She had tracked Timothy from his apartment — his ex had gotten the house — across St. Paul and downtown, right to Bee. She'd seen the blonde open the door, and her arms going up around Timothy's neck.

They'd disappeared back toward the stairway. She'd given them some time, and followed, using her own key to get in the building.

Now, with her mind clear and hard as a diamond, Fisk walked down to the cafeteria and through to the executive dining room. She felt as though she had a hand in her back, pushing her along. She got a knife from the serving cart, and as she was walking out, noticed the box of kitchen gloves. She took two, pulled them on, and continued back to her small office. As she walked, she got a whiff of... buttered popcorn? Was there somebody else in the building, somebody she didn't know about?

She didn't think so, but she did a swift recon, looking for light, movement, sound. Nothing. She went back to her office. Smelled the popcorn again. Couldn't find the source, but it seemed to be lingering around an unoccupied copy room. Didn't actually worry her, but it seemed curious.

She continued on. She had no plan, but then, as a law school graduate, she understood both the merits of meticulous planning, and the merits of spontaneity. This was time for the latter; that was demonstrated by the serendipitous discovery of the non-slip latex gloves.

In her office, she locked the door, sat in her office chair, in the semi-dark, and tested the point of the knife. As expected, the knife was dull. No matter, she had the time. The ledge under the windowsill was rough red brick, and whetting rapidly and with anger, she groomed the table knife to a fine murderous point.

And she calculated.

The lovebirds would not be leaving together. Timothy Carlson had arrived in his Porsche 911, and the bitch had her Subaru in the parking lot. When the knife was ready, Fisk walked back to the VP's outer office, where the pair had gone to use the soft leather couch. She waited two spaces down, inside an unlocked conference room, the door cracked open just enough to see. The anger clawed at her throat, and she struggled to control her breathing. Timothy didn't know it yet, but she was already planning the wedding. They'd been dating for a year, and an idiot blonde named Doris wasn't going to sidetrack her plans.

There in the conference room, she didn't have to wait long. With Timothy, unfortunately, you never had to wait long.

And Timothy, laughing, possibly a bit abashed, as he should be, left first, checked his fly, said good-bye through the open doorway one last time. He walked along the dark corridor to the stairs, down the stairs, and out.

Fisk followed, her senses tuned to any possible interference or interruption, but the building, except for the two of them, and the scent of buttered popcorn, was empty. The knife was light in her hand, ready.

She stopped outside the restroom, kicked off her shoes, listening, then pulled open the door and peeked. Grandfelt was in one of the toilet stalls. Fisk stepped inside, eased the door shut, then tiptoed silently across the tacky cold tile to one side of the booths.

Perhaps there was a change in air pressure, or perhaps the prospective victim simply had excellent hearing, but Grandfelt blurted, "Hello? Someone there?"

Fisk stood unmoving, and Grandfelt listened, then continued whatever she was doing in the stall. The toilet flushed, and after a minute, Grandfelt pulled the door open, stepped out, fully dressed, and walked to the line of sinks that faced the booths.

Not quite perfect for a murder, but good enough. When Grandfelt reached for the soap dispenser, Fisk stepped out quickly, coming up from behind. Grandfelt's eyes snapped up to the mirror, too late, Fisk stuck the knife in the other woman's back, striking hard, the blade penetrating past the spine and into the heart.

Grandfelt recoiled, bent, shrieked once, and turned, and Fisk stabbed her again and again and again and the blue eyes were looking up at her and she stabbed her and stabbed her eyes and throat...

She wasn't quite sure how long she was there, but whenever it was that she came back to the world, Grandfelt was not only dead, she was a mess. How did her blouse get ripped open, who tore off the lacy black bra? Fisk had no memory of it, but... it must have been her. And she had blood on her, all over her, blood almost up to her elbows, and covering her blouse, jacket and slacks.

She listened, heard nothing. If someone came... she still had the knife, and now, she noticed, she was bleeding from a cut on her hand. How that had happened, she didn't know.

Here she was, with a dead body on her hands. It felt like a risk, but not a large one, and had a feeling to it: she could run the table here. She stepped outside the restroom and into her shoes, looked around. Her purse was still in her office. She went that way, to get it, realized she was still carrying the knife, and when she got her purse, fumbled it inside and slung the purse over her arm.

