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The next night:

Marcia Wise went into the kitchen and chose a set of car keys—she loved the Jaguar, top down, summer breeze blowing through her hair, but she knew that Lara really didn’t like her driving it. Subtle, she thought, but a status thing. Lara was the boss; she was the help.

She hesitated, then picked the BMW keys out of the wooden bowl on the countertop. The BMW was a stuffy five-year-old SUV that they mostly used for winter driving and for Wise’s errands.

She hesitated again, then called, “Would you mind if I took the Jag? It’s a nice night.”

She got no response for five seconds, then Grandfelt called back, “No, go ahead. Be careful.”

“I will.” Wise could tell Grandfelt was put out, but she’d recover quickly enough. Grandfelt was in the library, reading a book on The Eight, a group of early-twentieth-century painters.

Wise walked into the library, kissed Grandfelt on the forehead, and added, “If you want anything else, text me.”

“I will, but I don’t think I’ll want anything,” Grandfelt said. “I’ll be in the TV room, I’m going to look for a movie. Don’t scratch my car.”

“Don’t start the movie until I get back. Half an hour. I’ll add some kettle corn to the shopping list…”

“You really shouldn’t,” Grandfelt said, which meant that Wise really should, while acknowledging that they both could stand to lose a few pounds. Like fifteen. Or twenty.

—

Wise went out to the garage, pushed the door lift button, got in the sparkling black Jaguar two-seater, backed it out and dropped the top. Marcia Wise lived a rich life, but she wasn’t wealthy, not on her own. Grandfelt gave her a salary barely large enough to max out the Social Security contribution, though she also picked up every other expense in their joint lives. On her own, Wise had a hundred and seventeen thousand dollars in an investment account, and that was it.

No house, no car, no nothing. She was a year younger than Grandfelt, and they were aging into their forties. If Grandfelt should fall for a younger woman…Wise didn’t want to think about the possibility.

So she didn’t. She focused instead on the light, snaky feeling of the F-Type R75 as it bumped down the alley to the street, and then the sense of freedom, and wealth, that the convertible brought to her.

She took a left at the end of the alley and drove a mazelike route to Whole Foods, less than ten minutes away. The supermarket parking lot served several other franchises, a Chipotle, a Caribou Coffee, a Noodles & Company, like that. She parked near the end of the lot, and on the far side, facing a concrete wall probably eight feet high. She did that because she wanted the empty spaces on both sides of the Jag. She brought the convertible top back up, and walked into the store, carrying a reusable grocery bag, jingling the car fob and house keys.

—

Ten minutes to nine with still some light in the sky, looking west down the street toward Lake of the Isles. Fisk was parked three cars closer to the alley than she had been the night before, in Timothy’s Range Rover. She was feeling restless, ready to quit again, go back home. Then the black Jag appeared at the mouth of the alley, paused, and turned toward her, away from the lake, and accelerated past.

Fisk sank down in the car seat, eyes barely above the level of the driver’s-side window. This was the opportunity she’d been hoping for, but she hesitated to do a lights-on U-turn right behind Grandfelt. This would be risky, depending on where the other woman was going, but had to be done. Her mind was clear on that.

When Grandfelt was a block away, Fisk made the U-turn and fell in behind as Grandfelt rolled up to a stop sign. Grandfelt took a right, and Fisk waited a beat or two, before following. The Jag would be a hard car to lose, at least while there was a bit of light.

Fisk had never followed anyone before, not in a car, but her frequent contacts with police witnesses gave her some ideas about how to do it. When cops followed someone, and that resulted in an arrest, the defense attorneys were always insisting that the cops swear that they never lost constructive sight of the car they were following. That they couldn’t have inadvertently and accidentally lost the person they were following, and might have understandably followed the very similar car of their innocent defendant, while the real criminal took a side street.

Fisk would then lead the cop through their surveillance routine, and exactly how the defendant had been tracked.

So she had that going for her.

—

Even if she hadn’t had that, she’d have had no trouble following the Jaguar. Grandfelt stayed on main streets, paying no attention to anything coming up from behind. She drove into the Whole Foods parking lot and parked out on the edge, well back from the store.

Fisk said aloud, “Perfect,” while feeling a tickle of apprehension. She was going to do it. But there were other considerations before she did that.

She went to the next shopping lot, parked, got out of her car, and walked back to the corner of the Chipotle and looked for cameras. She spotted them right away and her heart sank: she couldn’t be on video, in the Whole Foods parking lot, at the same time that Grandfelt was murdered. Not after Timothy’s freak accident.

But wait…

The cameras—she thought there might be four of them, aimed in different directions—were housed atop a twenty-foot-high pole with a battery box at the bottom, mounted on wheels so it could be moved to different locations. But there were trees scattered across the parking lot. Not extremely tall, but, she thought, tall enough. She looked at the alignment and thought it possible, thought it likely, that the cameras couldn’t see the area where Grandfelt had parked.

