Page 14

14

Stephanie Brady poked her head out her door, eye-checked Lucas and Virgil, and said, “Come in. I hope you’re not allergic to cats.”

They weren’t, and a good thing: four cats, three tabbies and one black as Satan, were either already in the living room, or came strolling in, to inspect the visitors. The house was neat, with minimalist furnishings and a complete lack of knick-knacks. Through a doorway, they could see a kitchen and a man standing by a counter, with his back to them.

“Let’s do this in the kitchen,” Brady said.

They went that way, trailing her, and the man turned to meet them; he’d been eating a bowl of cereal while he looked at a laptop. He was thin, balding with a modest brown mustache, wearing a yellow Miles Davis tee-shirt. He had a glass of milk in his hand. He said, “Hi. I’m Dan Peltz, Stephanie’s husband.”

They shook hands and Brady said, “I’ve got the picture box on the table…I just got home. I didn’t have time to sort the photos, we can do that now.”

The kitchen smelled like cereal and toast and milk, with a faint, but not subtle, odor of cat pan. A brown cardboard box sat in the center of a hardwood table with four chairs around it. One of the cats jumped up on the table, looked in the box. Peltz picked the cat up and dropped it on the floor, where it landed as soft as a sponge.

The box, twenty inches wide and long, and a foot high, with a lid, looked like it might once have contained a cowboy hat. The interior was half-filled with a pile of photographic prints, most of them four by six inches, a few smaller, some larger. They looked like they’d been machine-printed at Walmart or Target.

A small Canon 35mm film camera sat beside the box. Brady picked it up and said, “This is my old camera, but I hardly used it—Doris used it last. I noticed there’s still a roll of film inside. The film probably isn’t any good anymore. It’s been in there for twenty years.”

“Where’d you keep this stuff?” Lucas asked.

“Well, at the apartment. Not in Doris’s room, where everything else was. Because, the camera was mine. The box was in the hall closet, on a shelf, where we could both get it when we wanted it. When the investigators went through Doris’s stuff, I never thought about the box,” Brady said. “I stayed in the apartment until I met Dan and never touched the box until we moved here. Then, this was like six or seven years after the murder…”

“Seven,” Peltz said. He took a sip of milk, leaving a rim of white on his upper lip. He licked it off. He was a type that Lucas found irritating: he was satisfied with who he was and what he had, and always had been. No tread wear on Dan. “Almost eight.”

“I didn’t think there’d be anything significant in it after all that time,” Brady concluded.

“The BCA has a photo lab contact who might be able to save the film,” Virgil said. “I’d like to take the camera with me. If we get prints of you, or people you know, we can return them to you.”

“That’d be fine, but I can’t hardly remember using it,” Brady said. “I don’t know when phone photos started. When they did, which I think was a little after Doris was killed, I started using my phone and never looked back.”

—

She set the camera aside for Virgil, reached into the box, pulled out a handful of photos, shuffled through them, and dealt a half dozen out to Lucas and Virgil. “That’s Doris in the photos. They’re not very good.”

The photos were faded, the color gone blurry, as if they hadn’t been fixed very well. But they could see Grandfelt as she’d been when she was alive, and her pretty pale face showed the kind of sad defiant vulnerability that both Lucas and Virgil recognized from the faces of women they’d known who sold sex.

They divided up the rest of the box between the four of them, and in the end had a stack of photos of Grandfelt, including twelve with several different men. The photos were poor enough that they were unable to decide how many of the twelve were actually of different men, and how many might be duplicates. With one exception, all the photos were taken in or outside of bars. The exception was a photo taken at Bee Accounting, of Grandfelt and a man standing next to a coffin-sized Xerox machine. Brady recognized the man: “That’s George McCallan. I don’t think Doris would have had anything to do with him. He was obnoxious and he smelled funny. You notice that they don’t look especially happy.”

Lucas spread the other eleven photos like a tarot spread: “You don’t recognize any of these guys? You’re sure?”

