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Fisk freaked when she read about the murder of Marcia Wise. She’d pulled off a risky killing, but of the wrong woman. Even worse, Grandfelt would now be on guard—might even have guards—and she’d told a true crime site that she would provide an additional one million dollars in reward money if anyone could tie the murder of Marcia Wise to that of her sister.

The story had been dying on the national media, but now was back with a vengeance. CNN sent a former Minneapolis TV anchor back to the Twin Cities to track every move by the BCA and the true-crimers.

When Fisk went out to a true crime site, she found a report that Virgil Flowers believed he’d identified the man who may have raped Doris Grandfelt twenty years earlier. The woman circulating the report—quickly picked up word for word on the other true crime sites—said that Flowers refused to give up the name but said that he was in the medical profession.

Fisk rocked back in her computer chair: “Jesus Christ.”

She scraped a thumbnail on her lower teeth until the fleshy back of her thumb began to bleed. She could feel herself coming unglued: if they thought the DNA donor was in the medical profession, it seemed to Fisk that it would only be a matter of time before they identified Timothy. In her various prosecutions, she’d known identities established with less evidence than a profession, a foggy photo, and a car, especially an elite car like a 911.

And, of course, Carlson was a Bee client, and they would have a list of those.

Not knowing what else to do, she got a gallon jug of Drano Max Gel, and walked around the house pouring the gel down drains; it was the third gallon she’d used in the various sinks, tubs, and showers around the house. The stuff supposedly dissolved hair, which was the objective.

With that working for her, she went back out to the various true crime sites for another look. After checking five or six, it appeared that the marshal, Davenport, was not nearly as involved as Flowers, the BCA agent. So what was Davenport up to? Was he up to anything? Flowers appeared to be the lead in the investigation.

Both law officers had gotten extensive coverage at one time or another in the local papers. She checked the Star-Tribune website, did a search for both names. There was more about Davenport than Flowers, but Davenport lived in St. Paul while Flowers apparently lived on a farm near Mankato.

She checked the websites of the county tax collectors around Mankato and found nothing under Flowers’s name. Another search of the Star-Tribune records turned up the name of Flowers’s “partner,” which meant they weren’t married: a woman named Florence Frances (Frankie) Nobles. Nobles had a farm in Nicollet County, a few miles northwest of Mankato.

She had to think about that. She was still thinking when Virgil called her.

—

“Miz Fisk,” Virgil said. “I was sorry to hear about your husband’s death. I’ve been investigating the death of Doris Grandfelt, twenty years ago, which has been the subject of a reward…I got your telephone number from Russ Belen…”

Belen was the Ramsey County Attorney, and Fisk’s boss.

“I know about it, the investigation, at least, what’s been in the media,” Fisk said.

“Okay. There have been some indications…well, if you know about it, you know that some DNA was recovered from Grandfelt’s body. We’ve had some indications that your husband may have been intimate with Grandfelt back on the day she was murdered.”

“What? Indications? You mean DNA?”

“Yes. DNA. Dr. Carlson was a client of Bee Accounting…”

“I know that. I worked there briefly, at the time Doris Grandfelt was murdered,” Fisk said. “In fact, I met Timothy as the murder investigation was taking place. He had some complicated legal issues involving taxes…I can hardly believe that he was involved with Doris Grandfelt, though. She was a clerk, and I was told that she was not overly bright. I didn’t know her myself.”

Virgil was astonished, struggled to control his reaction. He took a low breath, and said, “It might not have been her IQ that attracted Dr. Carlson. If you’ve been following the investigation, you know that there’s been a question about the extent and…quality…of Doris Grandfelt’s sexual activities.”

“Yes. There have been reports of sex for pay. That doesn’t sound at all like Timothy…”

“We’ve been told that Dr. Carlson was cremated after his death?”

“Yes, he was.”

“Well, we would like to come to your house and take some samples for DNA comparisons.”

“I have no objections to that, I suppose…Or wait a minute. Maybe I do,” Fisk said. “I’d really prefer that this didn’t become public. Could I get some kind of written agreement, a letter, perhaps, from you, saying that you and the BCA will hold this procedure confidentially?”

