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When they got up to leave, Virgil held up his phone and said, “We’ve got a record of all this. A recording. There’s a good chance that if Heath falls, either for ripping off these charities or for killing Sand or his wife, the prosecutor will want to talk to you. You’ll be ableto make a deal and walk away. Or mostly away. Do not run. Do. Not. Run. If you run, we’ll track you down, and there won’t be a deal.”
Hinton: “You really are an asshole. Why don’t you take a lesson from this guy...” He nodded at Lucas. “...and relax a little? Don’t go through life as an asshole.”
“Good advice,” Lucas said. “I’ve told him he should try to model himself on me.”
“And you should,” Hinton told Virgil, with apparent sincerity.
—
Outside, Lucas tooka minute to laugh as they got in the car, said, “Virgil, somebody finally figured you out. You asshole.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna want to look at an autopsy report on Helen Heath.”
Lucas nodded: “If he did his wife, he could have done Sand and the kids. But I don’t know. Hinton is a con man. Con men know psychology. He thinks Heath is a pussy and would be too smart to murder her. Especially like that, falling down a stairs. That’s got some weight to it.”
“It does, unless Heath is a psycho. We know the Sand killer must be one,” Virgil said. “Psychos can hide it. Maybe even from con men.”
—
They’d worked lateinto the afternoon. They sat in the parking lot for a while, talking about what to do next: Virgil wanted to go home to Mankato, which would take an hour and a half, but promised to be back in the morning, when they could go after Heath.
“I’d rather transcribe the talk with Hinton and get that on the record, before we hit Heath,” Virgil said.
“Fine with me,” Lucas said. “My only problem might be if Hinton warns him that we’re coming.”
“Yeah. But he could be on the phone, right now. Maybe we should have busted him on the warrant...”
“Then he’d lawyer up and we wouldn’t get another word out of him for a month,” Lucas said. “Nah. We got him scared. He won’t go anywhere. Probably.”
Virgil smiled: “Probably.” He took his phone out. “Gotta call Frankie and tell her to brace herself.”
“You do that, big guy,” Lucas said.
—
They were ontheir way back to Lucas’s house, when they took a call from the BCA duty officer. “We got a call from a woman who wouldn’t give her name, with a message for you guys. She heard on theJonesing for Newsshow that you two were working the Sand murder. She has what she said was an important tip.”
“Did you get her number?” Lucas asked.
“Yes. It’s a pay phone at the university,” the duty officer said.
“I didn’t think they had those anymore,” Virgil said.
“They do, but they’re rare, and mostly used by drug dealers,” the duty officer said. “You want the message?”
“Sure, why not,” Lucas said. He had little faith in anonymous tips.
“What she said was, ‘Watch season four, episode six ofThe Old Palsstreaming series on Netflix.’ That’s it.”
Virgil: “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“I got Netflix,” Lucas said.
—
At Lucas’s house,they trooped into the family room and turned on the television, went to Netflix, foundThe Old Palsstreaming series, and went to season four, episode six.
