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A month after the big meeting, all of the investigative material was turned over to Dick Roller, a Dakota County assistant county attorney who either would, or wouldn’t, present the material to a grand jury.

Two weeks later, he called Lucas and said, “We’ll send you some paper, but I wanted to notify you and Virgil that you’ll be called to testify before the grand jury next week.”

“You gonna indict her?” Lucas asked.

“That would be up to the jury…”

“C’mon, man, the jury does what you tell it to do,” Lucas said.

“They do tend to follow my advice,” Roller said. “Finding Schmidt’s body made things easier.”

“So are you going to indict her?”

“It’ll take a couple of sessions to get through it all, but, yeah, we’ll arrest her sometime during the week after next. I gotta get my boss to sign off on it, but he will.”

“I will see you next week,” Lucas said.

—

The jury met for four days, in the evenings. Lucas and Virgil testified on the same evening, went out for beer when they were done.

“What happened with the search at Bee? Knife-sharpening marks?”

“Not that anyone could find, but they might be there somewhere,” Lucas said. “The problem is, the whole floor where her office used to be was remodeled ten years ago. There’s drywall where there used to be brick, and nobody can pinpoint exactly where her office was. So…we’d have to demolish the place. That won’t happen.”

Virgil went on south, and Lucas turned north to home.

And they waited.

—

A week after they testified, Roller called: “We’re going to arrest her this afternoon. First-degree murder in the case of Doris Grandfelt. Ramsey County sheriffs will serve the warrant and haul her butt to the jail. We’ll hold her until she makes bail. You want to be there for the bust?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you call Virgil and tell him? If he’s in Mankato, he’d have enough time to make it up here. If he wants to.”

Lucas called Virgil, who said, “I’ll be out of here in ten minutes. Don’t let them do it without me.”

“We don’t have a precise time, yet,” Lucas said. “I don’t think you have to hurry.”

“I’ll hurry anyway. I don’t want to miss it.”

“Come to my house. Her place is only ten minutes away. Maybe fifteen. We can wait until Roller calls.”

“On my way.”

—

The arrest attracted a crowd. Roller, a tall, too-thin man with an extra-high forehead, thin black hair, rounded shoulders, and a small, firm pot-gut, stood on the curb and watched, with Lucas and Virgil. Fisk answered the door, invited the sheriff’s deputies inside: they were close enough to hear her ask if she could call her attorney before they took her to the jail.

The deputies looked back at Roller, who nodded, and the deputies and Fisk disappeared inside.

“She’s already lawyered up,” Lucas said. “Wonder who she got? And what she told him?”

“I’ll bet she told him she was being persecuted by cops who are getting even for the Harrison prosecution. And her attorney will use that,” Roller said. He smiled at Lucas and Virgil: “You guys are gonna get roasted. Guilt by cop association.”

Fifteen minutes later, Fisk emerged with two deputies. She was carrying nothing at all and hadn’t been cuffed. She said something to the deputies, and they all swerved toward Roller, Lucas, and Virgil. To Roller, she said, “Thanks for not cuffing me up. That was nice of you. And for giving me a chance to feed the dogs.”

Roller nodded. “You’re welcome.”

To Lucas and Virgil: “As for you two, I hope you get cancer, die, and roast in hell.”

“You already tried that with my family and it didn’t work,” Virgil snapped.

The deputies took her off to jail.

“That was pleasant,” Roller said, smiling again.

“Fuck her,” Virgil said.

Lucas didn’t say anything. He was looking up at the house. “Can I go around back? I mean, I’m investigating.”

“There’s nobody here who says you can’t,” Roller said, as the sheriff’s car carrying Fisk disappeared down Summit Avenue.

Lucas went around back, with Virgil and Roller trailing. He stood on the patio, looking up at the balcony from which Timothy Carlson had fallen. They could hear the dogs barking inside.

“Interesting,” Lucas said.

