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Margaret Trane, a Minneapolis deputy chief and one of Lucas’s longtime friends, showed up in jeans and a sweatshirt, even as the phone under the car continued to ring every few minutes.

Lucas’s phone was ringing, too, alternating with the phone under the car, but Lucas didn’t answer.

“You gotta go tell Lara,” Lucas told Trane. “I won’t do it. I’m terrible at it.”

“I’ll get someone…”

“You should do it. You’re important enough to make an impression,” Lucas said. He added, “Chief.”

“Then you’re coming with me.”

“Ah…” Lucas was dragging his feet, but finally nodded. “Okay.”

“You think this is the original Grandfelt killer?” Trane asked as she watched the homicide and first-arriving crime scene investigators crawling around the Jaguar.

“I believe it is,” Lucas said. “I can’t think who else it might be. In one way or another, the true crime investigation has become a threat. I don’t know why it has—if I knew that, I might know who it threatens.”

“Where’s Flowers?”

“I haven’t called him yet. I’ll go do that. Didn’t you guys work together on that professor case, the professor who got murdered in the university library?”

“Yeah. I kinda like the guy. Flowers, not the professor.”

“I’ll call him. Then let’s talk to Lara.”

—

Virgil was at his hotel, working on the novel. He was astonished to hear about Wise. “What have we done?”

“I don’t think we’re to blame…”

“Neither do I. I meant, what have we done to stir this up? We must have done something.”

“I was just talking to Maggie Trane about that. I don’t know.”

“How did Maggie get involved?” Virgil asked.

“I called her to get some cops to look at the Jaguar.”

“Good move. All right, I’ll see you at Grandfelt’s place. I’m still dressed, I’ll leave here in five minutes.”

—

Lucas wasn’t good at death notifications, and he knew it. He became too gruff when he was angry or upset, and sometimes that came out during a notification, putting out a “Yeah, he’s dead, get over it” feel.

Trane was far better: straightforward, but bleeding sympathy. When they rang Grandfelt’s doorbell, Lucas saw a curtain move at the side of the stone porch. He lifted a hand, and Grandfelt unlocked and opened the door.

“I’m Margaret Trane, I’m a deputy chief of police for the City of Minneapolis. I’m afraid I have dreadful news for you,” Trane said, as Lucas hovered unhappily in the background. “May we come in?”

Grandfelt backed away from the door, leaving it open, and said, “She’s dead.”

“Yes, she is,” Trane said, stepping inside.

“And Lucas was too chicken to tell me himself.”

Trane nodded: “Yes. He was.”

“Oh, goddamnit.” Grandfelt burst into tears and turned away from them, her hands to her face.

Trane went over to her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders as Lucas stepped awkwardly inside the door and closed it behind him.

—

When Virgil showed up twenty minutes later, they were all sitting in the overcooked living room. Grandfelt had a roll of toilet paper sitting on the couch beside her, and she was using pads of the tissue to blot her eyes during sporadic episodes of weeping.

Virgil was also good at notifications, and touched Grandfelt’s shoulders as Trane had, muttering comforting cop cliches as he did it.

They listened to her talk about Wise for the best part of an hour, but then Grandfelt asked the question that was most obvious to the three cops: why now and why Wise?

They all agreed that Wise was murdered because she resembled Grandfelt and was driving Grandfelt’s car. Several things fell out of that assumption.

The killer had access to a database that gave him Grandfelt’s address and the makes and models of her cars. One place that was all available was the DVS. The database wasn’t open to the public, but entry was easy for anyone who had the right passwords.

“A lot of people do. Mostly cops and public employees, and I suspect quite a few media people and politicians, so there’s that,” Virgil said.

Grandfelt: “What if they know me, and have been here in this house and have seen my cars?”

“That’s not likely,” Trane said. “Marcia closely resembled you. But if they’d actually met either of you face-to-face, they wouldn’t have attacked her. We know she’d already gone into Whole Foods because of the grocery bag in the car. That means whoever was watching her saw her in good light…and they attacked her anyway. That suggests that they really didn’t know you, but were acting on the basis of your address and automobile and the resemblance. They staked out your house and followed the Jaguar.”

“Sounds a little like a cop,” Lucas said. “Access to the DVS and he could follow her without giving himself away.”

“We’re pulling video from every camera we can find around the store, that may kick out something,” Trane said. “We don’t yet know exactly how the killer approached the car.”

“He’d have to have a car of his own to follow her,” Lucas said. “Maybe there were witnesses at the store who saw the killer or his car…”

“Maybe,” Trane said. “I wouldn’t bet my life on it. It was dark and we have no idea of what car we’re looking for, or who might have seen it.”

“If we’re looking for a motive, I’d say the killer was attempting to complicate the whole reward situation,” Virgil said. “If he’d killed you…” He looked at Grandfelt. “…I would think that the reward offer would be up in the air. Especially if your heirs challenged it.”

“My heirs are my parents and a few nonprofits,” Grandfelt said. “My folks want to find Doris’s killer as much as I do.”

“Still…”

“That’s a good point, Virgie,” Trane said. “I would be surprised if that wasn’t a motive.”

