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Back in the Day

In 2003, Lucas Davenport was being driven crazy by three kinds of people: computer programmers, actors, and accountants. He didn’t yet yearn for the time when he’d been a cop, instead of a start-up business executive, but he was getting there.

On this particular day, in the Nick O’ Time Coffee and Pastries Shoppe, it was actors who were up his ass.

He’d spent weeks writing scenarios for 9-1-1 training calls. Under his game plan, each 9-1-1 trainee would be seated in front of a computer, just as she would be in real life, and would take a prerecorded call: frightened people screaming for help. Each call would require the operators to make an appropriate response, guided by suggestions that would flash up on the computer screen.

Each operator response branched to another screaming reply by the caller, which branched to another response, depending on what the answer was. At more advanced levels, the operator would be dealing with three or four calls at once and would have no prompts, as would happen with a disaster of greater or lesser extent, like a school shooting, or a small-plane crash.

The whole sequence would be overseen by an instructor, based on training manuals also being written by Lucas.

Lucas wanted the calls to be vocal and realistic—that is, the trainee would have a set of headphones and a microphone. When a call came in, he or she would select an appropriate response and read it in the appropriate tone of voice.

He knew what he wanted, but the programmers explained in incomprehensible detail how difficult it was and why they should be paid more. Which drove him crazy. All he wanted to know was whether they could do it. They could, but they whined.

—

The actors would provide the 9-1-1 calls with the appropriate amount of panic:

“My house is on fire!”

“There’s a man in my house. He’s got a gun!”

“My husband is hurting me! Here he comes…”

“My son has shot up and he’s not breathing!”

Lucas had experience writing board games—based on historical battles and fantasy conflicts—and had put his entire savings into the new computer company, tentatively called Davenport Simulations.

He was paying the programmers and actors, all graduate students at the University of Minnesota, a pittance, along with stock options, which everyone, without exception, laughed off as improbable.

Hence the other major pain in his ass: the accountants.

—

So there he was in a booth in the Nick O’ Time with two actors, both grad students, both female, both attractive, one white and blond, one Black and dark-haired, trying to explain to them why asking for a “somewhat Black” accent was not racist, but designed to elicit a certain kind of response from a trainee, who might or might not be racist.

“I don’t want Mammy from Gone with the Wind , I want somebody who sounds like they live in North Minneapolis,” he said. North Minneapolis was local code for “Black.”

“Lots of white people in North Minneapolis,” the white actor said, deliberately yanking his chain.

Lucas: “You know what I mean.”

“It’d be less racist if you paid us more,” the Black woman said.

“Tell me that when you cash in the stock options,” Lucas said.

The two women laughed and the white woman said, “Yeah, right, remind me to do that.”

The three of them were impatiently working through the whole cultural/racial conundrum when two large men, mid-thirties, muscular, wearing Polo golf shirts under sport coats, and khaki slacks, with World War Two haircuts, one of them snapping his chewing gum, came through the door. The one snapping gum had brilliant white teeth, which were actually implants, paid for by the state when his natural teeth had been knocked out by a woman wielding a flowerpot.

The men looked around, and Jenkins spotted Lucas, ambled over to the table, trailed by Shrake, checked the actors and asked Lucas, “Settin’ up a salt ’n’ pepper three-way?”

“Shut up, you fuckin’ clown. We got serious business here,” Lucas said. To the startled actors, “Don’t pay any attention to him. He’s a moron. Are we good? You understand where I’m coming from? It is a racial thing, but not racist. Not on our part.”

“That sounds a little racist, whatever it is,” Shrake said, without being asked.

“I do understand, but I’ve got to think about it,” the Black woman said. She looked up at the two large men and then back at Lucas. “Who are these jerks?”

“Ooo, I like them spicy,” the slightly smaller of the two large men said.

“I ought to kick your balls up around your collar,” the actor said.

The blonde said, “Do it, Jackie.” And to the slightly smaller man, “She’s in karate.”

The larger of the two large men: “So, uh, could we get some phone numbers?”

Lucas, rubbing his forehead with his fingers: “Jesus God. I’m just trying to get through life.”

—

The two men went to the counter to order coffee and scones, and the two actors left, agreeing that they would review the new scripts and call with any notes that they thought would improve them. They’d think about the “Black accent.”

When the men came back, Lucas, who was not small, moved over so Jenkins could sit next to him, because Jenkins and Shrake would not both fit in the same side of a restaurant booth.

Jenkins said to Lucas, “This is my new partner up at the BCA. Shrake. He’s kind of an asshole, but he’s willing to carry my lunch bucket.”

