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Duncan took charge of the shoes, and when he asked what Virgil and Lucas were planning to do next, Virgil said, “Okay, we’re going to sic a couple of our true crime people on Amanda Fisk. We need to background her. We know she was dating Carlson around the time Grandfelt was killed, and maybe…maybe…well before she was killed. She could have had access, one way or another, to a key that would get her into Bee after hours. Her husband died a really curious death after Lara Grandfelt offered the five million reward and a bunch of true-crimers showed up. We need to get serious about looking at her.”

“Man, she’s a county prosecutor. She’s sorta like one of us.”

“She might be a serial killer, unlike us,” Lucas said, rubbing his hands together. “I’m starting to get a tingle here.”

“Don’t tell me what’s tingling, I don’t want to hear about it,” Duncan said. “So: quietly, boys. Carefully. We don’t want any of this bleeding out on the true crime sites prematurely.”

“Why not?” Lucas asked. “A good way to jack up the pressure.”

Virgil: “Yeah, but, Jon’s right. She knows everything there is to know about evidence. I’d like to put something together before she has a chance to screw with it. Or to start some kind of PR campaign against us.”

—

Back in the borrowed office, Lucas asked, “With the fire and all, did you ever get back to Dahlia Blair about when Fisk and Carlson got married?”

“No. She called me Friday, there was some kind of computer complication that she was trying to work around. I told her I was out of it because of the fire. The next thing I knew, there were six true-crimers taking videos of the ashes. Haven’t talked since.”

“I saw the videos,” Lucas said. “Who was the hulk in the black tee-shirt?”

“Moses, one of Frankie’s kids. By the way, Frankie and I are gonna get married, maybe next week. Or next month. Or whenever Frankie can set it up.”

“About time,” Lucas said. “We’re coming, of course.”

“Yeah, you’re gonna be best man,” Virgil said. “Anyway, we need to call Dahlia.”

—

They did that. “We didn’t know if you still wanted us around after all the fire videos we did,” Blair said.

“Yeah, okay, but when…”

“Amanda Fisk and Timothy Carlson got married in September, four months after Doris was murdered.”

“Hot damn,” Virgil said.

“This is something, isn’t it?” Blair asked.

“It might be,” Virgil said. “But please, please don’t do anything with it. Not yet. We will feed you some really good stuff when we get it, and it should be coming soon. Maybe early next week.”

Off the phone, Lucas said, “Let’s think about this. Let’s suppose that Fisk killed Doris, Carlson, and Wise. She didn’t leave any hard evidence behind. Minneapolis got no foreign DNA from Wise’s body and there’s nothing from her on Doris. Carlson she had cremated and nobody looked.”

“If there was anything in my stable, it went up in smoke,” Virgil said.

“We’re building a case on nothing but circumstantial evidence. Other than that, we got nothing.”

“So we’ve got to pile it up, the circumstantial stuff,” Virgil said. “The trouble being, we could be wrong.”

“We need to get the best true-crimers off all the other shit they’re looking at and have them research Amanda Fisk from the time she was born until a half hour ago.”

“I’ll call them,” Virgil said.

—

They spent the rest of the afternoon and most of Friday talking to true-crimers, but nothing of interest turned up. Some of the true-crimers were anxious to be first with Amanda Fisk’s name as a person of interest, and Virgil was reduced to pleading with them to keep it quiet. That wouldn’t last long.

Government offices were closed on the weekend, though online sources were still up. With the problems at the farm, Virgil went home Friday night.

Karen Moss called Virgil on Saturday while he was eating lunch and said, “I want a piece of the five million when we hang Fisk.”

“We’ve got nothing to hang her with,” Virgil said.

“I got something,” she said. “It’s good.”

“What?”

“Guess where Amanda Fisk grew up…”

“C’mon,” Virgil said.

“She graduated from Woodbury High School.”

“Interesting, but a lot of people went to Woodbury. It’s a big school.”