Virgil: “If it turns out that there’s a DNA match…”

“Then, I know, the information would become public,” Fisk conceded. “I don’t think Timothy would have touched Doris Grandfelt with a ten-foot pole, much less his penis. I would like the…mmm…examination to remain confidential if you don’t find a match. So we don’t have the rumor mill spewing its garbage all over Timothy and myself.”

“I understand,” Virgil said. “I’ll talk to my supervisors at the BCA and see what kind of agreement they would be willing to commit to. I don’t know what their answer will be.”

“Call me when you know. If we can make an arrangement, you will have my permission to examine the house and cars and anything else you might need.”

“Thank you. I will call you back.”

—

Fisk replayed the conversation in her head and decided that she’d handled it as well as it could be. She’d sounded surprised and concerned by the call, and she’d been cooperative. She had to be, she thought: all the information that she’d given them, they would have eventually found themselves, including the fact that she’d worked for Bee at the time of the murder. If she’d tried to hide that, they would have been curious about why.

She included one critical time change, but she didn’t think they’d be able to challenge that: she’d said that she’d started dating Carlson after the murder, rather than before. Was there anything else that she could throw at them that might lead them astray?

More thinking would be needed. She didn’t doubt that Flowers would be back in her face sooner rather than later.

—

“She told me the most amazing thing,” Virgil told Lucas and Jon Duncan in the borrowed office at the BCA. “She worked at Bee when Grandfelt was murdered.”

Lucas: “What!”

“That’s almost what I said. But I didn’t. I was nice. But man…she said she didn’t know Doris Grandfelt.”

“We gotta look at her,” Lucas said to Duncan. “There’s the jealousy motive.”

Duncan: “Is she gonna try to keep us out of the house?”

“No. She was cooperative,” Virgil said. “She wants a letter from us more or less promising to keep the DNA sampling confidential—she said she knows that we’d have to go public if we found a match with her husband. She doesn’t believe there’ll be a match.”

“Sounds like a win,” Duncan said. “We might be able to get a crew over there tomorrow…though somebody said something about comp time.”

“I’ll call her back and ask if tomorrow’s okay,” Virgil said. “She doesn’t believe that Carlson would mess with Grandfelt, not for money anyway. Oh, by the way, she said she met Carlson there at the same time the murder investigation was going on.”

“Curious,” Lucas said. “Things are beginning to coalesce around Bee.”

“If it turns out there’s a DNA match, we could get busy,” Virgil said. “If you guys don’t mind, if we could schedule the DNA sampling for tomorrow afternoon…anytime noon or later would be good…I’m going to run down home overnight. I can be back by eleven o’clock tomorrow.”

“Let me check about the DNA,” Duncan said. “Why don’t you head over to the hotel, get packed, and I’ll call you about the schedule.”

“Good for me,” Virgil said, standing up.

“I’m fine with it,” Lucas said.

“If we can’t schedule the DNA, I might stay home an extra day,” Virgil said. “Call me.”

—

Duncan called him, and Lucas as well, to tell them the DNA techs were off the next day, because they’d been working overtime on the men identified through the photos and were being pushed to take comp time instead of overtime, so Virgil stayed on the farm that extra day.

The farm, which rolled across two hundred and forty acres of pasture, alfalfa, and a line of woodland that followed a creek on the far west side of the property, wasn’t a major source of income. A hundred and sixty acres was in four separate alfalfa fields, the rest being in pasture, Frankie’s garden, and the farm buildings, which included a modest barn, a garage, a machine shed, a newer horse stable built by Virgil and a neighbor, and the house.

On the first evening at home, Virgil had worked through some baseball drills with Sam, Frankie’s fifteen-year-old son with an extremely former husband, and picked sweet corn with his own twins, Alex and Willa, and generally got no writing done at all.

When the sun was three finger-widths above the horizon, he and Frankie saddled their two horses and rode the perimeter of the farm, with a nice gallop along the edge of the creek.

On the morning of the second day, Virgil sat glassy-eyed at the kitchen table as Frankie and Olaf Nilsson, a neighbor, discussed the possibility of overseeding two of Frankie’s aged alfalfa fields with some kind of grass to rehab the declining alfalfa. They were trying to decide who would do the work with what machinery and who’d pay for the diesel and what cut Nilsson might get of the hay produced by the two still-productive alfalfa fields in return for his work and machines on the older fields.