—

Fisk’s attorney, Earl Gray, had offices a few blocks from the jail. He was waiting for the sheriff’s car transporting Fisk and was present for the booking. Fisk found the time spent overnight in the Ramsey County jail to be unpleasant, but tolerable. Fisk told Gray that she would post any reasonable bond.

The next day, Roller argued against any bond, arguing that Fisk was a multiple murderer and should be held in jail. Gray, a broad-shouldered, white-haired man, argued that his client was a well-known lawyer, that all of the evidence presented by Roller was purely “speculative.” He didn’t use the word “circumstantial,” because circumstantial was perfectly good evidence, while speculation was not.

Duncan, Virgil, and Lucas had been sitting in the courtroom during the bail hearing and when Gray entered, Lucas leaned toward Virgil and Duncan and groaned, “Earl fuckin’ Gray. You might know it.”

“You surprised? They’ve gone up against each other, gotta be a dozen times,” Duncan said. “Fisk is good, but she was batting about .300 against him. I mean, who you gonna call?”

“I don’t have to like it,” Lucas said. And then, “Whatever you think of Gray, you gotta admire that suit. Wonder where he gets them?”

The judge decided he wanted a million and a half dollars to free Fisk, and when told by Fisk that her wholly-owned home on Summit Avenue had recently been appraised at one-point-seven million by a reputable real estate agent, agreed that the house would do as bond. There was paperwork, but Fisk and Gray were on the street shortly after noon.

—

The next day, Lara Grandfelt spoke to Lucas. “I want to do something about the reward.”

“Well, that’s up to you, Lara. Fisk hasn’t been convicted,” Lucas said.

“No, but I’m convinced. I know who killed Doris and that’s all I wanted. Who should I talk to?”

“I’ll give you some names. There are maybe twenty of them, who ought to get something, some big, some small,” Lucas said.

“Send me a list,” Grandfelt said. “And phone numbers.”

The discussion about the reward went on for a while, mediated by Mason, Tono, Whitehead and Boone, Grandfelt’s law firm. Big Dave called Lucas about the reward. His actual name was Derrick McBride, and Lucas passed that on to Michelle Cornell and to Roller, should Roller think it necessary to get McBride on the witness stand. Lucas and Virgil were involved in a half-dozen phone calls about the reward, but that was all.

In the end, Dahlia Blair got five hundred thousand dollars and went back to Nebraska a happy woman, with an urn full of ashes in the back seat of her car. The reward distribution made headlines on every true crime site in the world, and was mentioned in the New York Times , Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal , as well as all the cable news stations.

—

The following weeks were marked by jousting over disclosure of the state’s evidence, which was released in a trickle and leaked to the media at the same time, causing Gray to go to the media himself charging that the jury pool was being deliberately poisoned.

On the other side, in a move that the state didn’t immediately discover, Gray sent an investigator north to poke around Don Schmidt’s former home and grave site. Schmidt’s mutilated body, unfortunately for Fisk, was a serious danger, when combined with her father’s statement to Lucas and Virgil that Schmidt may have abused her as a child.

Gray’s investigator talked to the few people who remembered Schmidt—his original landlord had died—and then, tracking down a rumor heard by the landlord’s son, found a retired Chicago deputy sheriff that the BCA hadn’t managed to uncover.

The deputy remembered Schmidt quite clearly. He’d been a member of a low-rent biker gang that called themselves the North Woods Mercs…

“For mercenaries,” the deputy said.

“Yeah, I got that,” the investigator said.

“The thing is, there was a rumor that Don was diddling the daughter of the gang leader, Rufus Bends. The kid was about…twelve, I guess. You could talk to her, she’s around, must be in her twenties, now. When Don took off—until the BCA dug up his body, we assumed he’d took off—we thought it was because Rufus said he was going to cut off his head and his cock and put his head on a stick with the cock in his mouth. Uh, penis.”

