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Amanda Fisk was running about fifty-fifty on whether to pay the caterer or kill her. The food was okay, though it seemed to focus on the aromatic: sauteed chicken livers in sesame oil? Smoked salmon crostini?

But the caterer, whose name was Joyce, instead of sticking close to the food, seemed to be more focused on the house and whether or not Fisk was going to put it up for sale. Fisk found her wandering through every room on both floors, including the bedroom, where she’d been peering out the window where Timothy had taken his fall. She wasn’t trespassing, exactly, because there were a lot of people wandering around, and Fisk had put up a sign, with an arrow, pointing up the stairway, that read “More bathrooms.”

Joyce had even asked, “Is this where…IT…happened?”

Fisk avoided an answer, instead asking, “Do we have another pan of the baked brie bites? There seems to be a demand.”

Fisk had begun to suspect that the woman was scouting for a real estate agent; but no matter, there were at least a hundred other people all over the place—from Timothy’s practice, from the hospitals where he was on staff, from the county attorney’s office, along with, Fisk suspected, gate-crashers there for the food.

She would be expected to give a tearful eulogy in the not-too-distant future, and she’d prepared for it. Could she squeeze out a few tears? She doubted it, but she was prepared even for that. She’d make a last-minute trip to the bathroom, hit both eyes with some Systane eye drops, and with flooded eyes, would make her way downcast through the living room where she’d ring her little bell. With any luck, some of the Systane would trickle down her cheek…

In the meantime, the mourners, all of them, collectively, were laying down a blanket of unidentifiable DNA, while mumbling regrets through a mouthful of spinach puffs; the mourning seemed perfunctory, the eating not so much.

Timothy was still present, in his solid silver urn. She planned to dump him over the fence into the Belgian Malinois’ yard as soon as the crowd had gone and it got dark. If anyone asked, he’d gone in the Mississippi, where he’d spent many hours happily wandering the overgrown shores with the goddamn Jack Russells.

“You know, the thing I liked about Timothy was his joie de vivre…”

Yeah. You could take your joie de vivre and your bad French accent and stick them where the sun don’t shine…

As for the urn, maybe she could have it melted down? But that was for later. For now, dressed in a dark blue knee-length dress, with a double string of pearls, she wanted to get as many people as possible sitting in chairs, opening doors, handling Timothy’s tools—she’d had a lowball offer on the tools, and would accept it before the bidder left the premises.

And from people not gauche enough to actually inquire (yet) there had been noticeable interest in Timothy’s 911 and the Range Rover. She’d been hinting to those people that the cars were actually available after she’d given them a thorough cleaning.

All of this was splattering through her mind like random raindrops when she passed a group of prosecutors from the county attorney’s office, and heard one of them saying, “…a bunch of new photos taken by Doris Grandfelt, supposedly her last dates…”

And she thought, What!

The caterer, Joyce, was forgotten. She couldn’t kick a hundred people out of the house, when they’d barely dented the antipasto skewers, but she desperately needed to look at the true crime sites, and right now . She walked back to the library, got her laptop, and locked herself in the guest bathroom.

AnneCashInvestigations had the new photos. Fisk had no idea who the men were in four of the photos, but the fifth one…

Timothy. And Timothy’s fucking 1998 Porsche, with that funny tail fin thing, the wing. The photo was not a good one and was old and murky. It could be a shot of any tall, slender, sharp-nosed balding man in what looked like a blazer and slacks combination, standing on a sidewalk outside a bar. With a Porsche.

On the other hand, if you knew him at the time…

Something, she thought, sitting there on the toilet seat, had to be done. And the only thing she could think of was the elimination of the prize for finding the killer of Doris Grandfelt. The cops, as far as she knew, had made no progress whatever in solving the case. The true crime people had been another story altogether.

Out of the bathroom, she made her Systane-eyed speech about Timothy, reliving some of the good times from Timothy’s point of view, even got a few laughs. Cleared the house out, including the caterer and the gate-crashers, and left the urn of ashes for later.

It occurred to her that she ought to feed the dogs, and she did. The dogs were another problem that would have to wait for later. Too many people knew how much Timothy loved the mutts, so she’d have to keep the little fuckers around until any questions about their fate might no longer be asked. Like maybe she gave them to a passing troupe of dog lovers.

But Lara Grandfelt had to go.

—

Fisk was thoroughly versed in the theory and practice of murder, having, over the years, sent four dozen murderers to prison as a prosecutor, and having killed six people herself, including Timothy.

Her personal kills included a fourteen-year-old ninth grader, tripped and shoved in front of a moving truck. The girl had been ejected from behind a tree and the driver said he never saw her before he hit her, and even after he hit her, wasn’t sure what he’d hit.

When he’d stopped to look, he’d found a horrified Amanda Fisk standing over the body of her crushed schoolmate. Fisk told cops that the girl had started to step out from behind a tree and had tripped and fallen over the curb and under the oncoming wheels.

She’d cried real tears at the funeral. Not because she mourned the young girl, but because she was so frightened for herself—how poorly and impulsively she’d done it. If the girl hadn’t died, she would have told everyone about the hand in her back.

