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Russ Belen was a handsome man, a trifle short, with wide shoulders, curly russet hair, a generally cheerful attitude, and smiles for everyone. A firm look-you-in-the-eye handshake. Whether it was all real, nobody but Belen knew. What was known was that he didn’t consider a county attorney’s job as the high point in his political career.

Which was probably the reason he went on alert as soon as he spotted Henderson and his aide, Mitford, in the back of the room. The party included Rose Marie Roux, the state commissioner of public safety; Ralph Moore, BCA director; as well as Duncan, Lucas, and Virgil.

A step inside the door, Belen stopped, looked around, and asked the room in general, “Am I the last one to arrive?”

Roux said, “The rest of us have been meeting for an hour, Russell. Do you know Lucas Davenport and Virgil Flowers?”

“Sure, Lucas and I go back a way…Virgil I only know by reputation. You’re starting to scare me. What’s going on?”

They were meeting in a BCA conference room around a long faux-walnut table. Roux said, “Sit down, Russ. Over there, where you can see Lucas and Virgil.”

He took a chair, continuing to look quizzically at the participants. To Henderson, he said, “You’re unexpected in whatever this is, Senator. Am I happy to see you again?”

“You may not be shortly,” Henderson said.

Belen: “What’s the problem?”

Roux said, “Lucas? Virgil?”

Virgil said to Lucas: “Go.”

Lucas looked at Belen and said, “We’ve been investigating a member of your staff. Amanda Fisk. We have serious reason to believe that she may be a serial killer.”

“What!” Belen was wearing dark-brown horn-rimmed glasses, and he fumbled at them, knocking them skittering onto the tabletop, where he left them. “What!”

He was shocked, his mouth open, turning to each of the people in turn around the table. “What in the hell are you talking about?”

Lucas laid it out:

“Amanda Fisk has been associated with a number of violent and tragic deaths, and has directly benefited from some of them, although benefits in others are not so clear.”

Reading from a legal pad, he listed them: the death of Becky Watson, a young schoolmate when she was in ninth grade. The murder of Carly Gibson, a law school competitor. The murder of Doris Grandfelt, a marriage competitor. The unusual death of her mother, which resulted in a near million-dollar payoff. The death of her husband, which she actually witnessed, and which also provided her with an extraordinary inheritance benefit. The murder of Marcia Wise, probably mistaken for Lara Grandfelt, which was apparently an effort to eliminate the reward package. The burning of Virgil Flowers’s stable was an attempt to move him off the case, and resulted in injuries to Florence Nobles and her son Sam.

Lucas provided some details for each of the deaths and gave Belen a printout of additional details, including the fact that Fisk had grown up a block from the obscure site where Doris Grandfelt’s body had been left, her employment at Bee, her lie about the timing of her courtship with Timothy Carlson. Virgil had brought his laptop to the meeting and played the video of Fisk buying gasoline in the early morning hours before the stable fire.

In the end, Belen rocked back in his chair and said, “I believe you. I think she’s guilty as sin. I hope you all see the problem with a prosecution.”

Roux nodded and said, “Unfortunately, we all do. The lack of specific evidence. Though in the case of the nonexistent DNA from her husband, that would suggest a guilty knowledge that she was trying to erase.”

“But it’s an effort to erase information that could have led to a prosecution of her husband, not of Amanda,” Belen said.

—

“We still have some ground to cover,” Lucas said. “In the case of her mother, we need to speak to her doctor to find out whether there had been any other overdose issues. We need to go back to Fisk’s house to nail down the DNA evidence. She might very well have gotten almost all of it, but we’ll find some.”

Belen said, “She’s currently on compassionate leave. I suggest we don’t change that, for the time being. When we’ve compiled everything in an…executable form, I’ll formally suspend her from her job and ask for a search warrant to go back in her house for DNA. Then the cat will be out of the bag.”

Henderson: “Russ, I’ve never been a prosecutor, but I can’t see any possible way that your office could handle this, if it’s prosecutable at all.”

Belen nodded. “There’s no way we could handle it. I know the guy down in Dakota County, he’s good. I’ll talk to a judge and request that the case be sent to Dakota for a grand jury investigation.”