“I don’t. None of them worked at Bee. Like I said, I didn’t go to clubs very much. Except, you know, for Prince,” Brady said. “Doris went three or four days a week, Wednesday or Thursday, then always on Friday and Saturday for sure. She liked to get high and she liked to dance.”

“Alcohol, weed, coke?” Virgil asked.

“All of that, I think,” Brady said. “I talked to her about it, but she said she was okay. She never bought any drugs, she said, sometimes she used when somebody gave her some. I told that to the investigators.”

“How many nights a week didn’t she come home?” Virgil asked.

“Oh, she stayed out late, but she always came home. Late, I mean, two or three o’clock. A couple of times, the sun was up, but she always showed up.”

Lucas: “Worse for the wear?”

Brady nodded: “You could say that. Especially if she’d been out on Wednesday or Thursday, and had to go to work the next day, and then went out Friday and Saturday. On Sunday mornings she’d look like she’d been in a wrestling match. That ‘Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down’ song…”

“Johnny Cash,” Virgil said. “Kris Kristofferson.”

“Yes. Those. I could see that song in her.”

“Did you know she might have been getting paid for sex?” Lucas asked.

She shook her head: “It never occurred to me. She was like the classic good girl. She’d even go to church sometimes. I thought she was having a good time, and if she slept with someone, it was part of that, having a good time.”

Lucas: “You didn’t think much about it.”

“It’s not like we were living in the 1950s,” Brady said.

“Huh.” Lucas picked up the photos and said, “We’ll let you know about the camera.”

—

Outside, Virgil said, “You know, there’s probably a fast way to find out who the guys are, in those photos.”

“I don’t like what you’re about to say,” Lucas said. “But I agree.”

“I don’t like it either,” Virgil said. They walked farther along the sidewalk, until they were under a streetlight. “If we post the pictures to the true crime sites, or if somebody does…we’d crowdsource their identities. I don’t know any other way to do it. We’d probably know some of them by noon tomorrow.”

“We’d take some shit,” Lucas said.

“So what? The people who’d be giving us shit are the same ones who twisted our arms to do this.”

Lucas thought it over, then said, “We could give them to Dahlia Blair, if she’s still here. With Bud Light dead, she could use the break.”

—

Dahlia Blair answered the phone, but said she was planning to go back to South Dakota in the morning. “I can’t deal with this. I’m kind of scared—if they murdered Bud, are they coming after me? I’ll take your pictures and post them, but I’m so unhappy I can barely get off this bed. I shouldn’t have come. We shouldn’t have come.”

“You can’t predict what will happen when you start messing around in situations like this,” Lucas told her. “None of us could have predicted this.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know,” Blair said. “It’s all fun and games until somebody gets hurt. I’ve heard that phrase a hundred times. My dad would say that when me and my brothers would be fooling around on the farm. I never thought about what it really meant. This was supposed to be fun and maybe some money.”

—

In Virgil’s truck, Lucas put the photos on the center console one at a time, illuminated with his iPhone flashlight, and Virgil used his iPhone to take pictures of them and texted them to Blair. She called back to say that she’d have them up on her website in half an hour and they’d be everywhere by morning.

“People will do screen shots, trim them, and put them up as their own,” she said.

“Dahlia, you know we’re sad about Bug, but…there’s a good chance that the BCA and the St. Paul cops will track down the killer,” Virgil said. “Maybe it’ll be Doris Grandfelt’s killer, and there’ll be some money in it.”

“I don’t know if I’d want it anymore,” Blair said.

When they ended the call, Lucas said to Virgil, “You called him Bug.”

“No, Bud.”

“I know it’s Bud, but you called him Bug.”

“Ahh…shit. I think a cop called him Bug and I picked up on it. I’m tired of this. Why don’t we both quit and do something else?”

“I’ve thought about it, and I know why I won’t quit. I still get a thrill out of chasing assholes,” Lucas said. “Of course, I’m not chasing buck-toothed shitkickers around pig farms for banging their sisters. Like you.”

