Page 28

28

Tuesday, the day everything turned.

The day began for Lucas when he got a call from Senator Henderson, who spoke in hushed tones. “Jesus, Lucas: I jacked up the DNA guy in Chicago. He took a look and said we got a match. The DNA in the shoes is a match for the DNA taken from Doris Grandfelt. We got him. Or her.”

“All right. This is good. We’ve got to keep it to ourselves for the time being. I’ll talk to Jon Duncan at the BCA and tell him to keep it to himself until we can meet with…the big dogs at the BCA and the Ramsey County Attorney. You might want to be there.”

“I do. What about Lara?”

“Are you in St. Paul?”

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you pick me up and we’ll both go talk to her. She knows we have a suspect. I’ll fill you in on the ride over.”

“I’ll see you in twenty minutes. I’ll have Neil drive us over.”

Lucas called Virgil, told him about the match.

“We’ve got to have the big meet,” Virgil said.

“Yeah. I’ll call Jon. I’ll tell him to go ahead and set up the meeting for late today. Henderson and I are going over to Grandfelt’s to talk to her.”

“Okay. I’m talking to all the true-crimers this morning to see if they got anything else…”

Lucas called Duncan and told him about the match. “That goddamned Henderson…it’s about time he got his nose out of this.”

“He won’t do that,” Lucas said. “Grandfelt is one of his big donors, and besides, this kind of thing gets him excited. Makes him feel like he might be a cop.”

“Right. Well, fuck it, water under the bridge. I’ll call Chicago and confirm it, the DNA, and I’ll set something up for late afternoon. You and Virgil better be on good behavior.”

—

A half hour after Henderson called, a black Cadillac SUV pulled into the driveway; the sky was overcast, and the weather had turned cool, a hint of the oncoming autumn. Lucas got a rain jacket and carried it out to the car, got in the back.

Henderson was in the front passenger seat, his aide, Neil Mitford, behind the wheel. Mitford said, “Tell us everything.”

Lucas told them everything. They both had law degrees and took it in, until Henderson said, “I’m convinced. I’m not sure a jury would be.”

“I’m not, either,” Mitford said. “It’d be nice if we had a couple more sticks to throw in the fire.”

“Virgil’s out looking for sticks right now,” Lucas said.

—

Anne Cash had been looking for records of a probate proceeding on Amanda Fisk’s mother, Alma. She found them in an hour, printed them, and called Virgil, who was in his hotel room, pacing, reading snatches of his new manuscript, watching a rainstorm coming in from the west.

“Yeah, Anne.”

“There was an informal probate, but we have a record. Alma had a much bigger estate than you’d think. We couldn’t figure that out so we went back and found another probate under the name Schmidt, which was Alma’s maiden name. Rhonda Schmidt, Alma’s mother, died seven months before Alma and left Alma a house in Stillwater, plus sixty-seven thousand dollars from investments with Vanguard and twenty-five thousand dollars from a life insurance policy. We looked on a real estate site and saw that the house was sold by Alma for three hundred and seventy thousand dollars two months after Rhonda died.”

“And that wouldn’t include any money Alma had on her own?” Virgil asked.

“No. It doesn’t look like she originally had much of her own, before her mom died. We can’t figure it directly, because by that time it had been absorbed by the money she got from her mother, but it looks like it was less than forty thousand dollars, total. But she owned her house outright, and Amanda Fisk, her only heir, sold it a month after Alma died for three hundred and nineteen thousand dollars. And Alma apparently bought a new car with the money from her mom, and we don’t know what happened with that, but it was valued at forty-six thousand when she bought it.”

Virgil was doing the numbers in his head, and he said, finally, “Jeez, Anne, you’re telling me that Fisk got eight hundred thousand dollars when her mother died?”

“Something like that.”

“We need to look at an autopsy. Get everything you’re looking at in print. Everything, and your source for it. I’ll be in my car heading over to the Ramsey County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

“We got her? Fisk?”

“Not yet, but…keep quiet for another day. Please.”

“Pressure’s building up. Something’s gonna blow.”

“Hang on for twenty-four hours.”

—

Virgil called Lucas, who was still in Henderson’s Cadillac, and told him what he’d gotten from Cash.

“That’s another stick,” Lucas said.

“What?”

