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8

The next morning, Lucas was stirring unappetizing, sand-like protein into his breakfast oatmeal when his phone rang. The number was unknown, but that happened, so he picked up and said, “Yeah?”

A woman’s voice: “Is this Marshal Davenport?”

“It is.”

“This is Sergeant Leeann Carney over at Woodbury PD. You gotta get over here.”

“What’s going on?”

“You sorta need to see it,” Carney said. Her voice had a whistle in it, as though she was breathing over a snaggletooth. “We got a boatload of true crime people crawling around the Grandfelt crime scene and there have been some…conflicting opinions. I’m talking potential assault.”

“Is a boatload bigger or smaller than a buttload?”

Brief hesitation, then: “Smaller, but it’s gonna be a buttload soon enough. The feeling is, since you’re the guy in charge of this circus, you oughta see it.”

Lucas: “I’m not really…Okay. Listen, are you there?”

“I am.”

“I’ll ask for you,” Lucas said. “Leeann Carney.”

“Yes. We’ll be looking for you,” Carney said. “Uh, what do you look like?”

“I’ll be wearing jeans, a light blue golf shirt, a dark blue sport coat, and a Wild ballcap. Women tend to find me incredibly attractive.”

“I’ll look for the ballcap,” Carney said. “You know, in case your animal attraction gets all clogged up.”

—

Off the phone, Lucas ran a shot of cold tap water on the oatmeal, remembered to drop a half-handful of raisins into the mix, popped it in the microwave for two minutes, and called Virgil while he waited for the mess to heat up. Virgil was still at home, although it was already 10:30.

“I’m going over to the crime scene,” Lucas said. “Meet me there. We’ll get an idea of what’s gonna happen. I’m told there’s a whole bunch of true-crimers already there.”

“I’m eighty miles away…”

“Yeah, I know. I haven’t eaten breakfast yet. I printed out the files last night and I’ll thumb through them while I eat, so…I’ll be a while. We should get there about the same time, if you leave in the next few minutes,” Lucas said.

“What are you having for breakfast?”

“You know—two eggs over easy, four strips of bacon, toast, orange juice,” Lucas said. “Thinking I might have the last slice of coconut crème pie for dessert. Left over from last night.”

“Right. I know about Weather’s vegetarian diet kick,” Virgil said. “You’re having two celery sticks and half an avocado. With a glass of water.”

“See you in an hour and a half?”

“See you there.”

—

Virgil had been working on the new novel—tentatively titled Rock’n a Hard Place , about a murderous country-rock band—since eight o’clock. He rang off, saved the manuscript to Microsoft’s cloud and two separate flash drives. The window was open and he could hear the distant sound of a tractor doing something, maybe cutting hay, and a crow calling closer by.

He was barefoot, wearing a vintage Queen tee-shirt and blue nylon workout pants. He changed into an extra soft pair of jeans, a checked long-sleeved shirt, and leather walking shoes. Another pair of jeans, underwear, and two shirts went into a duffel bag along with his dopp kit. A shotgun, Apple laptop, a separate keyboard and mouse, a Garmin GPS receiver, Nikon Z7II camera with a couple of lenses, and binoculars went into a gear bag. An iPad would go on the passenger seat. He hauled it all out to his Tahoe.

He’d begun reading the Grandfelt files the night before, which Frankie had printed out in a near two-hour session. He stuck a partially marked-up printout in a canvas shoulder bag, along with his Glock and two magazines from the gun safe. He relocked the safe and pulled on his canvas not-quite-a-sport-coat, to go with the shoulder bag. That done, he cracked the cap on a Dos Equis, slipped it into a jacket pocket, put a Dog Star Ranch hat on his head and walked across the farmyard to the barn.

Frankie was out behind it, in a horse-manure-smelling round pen, lunging a horse named Rush. She was a short, busty woman wearing a white mannish shirt and black riding pants tucked into knee-high English riding boots. Rush was a tall brown rescue of unknown heritage that Frankie thought she could make into something. Honus the Yellow Dog was slumbering outside the pen.

Virgil put his forearms on the pole fence and shouted, “I gotta go. Up to Woodbury. You gotta pick up the kids at preschool.”

“Wait!” Frankie slowed Rush to a walk, then led him over to Virgil. She was sweating, a pleasant salty summer scent. “Where?”

“Woodbury. Lucas called. Something’s happening and he wants me to take a look. I could be a day or two.”

“You get any work done?” she asked.

“Maybe twelve hundred words,” Virgil said. “Not great, but not terrible. Needs work.”