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” the investigator said.

Gray passed the interview to Fisk. They’d hold it close as long as possible, but they’d eventually have to cough up the information to Roller, as part of the discovery process.

“What do you think the odds are?” Fisk asked him then.

“Of an acquittal? I hate to guess. It’s bad luck.”

“Come on, Earl. I’m a prosecutor. I’m thinking less than fifty-fifty for a conviction, now that we got the biker.”

Gray nodded: “That’s about right. Less than fifty-fifty. Not a lot less.”

—

Lucas called Roller that week and said, “I need to get into Fisk’s house.”

“What for?”

“I want to make a movie.”

“About what?”

“You’ll see. You’re invited.”

A week later, they served the warrant on Fisk. One of Roller’s assistants had called Fisk to warn her of what was coming, because they didn’t want to kick the door. They were met by Gray, while Fisk stood in the background. The dogs ran around their feet, yipping.

They gave the warrant to Gray, who passed it to Fisk, who asked, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Making a movie,” Lucas said.

Lucas led the way up the stairs, carrying a small mover’s box, normally used for books, followed by a BCA cameraman, then by Roller, Virgil, Gray, and Fisk.

Lucas walked down the hall to the master bedroom and across the bedroom to the windows leading onto the balcony. He opened the windows, stepped out on the balcony, and knelt. When the cameraman was in position, Lucas opened the box, revealing three dozen rubber Chuckit! balls, in three different sizes, all brand new. The dogs could smell them, and went berserk, running around the bedroom like furry balls in a pachinko machine.

Lucas: “Ready?”

Cameraman: “Rolling.” He wasn’t actually rolling, of course, because he was shooting video, not film, but cameramen still said “rolling.”

Lucas released the three dozen balls, one at a time, down the slanted roof toward the rain gutter. By the time they hit the gutter, they were moving too fast to drop into it—they went shooting off into space, as Timothy Carlson had.

“You got that?” Lucas asked the cameraman.

“In the can,” he said. It wasn’t in any kind of can, of course, because it was on a memory card, unlike film, which would be in a can, but cameramen still said that.

Virgil looked at Fisk and asked, “You’re telling us that the dogs rolled two balls into the gutter, so that your husband had to lean over the balcony to get them out?”

Gray: “Don’t answer that.”

“I’m going to answer that,” Fisk said. She checked to make sure the camera was no longer recording, then said to Lucas: “Fuck you.”

Lucas pulled back: he was looking into snake eyes that were far harder than his.

—

The following week, after some experimentation, Gray brought his own cameraman to the balcony, and rolled five old Chuckit!s, recovered from the dog beds and the bushes around the yard, down the roof. He didn’t roll them straight down, but diagonally, letting them bounce off the extended side of the balcony. They had to make three trials, fifteen balls, to get two to stick in the gutter.

“They’re moving slower because they’re partially deflated and chewed up, which of course they would be, after your husband bounced them off the back wall for months,” Gray told Fisk. “If there were a situation where the dogs had fun recovering the balls in the backyard, then running them up here to roll them down the roof again, eventually some would probably catch in the gutter.”

Fisk lied easily: “We did that all the time. It was one of the dog’s favorite games. They might have been rolling them down over several days, and we didn’t notice they’d stuck in the gutter.”

“Really,” Gray said.

—

After Gray and Fisk had to disclose the video as part of discovery, Roller went back to Fisk’s house with used Chuckit! balls and made a video that suggested the dogs couldn’t simply roll the balls to hit the side of the balcony—they would have to spit the balls at the side, to defeat the force of gravity enough to get them to roll diagonally.

He also presented the balls to the two dogs. The dogs happily grabbed them and ran off through the house. Brought back repeatedly, and given the balls, the dogs never attempted to roll them under the lower balcony rail.