Virgil eventually asked, “Why don’t we just buy the seed and pay Olaf to do the work?”

They both looked at him as though his brain had just rolled out of his ear, and then Olaf said in kindly Scandinavian tones, “Because then Frankie would have to come up with a stack of cash which she’d want to deduct from your taxes, and I’d have to pay taxes on what I get from her. If I do some work for you and get back a few tons of cattle feed, you think some dim-bulb accountant at the IRS is gonna be able to figure that out?”

During the afternoon, they ran farm-related errands and took the twins on a hike around the barn, and Virgil took a call from Duncan: “We’re good on the DNA sampling for tomorrow at one o’clock.”

“I’ll be there.”

—

In bed that night, he told Frankie, “I’m just burning up this August. Burning it up, talking to Internet influencers. I want to be here with you guys, and I want to write, and instead, I’m up to my neck in true-crimers in the Cities. The question is, how many good months like this can we burn and not regret it when we get old? I mean, this is one of the greatest months I’ve ever felt here, except for a little too much rain.”

“Good questions,” Frankie said. “No easy answer.”

Virgil punched his pillow back so he could lean back on it, half-upright, and Frankie put her head on his shoulder. “I wonder if the BCA would give me a leave of absence,” Virgil said. “You know, a year off. I could do a book and a half and then go back to the BCA if the books don’t work out.”

“You won’t find out about a leave of absence unless you ask,” Frankie said. “That seems like it might be a temporary solution. But: the books will work out. People like what you write.”

“When the new contract comes in, maybe I could build you an arena.”

She patted his stomach: “Not a pipe dream, but not a big urgent thing, either. You don’t really need an arena with two horses.”

“How long are you going to have…only two horses?”

She smiled, rolled her eyes, and said, “Rick and I have been talking about this warmblood rescue horse at Connie’s. Six years old. He’s a beauty, but he’s been abused. He’d need a lot of work just to get him to trust us. We could get him for a contribution to the rescue ranch. Maybe five thousand. Maybe a little more.”

“A rescue,” Virgil said. “A warmblood. I kinda like the sound of all of that.”

—

The next morning, Virgil left for the Twin Cities at nine o’clock, and halfway there took a call from Lucas.

“I won’t be with you at Carlson’s house,” Lucas said. “We went to a goddamn vegetarian place last night. Asmov’s Veggies. I’d stay away from it if I were you. I’m sick as a dog. I can’t get more than ten feet from a toilet or I’m in trouble.”

“You gonna see a doc?”

“I’m married to a doc and she says I have a mild case of food poisoning and I’ll be good again tomorrow. I’m weak as a puppy right now. I get tired when I try to stand up.”

“Don’t worry about it. I won’t be doing anything but watching,” Virgil said. “I’ll give you a call when we’re done.”

“Try to lay a little bullshit on Fisk. See what she thought about her old man. Push her a little on Doris.”

“I will do that.”

“Uh, I have some more news—I’ve gotta go out to New Mexico, to Santa Fe. I’m being deposed in the virus case, the murders. I’ll be gone for a few days. Leaving tomorrow afternoon, so…you got it.”

“A few days? What’s a few days?” Virgil asked.

“A few days,” Lucas said. “They’re talking about the deposition happening on Friday, but it’ll probably slop over until Monday, so I’ll be there over the weekend. I’m sorry, but I gotta go.”

“Will Letty be there?” Letty, Lucas’s adopted daughter, was an investigator for the Department of Homeland Security and had worked the virus case with Lucas.

“No, she’s already come and gone,” Lucas said. “She was deposed a couple of days ago. Anyway…”

“I’ll hold the fort,” Virgil said.

—

Lucas thought about getting something to eat, because he was both sick and hungry. When he stood up, he got dizzy, so he sat back down again. His phone rang, an unknown number, and when he answered it, “Hello?” a man said. “This is Big Dave.”

“Hey, Big. We’ve got a question. The guys who hung around with Doris, were any of them doctors? As far as you know?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t think I met anyone who said he was a doctor, but it was a long time ago.”

“All right. Listen, you want to tell me your real name?”

“Not yet. How’s the money thing coming along?”

“I think you may be in line for a chunk of it, but we’d need your real name, of course.”