She walked back down to the cafeteria, dug around, and found a box of black plastic garbage bags in a cabinet, and a pack of brown paper towels. She carried them to the restroom.

On the way, she noticed, for the first time, a feeling of wetness on her arms and chest and stomach: Grandfelt's blood. That had to be dealt with, but not yet.

Back at the restroom, in her bare feet again, she set the purse aside, and went to work. Grandfelt, not a large woman, was jammed into two overlapping garbage bags. Fisk spent another five minutes scrubbing up the blood on the restroom floor — probably didn't get it all, but if there was a tiny speck here or there, the janitors would get it, and never know.

She shoved the bloody paper towels in the bags with Grandfelt, took a minute to wash her own hands and arms, cleared off a slash of blood on her left cheek. Her clothes were saturated with blood, but it was less visible than it might be. She was wearing her work clothes, a dark blue jacket and dark blue slacks, over a pale blue blouse. The blood was evident on the blouse, but not so much on her jacket and slacks, especially not in dim light. And she could button the jacket: that was all good.

She buttoned the jacket, checked her hair, rinsed the blood out of the sink, took a last look around, dragged the bags to the door, listened.

All clear. She got her purse, put her shoes back on, and dragged the bags down the dimly lit hallway to the elevator, gripping Grandfelt's arms through the plastic. She took the load to the first floor, then to the back door. She pushed the bags through the door to the top of the steps, let the door close behind her, hurried out to the street, where she'd left her car. She drove it around to the back door, picked up the garbage bags — heavy, but not too heavy — staggered out to the car and dropped the body in the trunk.

Now what? Rather, now where?

She thought for a moment and came up with just the right spot. Minutes from the parking lot, and she knew it well, having grown up only a few blocks away. As she drove, she made a mental list: leave the body, but get all the other crap out of the sacks — the towels, the shoulder bag, the shoes. An ID, if there was one in the bag, would instantly identify the body, and might somehow identify the scene of the crime. The knife was in there: must get rid of it right away.

What about Grandfelt's car, still in the parking lot? She considered that, as she pulled into Shawnee park. If she had time...

The police might believe that Grandfelt was murdered in the building, but more likely would believe that she'd been picked up by somebody and taken away to be murdered. After all, there was no evidence of a murder in the building. She'd have to get rid of the garbage bags and be careful about it.

Shawnee Park was tucked in a kind of armpit where I-494 met I-94, east of St. Paul. She checked the few lighted windows in the surrounding neighborhood but saw no movement. Still wary, watchful, she stripped the body out of the sacks and threw everything else into one of them. As she was doing that, she noticed Timothy's Nike tennis shoes in the trunk, thought a minute, then pulled them on over her loafers. The ground was damp, no reason to leave small female footprints if you don't have to.

That done, and fueled by adrenaline, she dragged Grandfelt out of the car, humped the body a hundred yards across the playing fields to a line of trees, pushed back into them, and dumped it. Hurrying back to the car, she got inside, saw the purse sitting on the passenger seat, and the glimmer of the knife handle.

She picked it up, stepped out of the car again, stuck the knife in the ground, pushed it as far down as she could, and then stepped on it, to get it that last inch down in the soft earth.

Drive carefully she thought, on the way out of the park, neither too fast nor too slow, and with confidence. She'd done so well, this was no time to blow it.

Grandfelt's car.

She didn't drive back to the murder scene, but she got close, parked on the street a block away. She dug in the garbage bag, found car keys in the dead woman's purse, and walked to Grandfelt's car; blood was drying on her blouse, and she could feel it crinkling against her skin, raising goosebumps. She drove the Subaru six blocks and left it a block from a still-open bar, that everybody, including Fisk, referred to as a meat rack.

She sat for a moment, watching and listening, got out, locked the Subaru with the fob, and walked through the night to her own vehicle.

She could smell the blood on herself. Feel the lucid rays of the full moon cool on her face and arms. Perfect.

Brandon and Alice Parkinson were walking their kinky-haired gray labradoodle, Lloyd, on a grassy ramble along the edges of Shawnee Park. A retractable leash allowed the dog to dash into the trees and tangle himself in brush, but no matter, the Parkinsons were not in a hurry. They enjoyed the warming spring evenings, the air as soft as a cashmere blanket, a relief from the cold edges of a recently departed Minnesota winter.

