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The Belkin man had been gone for an hour, and Frankie was online with a company that sold saddles and other tack—she’d lost everything that had been stored in the tack room—when Lucas called from St. Paul.

“Guess what?”

“We got a match!” Virgil said.

“No. We did not,” Lucas said. “We got a good profile from the hair in his bathroom sink that is nothing like the profile from the semen recovered from Grandfelt.”

“Damnit! I was more and more sure that Carlson was our guy,” Virgil said. “We’re back to square one.”

“Not quite. We still have some photo guys who haven’t been located. You’re coming up tomorrow? We do need to see what everybody has done while we were out.”

“Yeah, why don’t I meet you at ten o’clock at the BCA?” Virgil said. “We’ll get with Jon, see what’s what. I’m wondering why he didn’t call me with this.”

“Because he doesn’t know about it yet,” Lucas said. “Henderson arranged for the private lab. He made a call at the end of the workday in Chicago and talked to the lab director. They’ll be calling Duncan tomorrow morning.”

“All right. Damnit, I was so sure.”

“See you at ten,” Lucas said.

—

They met in Duncan’s office, and after talking for ten minutes about the burning of Virgil’s stable, and the cleanup over the weekend, Duncan said that the fire was a sensation on the true crime sites. “How’d that happen?”

“I mentioned it to a couple of people,” Virgil said. “If somebody is deliberately fucking with me, I’m hoping they think I’m out of the case.”

“All right.” Duncan admitted he was unhappy that Henderson had called Lucas, without notifying anybody at the BCA about the DNA test. “But I’ll tell you what—I’m not so sure about the whole DNA thing anyway. I think Amanda Fisk may have been pulling somebody’s weenie. That would be Virgil’s.”

“What?”

Duncan held up a finger. “Let me get Linda, she’s right upstairs.”

He made a call and Linda Esselton, the DNA tech who’d done the scrubs of Timothy Carlson’s jewelry, appeared two minutes later, carrying a file folder. She took a chair and Duncan said, “Tell them.”

“The Chicago lab sent us the results and I printed them out.” She took several pieces of printed paper out of the file, fanned them on her lap, and said, “If you look at the results from the seven separate scrubs…”

“Linda, just talk to us in English, we’re not real big on the science stuff,” Lucas said.

She hesitated, then nodded: “Okay. I scrubbed seven pieces of jewelry. I got nothing. Zip. That’s not right. That jewelry had been sterilized. I didn’t notice anything unusual when I was scrubbing it, except with the gold Rolex bands, you wouldn’t be surprised to see an arm hair caught in the links. There wasn’t any. Okay, sometimes there isn’t—but there’s always something, even if it’s not visible. Skin cells. Tiny specks of blood. Something. But there wasn’t.”

“Are you sure your swabs were good?” Lucas asked.

“You mean my technique, or the instruments?” She was prepared to be offended.

“The instruments, we know your technique is good,” Lucas said.

Mollified, she said, “I had swabs from two different batches. I believe all of them were good.”

Virgil: “So what are you telling us?”

“Just what I said. The jewelry, all of it, was sterilized, and in a way that deliberately removed any traces of DNA. Why would anyone do that? I mean, innocently?”

They all shifted in their chairs, looking at each other and then back at Esselton. Virgil asked, “Are you telling us that somebody deliberately defeated the scrubs?”

“I’m not a detective. I’m telling you I’ve never seen anything like it. Before we sent the package off to Chicago, we split the hair sample that Carl recovered from Carlson’s sink, and after we got the results, Carl and I looked at our sample again this morning. The hair appeared to have been chopped. It’s not hair that would have naturally fallen into the sink, you know, because somebody was going bald and they brushed their hair in the morning and it went down the drain…it was chopped. Like haircut hair. The other thing is, we also recovered hair from the shower, but it was all Fisk’s hair. There was no other DNA in the shower drain.”

“You know for sure it was Fisk’s?” Duncan asked.

Esselton nodded: “We got the scrub from her, for comparison’s sake.”

“I saw that,” Virgil said. “She did tell us that they’d been cleaning the house, scouring it, really, getting ready for a sale. You think that would have included cleaning out the drains?”

“Possibly, but…that thoroughly? I mean, I’ve sold a couple of houses and made sure the drains all drained, so we wouldn’t get dinged by an inspector, but these were, I mean, there were only a few hairs in the shower, when there should have been quite a lot. And all the hair was from Fisk.”

“Interesting. And odd,” Lucas said. He smiled. “I like odd things. They’re trying to tell you something.”

Virgil turned to Lucas and said, “Fisk said she was clearing out the house for a sale, and because she couldn’t stand to look at her husband’s stuff. Other than the jewelry, there wasn’t a single damn thing in the entire house that belonged to him. No clothes. No shirts, no jackets, no socks, no shoes, nothing. She said it all went to Goodwill. I’m somewhat familiar with Goodwill, and if this is high-end doctor clothing…it’ll be gone by now. It would probably have been gone the day after she donated it.”

“Trying not to sound like Captain Obvious, it kinda looks like she was trying to hide something,” Duncan said. “We need to go back there.”

“Don’t do that yet,” Lucas said. “Give me and Virgil some time to work it.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” Virgil said. “When I was talking to Dr. Baer, he said they were both members of the Turtle Lake Golf Club. I wonder if she remembered to clean out his locker?”