“Send the bat signal up when you know for sure, and I’ll call you back.”

“I will do that.”

—

Two BCA techs were sitting in a car on the street outside the Carlson/Fisk house when Virgil arrived and pulled into the driveway. They were finishing Subway sandwiches and Cokes, and Virgil waited while they tidied up the wrappers and crusts and put them in a sandwich bag, which they threw into the back seat.

He’d worked with both of them before—Linda Esselton and Carl Smith. Both were easy to get along with, and competent.

“Nice place,” Smith said as they climbed the front steps. He asked Esselton, “What do you think? Buck and a quarter?”

“Maybe a little more,” she said. “Depends on what’s inside.”

“You going for a real estate license?” Virgil asked.

“My husband does custom cabinetry,” Esselton said. “I’ve been in a lot of places like this. Mostly over in Minneapolis, or out on Minnetonka.”

“Wouldn’t have painted it yellow, myself,” Smith said, as he pushed the doorbell.

—

Amanda Fisk answered promptly, a solid-looking blond woman, pretty in a hard way, intelligent eyes: but she didn’t look good, Virgil thought. She looked ragged, tired, stressed, as she probably should, a couple of weeks after her husband died in an accident she’d witnessed. Her eyes seemed to be glittering with tears.

And now the same husband was being investigated to see if he might have paid for sex with a woman who he might have murdered immediately after the sex.

She didn’t bother to smile, but said, quietly, “Yes, come in, please.” To Virgil: “You’re Agent Flowers?”

Virgil nodded. “Yes. Thanks for letting us do this. We’ll try not to bother you any more than we absolutely have to.”

“I admit that it doesn’t make me happy, but it is what it is.” She looked past him to the street. “I understood you were working with Marshal Davenport.”

“I am. He won’t be with us. He’s out of sorts today, food poisoning, and tomorrow he’s flying down to New Mexico. He’s being deposed in a case down there.”

“That thing about the viruses? From last year?”

“Exactly. Federal court, they’re going for the death penalty. Gonna be a tough deposition.”

“Interesting,” Fisk said. “I hoped he’d be here. I’ve never met him, and I’d like to.”

“On stuff like this, there’s not really much for us to do. It’s mostly the lab folks, Linda Esselton, Carl Smith.”

Fisk looked at the two techs and said, “You might have a problem…we have been cleaning the heck out of the house the past two weeks. Getting ready to sell it. Timothy was talking about retiring and we’d been discussing the possibility of downsizing here in Minnesota and buying a place in Southern California. Santa Barbara, actually. He loved golf. Now, after…what happened…I’ve decided to keep going on that. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

She looked so downcast that Carl shuffled his feet and said, “It must have been awful. We’ll find something and we’ll try to be quick. Did he have a closet that we could look at?”

“We have a closet, but I got rid of his clothing. Everything. It’s all at Goodwill. They might still have some of it. A friend of his bought one of his cars, the other is still here…”

Linda: “Did you have separate sinks in the bathroom? A shower he routinely used?”

“Of course. Let me show you.”

“Thank you. And we’ll need a scrub from you, so we can differentiate your DNA from his. I’m sure you know all about that.”

“Of course.”

—

Fisk took them up the dark walnut stairs, through a series of rooms done in carefully coordinated shades of off-white accented with beige, to a bedroom with a walk-in closet showing a line of empty clothes racks on one side, and the other crowded with a woman’s clothes and shoes.

“I had professional cleaners in to do the floors and clothes racks,” Fisk said. “Anyway, Timothy’s clothes were all along here…” She waved at the empty racks. “He didn’t have much in the way of jewelry, but what he had…we have a safe in his home office, down the hall, and the watches are there…”

Linda said to Carl, “Why don’t I take a look at the jewelry while you check the bathroom.”

Virgil followed Carl and Fisk into an expansive bathroom with two sink basins, but no sign of a man’s presence. “All of his stuff…deodorant, lotion, shaving cream, razors…all gone to the trash,” Fisk said. “The left sink was his, I was on the right.”

“Let me take a look at the drains,” Carl said.

While he did that, Virgil followed Fisk and Linda down a hallway to Timothy Carlson’s home office, which featured a desk that must have been eight feet long and four deep. There were four shallow drawers on either side of the leg hole; the drawers were shallow because the back of both sides of the desk were actually concealed safes.

