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—
When they weresure she was gone, Lucas said, “You know, when Sandy said, ‘That’s one we know of,’ that would imply that you and Sandy...”
“Shut up.”
“I wondered what the hell happened to my desk that one night. I came in the next morning and there were pencils all over the floor, and what looked like a smear...”
“I’m not listening...”
“I had to wipe the desk down with a paper towel. I mean, jeez.”
—
Dahl lived ina modest split-level house in White Bear Lake, north of St. Paul. They cruised the place twice, Lucas driving, Virgil checking out the house with binoculars. “Looks dead.”
“That’s great, but what about the garbage can?” Lucas asked.
“Behind the fence, I think. That’d be the logical place.”
A woven board fence extended out from the garage to the next property, and then turned down the lot line along the backyard.
“I’ll knock,” Lucas said. “If you sorta want to hang back...”
“Wait a minute, I’m getting the gloves on,” Virgil said. He began rolling some tan vinyl gloves up his fingers. When he was ready, he said so, and “I hate this. I always wind up smelling like tomato sauce and rotten bananas.”
“Face it; that’s your lot in life,” Lucas said. “I, on the other hand, smell like Tom Ford’sOud Wood.”
“So that’s what it is,” Virgil said. “I thought you might have had a hooker in the car.”
—
They were onDahl’s block, and as they came up to the house, Lucas pulled in at the far right side of the driveway, as close as he could get to a gate through the woven fence. Lucas got out, walked to the front door to ring the doorbell. Virgil unfolded a plastic garbage bag and waited.
Lucas rang the bell, stood looking at the door, rang again, listened, opened the screen door, and knocked on the interior door. Nobody came to answer the knock, and Lucas turned to look at Virgil, and nodded. Virgil climbed out of the car, walked to the gatein the fence, worked the handle, stepped behind it, where he found two blue trash cans.
He lifted the lids on both, saw some Pepsi cans. He gathered them up, handling them by the rims, and dropped them in the garbage bag. He added an empty orange juice bottle and a waxy microwave pizza box. That looked like the best of it, so he dropped the trash can lids, closed the gate behind himself, and walked back to the car.
Lucas: “We good?”
“If we have the right address.”
—
Virgil called Sandyon the way back to the BCA, told her to crank up the latent fingerprint unit for a crash examination. She said she would do that, and the fingerprint tech was waiting when they arrived. He took the bag and disappeared.
Lucas said, “Late lunch.”
“Parrot?”
—
The Parrot Caféwas a half mile from the BCA office and an agent hangout. They settled in for sandwiches and used their cell phones to look up the recipients of money from Sand’s will.
Martin Wye was an adjunct professor of environmental studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth and an authority on North Woods predators. He’d founded and still operated the Center for Predator Studies in the town of Ely.
Virgil: “Says he wrote the definitive papers on fishers. Sounds kinda legit.”
“I don’t want to drive all the hell the way to Ely to talk to him... and if you went, you’d probably be towing a boat and get lost for a week.”