“What are the chances that it was a random killing?” Grandfelt asked.

“About zero,” Trane said. “Her purse is under the car, she was hit a bunch of times, not just once. Whoever did it was there to kill her, not rob her.”

Lucas said to Grandfelt, “I spent some time talking to Chief Trane at the scene, and to Virgil, and we’ve sort of agreed that we did something during this true crime situation, the reward thing, that stirred up the killer. We’re a threat to him. We suspect that we’ve posted photos of him…”

“I saw those,” Grandfelt said. “They didn’t mean anything to me.”

“We’re hoping they mean something to somebody, and we get a call,” Lucas said. “Because we think they mean something to the killer. We need to figure out what that is.”

“I plan to lobby all the TV stations, get the photos on every news program and keep them up,” Trane said. “If the killer is worried about the photos, that means he’s worried that somebody might recognize him.”

Grandfelt: “I can call the major stations. I could buy ads showing the photos and talking about the reward.”

“That might help, but it would be expensive,” Trane said. “If you do it, you should press for some extra news time, to go with the paid time.”

“I could do that,” Grandfelt said. “I’m already in this for five million dollars…”

—

They all looked at each other: they were finished here. Then Grandfelt suddenly began weeping again, blotting her eyes with the toilet tissue, and Trane said to Lucas and Virgil, “I’ll hang around here for a while. I’ll stick a couple of cops out front overnight.”

Virgil and Lucas stood up, and Virgil said to Grandfelt, “We’re so sorry about your friend,” which sounded stupid when said out loud, but Lucas nodded: that was all they had.

—

Outside, on the porch, Virgil said, “Doctor, doctor, give me the news…”

“I thought this case was going to be a joke,” Lucas said. “I’m not laughing anymore.”

“This killer. We know he killed Doris, and almost certainly killed Wise. Is it just those two? Or is he a serial killer? Have there been a bunch of them?”

Lucas said, “When you get back to the hotel, drop a note to our true-crimers. Let’s get them together again tomorrow. There are some more things they could do for us. I’m gonna go home and make a list.”

“Where do we meet? What time?”

“How about where we started? My place. Say, eleven o’clock.”

—

Weather was getting ready for bed when Lucas got home. She did operations almost every morning and hospitals started early. He stuck his head in the refrigerator, came out with a string-cheese single-pack, and told her about Wise as he stripped the plastic wrapper off the cheese. “It could still be a woman, I guess, but she was battered. You said yourself that’s more like something a man would do.”

“I’ll back off to forty-sixty, woman-man,” Weather said.

“Okay. I’ll be up for a while,” he told her. “This thing is complicated. I gotta stop talking and start thinking.”

“Do you have anything at all?” Weather asked.

“That’s what I’ll be thinking about. We do, but it’s all bits and pieces. I’m trying to figure out what we do with them.”

“A puzzle. You’re good at puzzles.”

She kissed him goodnight and went up the stairs to the bedroom. Lucas got a beer, carried it into the den, sat in his favorite chair and stared at a blank TV screen for a couple minutes, then got up, found a legal pad and a pen, and began his list.

Could Klink the Shrink be right? Was the killer a doctor or another medical worker? Drives a Porsche?

BCA now has a list of Bee clients when Doris was murdered. How many doctors on the list? Do DVS files go back that far, to Grandfelt’s murder, to ID doctors with Porsche 911s?

How is the research going on those cockeyed murders in the Twin Cities? The ones with no reasonable motive, in which the killer left no clues, seemed to be in a frenzy when he stabbed or bludgeoned the victim, between the Grandfelt murder and the present?

Do we have anything on the 2000 time-frame tax collector or assessor lists for neighborhood around the park where the body was found? Any hits of Bee employees there?

Talk to Cory Donner at Bee. The knife was sharpened on red brick. The killer must have sharpened the knife there, if the murder had been there, and that would also have scarred the brick. Could they find the scars? If so, where exactly?

Lucas spent a few minutes contemplating the list. It was, he thought, thin. Nothing on it would definitively pin down one person. They had the DNA of the last person to have sex with Grandfelt, but after looking at the investigative files, he was feeling more and more uncertain about whether the DNA actually belonged to the killer.

If they could find the DNA donor, though, they might have a line on the killer, since the sex and the murder were very close in time.

—

From his hotel room, Virgil sent out invitations to the six true crime blog owners who were doing the online research for them. Two of them got back within minutes—pulling all-nighters, Virgil thought, which might be their routine.

And the next morning, as a thunderstorm pounded the streets with a downpour of the kind normally reserved for the tropics, the six true-crimers settled in with them at Lucas’s house, bringing with them cups of coffee, tea, and bottles of Coke. Virgil had included Michelle Cornell in the invitation, and she’d brought a stack of yellow legal pads from the law firm’s office supply cabinet, along with a clutch of ballpoint pens, which she handed out to everyone.

Anne Cash started things by asking, “Is this about the five million?”

“Well, no, not exactly—though I suppose it could be, if everything works out,” Lucas said. “Let me start out by saying that Lara Grandfelt’s assistant was murdered last night, after apparently being mistaken for Grandfelt herself.”