“Mitford’s with us, said we needed another stick to throw on the fire.”

“I’m on my way over to the ME’s office, see if they did an autopsy and if they did, what they found.”

“Must have been one, sudden unexpected death with no witnesses,” Lucas said.

When Virgil rang off, Lucas told Henderson and Mitford about Fisk’s double inheritance.

“She’s starting to sound like a bad, bad person,” Henderson said. He had been looking at himself in a visor mirror and smiled in the mirror at Lucas.

—

Darrell Richardson, the medical examiner, met Virgil in his office and a clerk brought in the autopsy report. Richardson looked at it, frowned, and said, “Before my time…There’s not much to it. It looks like an accidental overdose. She was insulin-dependent, and the chemistry says she overdosed herself on insulin and also had a pretty heavy dose of zolpidem in her bloodstream. Zolpidem’s a sleep aid…”

“I know, it’s Ambien,” Virgil said. “How big a dose?”

“She apparently took two ten-milligram tabs. The usual dose for a woman is seven and a half milligrams, but she had a prescription for ten-milligram tabs. We did recover the pill bottle, there were still seven tabs left. So, she’d been using them right along, apparently. From what we could tell, it seemed likely that she’d done her insulin, then a tab of Ambien, or two tabs, and that may have left her confused about whether she’d taken her insulin, and she took another shot. It happens…”

The two of them went over the investigator’s report, and there was no indication that she’d had visitors the night of the overdose, but to Virgil’s eye, it didn’t appear that anyone had looked very hard.

—

Virgil called Lucas with information about the autopsy. Lucas, Henderson, and Mitford were in Grandfelt’s living room, and Lucas passed the information on to the others.

“This is now a case,” Mitford said.

“I think so, too,” Henderson said.

Grandfelt, who had been wandering around the room with brief perches on one of her high-fashion chairs, asked, “Can we tell the true crime people to go ahead and use her name? That would put pressure on her. We might see if she’s inclined to do something precipitous.”

“Well, I can tell you, from what Virgil said, his impression of Fisk and from Dr. Baer, she’s not going to kill herself,” Lucas said. “If we manage to indict her, she’ll fight it. She’s got the money.”

They all thought about that, then Grandfelt asked, “Do you really think she burned down Virgil’s stable?”

Lucas nodded. “We do.”

Henderson said, “If she drove all the way to Mankato and back, she probably bought gas.”

“We’re trying to get a person to look at her credit cards,” Lucas said.

“If I were going to burn down Virgil’s stable, and needed gas, I wouldn’t put it on a credit card. Maybe you should check some gas station security videos,” Mitford said.

“Lot of gas stations,” Lucas said. “And everybody buys gas.”

“Not many gas stations near her place,” Henderson said. “My house is a mile down the street from hers. There are two Speedways and a SuperAmerica that are handy. It would be interesting to see when she last tanked up.”

“We’ll look,” Lucas said. “I’ll call Virgil and get him started.”

He did that.

—

There were three gas stations that were more or less handy to Fisk’s home. Virgil reasoned that if she were to tank up the car, she wouldn’t have gone to the closest one. Of the other two, one would require a turn away from a main route to Mankato and the farm; the other would put her on the main route.

He’d gone to that one.

The assistant manager at SuperAmerica said they did, in fact, have video of the pump area, but he didn’t know exactly how to rewind the video and display it, but he knew it went back thirty days. He also knew a woman who worked for TC Surveillance who could do all that, but would charge for it.

“She’s not cheap, she’d probably want two hundred bucks to come over right away.”

“The state of Minnesota has two hundred bucks,” Virgil said.

“They should, what with the taxes here,” the manager said. Virgil didn’t answer, but stared at him, and when it was about to become awkward, the manager said, “I’ll call her.”

Virgil was waiting for the woman to show up, and eating a bag of peanuts, when Lucas came through the door: “Got anything?”

“Not yet.”

“Big meeting at four o’clock. We could use another thing. As many things as we can get.”

Virgil was telling him about waiting for the woman from TC Surveillance when a call came in on Virgil’s burner. Mary Albanese, another of the true-crimer researchers. Lucas listened in.

“We’ve got something weird, could be nothing,” Albanese said. “But it’s curious. We found a cold case in St. Paul, a woman named Carly Gibson, who was beaten to death in 1998. With a lead pipe, if you can believe that. I mean it’s such a cliché. Anyway, it was never solved. The murder wasn’t.”

