Bloody Genius (13 page)

Monday.

Virgil got an early start and was halfway to Minneapolis when Trane called. “Where are you?”

“Coming up to Shakopee. Did something happen?”

“Listen to this. I’m going to hold my phone close so you can hear it.”

“. . . Please leave a message.
Beep!
”

A man’s voice, but pitched high, maybe faked: “Uh, this is a message for Detective Trane about Dr. Quill. I know a woman named China White who told me that she was afraid she killed him. She hit him with a laptop. He was talking on his telephone in his study room but left his computer out on a library table, and there was nobody around, so she picked up the computer and hit him with it. She hit him two times. This wasn’t at night. The newspaper said it was at night, but she said this was in the daytime, right before the library closed. She took his cell phone, shut the door and locked it with his key, then took his computer and
threw it in the river along with his car keys. She forgot about the cell until the next day. There should be video of her going out of the library. She did it because she was selling cocaine to Dr. Quill and he said there was something wrong with it and he wasn’t going to pay her. She said there was nothing wrong with it and got angry and hit him. She sometimes goes to the Territorial Lounge. Thank you for listening.”

Trane came back. “That’s it.”

Virgil said, “Damn.”

“Thank you. That’s the kind of insight I was hoping for.”

“Well, give me a goddamn minute to think, will you?” Virgil snapped. “You’ve had it for a while. What do you think?”

“I’ve had it for, like, five minutes,” she snapped back. “I don’t know what to think.”

“If you took all the different factual parts—that the caller knew to call you, that the laptop, phone, keys were missing, that he was hit twice—how much of that is public?”

“One way or another, all of it,” Trane said. “The newspapers and television knew everything except the fact he was hit twice, but that was mentioned in the autopsy report, and his wife and daughter had access to it. Who knows who they might have told? The keys, laptop, and phone—all those details were leaked during the first week of the investigation, but at different times. Would a scammer have seen all those mentions on TV and in the papers? I mean, ’CCO had the missing keys and phone, but the
Star Tribune
got the computer.”

Virgil said, “Have you talked to your Narcotics guys? You know what China White is?”

“Yeah, but we’re not talking about China White, we’re talking about coke . . . At least, I think that’s what we’re talking about. I’m trying to find somebody who knows about this Territorial Lounge.”

“I got a guy at the BCA who might be able to help,” Virgil said.

Virgil thought about the tip and China White as he continued into the Cities and across the Mississippi to the university. There were, in his experience, a whole bunch of reasons that somebody could wind up violently and illegally dead. There were a whole bunch more that somebody could wind up violently but legally dead, but those didn’t apply in the Quill case.

In his territory, in the southern third of Minnesota, the most common murders were domestic conflicts. Domestics were followed in frequency by alcohol- or drug-inspired mayhem. Psychological upsets counted for a few, and the rest were for a variety of reasons: money, sex, revenge, immaturity—the ten-year-old who shoots his mother for taking away his cell phone—and ideology. Virgil had never seen a purely ideological murder, Republicans being too cautious, Democrats generally being bad shots.

Mostly it was domestics and booze.

Where would the Quill murder land in that matrix? Wasn’t a domestic, and there was no reason to think alcohol was involved. Not ideology. Unlikely money, since he had an elaborate will that would be hard to break; people would get what he left them, no more, no less. All of the people who seemed possible suspects were mature adults except his daughter, who didn’t have any reason to kill him except general disdain, which wasn’t usually enough. So a maturity problem didn’t seem likely.

Could be anger or revenge, if Green were involved, or somebody in Quill’s lab, if the killer was an employee unhappy about not receiving credit for scientific work or a low salary or had other job tensions. Was somebody about to be fired?

Could be sex, if Quill were having an illicit relationship or if he were inviting hookers up to the carrel late at night.

Virgil thought about that for a moment. If the library was empty, and if he didn’t want to take a chance of inviting a prostitute into his home, that would explain the pubic hairs on the yoga mat. The ex-wives did say Quill liked sex, and with the breakup with his third wife, he wasn’t getting any. But a hooker? A hooker wouldn’t likely forget a wallet, and Quill had seven hundred dollars in his and it was still in his back pocket when he was found.