Alice was back from Chicago, a visit to her parents. She'd taken the Empire Builder train to and from St. Paul. She was still afraid to fly after the 911 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two years earlier. As a side benefit, she felt confident in transporting six ounces of primo weed back from Chicago, where her mother had a tight connection with a dealer. She would not have been confident bringing it back through O'Hare's airport security.

As they walked, they could hear the faint but unmistakable sound of Britney Spears singing "Oops! I did it again," which must be coming through an open window somewhere in the neighborhood, another sure sign of spring. Brandon carried a flashlight, the better to untangle the dog when that became necessary. He flicked it off and on as they walked along the line of trees at the far edge of the playing fields.

Lloyd checked out a dried pile of dog poop. Alice pulled him away and said to Brandon, "Stop hogging the J, for cripes sakes."

Brandon passed the joint, Alice took a toke, held her breath for a few steps, let the aromatic smoke filter slowly out her nose. Alice was a believer in the slow nose exhale, that the sensitive nasal linings transmitted the THC more rapidly to the brain, made the high stronger and more resonant.

She passed the joint back and they ambled on, letting the dog lead. They'd been talking about their teen-aged daughter, Shona, who was showing an intense interest in a particular boy in school. Brandon called him 'the rat,' because of his distinctly ratlike appearance, a thin face with a prominent nose and a pointed chin on which the kid was attempting to grow a beard.

"That's really unkind," Alice said, reaching a point in her stoneage where everything went mellow. "He can't help his appearance."

"Of course, he can," Brandon said. "He even dresses like a rat."

"That's true," Alice conceded. Brandon passed the J and Alice took a contemplative toke and passed it back. As she exhaled, she said, in a squeaky voice, "I'd prefer not to have any ratlike grandchildren, if I can avoid it. Especially not when Shona's in tenth grade."

"Gimme some light, I'll get it." As Brandon shined the flashlight back into the trees, Alice pushed a branch aside, following the leash to the dog. When she got to him, she stopped. Looked. Looked again, into the bright puddle of moonlight. "Brand! What the heck is that? What the heck is it?"

She swiveled back, dragging the dog behind her. She hugged Brandon around his waist. "It looks like..."

Brandon, who'd played high school football back in the late '70s, knew no fear. He stepped into the trees, Alice behind him, holding to his belt, and turned the flashlight toward a white lump.

The woman had been butchered.

She lay on her back, half upside down in a depression in the damp earth. She was mostly nude. She'd been ripped from sternum to pelvic bone, stabbed multiple times in the face and eyes, neck and upper chest. Her body was a ghastly pale lump in the now sepulchral light of the moon. And he could smell her: a butcher shop odor, mixed with a fecal stink.

Brandon said, "Oh, fuck me," turned away, backtracked, and vomited on Alice's shoes.

After discovering the body, the couple, stoned to the gills and panicked, crashed through the brush and trees, dragged the frightened dog into the open, and ran toward the house where Britney had been singing her song, now replaced by the Back Street Boys with "I Want It That Way."

They were running for what they thought might be their lives, between the ballfields, to a parking lot. There, stopping to catch their breath, they called 9-1-1. Ten minutes later, they led a squadron of Woodbury cops back into the trees and the body.

After a quick survey of the murder scene — a mutilated young woman with blond hair, half-wrapped in a silky blood-soaked blouse and beige skirt — the cops called the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul and asked that a crime-scene crew and investigators be sent over immediately.

Although both were smart, hard-nosed cops with enough experience to become cynical about the possibility of progress in human nature, none of the big guns at the BCA trusted them to work a high-profile, media-sensitive investigation like that of the murder of Doris Grandfelt. She was the prime example of the Hot Blonde Syndrome: if you want to keep your murder quiet, kill a black woman. Or a Mexican or a Palestinian.

You do not kill hot blondes, whose ghastly deaths make the top of the ten o'clock broadcasts, and get away with it.

Unless you do, of course.

In which case the Jenkinses and Shrakes of the business will be brought in when it's too late to do any good, hopefully to take the blame for the lack of results.

"Or we could beat it out of him," Jenkins said.

