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“Are we going to kill him?”
“That’s still the plan,” Cooper said.
“I know itwas. We could tell Lucas and Virgil who he is, that you suspected it all along, and they’d find a way to go in there and find the computers.”
“And then what?” Cooper asked. “A trial where he might pull some crazy shit and get off?”
“As one of your lawyers, I can tell you he won’t get off. Not as long as those computers are still there when the cops go in,” Melton said.
“What if he ditched them? Like tonight?”
“Well... We’d know, but...”
“If that happened, and if he got off, we’d find him and kill him. But I don’t want to go to prison and when I saw those computers, it all came to me. Like I was struck by lightning. What we’d do next.”
“Tell me,” Melton said.
—
Hess got homeat nine o’clock, flipped the lights on, took a step inside and suddenly felt that he was not alone. He neither saw nor heard anything, but he smelled something: what was it? Sweat? Or... deodorant? Perfume?
He called, “Hey! Hey! Hello? Who’s there?”
Nobody was there. The loose wooden safety bar stopped him: hewas sure that it had been in the door tracks. The door itself was closed...
But when he went in the bedroom, he saw the orchid the instant he was inside. And the empty pot.
“No, no, no... oh, no.”
He turned around in the bedroom, picked up the silk flower, hurled it at the wall, walked out to the living room and smelled it again...
Perfume.
21
The next morning, Virgil was halfway back to the Cities when Durey called.
“Heath’s attorneys apparently went steaming into the U.S. Attorney’s Office this morning. They want the search warrant and everything it produced to be quashed. The FBI’s Special Agent in Charge called in the guy who is supposed to be supervising the overall investigation, and he called Russo...”
“Cut the introduction and get to the movie,” Virgil said.
“Russo claimed that Heath’s alibi wasn’t watertight,” Durey said. “That the mayor and the other people eating with him the night of the murders agree that Heath went to the bathroom a couple of times and did some table-hopping, so he wasn’t right under their eyes the whole time. It only takes three or four minutes from the restaurant to Crocus Circle, so maybe...”
“It would take a bizarre piece of luck to leave a restaurant, drive to Sand’s house at exactly the right moment, kill three people, and get back without anyone noticing,” Virgil said. “The killer was inside for what, five or six minutes? He would have been gone for a minimum of fifteen minutes.”
“Yeah, we all know it’s bullshit, but it got us inside Heath’s place. Anyway, what I’m calling to tell you is that the U.S. Attorney is trying to protect his ass. He called the magistrate judge who signed off on the warrant, Coffman, and apparently a shit-fit was thrown. Coffman wants everybody in his chambers at eleven o’clock. Can you make it?”
“Yes, I’m halfway there now. So the federal courthouse?”
“Yeah. Call Davenport and tell him about this, and tell him to get over there, too. Russo’s carrying the water on this, but it was Davenport’s idea.”
—
Virgil and Lucasmet at a Minneapolis Starbucks to decide what they’d say, if the magistrate had questions for them. Lucas argued for innocence: that the man in the video getting out of the car at the airport looked exactly like the Sand killer, even to small details of dress—the University of Minnesota rain hoodie, the Covid mask, the size of his shoes.
That they had good reason to believe that Heath had been involved in long-running charity frauds and that his two associates or accomplices were either murdered or missing.
“Coffman’s not stupid,” Virgil said. “If he knows Heath’s alibi is solid, he could throw out anything we found.”