Then, finally, drugs, and the tip on an unknown dealer called China White. Drugs could explain a lot. If the cocaine found in the old desk was Quill’s, and if he were involved with a dealer, it would explain surreptitious meetings late at night. And if he was getting drugs from a prostitute, which was not unheard of, it’d be an even more credible explanation.

It would also mean that the attack on Terry Foster was almost certainly not related to the Quill murder. Maybe Foster was the victim of a random act, a coincidence.

He called Trane, who picked up instantly. “What?”

“I wanted to mention a couple of things that we should keep in mind. If the Terry Foster attack is related to the Quill murder, then we’re dealing with a planner, not an impulse killer. If Foster is related, then the killer is male, not a female named China White. Foster was sure of that.”

“That’s all true, but only if Foster is related to Quill.”

“You were planning to talk to the St. Paul cops yesterday. Did you get that done?”

“Nope. Do you know Roger Bryan?”

“Yes. He caught it?” When Virgil was a St. Paul cop, he’d worked with Bryan, then a new detective. Virgil considered him competent, and maybe better than that.

“Yeah. He was doing one of those low-rent Ironman things yesterday—bike fifty K, swim Lake St. Croix, run ten K. He was gone all day. He’s working today, we’re meeting up this afternoon.”

“I’d like to sit in on that.”

“You’re invited,” Trane said. “You still headed for the lab?”

“I’m there now,” Virgil said. “Looking for a place to park where I won’t get towed.”

Virgil had taken a couple of required chemistry courses when he was at the university and had scored solid B’s, which might have been C’s if he hadn’t impressed the chemistry professor with his formula for what the professor called, with a complete lack of cultural sensitivity, the “Yellow Peril.” That is, a cheap and semilethal concoction of ethanol, orange juice, and pineapple nectar, which the professor served at departmental parties.

All Virgil remembered of his legitimate chemical efforts was measuring the density of Pepsi Cola and the confusing mass of glassware in the lab. He expected something similar when he followed a harried-looking woman through the door of Quill’s laboratory but found, instead, something that more closely resembled a sophisticated computer lab. The room was the size of a high
school classroom, with several doors down its interior length leading to other rooms.

The woman, turning to Virgil, asked, “Can I help you?”

Virgil identified himself.

“Barth’s death was a complete shock,” she said. “I can’t help you with anything. You probably want to talk to Carl.”

“Carl?”

“Anderson. He’s the lab director, if we still have a lab. His office is back that way.”

She pointed, and Virgil followed the direction of her finger, around a corner and into a second, larger room, where he found his forest of glassware and another woman who was using a multichannel pipette to transfer a liquid that looked like watery blood into multiwell microtiter plates. She looked up, and Virgil said, “Carl Anderson’s office?”

She said, “Keep going. I’m not sure if he’s still here.”

The glassware room was the same size as the computer area, rows of easy-clean gray cabinets topped with a black rubberized work surface with shelves above. The shelves held bottles and hardware and boxes of vinyl gloves. A computer-linked sound system pumped quiet Adult Alternative music into the room, tempting Virgil to pluck out his earballs.

But he kept going and found a chubby, balding man sitting in an office with an identifying plaque beside the door that said “Carl Anderson, Staff Director.” He was working at a computer on a separate table that right-angled his desk.

The door was open, and Virgil stuck his head in. “Mr. Anderson?”

Anderson, startled, jumped, turned, and asked, “Who are you?”

Virgil identified himself and his mission, and Anderson swiveled
to his desk and pointed Virgil at a visitor’s chair. “What a fucking mess,” he said, running both hands through his nonexistent hair, leaving behind white lines on his sunburnt scalp. “You have any news?”

“No, not really. A few things have popped up—I can’t talk about them—but there’s nothing solid.”

“How is it possible, in this day and age, that somebody could commit a murder, a beating murder, that didn’t leave behind DNA? I’d think that would be almost impossible.”

“There usually is a little DNA around, when you have a body,” Virgil said. “In this case, there was apparently no physical contact between Dr. Quill and the killer.”