“And…”

“She was going to law school at William Mitchell. She was in the same class as Amanda Fisk.”

Lucas peered at the phone, then at Virgil, then asked, “What’s the woman’s name again?”

He got it, and asked, “How’d you find this?”

“We were reviewing murder reports in the Star-Tribune . When we saw the date and the law school thing, it rang a bell.”

Lucas: “You’re a genius.”

“I certainly think so.”

Off the phone, he said to Virgil, “I’m going downtown. I’ll get with the chief and pull the case file. Then I’ll be over at William Mitchell.”

“While I wait here for the Surveillance chick.”

—

The woman from TC Surveillance, Jane Gou, was short, heavy, harassed, late. Before she’d done anything, she wanted to know who to bill. Virgil gave her Jon Duncan’s name and phone number at the BCA, and she took Virgil into the station’s tight back room and a small video screen.

She rolled the memory back to the night before the fire, then ran it forward at double speed. At one o’clock on the morning of the fire, Amanda Fisk drove into the station in her Mercedes SUV and gassed up the car. The car was parked sideways to the camera, so he couldn’t see the license plates. Fisk was dressed for the country in jeans, a jean jacket, and a Twins baseball cap. She kept her head tilted down, under the ballcap bill, so the camera couldn’t see her face, but Virgil was certain that it was her. The surveillance tape showed a running total of gallons dispensed. Toward the end, the total stopped for thirty seconds, and then started again, dispensing exactly one gallon.

Virgil said, as calmly as he could manage, which wasn’t entirely calm, “I’m going to need a copy of this.”

“You’ll need an AVI app to see it,” Gou said.

“I got one of those,” Virgil snapped. “Give it to me. On a thumb drive. If you don’t have one, I’ve got one in my car.”

He took a fast circuit around a junk food rack and came back to Gou, who said, “You’re scaring me a little. I’ll get the video for you.”

“Now,” Virgil barked. “Get it.”

He did another trip around the junk food rack, and Gou was downloading the video. Two more trips and she handed him the thumb drive, and she said, “You gotta chill.”

“I’ll chill when I’m dead,” Virgil said, and he went out the door.

—

Lucas got the cold case file on Carly Gibson and skipped through it. Gibson apparently had been walking to her car, a block and a half from the law school, when she’d been attacked and killed. Traces in her hair indicated that she’d been beaten with a lead pipe—old-school, but effective, her skull crushed. Her purse was missing, but a gold necklace was still in place around her throat, and a gold-look bracelet around one exposed wrist.

Robbery was mooted as a motive, but if so, the killer was in a hurry, having missed both gold items. On the other hand, it was dark. He, or she, may never have seen the gold.

The killer left behind exactly no spoor.

Lucas read through it again and was struck by the similarity to the murder of Marcia Wise. Again, no spoor: not a single trace.

—

While he was there, he pulled the report on the death of Becky Watson. According to the reporting officers, a witness—Amanda Fisk, a ninth-grade student at Woodbury High School—said that she and Watson had been at a movie in Galtier Plaza. They were waiting to be picked up by Fisk’s father. Watson was standing behind a streetlight pillar when she apparently stumbled over the edge of a curb and fell into the path of a UPS truck.

The truck driver had not been drinking and had a good safety record. He said he only saw Watson a split second before the impact and she “looked like she was doing a racing dive into the street.”

Watson was a good student and had no reason to commit suicide. The witness, Fisk, said she didn’t know exactly what happened, but agreed with the driver that Watson had lurched into the street, possibly stumbling over a raised curb.

The case was closed as an accident.

Lucas made notes and headed for the law school.

—

Virgil called and before he could say anything, Lucas blurted, “Fisk killed her law school classmate. Killed her exactly the same way as she did Wise. I talked to the dean, and we went back through the records. Fisk finished fourth in her class and was the top woman student. She would have been number two among women, if the woman who was leading her hadn’t been beaten to death. And man, I’ve been reading the Becky Watson file. If she didn’t push Watson in front of that truck, I’d be astonished. And you—did you find anything?”

Virgil’s voice grated like a trashed transmission: “That bitch burned down my stable.”