“So I looked at the property tax records, for a Fisk,” Moss said. “I found one. There was a Fisk family that lived on Hattie Lane in Woodbury back in the nineties. Not recently, as far as I can tell. That was a block from Shawnee Park.”

“Holy cats.”

“Am I good, or what?”

Lucas, laughing when he was told, said, “Another straw on the camel’s back.”

—

Virgil called Duncan, who said, “Keep pushing. We should have the DNA stuff back from Chicago on Tuesday or Wednesday. If we get Carlson’s DNA and it matches what we got outa Grandfelt, we’ll need to talk to the Ramsey County Attorney about Fisk—that we’re looking at her.”

“I don’t think we’re just looking at her, Jon,” Virgil said. “I think she killed all of them—Grandfelt, Carlson, and Wise, and I think she burned down my stable to get me off the case.”

“None of what you have is definitive. Keep piling it up. We need to catch her in a misstep.”

“She’s smart.”

“Not that smart. Instead of scrubbing everything clean in her house, she should have let us ID Carlson as the person who had sex with Grandfelt. Nothing illegal about that, they were both single adults. Scrubbing his DNA is what a guilty person would do. At least, somebody with guilty knowledge.”

“We’ll push.”

“One more thing,” Duncan said. “How old is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hang on…I’m going out to the DVS.” Duncan put his phone down and Virgil could hear him rattling keys on his home computer. “Okay. She’s forty-eight. What I’m wondering is, are her parents still around? If they are, we should interview them.”

“Huh. You’re right.”

“As always.”

—

Lucas agreed that they should interview Fisk’s parents, assuming they could find them. “We need their names. They should be on those old tax records, if that actually turns out to be Fisk’s family. Then we can check driver’s licenses…”

Virgil called Karen Moss back, got Harlan and Alma Fisk as the owners of the Hattie Lane house, but Moss said that the house had now been sold at least twice since the Fisks lived there. Driver’s licenses showed Harlan renewing until 1994, and not after that. Alma Fisk renewed until 2018, and then no more.

Virgil: “Are they dead?”

“One way to find out…”

An online search of death records turned up a death certificate for Alma Fisk issued in March of 2017; a check with the Star-Tribune obituaries found a brief paid obit that listed survivors as a daughter, Amanda Fisk. There was no mention of Harlan Fisk, or death certificate or obit for Harlan.

“We got the right family—and Fisk lived a block from Shawnee Park. She’d know how to deliver Doris’s body there. We’re beyond coincidence now,” Lucas said.

“Wonder where Harlan Fisk went? Divorce?”

“That seems likely,” Lucas said.

“If Harlan Fisk is alive, then he’s gotta be in his seventies, at least. So—Medicare, Social Security,” Virgil said.

“I don’t know how you get the records, but I know somebody who can. Let me make a phone call.”

The call went to Elmer Henderson, and that was the only call Lucas needed: Henderson got back in an hour and said, “There’s a Harlan Fisk in Eau Claire getting Medicare. He’s seventy-seven. I’ve got an address, but no phone number.”

“Thank you.”

To Virgil: “I think we interview him in person. First thing Monday. You want to come along?”

Virgil shrugged: “Why not? It’s an hour and a half from your house. I’ll be up there at nine.”

—

Monday came up rainy, and Virgil didn’t make it to St. Paul until nine-thirty. Lucas wanted to drive, which was fine with Virgil, who’d been up since five o’clock, and he dozed on the way over. At eleven o’clock, they were on Badger Avenue in Eau Claire, a neatly kept street of green trees and postwar houses, some with detached hutch-like garages in the back.

They spotted Harlan Fisk’s house, which had a rain-soaked American flag hanging from a short flagpole set next to the front door. They parked, pulled on rain jackets, and walked up the front walk, through the smell of sidewalk night crawlers, and pushed a doorbell.

Harlan Fisk pried the door open a couple of minutes later, as a woman called from the back, “Who is it, Harlan?”

“Don’t know.” He peered with pale-blue fighter-pilot eyes at the two men on the porch. “Who are you?”