Frankie said, “I’ve been thinking about the sex scene from last night. It slows things down too much and it’s not that interesting.”

“I fixed that. Took out the foreplay.”

“That’s the part I would have left in. Anyway…you won’t be back tonight?” she asked.

“Probably not. I’ll be at the Radisson. I can catch the rest of the daily quota tonight. Three hundred words. Maybe put some of the foreplay back in.” His daily quota was fifteen hundred good words, which editing would reduce to a thousand keepers.

They talked about scheduling—missing days and nights were still routine in the cop business—and Frankie climbed on the bottom rail of the fence to kiss him good-bye. As Virgil walked back to the Tahoe, Frankie started Rush again, circling him at a gallop, the horse moving like an elite athlete, the sound of his hooves sending Virgil off.

He pointed the truck mostly north, flipped the cap off the Dos Equis, put the bottle in the cupholder, said a brief prayer to St. Waylon, the protector of drivers against the evil eye of the highway patrol, and settled in for the ride.

—

August is the best month in Minnesota, though some argue for September. The drive through the farmland was pleasant, aside from a dozen windshield bugs, coming off the near flood-stage Minnesota River, their yellow spatters like flicks of custard on the glass. The bug guts tended to bake on in the summer heat and it would get hot later in the day. He carried Windex and a roll of paper towels for cleanups. Of course, the random grasshopper collisions of August were nothing compared to a heavy mayfly emergence, so-called because they usually hatched in June.

So Virgil went on, thinking about not much, taking in the countryside, occasionally flashing on the Grandfelt crime-scene photos he’d reviewed the night before. He soon enough found himself threading through the town of Shakopee and then onto I-494, which would take him around the southern side of the Twin Cities to the crime scene.

Take him around the Twin Cities slowly: half the metro area was overrun with orange traffic-warning barrels, marking out construction zones and piling up traffic.

—

He crossed the Mississippi, turned north, his iPad map app directing him off I-494, through a maze of tree-lined residential streets, past small houses that dated to the fifties and sixties, to Shawnee Park, in the suburban town of Woodbury. He spotted a jammed-up parking lot with twenty cars in it, three of them cop cars, and he rolled slowly that way.

The park, as he could see it from his truck, was a bowl with two baseball fields built into it, facing each other, with a shared outfield. A park building, probably for maintenance and possibly for bathrooms, was in front of him as he parked, and behind it, he could see a circular white wall that looked like it might be an outdoor hockey rink in the winter.

Across the playing fields, a line of tall trees—cottonwoods, aspens, what looked like box elders and maples—marked the edge of the playing fields, and behind the scrim of forest, sunlight sparkled off water.

As Virgil got out of his truck, a uniformed Woodbury cop walked over, checking Virgil’s grille lights as he came, and asked, “You a cop?”

“BCA.”

“Flowers?”

“Yeah.”

“There was a big guy, named, I forget, maybe…Dubuque? He’s a federal marshal, who said you’d be coming. He’s in the woods over there, where those people are.” He pointed.

Virgil thanked him, took a minute with the Windex and paper towels to clean up his windshield, then walked between the two softball diamonds toward the trees. Lucas was standing in a group of women, saw him coming, and broke away with apologies, which Virgil assumed were insincere.

Lucas, smiling: “Holy shit, you’re not wearing a tee-shirt. And I saw you cleaning your windshield. Could you do mine?”

“No, but I could lend you my Windex,” Virgil said. He looked toward the women. “Who are your friends?”

“The lead regiment of true-crimers. We got a problem,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Virgil said. “They look like a bunch of rabbits nibbling on carrot sticks.”

“I was thinking woodchucks and ears of corn. When you get closer, you’ll see their hair is bristly, more like a woodchuck’s than a rabbit’s. Or, possibly, like a beaver’s,” Lucas said. “Be careful. I caught one woman asking me a question and she had a telephone sticking out of the top of her pocket. I could see the camera lens and I know damn well she was recording. She asked why we’d been sitting on our asses for twenty years, and I gave her two words—‘We haven’t’—and walked away.”

“They’re aggressive.”

“I’ve met both aggressive and sneaky,” Lucas said. “And, aggressive-sneaky. And I’ve only been here for fifteen minutes.”

“Any…clues?” Virgil asked.

Lucas snorted and looked back at the clutch of women: “They wouldn’t know a clue if one jumped up and bit them on their collective ass.”