Fisk opened them both, but said one and a half of the two safes were purely her things—necklaces, bracelets, rings, watches—while the top half of one side had a sparse collection of male jewelry, including four watches, a cuff, and two sets of tuxedo cufflinks and studs.

“Okay,” Linda said. “Let me settle in here for a bit.” She opened her briefcase and took out a box of full of sealed swabs.

—

They watched her unwrap the swabs, then Virgil asked Fisk, “Is there somewhere we could talk for a minute? I have a few questions about Timothy.”

“Sure. We could go back to the bedroom…there are comfortable chairs…”

They walked back to the bedroom, heard Smith making scraping noises in the bathroom, and then dropped into two matching easy chairs that faced a pair of queen-sized beds. As they sat down, two Jack Russell terriers jumped on the far bed and peered at them.

“They love to sleep with me,” Fisk said.

“I’ve got a yellow dog, does the same thing,” Virgil said.

Fisk smiled and said, “Can’t get through life without dogs…You know I’m a Ramsey County prosecutor, I assume?”

“Yes. I’m not sure, but you may have been an assistant when I was working with the St. Paul police. That would have been twelve years ago, or a little more. When I saw you at the door today, it kind of rang a bell.”

She shook her head: “That could well be true. I’m sorry, I don’t remember you. Of course, I’ve seen about a million cops since then.”

“I don’t mean to be harsh about what I’m going to ask…”

She showed a short, curt smile, almost a grimace, and said, “Virgil, I’ve spent my life listening to what various dirtbags did to women—rape, child molesting, ag assault, murder. Nothing you could possibly ask me would be shocking…although I have to say, I’d be shocked if Timothy turns out to be a match for the Doris Grandfelt DNA.”

“You don’t think Timothy might have paid Doris for sex?”

She looked at the floor, three fingers pressed against a cheek, and looked back up and said, “You know, if a friend had taken Timothy by the hand and led him to Doris and said, ‘If you pay this woman five hundred dollars, she will have sex with you,’ then I think it’s possible he might have done it, at least at the time, a year after a divorce. I don’t really remember her from Bee—I mentioned that I worked at Bee at the time of the killing…”

Virgil nodded, and said, “Yes.”

“…but I’ve seen photos of her, and she was quite attractive in a farm-girl way. Blonde, big tits. What I have a hard time imagining is how they might have hooked up. At Bee? That seems impossible, frankly. How would the subject of sex ever come up? She was a clerk, for God’s sake, she wasn’t in any of the accounting conferences, as I heard it. Timothy was a shy man, but arrogant, and status-conscious. He was hardly the type to be hitting on a clerk, no matter what her tits were like.”

“We don’t know if Timothy was involved at all,” Virgil said. “We’re just running down various threads that we’ve encountered, hoping something will come up.”

“Then I may have a thread for you,” Fisk said. “Tina Locklin.”

Virgil sat up: “I haven’t heard that name.”

“She was a nurse in Timothy’s practice…he was in a joint practice with three other surgeons. There were several nurses working with them, uh, and surgical techs, they had their own little crews. I heard way back when that Tina Locklin was somewhat obsessed with Timothy. In love. Eventually…what I’m telling you is mostly third-hand, Timothy really wasn’t interested in talking about it…eventually, she had to be let go. One of the other docs, George Baer, did the deed. Fired her. You should talk to him.”

Virgil had his notebook out, and took down the spellings of the two names, Locklin and Baer.

“George Baer is still around?”

“Yes, retired. He’s here in the summer, though, he has a place up on Turtle Lake,” Fisk said. “Has a Fourth of July party every year, and Timothy and I would go. He was here for Timothy’s memorial.”

“Thank you,” Virgil said. “This is the kind of thing we always look for, maybe it leads to something. I hope Tina Locklin is still around.”

“She should be alive, even if she’s not around here. She was a year or two younger than Timothy.”

“Blonde?”

She hesitated and showed the short curt smile again. “I see where you’re going with that. Blonde, big tits? I don’t know, I never saw her. Like I said, Timothy didn’t want to talk about it.”