"I like the concept, but I want him healthy enough to talk."

All they knew about the CSI was that his name was Larry. They sat on either side of Larry, who looked at them warily and asked, through a mouthful of cheddar cheese, "Wut?"

"Tell us about it, Lare," Jenkins said, leaning close. He was perhaps a hundred pounds heavier than Larry, most of it muscle, so Larry swallowed and told them.

The scene, he said, had been frozen for a hundred yards around, but not before a half-dozen Woodbury cars had come and gone, followed by four more BCA vehicles that tracked over the earlier tracks. The crime scene investigation had begun the night before under portable lights, but nothing was disturbed until morning, when the scene was fully sunlit.

"We're about to move the body over to the medical examiner. We did the inch-by-inch stuff around the body and now we need to see what's under it."

"What have you detected?" Shrake asked.

"We may have some footprints."

"Footprints?"

"Maybe."

"Will that amount to anything, Lare?"

"Uh... who knows?"

"That's some fancy detectin', right there," Shrake observed.

The murder weapon had been sharp, with a blade that was narrow but inflexible, something like a boning knife. If the knife had been a pen knife with a three- or four- inch blade, then the murder could have been spontaneous. But it wasn't a pen knife. The blade was long enough that it would have been awkward to routinely carry, except in a sheath. That meant, investigators believed, that the murder had been planned, and the knife deliberately carried to that end.

"Unless it wasn't planned," Jenkins said. "I had a guy stoned on some kinda weird shit, stab a guy outside a taco shop with a knife he found on the sidewalk like one minute before. Unfortunately for him, he was standing under a video camera when he did it. No previous contact between the two, no motive... the stabber wasn't even a religious nut and was from out of town. We never would have caught him without the video. He was identified by his mom, who saw him on TV."

"What size are your Nike Air Force 1's?" Jenkins asked Shrake.

"Fourteen."

"Okay, you didn't do it."

No identifying material remained on the body, with one exception — a dry-cleaning tag on the hem of the woman's skirt. BCA investigators quickly identified the victim as Doris Grandfelt, an accountant at Bee Accounting Corp., with headquarters in the Lowertown section of St. Paul.

The identification was confirmed by the victim's twin sister, Lara Grandfelt. Bee Accounting was a twelve- to fifteen-minute drive from the park, depending on traffic. Grandfelt's car was found a few blocks away from Bee, near a bar known as a meeting place for singles. There was no blood in the car. A once-over at Bee Accounting found no sign of the attack there.

Although Grandfelt was a pretty, vivacious woman, none of the bar employees remembered seeing her there the night she was murdered. A presumption developed: Grandfelt had been grabbed after work, on the street, probably on her way to the bar, and had been taken somewhere else and was killed wherever that was.

"That's possible," Shrake said.

"If unlikely," Jenkins observed. "I've been there a few times. There are always people on the sidewalk when the place is open."

"You ever get lucky?"

"One time I thought I had, but it turned out a week later, I wasn't."

"What happened? I mean you didn't..."

"I don't want to talk about it."

The autopsy revealed that Grandfelt had engaged in sexual activity at least twice the day of her death, and that the first case of intercourse involved a condom that used a spermicidal lubricant. Traces of the lubricant were recovered from deep in her vagina, but no DNA was recovered from that first sexual contact. There was no way to determine whether the sexual contacts were with one man, or with two different men.

Some investigators questioned the idea that she'd been raped, because there'd been no vaginal bruising or tears, or signs of an involuntary, violent penetration. The investigators couldn't tell whether the woman had fought against an attacker. She had none of his blood on her fists or in her mouth, and none of his skin under her fingernails.

One of the investigators, a woman named Maria Jimenez, told Shrake that, "Doris had some muscle. She grew up on a farm down by Lakeville, threw hay, worked out here in the Cities. No ligature marks, no sign she was tied up, no signs of resistance. Nothing. I don't believe she was raped."

"You're smarter than you look," Shrake said.

"What?" Fists on her hips.

"Wait. That didn't come out right. You're smart. And you look great. Really great."

"Go away, bozo."

A psychologist employed by the BCA suggested that the eye wounds, which were post-mortem, were intended to keep the dead woman from seeing her killer in death. The cops took that with a grain of salt the size of a basketball.