“Then what exactly are they…”

“They’re looking for clicks on their websites,” Lucas said. “Every one of them has a website and they live on clicks and followers. If they get enough clicks, they can get ads from true crime publishers. Some of them probably make upwards of eight hundred dollars a year. You and I are clickbait.”

—

Virgil turned back toward the parking lot, waved a hand at it, and said, “I got a clue for you.”

“I could use one.”

“How’d you find the park?” Virgil asked.

“My phone app,” Lucas said.

“That’s how I found it. Without the app, I could have wandered around for an hour and never seen it,” Virgil said. “The killer knew it was here. How’d he know that? How’d he know how to get back here, twenty years ago, in the dark, without an app?”

Lucas looked out at the street. “Good point. He either came from here, or he had some reason to come here. I thumbed through the file this morning and I didn’t see any of your BCA guys saying that.”

“I read some of it last night, and I didn’t see anything either. What are we going to do about that? It’s fourteen hundred pages, for God’s sakes.”

“Dunno.” Lucas pointed to a blacktopped trail that led through a line of burr oaks: “There’s an elementary school back there. Not far. Wonder if a schoolteacher could have done it?”

“We can talk about it,” Virgil said.

“Here’s another thing I was wondering,” Lucas said. “The original investigation couldn’t determine whether the body had been delivered to the dump site with a vehicle, because too many vehicles had been driven back and forth across the field before crime scene got here. Woodbury cops, mostly, and apparently the grass had been mowed recently, so there might have been tracks from the mowers… Anyway, did the killer drive Doris across the field? If he did, it must have been way late at night. Why would he do that? There are places just as good, where he could have dumped her closer to a road.”

“Another excellent question,” Virgil said. “A guy brought that up in a report. Remember Louis Kelly, I think he retired probably ten years ago? He said nobody saw a vehicle in here that night. But if it was late enough…”

“Hard to black out a vehicle anymore,” Lucas said.

“Maybe you could, back then,” Virgil ventured.

Lucas: “Maybe it was a matter of luck. Nobody saw the vehicle because nobody saw the vehicle.”

“That would be my guess,” Virgil said, peering across the green playing fields and tan dirt of the infields. “If the murder was spontaneous, you might have had a killer who didn’t think about it. He’d been to the park, knew about the trees and how to get to them, and he was panicked or scared and knew the details of this place, so…he brought her here.”

“A baseball player?”

“Maybe the true-crimers would have some ideas.”

“Don’t ask,” Lucas said.

One of the women broke out of the group and walked toward them. She was middle-aged, stocky, dressed in camo cargo slacks, a long-sleeved tan shirt, hiking boots, and a straw hat. She had spent time in the outdoors, and her face and hands carried a hard tan. She wore black plastic-rimmed sunglasses like the owner of an art gallery might wear, and, Virgil thought, Lucas was correct: she looked unnervingly like an oversized woodchuck. Or possibly a beaver, but he couldn’t see her teeth to pick one.

“You aren’t done with the interview, are you, Marshal?” she asked. Her voice had an edge to it, like the teeth of a saw.

Lucas said, “I’ll be around, but I’m not real big on conversation, unless you’ve turned up information on the Grandfelt murder.”

“Haven’t been here long enough yet, but I will,” she said. She turned to Virgil: “I know about you. You’re that fuckin’ Flowers.”

Virgil, “Aw, for Christ’s sakes.”

“You’ll see me around,” the woman said. “My name is Anne Cash, Anne with an ‘e.’ My website is AnneCashInvestigations.com. It’s the biggest and best true crime site on the Internet. You should take a look.”

“We will,” Virgil said.

She turned and took a step away, then turned back, brought her phone up before Lucas or Virgil could react, and took a picture of them together. “Thanks,” she said.

“That’s kinda rude,” Virgil said to her back.

“Live with it,” she said. “I’ll have you up on my site in twenty minutes.”

“Toldja,” Lucas muttered.

“Gonna be a long day,” Virgil said, looking over at the collection of women. On further inspection, he discovered three men among them. “Have you been to the murder scene?”

“I think so. As best I can tell. Is your GPS receiver in your gear bag?”

“It is.”

“I only had my phone,” Lucas said. “Let’s get the GPS. We’ve got the location to three decimal points from the original investigation. I can get close, but I’m not sure I’m right on top of it.”

“What’s to see?”

“Well, nothing,” Lucas said. “But you know, as long as we’re here…”

Virgil got the GPS receiver and Lucas guided him around the group of women, who stayed back for a minute, but then followed them toward the trees and a major patch of raspberry canes. A narrow game path poked through the brush, and they took it back toward a substantial body of water.

