“I bet the papers jumped on that like a hungry trout,” Lucas said. “You're in a news meeting and you have the choice of two stories. A-President of the Senate works on budget resolution. B-President of the Senate bangs hot sixteen-year-old and maybe her mother, too, and faces grand-jury indictment. Whatta you going to do?”
“You think he did them both at the same time? I mean, simultaneously?” Carol asked.
“I don't want to think about why you want to know,” Lucas said. “Sandy, let's talk.”
She sat across the desk from him with a four-inch-thick file. “Lots of people have sex when they're sixteen,” she ventured. “Probably, now, most.”
“Not with the president of the Minnesota Senate,” Lucas said. He dropped into his chair and leaned back. “When did you get in?”
“I came back last night, about midnight. Then I stayed up reading until five…
I had some luck down there.”
“Start from the beginning,” Lucas said.
She nodded. “I went down and found the Polk County Courthouse. Des Moines is in Polk County. Anyway, I went to the clerk's office, and there was this boy there-another intern. I told him what I was looking for, and he really helped a lot. We got the original trial file, and Xeroxed that, and then we discovered that Duane Child-that was the man who was convicted of killing Toms-we found out that Child appealed. His attorney appealed.
They claimed that the investigation was terrible, and that the trial judge let a lot of bad information get in front of the jury.” “What happened with the appeal?” Lucas asked.
“They lost it. Child is in prison. But the appeals court vote was six to three for a new trial, and the three judges who voted for it wrote that there was no substantial evidence, either real or circumstantial, that supported conviction.”
“So…”
She held up a finger: “The main thing, from our point of view, that Bill showed me… Bill is the other intern… is that when they appealed, they got the entire police investigative file entered as evidence. So I got that, too.”
“Excellent!” Lucas said.
“Reading through it, I cannot figure out two things: I cannot figure out why he was indicted, and I cannot figure out how he was convicted,” Sandy said. “It was like all the cops testified that he did it and that was good enough. But there was almost no evidence.”
“None?”
“Some. Circumstantial,” she said.
“Circumstantial is okay…” Lucas said.
“Sure. Sometimes. But if that's all you've really got…”
“What about connections between the Toms murder and the others?” Lucas asked.
“That's another thing, Mr. Davenport…” she began.
“Call me Lucas, please.”
“That's another thing, Lucas. They are almost identical,” she said. “It's a perfect pattern, except for two things. Mr. Toms was male. All the others are female. And he was strangled with a piece of nylon rope, instead of being shot, or bludgeoned.
When I was reading it last night, I thought, Aha.' “ “Aha.”
“Yes. The killers are smart enough to vary the method of murder, so if you're just looking at the murders casually, on paper, you've got one woman clubbed to death, one woman shot, one woman dies in a fall, and one man is strangled,” Sandy said.
“There's no consistent method. But if you look at the killings structurally, you see that they are otherwise identical. It looks to me like the killers deliberately varied the method of murder, to obscure the connections, but they couldn't obscure what they were up to. Which was theft.”
“Very heavy,” Lucas said.
“Yes. By the way, one of the things that hung Duane Child is that he was driving an old Volkswagen van, yellow, or tan,” Sandy said. “The night that Toms was murdered, a man was out walking his dog, an Irish setter. Anyway, he saw a white van in the neighborhood, circling the block a couple of times. This man owns an appliance company, and he said the van was a full-sized Chevrolet, an Express, and he said he knew that because he owns five of them. The cops said that he just thought the van was white, because of the weird sodium lights around there, that the lights made the yellow van look whiter. But the man stuck with it, he said the van was a Chevy. A Chevy van doesn't look anything like the Volkswagen that Child drove. I know because I looked them up on Google. I believe the van was the killers' vehicle, and they needed the van to carry away the stuff they were stealing.”
“Was there a list of stolen stuff?”
“Yes, and it's just like the list Carol showed me, of the stuff taken from Bucher's house. All small junk and jewelry. Obvious stuff. And in Toms's case, a coin collection which never showed up again. But I think-and Carol said you think this happened at Bucher's-I think they took other stuff, too. Antiques and artworks, and they needed the van to move it.”
“Have you read the entire file?” Lucas asked.
She shook her head. “Most of it.”
“Finish it, and then go back through it. Get some of those sticky flag things from Carol, and every time you find another point in the argument, flag it for me,” Lucas said. “I've got to do some politics, but I'll be back late in the afternoon. Can you have it done by then?”
“Maybe. There's an ocean of stuff,” she said. “We Xeroxed off almost a thousand pages yesterday, Bill and I.”
“Do as much as you can. I'll see you around four o'clock.”
Before he left, he checked out with Rose Marie, and with Mitford, the governor's aide. Mitford said, “I had an off-the-record with Cole. He doesn't plan to do any investigation. He's says it'll rise or fall on the BCA presentation. They could possibly put it off for a couple of weeks, if you need to develop some elements, but his people are telling him they should go ahead and indict. That they've got enough, as long as the Barths testify.”
“Everybody wants to get rid of it; finish it, except maybe the Klines,” Lucas said.
Virgil Flowers was waiting in the parking lot of the Dakota County courthouse. Lucas circled around, picked him up, and they drove into the town of Hastings for lunch.
Like Lucas, Flowers was in his grand-jury suit: “You look more like a lawyer than I do,” Lucas said.
“That's impossible.”
“No, it's not. My suit's in extremely good taste. Your suit looks like a lawyer suit.”
“Thanks,” Flowers said. “I just wasted thirty bucks on it, and you're putting it down.”
They went to a riverside cafe, sitting alone on a back patio with checkered-cloth-covered tables, looking toward the Mississippi; ordered hamburgers and Cokes. “Everything is arranged,” Lucas said, when the waitress had gone.
“Yes. The whole package is locked up in the courthouse. The jury starts meeting at one o'clock, Cole and Conoway will make the first presentation, then they'll bring in Russell from Child Protection to talk about the original tip. Then you go on, testify about assigning the investigation to me, and you'll also testify about chain-of-custody on the evidence that came in later, that everything is okay, bureaucratically. Then I go on and testify about the investigation, then we have the tech people coming up, then they get the Barths. After that, they go to dinner. They reconvene at six-thirty, Conoway summarizes, and then they decide whether they need more, or to vote an indictment.”
“Does Conoway think they'll vote?”
“She says they'll do what she tells them to do, and unless something weird happens, they're gonna vote,” Flowers said.
“Okay. You've done a good job on this, Virgil.”
“Nice to work in the Cities again,” Flowers said, “but I gotta get back south. You know Larry White from Jackson County?”
“Yeah. You're talking about that body?”