—

Fisk made a valuable but serendipitous contribution to the defense, as the result of going to her dentist. There was a wait, and she picked up an older New Yorker magazine that had a long story about a British nurse convicted of killing seven neonatal babies with a variety of injections. The main evidence against the nurse was her presence at the time the babies died—a statistical cluster of deaths matched to her work shifts. (The defense claimed the cluster was artificially constructed by the prosecution.)

She showed the article to Gray and said, “I did some research. There are all kinds of random, unexpected clusters that don’t seem to make any sense. Crimes, diseases, all kinds of stuff. If you have a big enough sample, the clusters not only occur, they’re inevitable. There are probably thousands or even tens of thousands of people in the United States who have been close to death clusters as big as the one Roller is trying to hang on me. They’re unusual, but they occur all the time—and the key thing is, they’re inevitable.”

Gray read the article and said, “We need a statistician. One who speaks English instead of mathematics. If we can get the judge to throw out the cluster of deaths around you and all we have to worry about is Doris Grandfelt…That would be excellent.”

“I think we can do that,” Fisk said.

—

In the midst of the maneuvering around the upcoming trial, Virgil married Frankie. Lucas was best man, and Moses gave away his mother. Weather cried, as did Virgil’s mother for the fourth time. By mid-November, the new stable was up. Frankie thought it looked quite handsome.

Despite the reconstruction of the stable, and continuing work with Roller on the Grandfelt case, Virgil finished the novel, spent a week agonizing over the question of whether it was good enough, and sent it off to New York. His editor accepted it two days later and his agent started pushing on the new contract. He asked her if it would be large enough to quit cop work, and she said, “Oh, yeah.”

—

In the end, the prosecution and defense disclosed information and witnesses each planned to use in the trial. Virgil, Lucas, and Duncan met with Roller on a cold winter day before Christmas to review it. The trial was set for late January.

“Fuckin’ Chuckit!s,” Lucas said.

“I think the jury is more likely to believe our videos than theirs,” Roller said.

“Are you even going to be able to get Carlson’s death up there?” Lucas asked. “All this bullshit about clusters…”

“I know the judge fairly well. He’s a smart guy,” Roller said. “I think he’ll let us put up all the deaths, but he’ll allow Gray to put up his math guy to talk about clusters and explain how they can happen. Then we’ll put our guy up there to explain how clusters often do point to a single cause. Not always, but frequently. The jury will have to sort it out.”

“You think Earl will put her on the witness stand?”

“I’ve been wondering about that myself,” Roller said. “She doesn’t appear to have any emotional range at all. If you asked her whether she was molested, if you ask her if she pushed Carlson off the balcony, I doubt that she’d break down and cry. From what Virgil says, and what the people who know her say, I’m not sure she’s capable of that. But if she did…that’s sort of a gusher of sympathy for her. Down in the dungeon, getting raped while her mother lets it happen? Seeing her husband fall to his death? But if she can’t do that, if she can’t cry, if she lapses back into her stone-eyed-killer act…that would work for us. So, I don’t know. Maybe she’s sitting up at night, practicing her best weeping hysterics act.”

“Getting raped and killing the rapist is one thing, but doing what was done to Don Schmidt, that’s a whole different thing,” Virgil said.

“It is,” Roller agreed. “The photography in the Grandfelt and Schmidt and Wise murders is going to be important. If the judge lets the jury see it, they’ll want to punish someone. Gray will challenge it as unnecessarily prejudicial—I don’t know what the judge will do. He might ban the pictures but allow detailed forensic testimony, which is not the same. Not the same impact. We’ll have to see what he does.”

“What about the biker guy?” Virgil asked. “Rufus Bends?”