“Battle Creek Lake,” Lucas said. “Should have been called Battle Creek Slough.”

“Or swamp,” Virgil said. “That would be primo snapping turtle water back there. They’re good eatin’, so I’m told.”

“I’ll stick with snails,” Lucas said. “Being of French heritage.”

Virgil powered up the GPS receiver, when a woman called, “Davenport? Flowers?”

—

They turned and saw a uniformed cop hurrying toward them, chevrons on her shirt sleeve. Lucas said, “Sergeant Carney?”

“That’s me. I spoke to the city manager and they’re calling around to the council and talking about making the park off-limits tomorrow.” Carney was a thin woman with bony shoulders and a heart-shaped face, blue eyes, and a short blond ponytail. “We’ll let them roam around this afternoon, but after that, it’s entry by permission. That’s if the council approves. Somebody’s already cut branches off some of the trees…”

Virgil: “Why did they do that?”

“They’re all making videos,” Carney said. “Some of them with their phones, but some of them have these big Nikons and Sony cameras. The branches were in the way. They thought they were filming the murder scene, but they weren’t. It’s over this way.”

They followed Carney along the narrow path into the trees, low branches swatting at their faces, raspberry canes scratching at their pants, trailed by a line of true-crimers. They passed a strong stench, and Carney said, “Somebody took a dump last night.”

Lucas: “No kidding.”

They went on, until Carney stopped and said, “It was right about here.”

—

There was little to see but trees and brush. Virgil took out his GPS receiver, moved a dozen steps away to a spot with more open sky, and waited. A few yards back, the women were taking pictures and video of him, with a variety of cameras.

When Virgil had four satellites, he walked back to Lucas and Carney and said, “I think we’re actually about ten yards that way.” He nodded to the west, to a spot a few feet off the narrow trail, and they went that way and looked around. Still nothing to see except a clump of nettles.

The women closed in on them, and one of them took a small can from a pocket on her denim travel vest and quickly sprayed Day-Glo orange paint on a tree trunk.

Carney said, “Hey! Stop that.”

“It wears off,” the woman said. She turned to the other women and asked, “Anyone seen Bud?”

“He’s coming, he had to run to the car.” The speaker had a Sony camera mounted on a complicated upright handle that read “SmallRig” on the front, and also mounted a R?de microphone. She pointed the camera at the woman who sprayed the tree and said, “You’re live.”

The painter turned to Lucas and said, “So this is the exact spot, Marshal, where, twenty-one years and ninety-eight days ago, Doris Grandfelt suffered an agonizing death at the hands of an unknown…”

Lucas turned his back and walked away, and the woman shouted, not looking at him but at the camera, “Marshal! Marshal! I’m talking to you.”

Lucas, joined by Virgil, kept walking, and the camera tracked them.

“That’ll be worth a few clicks,” Virgil said.

“I don’t want to get involved in any sensational YouTube shit,” Lucas said. “We gotta take care, man.”

They could hear Carney arguing with the women about the spray paint. A man hustled toward them with an instrument over his shoulder, a hand grip on one end and what looked like a basketball hoop on the other, with a video screen mounted in the middle. He was carrying it in a way that seemed designed to obscure exactly what it was. Lucas stepped in front of him and asked, “What’s that thing?”

“Metal detector,” the man grunted. He sidestepped Lucas, who let him go.

“Metal detector,” Virgil mumbled as they walked away. “What the hell?”

Carney caught up with them at the cars: “Chief Bacon would like to talk to you guys, when you’re done here.”

“Where’s he at? City hall?” Virgil asked.

“No, he’s here somewhere, over in the other parking lot,” Carney said. “I’ll find him for you, but I won’t stay around to listen. He’s in a pissy mood.”

“So are we,” Lucas said.

—

Bacon was a rotund man, maybe fifty, with salt-and-pepper hair and a red face. “I don’t know whether I want you guys to come up with something or not. The council is all over me, bad publicity for the city and all that. It’d be nice to find the person who killed Doris, but there’s a cost to it.”

He went on for a while, on the one hand this, the other hand that, and when he turned away for a minute, to talk to another city cop, Virgil muttered to Lucas, “Let me handle this.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Hit him with my justifications.”

Virgil did that. When Bacon turned back to them, he said, “We know you guys have your daily concerns to keep up with, there’s not a lot of investigation to be done here, we’ll try to keep the focus on the BCA, we don’t think this mission will amount to much, maybe a day or two, Miz Grandfelt’s law office is handling the paperwork, blah blah blah…”

When he finished, Bacon said he appreciated all that, he’d leave an officer for crowd control, then got in his car and disappeared down the road.

