of a lemonade or potato chips, and after another minute of meaningless conversation, she and Wise walked out.