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Amanda Fisk woke in the morning to the sound of people shouting in the street, not a common occurrence on Summit Avenue. She put on a robe, went to the front balcony, and looked out. A cluster of compact SUVs was parked illegally in front of the house, and a group of women, and one man, were making movies, and the man pointed at her and shouted something that might have been, “That’s her!”

“What the hell?”

But she had a feeling that she knew. She’d locked the dogs out of the bedroom, but the little fuckers were waiting for her to emerge and began ricocheting around her feet as she hurried down the stairs to her home office. The office had only a small window that looked out to the back of the house; she peeked, and none of the people at the front had ventured around back. The yard was empty.

She opened Anne Cash’s website and there it was: “Prosecutor Investigated for Murder of Doris Grandfelt and Others, Including Husband.”

She scanned the attached story, her lips moving with the words: Becky Watson, Carly Gibson, Doris Grandfelt, Alma Fisk, Timothy Carlson, Marcia Wise.

The story mentioned the burning of Virgil Flowers’s stable, and injuries to his girlfriend and her son, and to two horses.

“There’ll be more jackasses mad about the horses than about the people,” she muttered to herself. “You really want to get me, you should have focused on the horses.”

She stared at the screen for a moment, calculating, brushed past the caroming mutts, ran back up the stairs, showered, did her makeup, dressed carefully in a blue-checked dress and low heels. She packed clothes and a lot of underwear, got her business purse, and headed down to the garage.

The dogs were barking at her; they wanted breakfast, and she couldn’t remember if she’d fed them the night before. She dumped about three days’ kibble into their two dishes, gave them a full bowl of water, and left them. The garage, though attached, was partly behind the house, so she was out, turned and rolling down the driveway before the true-crimers spotted her. She hit the street and turned right and in the rearview mirror, saw true-crimers running for their cars. She had a good lead, made several turns, then headed downtown.

—

Russ Belen was in his office, saw her coming, and half stood, crouched over a pile of papers on his desk. She banged inside and shouted, “Have you seen what they’ve done to me?”

Belen pointed at a chair, said, “Some of it,” and “Sit down! Sit down!”

“The goddamn cops are framing me for Harrison,” she shouted at Belen, saliva spraying across his desk; she didn’t sit down.

Harrison was a cop who shot a Black woman at exactly the wrong time, in exactly the wrong place, and without anywhere near enough justification. Fisk had sent him to prison.

“I’ve seen what they’ve got, and it’s strong, Amanda,” Belen said, in a trying-to-be-reasonable voice. Two assistant county attorneys were pushing through the door but he waved them back. “I’ve got no choice but to suspend you. I can’t pay you during your suspension, but if this turns out to be nothing, you’ll get your full salary.”

“Suspending me? You’re suspending me all right. You’re lynching me,” Fisk shouted at him.

“Not me, not me,” Belen said, a notch quieter. “The BCA is taking the information to Dakota County. Bob Christianson will be making the decisions.”

“Christianson? You know what I think of Bob Christianson? He’s a goddamned right-wing fool and he’s already said he wouldn’t have prosecuted Harrison.”

Belen held his hands up, a blocking gesture. “Look. I can see you’re angry, and if you’re innocent, I can certainly understand why. But this doesn’t have anything to do with Harrison. And I’m going to have to ask you to leave. If you need anything from your desk, I’ll have Clark escort you…”

“Escort me? You sonofabitch…”

In the end, she was back on the street with two banker’s boxes full of personal effects. She carried them across to the Victory Parking ramp where she’d left her car. She thought about the Saint Paul Hotel, which was around the corner, but decided against it. She needed somewhere a little more anonymous, a traveler’s hotel, a Holiday Inn or the equivalent, as a bolt-hole if she needed it. She’d go back to her home after dark, feed the dogs again. The dogs. The little fuckers would probably be shitting all over the living room carpet…

She wrenched herself straight again. She had to think, and not about the dogs.

One thing: they didn’t know about Don.

And for just an instant, a smile flickered across her face. Even Don hadn’t comprehended what she was going to do to him, until she’d already done it.

—

Belen managed the transfer to the grand jury investigation to Dakota County, which would be done under the supervision of a longtime assistant county attorney named Dick Roller. Virgil knew him and said he was very good.

Lucas and Duncan coordinated the data collection on the case, pinning down times, dates, autopsies when they were available, interviews with people who’d known both Fisk and the victims. They attempted to document the links between them, and possible motives.

Roller pushed hard for any physical evidence of a murder that could be connected to Fisk. The video of Fisk buying gasoline was good, but not definitive, because she did have a gasoline lawn mower at her house.

—

A BCA agent named Evelyn Harvey was placed in charge of tracing Don Schmidt. She visited his last known residence in a manufactured home outside Harris, Minnesota, north of the Twin Cities, and called Lucas from there.

“The house is a wreck. I mean, literally, it’s collapsing. It hasn’t been lived in since 2008. But: it’s not really in a trailer park. It’s in a wooded area, with a few more of these homes scattered around, originally on four-acre lots. Most of them are wrecks, now. If you’re thinking that Fisk might have come up here and killed Schmidt, it would have been a heck of a lot easier to kill him and bury him right here, than to haul him away and bury him somewhere else. Plenty of privacy.”