“Well done,” Lucas said. “But what’s this?”

Carney was jogging toward them, across the softball outfields. “They found something with the metal detector,” she said, as she came up. “I told them to leave it, but I don’t think they will.”

“Where is it?” Virgil asked.

“Right on the edge of the trees.”

She pointed, they looked. The crowd of women and the three men had gathered in a tight huddle, bent over, looking at something in the dirt.

“Damnit,” Lucas said. He led the way across the playing fields, the women turning to look at them as they got close. “Probably a bottle cap.”

—

“What is it?” Virgil asked. “You didn’t touch anything?”

“We dug it up. Right below the surface,” the metal detector man said. He held his hand out, showed them a nickel, sitting in his palm.

Lucas: “A nickel?”

“Yes. Amazed nobody found it before. It’s a 1995, so the killer could have dropped it,” said Anne Cash, the woman they’d spoken to earlier.

Virgil: “There’s a path worn in the grass from people walking along the edge of the trees. It could have been dropped by anyone, anytime.”

Another woman chipped in. “Its importance isn’t what it is in itself . Its importance is, it demonstrates the negligence of the original investigation. This should have been found by the crime scene crew.”

Lucas: “But it might have been dropped last week. Or anytime in the twenty-one years since the killing. Or the eight years before. It’s meaningless. Or maybe you could use your blog to find out who might have had a 1995 nickel.”

“No reason to get sarcastic,” Cash said.

“Yes there is,” Virgil said. “You’re standing around looking at a nickel like it’s the Kensington Runestone, and it’s a fuckin’ nickel.”

Lucas elbowed him in the rib cage, and when Virgil looked at him, Lucas nodded at the far edge of the group. Virgil turned that way and spotted a woman pointing a diminutive camera over the shoulder of the woman in front of her. “That ‘fuckin’’ will get us a few clicks,” Lucas said. “Let’s go get a Coke or something. Talk about this. You drive.”

—

In Virgil’s truck, they talked about not much, because there wasn’t yet much to talk about, until Lucas said, “I’ve got a big favor to ask.”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I’m asking,” Lucas said.

“I don’t need to. If it’s a big favor, I don’t have time,” Virgil said. “I’ve got a novel to finish.”

“Look. For the next couple of weeks, you gotta do some work,” Lucas said. “You can’t just take the month off.”

“ Some work. A big favor sounds like a lot of work. But okay, spit it out.”

“There’s no point in both of us doing everything,” Lucas said. “I’ll be the liaison with the suits—Grandfelt, the lawyers, the politicians. I’ll keep them quiet and satisfied that we’re working. Daily updates. You be the main liaison with the true crime people.”

“Jesus, Lucas, I…”

“You’re a lot better at that kind of stuff than I am. You’re more social. You’ve got a better line of bullshit. Look at the way you handled the police chief,” Lucas said. “I can’t do that—I sound like I’m lying. I don’t have the patience to deal with the whack-a-doodles. You do it all the time, out there in the corn and beans. I mean, look at your friends. Johnson Johnson? I’m surprised he’s not up here with a Grandfelt-sniffing dog.”

Virgil shifted uncomfortably in the driver’s seat. The comment about his friend Johnson Johnson had been true enough. “Look, I’ll tell you, I gotta finish this novel on time. I gotta. It’s gonna be my life, and to me, it’s more important than Doris Grandfelt. I no longer have my heart in chasing assholes. I’m willing to work on Grandfelt, but I can’t get all tangled up…”

“You don’t have to get tangled up,” Lucas said. “All you have to do is liaise.”

“Is that a word?”

“You know what I mean. Don’t like the true-crimers? Blow them off if you like,” Lucas said. “But be the man. Let me take care of the suits, and you’re the man the true-crimers call up when they need to.”

Virgil thought about it for a minute, then nodded. “We can give it a try. If it starts eating me up, I might quit right in the middle of everything. Fuck Lara Grandfelt and her dead sister.”

Lucas switched out of pitch mode, settled into the seat, and said, “Thank you.”

—

The Parrot Café was a BCA hangout, a low-rent café with decent burgers, mediocre fries, a piss-poor pie, acidic coffee, and an ever-present odor of brown gravy and pencil-thin sliced beef. Two old friends, Jenkins and Shrake, were pushing cheeseburgers into their faces. Jenkins did a fake double take when they walked in, and Virgil said, “You might know it,” and Lucas said, “They’re eating. There’s a surprise.”