Finding out for sure would not be risky. If she parked next to Grandfelt, as she had planned, she could get out of the car and look back toward the cameras. If she could see them—and they could see her—she’d simply leave. If Grandfelt returned home uninjured, there’d be no reason for anyone to look at the video.

She considered it, chewing on her lip, walked slowly back to her car, and drove back to the Whole Foods lot, turned in, drove to Grandfelt’s car, and parked on the driver’s side of the Jag.

Without getting out, she looked toward the camera pole—and could see nothing of it at all. Not the pole, not the cameras.

And she sat for a full five minutes, watching the lot. Watching people come and go. Watching the routes that they walked to their cars.

Satisfied that she could pull this off, if she did it right, she picked up the wrench she’d kept on the passenger seat, got out of the driver’s seat, walked around the car, and got in the back seat next to the Jaguar. She didn’t quite close the door—kept it closed, but not latched. She pushed it open, pulled it back, did it again.

The door made no noise at all.

Ten minutes later, Grandfelt walked out of the Whole Foods carrying the grocery bag. Fisk was kneeling on the back seat of the Range Rover, scanning the parking lot. Grandfelt was getting closer and closer, and Fisk hovered behind the Land Rover’s D-pillar, her eyes flicking again and again toward the camera pole, never catching even a hint of it, as much out of sight as she could be.

Grandfelt went to the passenger side of the Jag, opened the door, put the grocery bag on the passenger side floor, and walked back around the car to the driver’s side. As she was doing that, Fisk sank deeper into the back seat of the Range Rover.

Looking up, she saw Grandfelt pass the Range Rover window. She got a firm grip on the wrench, pushed the door open with one foot and slipped out. Grandfelt had the Jag’s door open and had one leg thrust out so she could slide into the tight interior…

Grandfelt never saw Fisk. Fisk hit her on the back of the head with the eighteen-inch-long piece of steel, and Grandfelt dropped to the ground as though struck by lightning.

Fisk, now caught up in the kill, hit her again, and again and again, and then, breathing hard, teeth bared, ready to fight anyone else who needed it, she half-turned, half-stood, looked around the lot like a wary lion.

No alarm. Grandfelt was dead on the ground. Fisk sat down and pushed the other woman as far under the Jag as she could, using her feet. That done, she walked back around the Range Rover, wiped the wrench with a damp wash cloth left on the driver’s seat just for that purpose, and dropped both the wrench and the cloth in a garbage bag.

Two minutes later, she was gone. Saw no cameras.

—

Lara Grandfelt got caught up in a documentary on global warming, which showed, among other things, a polar bear mired in mud that was once solid permafrost. At some point, she glanced down at her watch: Wise had been gone for an hour. The Whole Foods store was ten minutes away.

She went back to the documentary, glanced at her watch again. Where was she? Joyriding in the Jag? Now worried that Wise had been in an accident, she called her, but got no response. Fifteen minutes and three more calls after that, she was very worried, but didn’t know exactly what to do.

She called Whole Foods, and somewhat to her surprise, the call was answered. She told the woman who answered the phone that she was worried about her friend, and the woman said she’d look for Wise and check the parking lot for the Jag.

The same woman called back and said the Jaguar, black and shiny—she read out the license tag number—was still sitting in the parking lot, but as far as she could tell, there was nobody in the store who resembled the woman described by Grandfelt.

—

Lucas took the phone call from Grandfelt. “Marcia’s disappeared!”

“What?”

Grandfelt described the sequence of events: Wise’s departure for Whole Foods, her failure to return, the unanswered phone calls, the call to the supermarket and the response—the car still in the parking lot.

“Is there a restaurant there?” Lucas asked. “Somewhere she could have gone for a bite to eat or a drink?”

“She doesn’t drink and we were planning to watch a movie and eat popcorn,” Grandfelt said. “I’m going over there.”

“No. No. Lara, I want you to make sure all your doors and windows are locked, and I want you to hunker down there,” Lucas said. “If there’s actually a threat, I don’t want you wandering around helpless. I’ve got a good friend on the Minneapolis force, I’ll call her, get some cops over to the store, and I’ll go over myself. I can be there fast. I don’t want you exposed.”

The fear clutched at her heart: “I’ll lock the doors and wait here,” Grandfelt said. “I’ll keep trying to call her.”

—

Lucas gave Weather a one-minute explanation and headed for his car. In the car, he called Margaret Trane, once a lead homicide cop and, after three heavily publicized murder convictions, now a deputy chief. He explained the problem, said he was on the way, and asked her to do what she could to route some cops to the store.

The first Minneapolis cops arrived nine minutes later. They got out of the patrol car and walked up to the Jaguar and one cop said to the other, “Is your phone ringing?”

“If it was, it sure as shit wouldn’t be playing ‘Tiny Dancer.’ Is it coming from under the Jag?”

When Lucas arrived a couple of minutes later, he was told that the woman under the car was definitely dead. Homicide was on the way.