“I’ve only been on a pig farm once, and not for that,” Virgil said. “But I gotta admit, you just gave me the theme for another novel.”

“You know what I’m saying.”

“I’ll take you home now.”

—

After dropping Lucas, Virgil went back to the hotel, set up his laptop, and started working on the novel. His first three books had been praised for the realism of the murder scenes. That was because the murder scenes were real, or mostly real scenes he’d seen and worked himself.

Building a story around the scenes was an entirely different process—creation rather than recall. The problems with creating the stories ate at him—kept him up at night, as his law enforcement chores no longer did.

He was still at work on the book, at eleven o’clock, when Carroll Bayes called. “I knew you stayed up late. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“I’m up for another hour,” Virgil said. “What’s going on?”

Bayes was still the lead BCA agent on the Charles Light murder. “People were screaming their heads off about the Bud Light murder. All those true crime sites, the TV stations. The ME, you know, wanted to look good, so he got right on it. He called me about half an hour ago. One of his assistants had looked at some blood tests and called him with the results. Richardson suggests that we not talk so much about murder. It might not have been one.”

Darrell Richardson was the county medical examiner.

“What’s that? He’s saying it’s not murder?” Made Virgil stand up.

“Well, mmm…Look, do you know how to make crappy chili taste better?”

“Chili? What are you talking about, C?” Virgil asked.

“It turns out that you can make cheap, crappy chili, the only kind you can get at the Wee Blue Inn, taste better by dumping in a scoop of peanut butter. Light had a plastic bowl and a plastic spoon sitting on the room table, mostly empty, but with some of the motel chili still left,” Bayes said. “One of the blood tests suggests that Light was suffering from a massive anaphylactic shock, and it killed him. He apparently had a serious peanut allergy. He carried a card saying so and had a box of EpiPens in his suitcase.”

“He was hit. His skull was cracked…” Virgil started.

“His head was cracked, and he bled some, but he probably wasn’t hit,” Bayes said. “When the tests results started coming in, the doc sent an investigator back over to the Wee Blue Inn, to look around. She found that the bed had one of those cheap steel bed frames, and a corner of the frame was sticking out an inch or so at the foot of the bed. There was a dark sheet over it, so no blood was visible, but the corner of the frame fits the wound on Light’s head. They missed it the first time around. The thinking now is, he gobbled down the chili, laid down, felt the allergic reaction coming on, panicked, got out of bed, staggered, fell, and hit his head. He didn’t actually crack his skull. Didn’t die immediately. He probably knocked himself out, at least for a few seconds, and the anaphylactic reaction killed him. The blood trail to the door could have been an attempt to call for help.”

“Why didn’t he inject himself with the EpiPen?”

“I dunno,” Bayes said. “Maybe because he was messed up. Concussed, not thinking straight. His suitcase with the pens was on the other side of the bed, so…”

“Wow!”

“It’s not for sure, yet. Richardson has some more chemistry to do, but that’s the way they’re headed.”

“Thanks, man. Jeez—that’s something. I’ll tell Lucas.”

—

As long as he’d been disturbed, Virgil didn’t see any reason why Lucas shouldn’t be, and he knew Lucas was a night owl anyway. He called, and Lucas picked up on the first ring.

“What are you doing?” Virgil asked.

“I was watching West Coast baseball. You think of something?”

“Not exactly. I did get some interesting news…”

—

The next morning, Lucas walked out to Virgil’s truck and got in, shaking his head: “Peanut butter allergy?”

“I’d laugh if I didn’t feel so sorry for the guy,” Virgil said, as they rolled out the driveway.

“The weird thing is, his getting killed got us some breaks,” Lucas said. “Where’d we be if he hadn’t got killed?”

“Okay. What are we doing this morning?”

“I got a call from Mitford. That guy running for office, the one Jepson mentioned?”

“The one named Stan?”

