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Lucas had begunreading about Cooper, Sand’s wife. She’d been interviewed a half-dozen times by agents from three agencies, and somebody had put together a biography, with a selection of photographs, old and new.
Cooper was a tall, dark-haired woman approaching middle age, showing bones in her shoulders and elbows and knees, ungainly at first glance, but, according to her FBI biographer, a killer with a tennis racket in her hands.
A professor of theater arts at the University of Minnesota, she’d once, briefly, been an actress in Hollywood. From 2005 to 2009, she’d been a regular on a televised ensemble series modeled afterFriendsbut not as good asFriends.
With deep brown eyes and a high-ridged nose, she might have played an ancient Roman or Greek, though her ancestry was resolutely Anglo-Saxon. On the show, she’d played an uptight accountant of uncertain sexuality. Lucas had seen a couple episodes on astreaming service, but had quit watching because they weren’t very good. Even if they had been, they wouldn’t have been to his taste.
She had been born and raised in Minnesota, the daughter of two doctors. She was a graduate of the Blake School and held three degrees in performance arts, two from NYU and a third, a PhD, from UCLA. She told interviewers that her talent for teaching was stronger than her drive to act, and when offered a job at the University of Minnesota, had happily returned home.
And there she’d met a youngish lawyer, also a graduate of the Blake School; Alex Sand had been two years ahead of her, and she hadn’t known him well. After her return to the Twin Cities, they’d bumped into each other at a wine-and-cheese political event. The bump matured into courtship, marriage, and three children, two early in the marriage, followed by a trailer, a four-month-old daughter.
They were no longer quite so youngish. Cooper had become an associate professor, climbing the ranks, and Sand had been appointed as a federal judge by Barack Obama. Their marriage was solid, she said. They both loved each other and liked each other and loved their children. Though both were atheists, the family went to church on Christmas and Easter so the kids could have the experience of organized religion.
Cooper & Sand, as they thought of themselves, bought a family home, a much-remodeled house built in 1918, that didn’t fit into a specific architectural style, but showed bits and pieces of several styles: stone and brick and creamy stucco with a slate roof and black shutters on the narrow windows. They were comfortable there, comfortable in the neighborhood. Any antagonisms between neighbors, and there were some, didn’t include them.
Their house, Cooper told investigators, was too rich for a college professor and a judge, but Sand had chosen his great-great-grandfather wisely. His great-great-grandfather had owned Old River Mills, which eventually became a major component of General Mills—Cheerios, Wheat Chex, Betty Crocker, etc. A large chunk of money had taken up residence in the Sand family and had remained there for a hundred and fifty years. Alex Sand had been a millionaire as a toddler.
They had the usual disagreements of a husband and wife: the judge thought some of her closest friends were too arty-fartsy, she thought some of his had sticks way too far up their Anglo-Saxon rectums. They recognized these things about each other and about their friends, and even laughed about them.
They were as happy as successful people could be, right up until the bloodbath.
Into the file, Lucas said across the table, “They pushed on Cooper pretty hard.”
“She inherits,” Virgil said. “No prenup. She’s five-ten and slender, which means she fits the physical profile of the shooter. What doesn’t fit is her time profile. Or her foot size, for that matter. Her car’s on cameras leaving the university, and arriving at and leaving Whole Foods, although you never see her face and you can’t really nail down the driver’s actual height. If she could have gotten somebody tallish to drive for her...”
“Then how would she have caught up with the car to drive it home?”
“Don’t know,” Virgil said. “There are obvious possibilities. Traded cars with the driver of her car, then traded back after the killings.”
“Which means an accomplice.”
“Yup. That seems... unlikely, to me,” Virgil said. “If she did it, she did it herself without any help. Too smart to bring a second person into it.”
“A lover?” Lucas suggested.
“No evidence of that.”
“You’d have to be one goddamn crazy cookie to kill your husband and include your two little kids in the deal. Or to hire somebody to do it,” Lucas said.
“Maybe that was why she was so distraught,” Virgil said. “She didn’t want the kids in on the deal, but the guy had to kill them because they were witnesses. They were twelve and ten, old enough to identify him.”
“If he came through the door right behind them, he probably saw the kids before he was inside.”
“True.”
“Maybe she’s distraught because she loved her husband and kids?” Lucas suggested.
“I think that’s most likely,” Virgil said.
“So you were playing devil’s advocate, there.”
“You know they had to poke her, Durey and Russo,” Virgil said.
“Yeah.”
A while later, Lucas said, “Whoa. Cooper says the killer did take something out of the house—laptops. And cell phones. Both the judge and the boys had their own laptops and cell phones and they’re all missing.”
“You didn’t know that?” Virgil asked.