Moore, the BCA director, said, “I think we should pull Virgil off the case. I don’t want to, but since he believes he’s been directly attacked, by Fisk, I think it would be best.”

“I think it would be mandatory,” Belen said.

Virgil: “I agree.”

Belen turned to Lucas: “How soon could we get all the material compiled as a complete investigative report that we could act on?”

Lucas said, “We’ve got a bunch of clerical work to do. You know, names, dates and places, motive and opportunity, medical examiner’s reports, all that. It’ll probably take a month to get all that done. I would like to keep that process as secret as possible, although a number of true crime bloggers have Fisk’s name. It will leak. And soon.”

He explained how that had happened, and Belen slapped his forehead and said, “You used the true crime people to do investigative work? You leaked some of the progress of the investigation? That’s…that’s…”

Lucas leaned in hard: “Nonstandard. We asked these people to do paper research that the BCA wasn’t equipped to do,” Lucas said. “With the exception of the discovery of the knife, they didn’t do any actual investigation.”

“It’s worse than nonstandard,” Belen argued. “It could be contaminating.”

“I don’t see why,” Lucas said, leaning away. “What they found for us was basically material available through open public records. Anybody could have found it. For the BCA to do it, it would have had to assign twenty investigators with no surety that there’d be any kind of positive outcome, while the bureau’s regular work would have been effectively sidelined. That simply wouldn’t have happened.”

Moore, the BCA director, said, “Lucas is correct. We couldn’t have done that, unless…well, we could have assigned two people to work it, I guess, but it might have taken months. Or years.”

Belen, fuming, said to Lucas, “I don’t like it. I’ll give you the fact that you may have needed these people, but you know when Fisk is indicted, if she is, she’s going to argue that the jury pool is poisoned by all the publicity and by your leaks…and we’ll wind up having the trial in Cornbread, Oklahoma, or something.”

“You won’t, Dakota will,” Henderson said.

“I’m speaking on behalf of any prosecutor, Senator,” Belen snapped.

“I know that, Russ, and I see the problem. We all do. We do have to consider that without the work by Lucas and Virgil, you’d have a serial killer on your staff until she retired with a nice pension. And she might not yet be done with the killing.”

—

As he said that, there was a soft knock at the conference room door, which popped open and a young woman stuck her head in. She had a sheet of paper in her hand, and she said, “Agent Flowers asked me to do a computer search and to report here if I got a result.”

“What’d you get?” Virgil asked.

“Don Schmidt renewed his driver’s license up through 2009. He was unemployed and living in a mobile home park near Harris, off I-35. I talked to the son of the man who owned the park at the time, and he said he remembers Schmidt talking about going to California, and one day, he did. I can find a lot of Don Schmidts around the country, hundreds of them, but none seem to track back to our Don Schmidt. None with the same birth date and location. I need to do more work on that, but so far, I’m not finding him. We need to talk to somebody about Social Security contributions. That might locate him.”

“I can help with that,” Henderson said.

“Who is Don Schmidt?” Belen asked Virgil.

“A man we think might have sexually abused Amanda Fisk as a child,” Virgil said.

Belen groaned: “Great. That’s just great. We really didn’t need to create any sympathy for the woman.”

Virgil: “Yeah, well. I think that’s one more item in the hit list. I’ll bet Don Schmidt hasn’t contributed a nickel to Social Security since he went to California. Because he’s in a hole in the Northwoods.”

“Prove it,” Belen said. “Is there anything else ongoing that might provide some direct proof?”

Lucas said, “One thing. We were going to ask some of the true-crimers to take a look, but now that we’re at this point…We want to get a couple of crime scene people to go back to Bee and crawl along the wall where Fisk apparently had an office, and the other walls around there, and see if they can find any evidence that a knife had been sharpened on the red bricks.”

He explained about the red grains found in the point of the apparent murder weapon.

“If you could match grains, that would be important,” Belen said. “Maybe even critical. It’d be something physical, instead of circumstantial. Though it could still be blamed on her husband, I suppose.”

There was a long silence, and then Henderson said, “Well, Russ. Now you know our problem.”