“Mitford thinks it’s a guy named Stanley O’Brien, who ran for a seat in the legislature, the state house. He actually won and served four terms. Mitford said he quit to join a lobby group and moved on to a couple more after the first one. He’s currently the director of the Minnesota Small Manufacturers and Assemblers Association.”

“Here in St. Paul?”

“Right across town. They’ve got an office on University, a couple of blocks from the capitol.”

“We should drop in,” Virgil said.

“I looked at the biggest true crime sites, they’ve all got the photos,” Lucas said. “You heard anything from the BCA about that?”

“Not yet, but I will.”

“I suppose.” Lucas yawned, covered his mouth with a fist. “What happened with Brady’s camera?”

“Nothing, yet, it’s still on the back seat. I called Jon and he says he’ll get the film guy working on it. We should swing by the BCA and drop it off.”

“After Stan.”

—

The Minnesota Small Manufacturers and Assemblers Association offices were in a redbrick building among a bunch of other redbrick buildings squeezed between parking lots north of the capitol. Most of the offices were occupied by lobby groups of one kind or another. The MSMA offices were on the fourth floor behind an oaken-look door.

They pushed through and found themselves standing in front of an unoccupied receptionist’s desk. A chime had tinkled overhead as they walked in, and the receptionist showed up a few seconds later, hurrying around a privacy wall that blocked the view to a hallway of offices in the back.

The receptionist looked from Lucas to Virgil and a “cop” light went on in his eyes. He asked, “Can I help you?”

Lucas produced his marshal’s ID and said, “We’d like to speak to Mr. O’Brien.”

“We have two Mr. O’Briens…”

“Stanley O’Brien,” Virgil said.

“He’s not in his office, he’s in the back…”

“Well,” Lucas said, “show the way.”

—

The receptionist did, but not enthusiastically. “We’re actually having our morning warm-up right now. It’s an informal chat that we do every morning…”

He ushered them into a back room where four men and a woman were standing around with golf putters, one of them lining up a putt on a ten-foot-long putting carpet. The room had a lunch table, a refrigerator, a dartboard, and a couple of four-top tables with chairs. The man making the putt ignored the opening of the door, but pulled the putt to the left when the receptionist said, “Uh, Mr. O’Brien…”

O’Brien turned, irritated, but snapped his mouth shut when he saw Lucas and Virgil. The receptionist said, “These…mmm…officers would like to speak to you.”

“Officers?”

“I’m with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and my associate is a deputy U.S. Marshal,” Virgil said. “We would like to confer…privately.”

“Well, of course.” O’Brien propped his putter against the wall and said, “Come with me.”

As they followed him down the hall, Virgil said, “You have the same putting problem that I do. You’re handsy. You jerk at the ball.”

“I know that,” O’Brien said.

“You can buy gloves that keep your wrists straight and teach you to rock your shoulders,” Virgil said.

O’Brien glanced back and asked, “You try them?”

“Yup. And some other things.”

“They work?” he asked.

“Not especially.”

“Thanks for the tip, then.” He said it with a quick smile, friendly enough.

—

O’Brien’s office was spacious, but not ostentatious: picture of a woman with two kids on his L-shaped desk, turned so a visitor could see it. Probably his family, though they didn’t ask. Much of the wall space was taken up with plaques, photos with well-known senior politicians, including Senator Henderson. A flag hung from a pole in a corner.

O’Brien settled behind his desk, knit his fingers together on the desktop and asked, “What can I do for you?”

Lucas turned to Virgil and nodded, and Virgil said, “Twenty years ago, Doris Grandfelt, an accountant with Bee Accounting…”

Both Lucas and Virgil were watching O’Brien closely, and saw his eyes widen as he took a breath. He knew what was coming.

“…was murdered, stabbed to death. Recently, the investigation was reopened, and without going into a lot of detail, it was determined that Doris was providing sexual services for pay and that you were one of her customers.”

O’Brien looked down at his fingers, then pulled them back and dropped his hands into his lap. He said, “Yeah. I…dated her once or twice. I certainly didn’t have anything to do with her murder.”