“Be our first stop,” Lucas said.

Duncan: “You guys need to talk with your true-crimers, too. I think a few of them gave up and went home while you were gone.”

“We’ll get with them after Turtle Lake,” Virgil said. “They’ve been doing research, we need to know where they’re at.”

—

On the way north, Lucas said, “Fisk. You think she could have burned you out?”

“Would have taken brass balls. Guess what: she has them.”

“She worked at Bee,” Lucas said.

“Yes.”

“She married Carlson not long after the murder,” Lucas said.

“Yes.”

“Interesting series of coincidences; in which I don’t believe,” Lucas concluded.

“If she killed Doris Grandfelt…wait. So she knows, somehow, something is up. She’s been dating Timothy Carlson, a rich doctor, and all of a sudden this hot piece of blonde shows up on his doorstep. She somehow figures out that they’ve been meeting at Bee, and she hides in there after hours to see what’s up. She sees them having sex, or hears them, is sideswiped by jealousy, and kills Doris.”

“Was Carlson there for the murder?”

Virgil had to think for a minute: “Don’t know,” he said eventually. “Probably not, but the murder was pretty close to the sex.”

“One problem with all of this,” Lucas said. “Everything you can blame Fisk for, it’s more logical to blame Carlson. He’s screwing Doris, not long after an emotional trauma, his divorce, has a sudden spasm of regret followed by a psychotic break, and kills her. I’m not saying that’s what happened, but a defense attorney would.”

“He didn’t kill Marcia Wise,” Virgil said. “And we know that was connected.”

“You’re saying we’re dealing with a serial killer? Women rarely are, not even one in ten, and not this way,” Lucas said. “Maybe with poison, or drugs, but they don’t stab people to death, or beat people to death, or throw them off balconies…I don’t know how big Carlson was, but from what I’ve seen, I’m thinking a hundred seventy, a hundred and eighty pounds? Could she throw him off, even if she wanted to?”

“If he was stretched out, balanced on a railing, and she just had to tip him over, maybe,” Virgil said.

“Maybe.”

The Turtle Lake Golf Club was pleasant enough, low rolling terrain dressed in midsummer green, with what appeared to be well-tended greens. The clubhouse itself was of the hybrid Black Forest chalet/Southern plantation style.

Lucas had been at the club once before, not to play golf, but to chat with a member. This time, they located the general manager, Dale Young, who took them to the men’s locker room. Two obese, white, naked men were walking out of the shower rooms, talking, both jiggling and shaking like bowls of Jell-O.

When they were out of earshot, Virgil muttered to Lucas, “I didn’t need to see that.”

“Guys haven’t seen their dicks in years,” Lucas muttered back.

Young said, “I didn’t hear any of that.”

Gerry Wint, the locker room attendant, showed them Carlson’s locker, which was empty.

“Wife came in and cleaned it out,” Wint said. “I had to check and make sure no naked gentlemen were wandering around.”

“Well, poop,” Virgil said. To Lucas: “Think we should bring in the DNA guys and scrub the locker?”

“Man, I don’t know. Maybe,” Lucas said.

“Did she get his clubs?” Virgil asked Young.

“Same day she cleaned out the locker,” the manager said. “I was there for that because that’s when she notified us that she was out. She was a club member by being married to Tim, and she let us know that she didn’t want to be a member. Tim, of course, was gone. So…”

Wint spoke up. “You know…I wasn’t here when she came in, Marv was filling in. I wonder if he gave her all his other shoes?”

Lucas: “Other shoes?”

“He had three pairs of shoes in his rotation,” Wint said. “I wonder if he left some shoes with Marv? Let me go look…”

He walked around a counter and into a back room, reappeared a minute later with some brown and white golf saddle shoes. “These are his…We put ID tags in them so we don’t mix them up. I guess Marv didn’t polish them because, you know…Dr. Carlson was dead.”

“Gone,” said Young.

“Yup, dead and gone,” Wint said.

Virgil took the shoes, carefully lifted the tongue, and looked inside. To Lucas, he said, “Ten and a half.”

Lucas, worried about the current ownership of the shoes, and what Young might think of that, said to Wint, “Could you put those in a bag? We’ll take them with us.”

Young said, “I’m not sure…”

“It’s perfectly okay, really,” Virgil said, stepping between Young and the shoes, which he handed to Wint. “We’ve done this for a long time.”

Five minutes later, in Virgil’s truck, speeding down the tree-lined driveway, Lucas laughed and mimicked him: “ It’s perfectly okay, really, we’ve done this for a long time .”

“What I think is, we gotta get back to the office right now, and get these things scrubbed, in case Young calls Fisk and she gets all legal on us,” Virgil said.

“Get them scrubbed and get a subpoena sent up to Young,” Lucas said. “Not exactly the right order, but it’d confuse things.”

—

At the BCA, Duncan wanted to know the odds that Carlson’s DNA would match the DNA from the Grandfelt murder.

“I would bet lots of money on it,” Virgil said. “Amanda Fisk has scrubbed that house clean. Our own people have never seen anything like it.”

“We got the hair from the sink…”

“Hundred dollars says the hair from the sink doesn’t match the DNA from Carlson’s shoes,” Virgil said.

“Then let’s get it done,” Duncan said. “Right now.”