“I worked a case down in Louisiana where we used ground-penetrating radar to look for grave sites…”

“That was exactly my thought. We can do that, we’ve got the GPR gear. I don’t think it’d be a big problem here, unless she actually buried him under the house. There are little clearings and openings in the trees where I think she’d have put him. In the heavy woods, there are so many roots that digging would have been really hard, so there’s a limited amount of area where we’d have to use the radar.”

“Good. See if you can get that going, Ev, and I’ll talk to people here to support the request.”

“Great. I’ll tell you what happens.”

—

The compiling of the available information took a month. In the middle of the month, Harvey called Lucas at home, and said, “You better get up here. We think we’ve got a grave, or at least a burial of some kind. We’re printing radar images now, but there appears to be a lot of junk on top of what could be a body.”

“Are you excavating now?”

“We’ve got a crime scene crew on the way…”

“Those guys know this stuff better than I do, but emphasize to them that if there is a lot of junk, that’s evidence. If she killed him and buried him there, she may have wanted it to look like he left voluntarily, so she piled personal effects on top of the body before she filled the grave.”

“I will mention that to them. When can you get here?”

“I’ve got some stuff I’m putting together right now. I can leave in an hour. How long does it take to get there?”

“Forty minutes from the BCA office.”

“I’ll see you in two hours, then. Or less.”

Lucas had typed up interviews with several former William Mitchell law students who had known Fisk and Carly Gibson, and who remembered the competition between the two. He was doing a precise editing to make sure the transcripts were exact. The work was tiresome, but had to be done.

When he finished, he got a jacket, some bottles of Diet Coke that he put in a cooler, left a message for Weather, found his son, who was with a male friend and about to go scouting for female friends, told him where he was going, and headed north.

He wasn’t too worried; the kid would have a driver’s license in a year, and then he would worry.

Although it was almost impossible to get lost, Lucas got turned around for a few minutes after he left I-35 and got to the site a little more than two hours after he left home.

The abandoned house itself was only partially upright; the roof had collapsed to the inside, though the back and one side wall were still standing. A broken sink was visible in what would have been a bathroom, but the toilet seemed to be missing, and the towel racks and medicine cabinet had been pulled off the walls and taken away. There were long slashes in the wall where somebody had pulled out the wiring.

The house was set on a wooded lot with a stake out front, and a rusty chain attached to the stake, apparently for a long-gone dog. Trees pressed close around the wreckage, mostly oaks and sugar maples, but here and there were grassy openings. Evelyn Harvey and a three-person crime scene crew were working in one of the openings.

Harvey was a tall, dark-haired jock-o woman wearing a plaid shirt and jeans; she looked like she could run down a coyote. And she was excited: “First time for me, pulling a body out of the ground.”

The crime scene crew, dressed in now-filthy white coveralls, were removing dirt from the possible grave site with trowels and sifting every trowelful. “The GPR guys say that the first of the junk is about a foot down, and we’re about there. They think the body, if it is one, is down at least another foot.”

The GPR crew had already left, taking their radar with them. Lucas asked, “Why do they think it’s a body? Can they see bones?”

“There’s some kind of metal thing down there, they think it’s part of some cooking equipment, pans or something, but under it, one of the printouts—I could show you…”

“Tell me, that’s good enough.”

“Under the metal thing, they can see something hard and curved and they think it’s part of a cranium. Only problem with that is, it’s in the middle of the grave, instead of at one end. And there’s so much junk down there…”

“And we’re getting to it,” said the woman who was running the CSI team. “We’re right on top of…mmm…could be the cuff of a jean jacket.”

A van pulled into the lot, and a Ramsey County medical examiner’s investigator got out, walked over, introduced himself, and looked in the hole. “How long has it been there?”

“Probably fifteen years or something like that,” Harvey said.

“With that kind of dirt, the dampness, won’t be much left,” the investigator said.

Over the next three hours, enough junk came out of the hole to partially furnish a house: clothing, cooking equipment including a cast iron skillet, a toaster and a microwave, glasses, cups, silverware.

“Tried to prove he’d skipped out on rent, rather than disappeared,” Lucas said.

They found a plastic wallet, and inside, Don Schmidt’s driver’s license.

Eventually they cleared away enough junk to see the remains of the body. That’s when they found out why the head was not at the end of the grave: the killer had cut it off and placed it between the body’s slightly splayed legs.

They found a pair of handcuffs, which were no longer quite fastened around the wrist bones, which had collapsed in the damp earth; and a plastic rope, around the ankles.

“Bag the handcuffs, don’t touch them,” Lucas told the CSIs. “It’d be nice if they came out of the Ramsey County Attorney’s office.”

“Why would they have?” Harvey asked.

“They wouldn’t have; it’d just be nice,” Lucas said.

There was leathery skin around some of the bones and the spine. The investigator had a laser pointer and pointed it at the groin area. “Seems to be missing a penis and testicles, but not the skin on the thighs around them. See those straight edges on the skin that’s left? It looks to me like he was castrated.”

The investigator was fascinated; Lucas was repulsed.

“So now we know,” Lucas said to Harvey, as the ME’s investigator handed down tools to begin lifting bones. “I’m out of here. You should put in for overtime.”

“I will do that,” she said. They were standing side by side, and she squeezed his arm. “Thanks for coming, Lucas. Honest to God, I’m kinda getting off on this.”

Lucas called Virgil at home, and filled him in.

“Not just a bitch; a witch,” Virgil said.

“A line you could use in a novel,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, and I probably will, sad to say.”