Sometime after she was dead and her arteries had stopped pumping out blood, she'd been cut open, and some of her internal organs dragged around with the knife blade.

The killer was nuts.

"We can all agree on that," Jenkins told Shrake, who nodded.

The man, named Jeremy Williams, had both an alibi and volunteered for a DNA test that indicated that he was not the last person to have had sex with Grandfelt. His alibi had been checked and found solid, if not perfect; which was good for Williams, because cops were suspicious of perfect alibis. Williams was an assistant coach at Cretin High School in St. Paul. He said he'd never visited Grandfelt at work and had never visited the park where the body was found. The investigators couldn't break that down.

There had been another relationship before Williams, which the BCA traced to a man named Clifton Howard (also incorrectly referred to in several reports as Howard Clifton), but he had moved to Seattle two years earlier, having broken off the relationship. He had established alibis there for the period around the murder and also volunteered for a DNA scrub.

Her twin, Lara, a bank employee in St. Paul, told investigators that Doris had had an off-and-on sexual relationship in college with a boy named Christopher Schuler. She said that Schuler was "odd."

Schuler was found working in Salt Lake City as a waiter, and the restaurant staff confirmed that he had been working the night of the attack, and the days before and after. Schuler wrote an angry letter to Lara Grandfelt about pulling him into the case, and Grandfelt called him to apologize.

A review of Doris Grandfelt's employment status revealed that although she had graduated from Manifold College, a small church-linked school in southern Minnesota, with a major in accounting, she was not employed as a supervising accountant at Bee — she was more like a skilled clerk and was paid as a skilled clerk. Two dozen male Bee employees were interviewed and asked for DNA swabs, which they provided, to no effect.

Despite a low salary, Grandfelt dressed well, and had a collection of designer shoes. — Chanel slingbacks, Louboutin stilettoes, Blahnik pumps, Gucci horsebit loafers. Jimenez, the investigator who didn't think Grandfelt had been raped, looked at the shoes and said, "She wasn't going to the state fair in these things. I smell money coming from somewhere."

Grandfelt's parents were affluent but provided no significant post-college support for their twin daughters, believing hard work would teach them the value of a dollar.

Further interviews with her roommate and with friends revealed that Grandfelt had an active club life in Minneapolis and was known by a number of bouncers and bartenders as a welcome regular. After doing the interviews, one of the investigators confidentially suggested that Grandfelt might have been involved with sex-for-pay, to fund the expensive wardrobe and clubbing lifestyle. There were hints that she was not unfamiliar with cocaine, although no signs of the drug were found in the autopsy or in her apartment.

When word of the sex-for-pay and cocaine discussion leaked to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Lara Grandfelt went ballistic and tried (unsuccessfully) to sue both the BCA and the paper for defamation. Can't defame a dead woman, she was told.

"What do you think?" Shrake asked Jenkins. "Was she on the corner?"

"Those shoes... there was no way she was buying them on her salary. She wasn't on the corner, though. Too conservative for that. Probably working for someone over on Hennepin, who'd set her up with dates, maybe provide some protection."

"Anybody talk to Minneapolis vice?"

"Jimenez called over, but they'd hadn't heard of her. Grandfelt, not Jimenez. Never been busted for anything. Not even a speeding ticket."

"We need a survey of Hennepin Avenue bartenders, see what they know."

"I could sign up for that. I'd need some expense money."

In the days and weeks following the murder, frustrated BCA investigators were unable to find anyone who admitted having sex with the woman on the day she was killed, or any other day, other than acknowledged sexual partners. None of those admitted to having sex with her in the months before she was murdered.

In the end, the cops did 336 separate interviews. They had unidentified DNA; had evidence that the killer wore Nike Air Force 1's, size ten and a half, as did a million other American males; had evidence that the killer owned a knife with a blade at least six inches long of unknown make, but probably good quality — the knife hadn't bent or deflected when hitting bone. And they had a great collection of footwear, locked in an evidence room.

If there had been any reason to do a full forensic examination of the third-floor women's room in the first hours after the discovery of the body, investigators might have found stray blood cells that could have traced to Grandfelt, and thus pinned down the scene of the crime. But there was no reason to do that, and after a few daily applications of restroom floor cleaner by the janitors, the possibility was gone.