“Did you pay her?” Lucas asked.

“I…gave her gifts. We went dancing one time, the two other times…I gave her gifts.”

“You didn’t talk to police after her murder,” Virgil said.

O’Brien shrugged. “I was married at the time. I had nothing to do with the murder and I had no clue who might have done it. I was running for office, for the state legislature. This was in pre-Trump days, when an…affair…would have instantly thrown me out of the race. Which I won, incidentally.”

“We know,” Virgil said. “Would you be willing, now, to take a DNA test?”

“If it could be private. If it wouldn’t be spread all over these true crime sites,” O’Brien said. “I’ve been following this whole thing in the papers, on television, and it seems like you guys have pretty much gone to mob rule.”

Lucas, sharply: “Not us.”

“Bullshit. I saw lots of investigations when I was in the House, and I never saw anything like this,” O’Brien said, just as sharply. “Everybody in town is watching it. Every TV news show, and then this poor bastard from Nebraska got murdered.”

Lucas didn’t bother to correct him, but said, less sharply: “Okay, I know what you mean. I don’t like it any more than you do. Now…do you know any more of her customers? Anything that could help us?”

“I could give you a name, but I’d hate for it to get out, that the name came from me,” O’Brien said. “I’d feel like a rat. I’d be a rat.”

“This is not a TV show,” Lucas said. “We don’t think people who help us are rats.”

“This is a TV show, that’s the whole problem,” O’Brien said, rapping on his desktop with his knuckles. “Have you seen those pictures of her customers they have on the true crime sites? They’re all over the morning news programs. They’re hunting those guys down. I don’t know, there must be nine or ten of them, and the mob has torches and pitchforks and they’re hunting them down.”

“I didn’t know that they were on TV news,” Lucas said.

“They are. It scares the shit out of me,” O’Brien said, pushing away from his desk and looking around at his plaques in what looked like desperation. His face was red, and Virgil suddenly feared he might have a heart attack.

“Easy,” Virgil said. “We’ll have a crime scene woman come over to collect the DNA from you. It’s a simple gum scrub, takes only a couple of minutes. If you weren’t the last one to have sex with Doris…”

“No! No! That won’t help if my name gets out there. These other guys, the guys in the photos…There must be a dozen of them…”

“Eleven,” Lucas said.

“Okay, eleven. Even if it’s one of them, the other ten are innocent.”

“Paying money for sex is a crime…” Lucas said.

“Give me a fuckin’ break.”

—

They all sat in silence for a few seconds, then Virgil said, “Give us the name. We’ll call you a confidential informant and we won’t give you up.”

More silence, then, “Lawrence Klink, PhD.”

Virgil and Lucas looked at each other, and then back at O’Brien.

Lucas: “Klink the Shrink?”

“Yeah. Klink the Shrink.”

Lawrence Klink had had a long-running call-in show on a public radio network, then, after a while, when the ratings got high enough, he’d moved to a commercial station. He also had a popular blog. He didn’t call himself Klink the Shrink, but everybody else did. He liked attention, and every couple of weeks would show up in a Star-Tribune gossip column. The columns, as far as Lucas and Virgil knew, were never about his love life, they mostly concerned his discussions of the effects of social media on children; and about his real estate holdings, which included condos in Manhattan, San Diego, Austin, Vail, and Fort Lauderdale.

Klink famously believed that you could determine where investors could make large gains in real estate values through psychological analysis of public comments by artists and the female nouveau riche. His view was encapsulated in a bestselling book called Paint Me a Riche Bitche.

“How’d you know Klink?” Virgil asked.

“This was way back when—twenty years ago. We hung out in the same kinda political, academic, media circles. I’d see him in clubs checking out the good-looking women, but never saw him walk out with one. You know about Klink’s nose?”

“Yeah, it’s somewhat famous,” Virgil said.