Lucas had his ID out: “U.S. Marshal. We’d like to speak with you for a few minutes.”

“About what?”

“Well, about your daughter.”

“Amanda? I haven’t seen Amanda in years. What did she do?”

Virgil edged Lucas out of the way and asked, “You mind if we come in? It’s a little damp out here.”

Fisk backed away from the door and the woman, who’d come in closer, said, “We don’t speak to Amanda.”

Virgil glanced back at Lucas, who nodded: this was a good thing. They didn’t like her. They followed Fisk and the woman into a small living room, and Fisk went to the eat-in kitchen and brought back two kitchen chairs to supplement the two easy chairs that looked at the television. When they were all sitting, Virgil said to the woman, “We didn’t get your name?”

“Ruth Fisk,” she said. “Harlan’s wife. What about Amanda?”

“We’re trying to put together a history on Amanda. There were some…irregularities about her husband’s death.”

Harlan sat back: “Timothy is dead? She push him out a window or something?”

“Good guess. He fell off a balcony of their house,” Lucas said. “He died instantly.”

“He fell? That doesn’t sound like Timothy. He was a cautious guy, far as I could tell,” Harlan said. “Didn’t know him all that well. And I wasn’t really guessing. I was thinking of all those guys dying around Putin. On the news, they’re always falling out of windows.”

“Well, his death was investigated by the county medical examiner, we’re just doing some checks,” Virgil said.

“On what?” Harlan asked. “Like I said, I haven’t seen her in years. We had problems after the divorce—I did see her a few times when she was in college.”

Virgil: “What kind of a person is she? Outgoing, friendly, tough, what?”

Ruth: “Mean. She’s mean. She never really gave Harlan and me a chance.”

“Well, you can kinda understand that,” Harlan said to his wife. To Virgil and Lucas: “Anyway, I don’t think she really was against us. She just didn’t care. Didn’t care one way or the other. We were not important to her.”

“She looked at me like I was a bug,” Ruth said. “Really, she looked at everybody like they were bugs.”

“She had a tough run in life, that’s gotta affect people,” Harlan said. “After that thing with Becky Watson…You marshals know about that?”

“No…”

Harlan crossed his hands across his ample stomach. “Well, let me see if I can remember it all. There used to be a big movie theater in a shopping center in downtown St. Paul. Mandy and Becky went to a movie after school, they were in…let’s see…ninth grade? Anyway, I was supposed to pick them up after work, and they were standing on the curb downtown, waiting, and Becky stumbled on the curb and she fell in front of a delivery van and was killed. Mandy was right there with her, saw the whole damn thing. I guess Becky’s head was squashed…”

Lucas said, “Oh, boy.”

Harlan frowned: “What? It was an accident.”

Virgil said, “Okay. What we’re trying to do here is build a little history. Tell us about her.”

Harlan pushed out a lip, then, “Like I said, she had a tough row to hoe. Alma had a bad time in her pregnancy, and right after Mandy was born, she took off. Went back to her family and wouldn’t take Mandy with her, so I had to put her with a neighbor lady to take care of her, because I had to work. That went on for almost two years and then Alma came back but she and Mandy were never right. And then, oh, must have been seven or eight years later, Alma’s brother Don moved into what had been Mandy’s room, and Mandy moved down the basement. It was finished, and everything, with her own little bathroom, so we thought it was pretty good. Mandy called it ‘the dungeon.’ I don’t know for sure, but I think Don might have messed with Mandy.”

“Messed with…what does that mean?” Lucas asked.

“Messed with her. You know, while I was working. I don’t know what he did, and Alma said he didn’t do anything, and Mandy said he didn’t do anything, but I didn’t believe them. Still don’t. He did something .”

Virgil: “And you knew that…how?”