“Turns out he’s a Christian biker, and was, before the murder. In fact, his whole gang was Christian, you know, they supposedly turn the other cheek,” Roller said. “He denies doing anything about Schmidt, which is good for us. His daughter was molested, but not raped. She’ll testify to that, that Schmidt kissed her and put his hands all over her, skin-to-skin, including the vaginal area, but she says there was no penetration. There was mutual masturbation, no oral sex. Bends took her to a doctor at the time, and the doctor agrees that there was at least no deep penetration. But: the key thing is, she shows that Schmidt was a predator and a pederast, which may convince a jury that he messed with Fisk, as her father believes. There’s your motive for his murder and mutilation.”

“Is the jury going to believe Bends? That he didn’t do it?” Virgil asked.

“Don’t know,” Roller said. “I believe him. The jury might think otherwise. ’Cause he is a biker, and he looks and talks like a biker.”

“You’re making me unhappy, here,” Lucas said.

“It’s gonna be tough. But we’ve got all the other stuff. That Fisk was at Bee, had access to the knife, that she was dating Carlson at the time of the murder and lied about it, that she lived next to the park. We’ve got the law student battered as Marcia Wise was…”

“They got those fuckin’ shoe prints,” Virgil said.

Roller: “Yeah. They got the shoe prints.”

They talked about all of it for a while, until Virgil asked the question: “What do you think?”

Roller considered, then said, “Fifty-fifty.”

“I don’t want fifty-fifty. I want ninety-ten,” Lucas said. “She killed them all.”

“Get me the hard evidence, and I’ll use it,” Roller said.

“I promised Frankie I’d hang her,” Virgil said. “Now I’m afraid it’s the jury that’s gonna get hung.”

—

On another frigid December evening, Fisk welcomed Gray to her yellow house. Snow was falling outside, big slowflakes drifting sideways across the street. Gray brushed off his parka and stamped snow off his feet before entering. Fisk had been reviewing all the information that came out of the discovery process and had built a fire with white-barked birch logs in the living room fireplace.

The smell of the burning birch, the snow flurry outside the window, was like an old-fashioned New England Christmas by Robert Frost or somebody else literary…maybe Dickens?

The snow globe scenery didn’t fit the occasion.

When Gray sat down, Fisk pulled her feet up under her and asked, “What do you think?”

“Not that again.”

“C’mon. I want to know.”

Gray looked into the fire, the crackling logs.

“Gonna be complicated, Mandy. I can only tell you one thing for sure. We’re gonna take your husband’s size ten-and-a-half shoes, which were all over the site where Doris’s body was found, and stick them so far up the prosecution’s ass that they’ll need a winch to get them out. We’re gonna hang Timothy. You might find that upsetting, but we don’t have a choice.”

“Well, you know…Timothy’s dead. So I’m okay with that. But we’re not in a great place, Earl—it’s not all good.”

Gray sighed, and said, “No, it’s not. They’ve got quite a list of dead bodies. We’ll challenge them, and the judge might eliminate some of them, but I don’t think he’ll throw out all of them.”

“The dead bodies have nothing to do with me, Earl,” Fisk said. “Give me a number.”

“If I gotta…sixty-forty for a hung jury,” Gray said. “No better than forty percent for an outright acquittal or an outright conviction.”

The goddamn dogs were sitting there, looking at her expectantly, maybe with indictments in their beady eyes, canine accusations. It occurred to Fisk that if the prosecution had been able to call the dogs as witnesses, she’d be done.

She turned and held out two hands toward the fireplace, feeling the heat.

Gray: “Feeling the heat?”

“A little,” she admitted. “But I’ll tell you what, Earl. Sixty-forty for a hung jury? I’ll take that. I’ll take that. I got faith.”

She stood up and reached behind a mantel clock that Timothy had inherited from his mother, and that she planned to throw in the trash as soon as she was clear of the trial. She’d hidden two of the Chuckit!s there, and she took one in each hand and threw them over her shoulders.

The two Jack Russells went careening down the living room rug, jumping, tumbling, chasing the bouncing blue-and-orange balls.

“Sixty-forty,” Fisk said, as she and Gray turned to watch the dogs. “Sixty-forty, you little fuckers.”