But she had died; and that had been strangely satisfying.

Over the following years, at the University of Minnesota and the William Mitchell College of Law, she’d analyzed the ways of murder, and when the time came to kill the second woman, she thought she’d worked it all out. The hardest kind of murder to solve was the random attack where the killer escaped from the scene without being seen. Any murder with an obvious motive would be a problem: cops loved motives.

A second thought: obvious motives could also be misleading.

—

With one exception, Fisk wouldn’t kill for entertainment. That was simply stupid. But any gain on her part had to be non-obvious, as was the situation with Rose McCauley, a very pretty and very smart classmate at William Mitchell. One of them was going to be the top woman in the class, and after making a realistic assessment of the possibilities, Fisk was almost certain that it wouldn’t be her. Being top woman meant something at the time.

She killed McCauley one dark night—they went to the Mitchell night school—with a classic lead pipe that she found on a demolition site. She’d decided on the pipe because McCauley’s death would be fast and silent.

She hit McCauley as the other woman walked along a sidewalk to her car. Fisk stepped from behind a dense bridal wreath bush on the warm autumn evening and hit the other woman three times: once knocking her down, twice to make sure, crushing her skull. She took McCauley’s purse—robbery, the misleading motive—put the lead pipe inside it, and it all now resided safely at the bottom of the Mississippi.

Doris Grandfelt was the third kill.

The fourth kill…better not to think about that one. That one was over the top, even for Fisk; but entertaining. Just thinking about it, she could smell the buttered popcorn.

Fisk’s mother was the fifth.

Listen: her parents had divorced after her father had an affair with a woman in his shop at 3M. Her mother had never remarried, and ten years after the divorce, Fisk’s ancient grandmother had died and left a substantial estate to her daughter, Fisk’s mother.

It seemed unfair, somehow, that her mother, then in her sixties, would simply burn through that estate, and the money and house she’d gotten in the divorce, in her declining years. Her mother, in fact, was largely a waste of good air, an inert devotee of social media and streaming services.

Also a diabetic and insulin dependent. A couple of sleeping pills in a cup of late-night tea, followed by an overdose of insulin, moved the two estates right along to Fisk.

She didn’t think about her mother. She never had. It never occurred to her that she should, except in the context of a fully stuffed Fidelity account.

The sixth was Timothy.

—

Lara Grandfelt.

The problem was right out front: she was driving the research by the true crime enthusiasts, and so far, that research had turned up the only clues in Doris Grandfelt’s murder: the knife, the photos of Grandfelt’s customers, including Timothy. If the five-million-dollar reward package were to disappear, so would the true-crimers…she thought.

She wasn’t entirely sure about that. It was theoretically possible that the reward was somehow incorporated in Lara Grandfelt’s will. But Fisk thought that idea simply wouldn’t have occurred to Grandfelt, who was in her forties. She wanted to know who killed her twin. To have the murder solved after she was dead herself wouldn’t satisfy that quest, so it wouldn’t occur to her to put the reward in a will.

Even if Grandfelt did put it in her will, it would take a while for the will to be settled. Fisk had dealt with enough murder investigations to sense the movement in them…sense when an investigation was either moving forward or was dead in the water. The Doris Grandfelt investigation felt as though it were gaining momentum, running downhill.

If she could stop it, even temporarily, gain some time, get Timothy’s death well into the past, that could be critical.

—

With the memorial service over, Fisk went to her home office and started the basic research she’d need to kill Grandfelt. As a prosecutor, she had routine computer access to driver’s license files, and she went out for Grandfelt’s license information. That gave her an address: Grandfelt lived in the upscale Lake of the Isles neighborhood in Minneapolis, on a parkway that ran along the east side of the lake.

It also gave her Grandfelt’s cars: an older BMW sport utility vehicle, and a flashy, heart-stopping black Jaguar convertible.

From Google, she got a satellite view of the lakeside houses and the garages and parking spaces behind them. Access to the parking was through an alley that ran behind the waterfront homes. There was on-street parking all around the neighborhood, so she could get close in a car. She’d have to check for district parking restrictions. She noted, on the satellite view, a jogging trail around the lake.

In forty-five minutes, she’d worked out a credible approach to Grandfelt’s house. She would scout it by car and then on foot. She would pose as a jogger, on the lakeside trail. Why would she be running there when she lived in St. Paul? Because running in St. Paul had begun to frighten her. Any long running loop in St. Paul would take her through some rough neighborhoods, a woman alone, a new widow. She couldn’t run during the day because she worked.

Lake of the Isles was quiet, pretty, and very, very safe.

That should work, if the improbable happened, and she was stopped by the police for an ID check.

Her bigger problem was that Minneapolis had a lot of cops. If there was some kind of alarm, the response would be quick. She kicked back in her chair and thought about that. What if there were to be some kind of incident that would pull the cops to another location?

She couldn’t help thinking, Fire?

Or was that too ambitious? What about a swatting? If there were a swatting on the other side of the lake, another affluent neighborhood, all the local patrol cars would be pulled in…

A year before, she’d prosecuted a high schooler who’d had the bad judgment to be over eighteen—a legal adult—when he swatted his physics teacher. Swatting was a bit of a plague: call 9-1-1, screaming that there was a man in the house with a gun, that you’d locked yourself in a closet but he was coming, that you had a gun of your own, call out the address and then… Bang! The gunshot. And hang up.