Shrake, cued by Jenkins’s double take, turned to look, and started laughing, bits of hamburger and cheese flaking off on his sport coat. “Sherlock and Holmes. You catch the guy yet?”

“We’re making progress,” Virgil said. “It’ll take a week to nail it down.”

“I heard you nailed down a month off, with pay,” Shrake said.

“That much is true,” Lucas said.

“Move your asses over,” Virgil said.

The two extra-large men moved over in the booth, and Virgil and Lucas sat down. Virgil said to Lucas, “I oughta talk to Jon about getting these guys out to the park. They won’t find anything, but they might get dates. They always need dates.”

“Won’t happen,” Shrake said. “We’ve got a runner of our own to find.”

A waiter named Jaxon came over and Lucas and Virgil ordered pie, banana crème and cherry, respectively, with Diet Coke and coffee, also respectively.

Virgil: “So you guys are looking…”

They were looking, Jenkins said, for a semi-outlaw biker who unloaded some bad Chinese fentanyl on his cousin, who subsequently died, albeit with a smile on his face.

Virgil: “Have you checked with the Sturgis cops?”

Jenkins looked open-mouthed at Shrake and said, with a sudden intake of breath, “Oh my God, he might be onto something.”

Lucas: “Okay. You’ve looked in Sturgis.”

“In fact, he just left Sturgis, on his way back here,” Shrake said, checking his Apple iWatch. “Ask us how we know that.”

“You’re tracking his phone,” Lucas said.

“We plan to box him up about the time he hits Coon Rapids,” Jenkins said. “No reason for us to be sweating our butts around SoDak.” He pushed a french fry into his mouth and mumbled around it, “You guys actually find anything yet?”

The pie arrived, looking a little used.

“No, and we won’t,” Lucas said, poking a fork at Jenkins. “This is almost the biggest clown show I’ve been involved in, although, of course, that wouldn’t apply to Virgie.”

“That’s the goddamned truth,” Shrake said, shaking his head. “Did I ever tell you about this chick crawled up a furnace vent and Virgie…”

“About fifty times,” Lucas said.

“So, about this Grandfelt thing,” Jenkins said. “You got nothin’. You got no ideas, you got no moves that haven’t been made, you got nothing but your dick in your hand…”

“One thing,” Virgil said. “There were footprints around the scene, almost certainly made by whoever dumped the body. It’s all in the files, I read about it last night. There was a tread pattern that overlapped scrapes in the dirt apparently made by Grandfelt’s shoes when she was dragged into the trees. Size ten-and-a-half Nikes…”

“We know about that, and that’s not a clue,” Shrake said. “Half the guys in the Twin Cities could have made them.”

“Shut up for a minute, let me finish,” Virgil said. “There were too many footprints. That’s my opinion, not somebody else’s. There were six clean footprints in the dirt around the body, including the one that crossed the scrapes. We got photographs of them all. They shouldn’t have been there. The ground wasn’t that wet at the time of the killing and when Lucas and I were back there this morning, I was hardly making any prints at all. And I’ve got heavy tread on my boots.”

“You’re saying the prints might have been deliberate?” Jenkins asked.

“I’m saying it’s possible,” Virgil said.

Lucas scratched his head, nodded, said, “It’s possible.”

“You know what you just did?” Jenkins asked Virgil. “You just peed on the only clue you had.”

“Got the DNA,” Lucas said.

Virgil: “If she was raped.”

“There was a question about that at the time,” Jenkins said. “The boys thought she was raped, and the girls didn’t. The girls thought she was pushing pussy.”

“I know,” Virgil said. “But that possibility wasn’t something that was talked about much. Maria Jimenez was death on rape but thought that Grandfelt’s sexual contacts may have been voluntary.”

“I remember,” Shrake said. “That’s about the same time Maria started suppressing her intense attraction for me.”

“I do remember that, her suppressing it,” Virgil said.

“If the sex was voluntary, I feel sorry for the guy who left the DNA behind. If you find him, his ass is going to prison for rape and murder,” Jenkins said.

Shrake said, “Yeah,” without sounding happy about it.

Lucas’s phone buzzed, and he looked at the screen. “Sergeant Carney.”

He answered, listened, and said, “We’ll be right over. Don’t let anybody touch it.”

Jenkins, Shrake, and Virgil looked at him as he rang off. Virgil asked, “What?”

Lucas: “Finish your pie, author-boy. Carney says the metal detector guy might have found the murder weapon.”