“Just the way she acted around him. Like, sometimes, she acted scared, and sometimes, she was a little too friendly. I finally told the sonofabitch that he had to get out of the house. That was the beginning of the end for me and Alma, when I threw her brother out. We started fighting…Then, in there, I met Ruth, and we got it together, and Alma and I got divorced. Alma got everything I had. I had to start over, but 3M gave me and Ruth—we met at work—a transfer to the plant in Menomonie so I got to keep my pension. Ruth’s folks come from here in Eau Claire, so that’s where we settled. We commuted to work until we retired.”

“Did Amanda live with Alma until her mother died?”

“Oh, no, she was long gone before that happened. She moved out when she went to college, never looked back. That must have been in the mid-90s. She was born in ’76, so she would have graduated from high school, I guess, in ’94.”

Ruth: “We paid for her college.”

Harlan: “Part, anyway. She got good grades in high school, she’s a smart one. She got scholarships to cover her college tuition, but her mother wouldn’t help, so we chipped in—mostly for a room in St. Paul, you know, and some extra bucks along the way.”

Ruth snorted: “Extra bucks? Like a hundred dollars a month besides the room, and that was real money back then.”

“Yeah, and she had part-time jobs, too,” Harlan said. “Then she wanted to go to law school, and I told her we couldn’t help much with that, so she got a full-time job working in a supermarket and went to law school…it took her like an extra year, but she went to one of those schools that were flexible about it, so she graduated and got a good job. Then, she went to work for the county. That’s the last I heard.”

“What happened to Alma?” Virgil asked.

“Well, she got all our savings and the house, and the savings was considerable. I had to give her all that to save my pension, but she had rights to part of my Social Security if she’d lived. But, she didn’t. She had diabetes. She died real sudden. I got involved because there was a termination of her share of the Social Security benefits.”

“Was there an autopsy? Do you know?” Virgil asked.

“I guess, because we were told that she might have gave herself too much insulin. That’s all I know about that.”

—

They talked for a while longer but got nothing more that was substantive. They said goodbye, and as they pulled on the rain jackets and stepped out on the porch, Harlan said, “Whatever you’re doing, remember that the kid had a hard time growing up, a hard time, especially with that sonofabitch Don.”

In the car, Lucas said, “She had a hard time growing up. She also had a classic serial killer childhood. The Don guy. Messing with her? He was probably fucking her. She was around a lot of early death: the girl hit by the truck, her mother, her husband, Doris…”

“And still: not a single piece of hard evidence that implicates her.”

They drove in silence for a while, then Virgil asked, “Who do we know who could get a look at her credit cards? Without a warrant, without tipping her off?”

Lucas said, “Letty knows a woman at the National Security Agency who can look at them in real time. It would probably be illegal. If anybody ever found out. Why do you want to look?”

“I want to see when she last bought gas before my stable burned.”

“I could ask Letty to check with her source. Then we’d know if we should go after her with a subpoena, all legal-like.”

“It would be worth knowing,” Virgil said.

“I’ll make the call, tonight, when she’s not at work,” Lucas said.

—

They stopped at a McDonald’s in Hudson, Wisconsin, for lunch, then drove the rest of the way into the Cities. On the way, Virgil called Duncan to ask about the DNA samples, and Duncan said that he’d checked, and the Chicago testing firm was still saying it’d be the next day.

“Grandfelt has been calling, she wants to talk to you guys. Where are you?”

“I-94 coming into St. Paul. Did she say if she was at home?”

“Yeah, she is. You gonna stop over?”

“That would be best,” Virgil said. He added, “Hey. We talked to Fisk’s father. Thank you. Good stuff. She’s a serial killer, and more than we even know yet.”

“Great balls of fire. You’re sure?”

“Yeah, we are,” Lucas said. “Get the suits together, maybe tomorrow, we’ll lay it out for everybody.”

“You want Russ Belen?” Belen was the Ramsey County Attorney, and Fisk’s boss.

“I don’t know. Ask Rose Marie or Ralphy.” Rose Marie Roux was the Minnesota commissioner of public safety; Ralph Moore was the BCA director.

“I will do that. You go talk to Grandfelt.”