You’d have the SWAT squad there in twenty minutes, along with every other cop in the area.

She could easily swat somebody, but if she made a 9-1-1 call, which would be recorded, then, when the swatting call was proven fraudulent and Lara Grandfelt was found murdered at the same time as the SWAT call, she’d be giving away the fact that the probable Grandfelt killer was female.

Was there any way she could make it seem like a male voice calling in?

More online research: yes, AI made it possible to create something that sounded like a male voice saying anything you needed it to say, but the voices she heard didn’t sound real. Further, they were flat. She could find no way to make a voice sound panicked.

There were also apps that could change the pitch of a voice, make it lower, but the samples she heard didn’t sound convincing.

And to make the call, she’d have to buy a burner phone. She knew as a prosecutor that many of the places that sold burners also had serious video surveillance. She couldn’t afford to be on camera buying the phone.

—

Back to the fire idea—crude, but workable, she thought. The whole Lake of the Isles neighborhood was older, with a high percentage of wooden houses. A gallon of gasoline in a glass jug, a rag for a fuse, and she’d have her fire. If there were any noise to accompany the fire, if it was immediately obvious that the fire was arson, then anyone seen running would be suspect. If a cop stopped her to check her ID, then she’d have two murders to commit.

Would it be possible to spot an empty house? How would you do that?

She turned to Zillow, the real estate website, and began looking at homes in the Lake of the Isles neighborhood. There were many candidates for sale, almost all of them with photos attached.

She quickly found two that appeared to be empty—where the owners had already moved out. Switching to Street View on Google Maps, she saw they looked satisfactorily old and wooden. They’d burn like a circus tent.

—

About the actual approach: push a doorbell, and when Grandfelt answered, what? Shoot her? What if it wasn’t Grandfelt who answered? What if, like more and more people, she had cameras covering her property? What if the neighbors did?

Fisk leaned back in her office chair and ran the approach through her mind, visualizing every step, all the possible booby traps along the way.

And concluded that everything she’d just researched amounted to a fantasy. Too many cops. Too many cameras. Too much exposure—two separate crimes, an arson and a murder? Nonsense.

—

Thinking about it, thinking about what she, herself, did in the evenings…She’d go out, sometimes with Timothy, but most of the time without him. She’d run out to a supermarket, she’d play tennis, she’d go to the Mall of America.

Why wouldn’t Grandfelt do the same thing? Would she come home from work, lock herself up, or go out with her husband, if she had one? Or would she go somewhere on her own?

She would do that, at least sometimes, Fisk thought. And that was her vulnerability—moving from her car to wherever she was going, and then walking back to the car.

Fisk had already noted the on-street parking around Grandfelt’s house. She could wait for her on the street, from a point across from the access alley that ran behind the houses.

From there, unless something had changed, she should be able to see Grandfelt backing out of her garage, from where she’d have to drive past Fisk’s parked car. Fisk would be able to see if anyone was in the car with her. If she was alone, Fisk could follow her…

All very loose, very random. If she’d had to prosecute a case based on what she was thinking, she wouldn’t know how to do it, not unless the killer was actually caught in the act. There would be no intricate planning. There would just be the hit.

Risky, but there was no way to avoid risk. Doing nothing was risky, and the risk was getting more serious every day.

She got out of her chair, walked around the house, and finally out to the garage. The man who was buying Timothy’s tools hadn’t taken them with him—he’d be back later in the week to pick them up. She opened one of the drawers on Timothy’s rolling tool chest and her eye immediately fell on a fifteen-inch combination wrench.

She picked it up and hefted it: excellent. She flashed back to the night she’d killed the law student. Same thing, but with a better heft to it.

Now, Grandfelt would have to cooperate.

She had no real idea of what Grandfelt looked like, but she’d seen something on that website…

She went to Anne Cash’s website and found a series of videos of Grandfelt and her lawyers being interviewed on network morning shows, and on CNN. She watched four videos, until she was sure she could spot the woman.

All right, she had that. Next question: When?

She looked at the wrench sitting on her desk. Not that night; she was too tired from the day. Tomorrow?

—

The next night, having had twenty-four hours to plan, she went into the kitchen for vinyl gloves, got the wrench and her car keys and walked out to her Mercedes SUV, bought to match the SL550.

The trip across the Mississippi took twenty minutes. There was still light in the sky when she cruised past Grandfelt’s place, where she felt a quiver of house envy. Her own house, on the most prestigious street in St. Paul, was extremely nice. Grandfelt’s house was absurd, though she wouldn’t have minded living there. If it wasn’t exactly at the pinnacle of the Twin Cities housing heap, it was close.

Having spotted the house, and the alley that led to Grandfelt’s garage, she circled the block one last time and squeezed into a parking place a half block down from the alley.

And waited, and waited.

And that night, Grandfelt stayed put. Fisk went home at ten o’clock, frustrated, and with an ache in her back from having sat in the car too long.