“That’s not the entire story,” Shrake said, getting comfortable with his scone. He was not a tidy eater. “I hang out because I can supplement my income by playing golf with him.”

Lucas said, “I’ve already heard about Shrake. There are rumors that you guys are working the Grandfelt murder and you’re fucking it up.”

“Who is this guy?” Shrake asked Jenkins.

“Used to be a big-deal homicide investigator in Minneapolis. Then this cute little hooker who was feeding him tips got caught by her pimp. He carved her up with a church key. Lucas sort of went off on the poor guy. The politicians got pissed and he was kicked out of the department. They claimed he used excessive force,” Jenkins said. To Lucas: “Whatever happened to the chick?”

“Still looks like a jack-o’-lantern, a week after Halloween,” Lucas said.

“Nasty. How about the pimp? He walking again?”

“I don’t know. I don’t check on him anymore,” Lucas said. “I was told by a reliable source that he no longer needs diapers.”

Shrake lifted a hand to be slapped, and said, “Testify!”

Lucas slapped. “So. You guys fuckin’ it up?”

“Not us. We’re going around talking to the least-likely suspects while the big guns get the real possibilities,” Shrake said. “Not that there’s much difference between the two groups.”

“I heard the victim was a mess,” Lucas said.

“Bad as it gets,” Jenkins said. “The only thing I’ve seen that compares was back when I was on the street. A couple of kids drove an old MGB into a bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour. You couldn’t tell which head went with which body. Grandfelt was like that…she was ripped to pieces.”

“Tell me everything,” Lucas said, realizing that he was more interested than he should be, as he was now a business executive and not a cop.

Jenkins told him the story in detail, and when he was done, Lucas asked, “You gonna catch whoever did it?”

Jenkins and Shrake glanced at each other, then they both shook their heads. “I don’t think so. Whoever did this knew what they were doing,” Shrake said. “He left us nothing to work with. We’ve taken a bunch of blood samples and they all go back to Grandfelt. No extraneous hair, no skin, no DNA. Grandfelt was playing games with a bunch of low-lifes over on the Hennepin strip, and had been for a while, so that’s a problem, because it multiplies the possibilities.”

“Don’t think it was a low-life—or it might have been, but that’s not the critical factor,” Jenkins said. “The critical thing is, whoever did it is a psycho. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d done some other killings. This was not an ordinary thing.”

“So you got nothing? Not even a hint of a motive?” Lucas asked.

Shrake sighed, and said, “You know, it could be sex, but I don’t think so. Not money, either, because Grandfelt didn’t have much. Jealousy? That’s a possibility. But it might not be any of those. We found her car on the street near a meat rack, so it might be somebody who preys on blondes. Picked her up, took her somewhere quiet, fucked her and murdered her. No motive other than what the voices in his head were telling him to do. You know?”

Lucas nodded: “That makes it tough.”

“Maybe impossible,” Jenkins said. “I feel ‘impossible’ coming up like the sun in the morning, though the hotshots won’t admit it. They’re saying they’ll have the guy in a week. They’re full of shit. I’d be surprised if they get him at all.”

That was all Lucas knew about the Grandfelt murder at the time it happened.

Lucas stayed with the new company for three years, then sold all the stock in a management buyout financed by San Francisco venture capitalists. He became a dot-com multimillionaire and went back to being a cop, because what he really liked in life was chasing killers.

The actors and programmers, who had between five hundred (a janitor) and ten thousand (the lead programmer) stock options each, were cashed out at twenty-one dollars a share, which left them even more amazed than they were delighted, and they were delighted.

—

Every year or so after the murder, state investigators checked with public DNA databases for any DNA that correlated with the killer’s. Nothing turned up, which led investigators to believe that the killer didn’t care about his ancestry, and perhaps was at the end of his particular genetic line.

The BCA investigators also suffered through extended face-to-face contact with Lara Grandfelt, the twin, whom they unofficially classified as one of the biggest pains in the ass that they’d ever encountered.

The twin was smart, tough, and eventually affluent enough to hire private investigators and lawyers. She delivered a monthly telephone harangue to whichever investigator was unlucky enough to answer the phone, questioning whether it was stupidity, incompetence, or simple laziness that kept the BCA from finding the killer.

One investigator, often the butt of her accusations, admitted during lunch at the Parrot Café that he hated her. And then, after all of that, after all the shouting, after all accusations of incompetence, cupidity, cover-ups, and possible corruption, twenty-one full years after the murder…Lara Grandfelt threw gasoline on the case and set it on fire.