They chatted for a while, and Fisk told him that she was doing the prep for a murder trial expected to start in a month or so, in September. “It’s not much. Three-way argument. A domestic, really, about who was sleeping with who and when, and one guy shot the other one and regretted it about one bullet too late. The interesting part, for me, is that they both had guns. The killer said it was self-defense, the other man pulled first. The only witness, who was sleeping with both of them, has changed her story a few times, so we’ll see. He’s got a public defender who knows what she’s doing.”

“You think you’ll get him?”

She considered the question, then said, “Yeah, probably. Both men, and the woman, too, were basically white trash, and a jury won’t see much downside to putting him away, no matter who pulled first.”

“It’s an odd business we’re in,” Virgil said. “There was a public defender down in Watonwan County, good guy, basically, I think he’s working up here, now, Eddy something…”

“Eddy Webster? He was a PD outstate somewhere.”

“Yeah, that’s right. I busted a guy, mmm, Donny Herbin was his name. He went after a former friend with a shovel, for no good reason, hurt him bad. He was charged with ag assault and Eddy got it knocked down to simple assault. Herbin’s problem was that he was basically nuts. The judge put him in jail for thirty days, and two days after he got out, he shot and killed a grocery clerk over in Faribault because the clerk wouldn’t double-bag him.”

“I remember that story, the double-bagging thing—didn’t know you were involved,” Fisk said.

“I wasn’t, with that part. I only did the shovel part and told the judge that Herbin ought to get some treatment. The Jackson cops and the highway patrol ran him down after the shooting,” Virgil said. “Still. A strange business.”

They talked about the strangeness of what they did for another ten minutes, trading stories, and Virgil did a couple of soft probes about Timothy, and Fisk asked about how they’d gotten Timothy’s name, which Virgil fended off, and then Carl Smith, carrying his gear bag, stuck his head into the bedroom and said, “I’m good. Got some hair out of the trap in Dr. Carlson’s sink. Linda should be finishing up.”

And she was.

She had scrubbed all of Carlson’s jewelry and bagged the swabs. “If that doesn’t do it, nothing will,” she said. She asked Fisk for a gum scrub, to separate her DNA from Timothy’s, and Fisk agreed.

“I’m a DNA virgin,” Fisk told Esselton. “This is my first time.”

“I’ll be gentle,” Esselton said with a smile.

Fisk nodded and they did the scrub.

She wasn’t worried about the other samples. The hair in the sink wasn’t Timothy’s. His jewelry was either gold or platinum, impervious to most chemicals; and she’d soaked them in a household cleaner that the ’net told her would destroy DNA.

You can find anything on the ’net.

On the way down the stairs, Virgil said to Fisk, “Tina Locklin, George Baer.”

“That’s right,” Fisk said. “I have no idea if Tina had anything to do with anything.”

“I get that a lot,” Virgil said, and he thanked her for her time.

—

Out in the street, Virgil asked Esselton and Smith about what they thought, and they both thought that a DNA check would be routine. “I got some hair out of his sink, and I got some hair out of her sink, too. Make sure there was no funny business.”

“How long for the results?”

“You know we’re backlogged. We could be a couple of months out.”

“Yeah yeah yeah…”

“If you put pressure on somebody to jump the line, maybe…two weeks at best?”

“I’ll put pressure on somebody to put pressure on somebody else, and it won’t be two weeks. Call as soon as you have something.”

—

Virgil called Lucas from his car, told him about the sampling situation, the delay in the DNA results, which was not news to either of them—sometimes, DNA delays ran to months—and about the nurse who may have been obsessed with Timothy Carlson.

“I’ll call Henderson and have him talk to the governor either about jumping the DNA line or getting the samples out to a private lab,” Lucas said. “I’ll get something done.”

“Good. How are you feeling?”

“Still wobbly. I’m not on the toilet, though; I don’t think I have anything left inside.”

“Been there,” Virgil said. “Listen, I’m going to see if I can run down George Baer, and then maybe look for Tina Locklin.”

“Does that feel right to you?”

“I dunno. I’ll tell you what—Fisk is a tough nut. Smart, controlled. I kind of liked her,” Virgil said.

“How often do you run into somebody you kinda don’t like?” Lucas asked.

“Not that often, I guess,” Virgil said.

“You’re weird, Virgil, and you have to live with that,” Lucas said. “Call me after you talk with Baer.”