There was never exactly a final conference about the murder, and the case didn't become "cold" — although it definitely became cool — but there was a big get-together at which all the investigators were invited, including Jenkins and Shrake.

Their opinions were not solicited, but Shrake gave them anyway.

"You oughta... we oughta... get every single ambulatory male client of Bee's, and every male Bee employee, and make them take DNA tests. Jenkins and I believe that we would at least find out who was having sex with her, that last time."

DNA tests were expensive, there were hundreds of male clients, blah blah blah. It wasn't done.

That was about it.

On this particular day, in the Nick O' Time Coffee and Pastries Shoppe, it was actors who were up his ass.

He'd spent weeks writing scenarios for 9-1-1 training calls. Under his game plan, each 9-1-1 trainee would be seated in front of a computer, just as she would be in real life, and would take a pre-recorded call: frightened people screaming for help. Each call would require the operators to make an appropriate response, guided by suggestions that would flash up on the computer screen.

Each operator response branched to another screaming reply by the caller, which branched to another response, depending on what the answer was. At more advance levels, the operator would be dealing with three or four calls at once and would have no prompts, as would happen with a disaster of greater or lesser extent, like a school shooting, or a small plane crash.

The whole sequence would be overseen by an instructor, based on training manuals also being written by Lucas.

Lucas wanted the calls to be vocal and realistic— that is, the trainee would have a set of headphones and a microphone. When a call came in, he or she would select an appropriate response and read it in the appropriate tone of voice.

He knew what he wanted, but the programmers explained in incomprehensible detail how difficult it was and why they should be paid more. Which drove him crazy. All he wanted to know was whether they could do it. They could, but they whined.

"My house is on fire!"

"There's a man in my house. He's got a gun!"

"My husband is hurting me! Here he comes..."

"My son has shot up and he's not breathing!"

Lucas had experience writing board games — based on historical battles and fantasy conflicts — and had put his entire savings into the new computer company, tentatively called Davenport Simulations.

He was paying the programmers and actors, all graduate students at the University of Minnesota, a pittance, along with stock options which everyone, without exception, laughed off as improbable.

Hence the other major pain in his ass: the accountants.

"I don't want Mammy from 'Gone with the Wind,' I want somebody who sounds like they live in North Minneapolis," he said. North Minneapolis was local code for 'black.'

"Lots of white people in North Minneapolis," the white actor said, deliberately yanking his chain.

Lucas: "You know what I mean."

"It'd be less racist if you paid us more," the black woman said.

"Tell me that when you cash in the stock options," Lucas said.

The two women laughed and the white woman said, "Yeah, right, remind me to do that."

The three of them were impatiently working through the whole cultural/racial conundrum when two large men, mid-thirties, muscular, wearing Polo golf shirts under sport coats, and khaki slacks, with World War Two haircuts, one of them snapping his chewing gum, came through the door. The one snapping gum had brilliant white teeth, which were actually implants, paid for by the state when his natural teeth were knocked out by a woman wielding a flower pot.

The men looked around, and Jenkins spotted Lucas, ambled over to the table, trailed by Shrake, checked the actors and asked Lucas, "Settin' up a salt n' pepper three-way?"

"Shut up, you fuckin' clown. We got serious business here," Lucas said. To the startled actors, "Don't pay any attention to him. He's a moron. Are we good? You understand where I'm coming from? It is a racial thing, but not racist. Not on our part."

"That sounds a little racist, whatever it is," Shrake said, without being asked.

"I do understand, but I've got to think about it," the black woman said. She looked up at the two large men and then back at Lucas. "Who are these jerks?"

"Ooo, I like them spicy," the slightly smaller of the two large men said.

"I ought to kick your balls up around your collar," the actor said.

The blonde said, "Do it, Jackie." And to the slightly smaller man, "She's in karate."

The larger of the two large men: "So, uh, could we get some phone numbers?"

Lucas, rubbing his forehead with his fingers: "Jesus God. I'm just trying to get through life."

When the men came back, Lucas, who was not small, moved over so Jenkins could sit next to him, because Jenkins and Shrake would not both fit in the same side of a restaurant booth.

Jenkins said to Lucas, "This is my new partner up at the BCA. Shrake. He's kind of an asshole, but he's willing to carry my lunch-bucket."