Anderson wiped a hand across his mouth, said, “Unbelievable.”

Virgil asked Anderson a half dozen questions, including about his alibi, which turned out to be the typical mishmash of times, places, and people that made it believable but not perfect.

“If you want my best reason for not killing the man, it’s this: I’m making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year and now I might be out of work. I have a master’s degree in organic chemistry, but I’m basically a bureaucrat. I do paperwork, I supervise grant applications, I make sure everybody gets paid, and I decide who gets routine raises and who doesn’t. I tried to keep Barth inside his budget and that wasn’t easy. Every big shot scientist has somebody like me, but there aren’t a hell of a lot of openings. I may be comprehensively fucked.”

He didn’t know Katherine Green, Clete May, or Terry Foster. “I wasn’t involved in that whole pissing match between us and Cultural Science. Seemed a little dumb, though Barth wasn’t dumb. Those people should be ignored. Flame wars encourage them, because that’s about all they got going for themselves.”

“It was only a pissing match?”

“Academic feuds are endemic but don’t usually end in murder. Honestly? I don’t think those people are involved. I mean, they’re crazy but not insane, if you see what I mean,” Anderson said. “I’d be willing to bet that somebody was inside the library when they shouldn’t have been. A street guy, looking for something to steal. He bumps into Barth and panics and grabs the computer and
Bang!
Barth’s dead.”

“You knew we were looking at the computer as the murder weapon?”

“Yeah. Sergeant Trane asked me about it, why he’d have it, what he was doing with it. I didn’t know, but I asked her what the big deal was, we’re not doing anything secret here. She said it was possible that the laptop was the murder weapon.”

“Can you think of anything somebody could do with that computer, something that he might have on it, that would get him killed?” Virgil asked. “I understand it was a heavy-duty machine.”

“Sergeant Trane asked me the same question. I couldn’t think of anything. But I’m not sure the power of the computer was significant. Barth was a gear freak. If he bought a set of golf clubs, he’d get the best ones anybody ever heard of; if he bought a shotgun, it’d be a great shotgun—y’know, from Italy or something. If he bought a laptop, he’d get the fastest, most powerful he could find. He was rich. When it came to gear, he routinely bought the best. He had a Leica camera and a bunch of lenses he used for snapshots, the same stuff the rest of us use our iPhones for.”

Quill wasn’t sleeping with anybody in the lab, Anderson said, and none of the women there seemed like they’d be much interested in him. He had that three-wife history and was curt, at best, with all the lab people, even those he liked.

“Any possibility that he might get together with women online?” Virgil asked.

Anderson thought for a moment, then said, “I don’t know. Frankly, it wouldn’t astonish me. The efficiency of it would appeal to him. Sex on demand, without commitment. I understand that there’s often a money exchange involved in the hookups.”

“So, women might be another form of gear,” Virgil suggested. “Get what you want, pay your money, and be done with it.”

“That’s about it,” Anderson said.

Anderson walked through the lab and into the computer space with Virgil as Virgil was leaving but stopped to talk to the woman Virgil had followed into the lab. Anderson said to him, “This is Julie Payne. She knows everything.” Then to Payne: “Was Barth interested in any of the women in the lab?”

She cracked a smile, and said, “No.”

“It was that clear?” Virgil asked.

“Yes. He wasn’t interested in any of us.”

Virgil: “Did he have a girlfriend?”

“That’s harder. Some days he’d come in—this was after he’d left his wife—and he’d have that look that men get after a night of hot sex,” Payne said. “The postcoital, empty prostate macho glow. Both relaxed and predatory, looking for a new target.”

“I didn’t know we got that look,” Virgil said.

“Well, you do. I first spotted it in my ex-husband. First because of me, then later not so much,” Payne said.

“Then you think a girlfriend is likely?”

“Sex seemed likely. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he had a girlfriend. One time, this girl from the hospital came over with some
images for Sally—Sally works here, she’s a tech—and they were talking, and this girl said she might try Tinder. Dr. Quill was going by and heard that and said something like, ‘Real bad idea.’ He didn’t say anything else, just kept walking, but he obviously knew what Tinder was.”