“The fact is, his nose looks like the fuckin’ Hindenburg. This meant that, uh, Lawrence did not do well with certain kinds of women. I was dating Doris at the time, and I mentioned her name and…status…to him. He picked up on that. We never talked about it, but I saw him with Doris one night and he nodded to me, so I knew. Like he was saying thanks.”

“So he had a somewhat stressed attitude toward women?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, but he didn’t kill Doris. He…you gotta know him. I don’t think he’d ever do anything that was physically risky. I believe if he’d attacked Doris, she would have beaten the shit out him.”

More silence, then Virgil said, “You’ll take the DNA test? We’ll send a technician around and she’ll do a little gum scrub, in your office, privately. Nobody will know.”

O’Brien put up his hands, as if in surrender. “Okay. Bring her on. I gotta tell you, though, I don’t believe you. Somebody will leak my name. I don’t think the association will fire me, but they might. I’ll tell them that I was a kid in an unhappy marriage, that I was drinking, that I met her in a bar, blah blah blah. Maybe they’ll let me hang on. But some of these other guys…the ones they’re hunting down, they’re fucked. Am I right? Am I right?”

—

Back in the truck, Lucas said, “He’s right. Some of those guys are about to get their lives wrecked, if the true-crimers find them.”

“They’ll find them,” Virgil said. “That’s one thing they can do. We made it possible.”

“Yeah, well, we’re trying to catch a killer,” Lucas said. Then: “You ever nail a hooker?”

“No. How about you?”

“Nope. They kinda scare me,” Lucas said. “They are the world’s natural nihilists. A lot of them don’t believe in anything. Given the way they try to get through life…”

“I didn’t exactly come close…” Virgil started, then stopped.

“C’mon, let it out.”

“I was working a guy who did strong-arm robberies,” Virgil said, looking through the windshield, remembering. “Good planner. Never carried a gun. Giant guy, spent all day lifting weight out in the barn. Carried a sap, and he’d use it, if he had to. Anyway, he was hard to catch at it. His girlfriend was doing two years in the women’s prison at the time, and I drove up to talk to her. See if she could give me something. The place was more like a dormitory than a prison, at least for her…”

“I’ve been there,” Lucas said.

“Anyway, there was a woman there, she used to run a high-end brothel down in Rochester, mostly, you know, for the Mayo Clinic docs. She was doing a year and a day inside. So I was talking to the asshole’s girlfriend, and this brothel madam came over and asked, like, ‘What’s up?’ She was friends with the girlfriend. I was trying to get the girlfriend warmed up enough that she’d give me something, so I pulled this chick into the conversation, introduced myself. I gotta say, she was very good-looking. Very.”

“And, importantly, for a fuckin’ Flowers, soon to be available,” Lucas said.

“I didn’t know when she was going to get out, and I didn’t ask. Anyway, I gave her my card, and after I got out of there, I looked her up, saw what her background was, and why she was inside. Running a whorehouse. Like six months later, when she got out, she called me up and said, “Hey, I got a bottle of Cabernet and I’m looking for a get-out-of-prison party.”

Lucas snorted.

“I thought about it for a couple seconds. I mean, I did,” Virgil said. “I was unattached at the time. But, I begged off, never heard from her again. She was a very good-looking woman. Close as I ever came, I guess. She wasn’t looking for money, but she’d been selling sex wholesale, even if it wasn’t hers. And it might have been hers, as far as I know.”

“You’re a saint,” Lucas said.

“So, what would you have done?”

“The same. I’ve never met a hooker I really liked. Felt sorry for some. Not for some others.” After a moment, “You ever catch the strong-arm guy?”

“Yeah, we decoyed him out with Henrietta Mackey. You remember her?”

“Oh, yeah. I heard she moved to California. Good cop. Had some guts. She was SWAT for a while, when women didn’t do SWAT.”

“She was,” Virgil said. “But, she wanted to learn how to surf. Can’t do that on Lake Phalen. She wound up with the Santa Monica PD.”

“Good for her.”

Virgil nodded and said, “Next topic.”