"That's not the entire story," Shrake said, getting comfortable with his scone. He was not a tidy eater. "I hang out because I can supplement my income by playing golf with him."

Lucas said, "I've already heard about Shrake. There are rumors that you guys are working the Grandfelt murder and you're fucking it up."

"Who is this guy?" Shrake asked Jenkins.

"Used to be a big-deal homicide investigator in Minneapolis. Then this cute little hooker who was feeding him tips got caught by her pimp. He carved her up with a church key. Lucas sort of went off on the poor guy. The politicians got pissed and he was kicked out of the department. They claimed he used excessive force," Jenkins said. To Lucas: "Whatever happened to the chick?"

"Still looks like a jack-o-lantern, a week after Halloween," Lucas said.

"Nasty. How about the pimp? He walking again?"

"I don't know. I don't check on him anymore," Lucas said. "I was told by a reliable source that he no longer needs diapers."

Shrake lifted a hand to be slapped, and said, "Testify!"

Lucas slapped. "So. You guys fuckin' it up?"

"Not us. We're going around talking to the least-likely suspects while the big guns get the real possibilities," Shrake said. "Not that there's much difference between the two groups."

"I heard the victim was a mess," Lucas said.

"Bad as it gets," Jenkins said. "The only thing I've seen that compares was back when I was on the street. A couple of kids drove an old MG-B into a bridge abutment at eighty miles an hour. You couldn't tell which head went with which body. Grandfelt was like that... she was ripped to pieces."

"Tell me everything," Lucas said, realizing that he was more interested than he should be, as he was now a business executive and not a cop.

Jenkins told him the story in detail, and when he was done, Lucas asked, "You gonna catch whoever did it?"

Jenkins and Shrake glanced at each other, then they both shook their heads. "I don't think so. Whoever did this knew what they were doing," Shrake said. "He left us nothing to work with. We've taken a bunch of blood samples and they all go back to Grandfelt. No extraneous hair, no skin, no DNA. Grandfelt was playing games with a bunch of low-lifes over on the Hennepin strip, and had been for a while, so that's a problem, because it multiplies the possibilities."

"Don't think it was a low-life — or it might have been, but that's not the critical factor," Jenkins said. "The critical thing is, whoever did it is a psycho. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd done some other killings. This was not an ordinary thing."

"So you got nothing? Not even a hint of a motive?" Lucas asked.

Shrake sighed, and said, "You know, it could be sex, but I don't think so. Not money, either, because Grandfelt didn't have much. Jealousy? That's a possibility. But it might not be any of those. We found her car on the street near a meat rack, so it might be somebody who preys on blondes. Picked her up, took her somewhere quiet, fucked her and murdered her. No motive other than what the voices in his head were telling him to do. You know?"

Lucas nodded: "That makes it tough."

"Maybe impossible," Jenkins said. "I feel 'impossible' coming up like the sun in the morning, though the hotshots won't admit it. They're saying they'll have the guy in a week. They're full of shit. I'd be surprised if they get him at all."

That was all Lucas knew about the Grandfelt murder at the time it happened.

Lucas stayed with the new company for three years, then sold all the stock in a management buy-out financed by San Francisco venture capitalists. He became a dot.com multi-millionaire and went back to being a cop because what he really liked in life was chasing killers.

The actors and programmers, who had between five hundred (a janitor) and ten thousand (the lead programmer) stock options each, were cashed out at twenty-one dollars a share, which left them even more amazed than they were delighted, and they were delighted.

The BCA investigators also suffered through extended face-to-face contact with Lara Grandfelt, the twin, who they unofficially classified as one of the biggest pains in the ass that they'd ever encountered.

The twin was smart, tough, and eventually affluent enough to hire private investigators and lawyers. She delivered a monthly telephone harangue to whichever investigator was unlucky enough to answer the phone, questioning whether it was stupidity, incompetence or simple laziness that kept the BCA from finding the killer.

One investigator, often the butt of her accusations, admitted during lunch at the Parrot Café that he hated her. And then, after all of that, after all the shouting, after all accusations of incompetence, cupidity, cover-ups and possible corruption, twenty-one full years after the murder... Lara Grandfelt threw gasoline on the case and set it on fire.