—

A tall black man wearing an earbud met them at Grandfelt’s front door. He was wearing a blue suit, the jacket open so he could get at the cross-draw pistol on his left hip. Lucas held up his ID and the man said, “I’m Jim Nelson, with Wright Security. Let me call Miz Grandfelt.”

He stepped back from the door and a bit to one side, where he could call to Grandfelt while he could still keep an eye on Lucas and Virgil. They heard Grandfelt call back, “Let them in,” and he waved them in.

Grandfelt, Lucas thought, did not look good. She’d lost weight since the murder of her companion, skin sagging around her eyes and jowls. “Any news at all?”

“We need to sit and talk…” Lucas said, glancing at Nelson, “…privately.”

Nelson smiled and said, “Well, that was impolite.”

“No offense.”

“None taken. I’ll go out on the porch.” To Grandfelt: “Stewart’s outside, in back.”

She nodded, “Okay. Thank you.” She even sounded older. To Virgil, she said, “I was shocked to hear about the fire at your farm. Is everybody okay?”

“Everybody is now…my fiancée and her son got second-degree burns, but…they’ll be fine.”

“Wonderful,” Grandfelt said.

Nelson was outside, pulling the door closed behind himself. The three of them sat in the overstuffed living room and Lucas said, “Lara, we have some things to tell you, but you can’t pass them on. You know…you have to keep your mouth shut.”

“I can do that,” Grandfelt said. “Do you know who killed Doris?”

“We think we do,” Lucas said. “Unfortunately, we don’t have any single piece of hard evidence. Everything we have is circumstantial, but it’s strong. The person we’re looking at, a woman, is a lawyer and a county prosecutor who we think didn’t only kill Doris, but is a serial killer. We think she killed Marcia as well, and her husband, and probably set Virgil’s stable on fire. It’s possible she killed her own mother, and there was another curious death involving a young girl…when they both were young. If she killed that girl, she’s been murdering people since she was in high school.”

“My God. Who is it?”

“Her name is Amanda Fisk. She was an employee at Bee when Doris was killed. We believe the man who had sex with Doris is the man that Fisk married a few months later, and probably murdered a couple of weeks ago.”

They outlined the case against Fisk, and the problems with a possible indictment and prosecution. At the end, Grandfelt shook her head and asked, “I believe you…I think. But I’m not sure I believe you beyond a reasonable doubt. What do you think the chances of a conviction might be?”

Lucas tipped a finger at her. “Hard to tell. Maybe we’ll find some more evidence: this has all come together in the last couple of days,” he said. “Tomorrow, we should know if her husband was the one who had sex with Doris. That would be significant because it would provide us with a serious motive—jealousy. Not only that, she lied to Virgil about her relationship with Carlson. She said she only began dating him after Doris’s murder, and we have reason to believe that he actually began dating her much earlier than that.”

“Does she have any money?” Grandfelt asked.

Virgil: “She does. She lives in a mansion—I think you’d call it a mansion—on Summit Avenue in St. Paul. Carlson was a successful surgeon for at least thirty years, so there is money around.”

“Then if she’s taken to trial, and I’m convinced beyond a reasonable doubt, even if she’s found not guilty, I’ll sue her for wrongful death,” Grandfelt said. “Then all we need is a preponderance of evidence, and I think we’d get that, from what you’ve told me.”

“And that would satisfy you?” Lucas asked.

She had to think, then said, “Yes. I wanted to know who killed Doris and why, and I want to know who killed my Marcia and why, and I want that person punished. You are almost there. If you get all the way there, if you indict her, even if you don’t get a conviction, I’ll be satisfied, and I will go after her myself with a civil suit. I’ll take her job, her savings, her houses, and her cars. She’ll be living in a basement and riding in buses.”

Virgil told her about the help they’d gotten from the true-crimers, and Grandfelt said she understood, and that she was prepared to split the five-million-dollar reward, and the one-million-dollar add-on, between all the people who had helped.