Three of the six true-crimers simultaneously blurted, “What!”

“You can post it—later,” Lucas said. “It’s not on the TV news channels yet, so you’re not getting beaten with the news, but it will be on TV this afternoon. You’ll have it first, so let’s settle down while I give you some more information.”

“But this is amazing,” Sally Bulholtz said.

“It’s tragic, is what it is,” Virgil said. “That woman is dead by mistake. Beaten to death.”

“Where did this—”

“We’ll fill you in later, okay?” Lucas said. “Right now, and the reason we’re here, is we need some more help from you. If you help us out, you’re welcome to take credit for it.”

“What do you want?” asked Karen Moss. She was wearing a different tennis hat, this one reading “Kiss My Ace,” with a yellow tennis ball below the inscription.

“Tell us quick, I want to get the murder on my site,” said Mary Albanese.

“We haven’t gotten anything good from you guys,” Lucas said. “You need to jack up the pressure.”

“Everything you gave us was too flimsy…too vague,” Ruby Weitz said. “I got a couple of friends trying to organize those property tax records, but there are hundreds of different owners and people buying and selling…it’s a mess, and we really don’t know what we’re looking for.”

“I got the list of year 2000 doctors from the medical association, but there are twenty thousand names on the list,” said Bulholtz. “I don’t know what I can do with them. There are like ten thousand more medical-type personnel: dentists, pharmacists, like that, not including nurses.”

“We’re going to get more specific this morning,” Lucas said. “In the next day or two, Virgil is going to send you a list of all Bee Accounting clients at the time Doris Grandfelt was killed. Bee is compiling that information now, for the BCA, and we’ll have access to the list. There’ll apparently be several thousand names. We need to figure out which ones were doctors—”

“You think the killer is a doctor?” Cash blurted. “Can we put that up?”

“Please, not yet,” Lucas said.

“We’re giving you early breaks on the good stuff, like the murder for Marcia Wise. You’ll be able to beat all the other true crime sites on that. Some stuff, we’ll talk to you six about, but you have to hold it close,” Virgil said. “If you don’t, you’ll be out. We won’t talk to you anymore.”

“We need to sort out the doctors,” Lucas said. “And anyone else you think might be considered to be in a medical profession. Dentists? Whatever. We need to compare those names against a list of DVS records to see which of the medical people were driving Porsche 911s.”

“I don’t even know what those look like,” Dahlia Blair said.

“You could look them up online, but you don’t need to—you just need to look at the record and see if it says Porsche,” Lucas said. “I talked to the head of the DVS this morning, early, and they’re seeing what they can do about printing out all the Porsche records from the years around 2000. There’ll be several hundred of them.”

“So you’re asking us to compare lists of thousands of people against lists of hundreds of people. You know how long that will take?” Cash asked.

“Not too long, I hope,” Lucas said. “I want you to sort out which are the doctors from among the Bee clients and compare those to an alphabetized list of Porsche owners. Once we get the lists, it should be smooth sailing.”

“But you want us to sort out a few dozen doctors from thousands of names from Bee—that’ll be the hard part.”

“Well, that’s true,” Lucas said. “But that’s why we’ve come to you—you have the juice to do that.”

“Anything else?” Cash asked.

“Yeah. We’ve asked you to look at murders in the metro area reported in the Star-Tribune . How is that going?”

“My group is looking at that,” Albanese said. “So far, there aren’t too many that meet your criteria, but there are some. I’ll send them over. We started in 1990 and we’re up to 2012. The problem is, the reporting can be thin on murders outside of Minneapolis. We have names and addresses and that sort of thing, but not always exactly what happened, unless the person was stabbed or shot.”

“How many cases so far?” Virgil asked.

“Including all the questionable ones—we’ve marked those out—we have forty-two in the twenty-two years. The ones we think are specifically good, we have twelve.”

“Send them to Virgil,” Lucas said. “Now, how many of you guys have…assistants, or colleagues, or whatever you’d call them, here in the Twin Cities?”

Between the six of them, they had eight associates in town.

Moss: “Why do you want to know?”

“I’m going to talk to the CEO at Bee. I’d like to send a group of people over to their offices, and have people get down on their hands and knees in all the offices with redbrick walls and have them looking for whetting marks. Sharpening marks.”

The women looked at each other, and Weitz asked, “Could we film them doing that?”

“Don’t care,” Lucas said. “It’ll get out one way or another. If they find anything, they have to back off and call me immediately and we’ll get some CSI people over there. But don’t do anything until I talk to the CEO and give you the go-ahead.”

Moss: “I can ask my friends to do that…”

They talked—argued and speculated—about what else might be done, then Lucas pushed them to get more serious about the research.

“Yeah, we’ll push, but this is pretty boring work,” Cash said.

“Pretty boring until we nail the guy,” Cornell said. “Then it’s going to be a five-alarm fire. You’ll be the most famous true crime bloggers on earth.”

As the meeting was breaking up, Blair asked, “So we can post the Marcia Wise murder? Tell us what happened and how you found out.”

Lucas gave them some details, asked that they not be attributed to him or Virgil, and they all left in a rush.