Bloody Genius (14 page)

“Tinder is pay-to-play?”

“Not supposed to be but sometimes is,” Payne said. “Not all full-time hookers. Sometimes, it’s just a girl who needs a quick couple of thousand so she can go to Mardi Gras or something. The Virgin Islands or Cabo in February.”

“Would Dr. Quill take that risk? A hookup for money?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know. If he did, it would be calculated and probably not much of a risk.”

“How would I find one of these women?”

“Stroke to the right, big guy,” Payne said. And then she had to explain what that meant.

Something to think about. Pubic hairs, a yoga mat, an empty prostate macho glow. Why would a hooker kill him and why would she leave behind his wallet, with its unidentifiable currency? Everything she did take—the computer, the keys, the phone—would be evidence against her. And only the computer could be fenced, and not for much, no matter what it originally cost.

Virgil had some time to kill before the meeting with Trane and the cop, so he stopped off in St. Paul for a Butter Flake Roll at Breadsmith, went next door for a Strawberry Surf Rider Smoothie
from Jamba Juice, then idled around the corner and looked in a bookstore window until he finished eating and drinking his smoothie, then went inside and bought the latest Dave Robicheaux novel by James Lee Burke.

He made it to St. Paul police headquarters fifteen minutes ahead of time and sat and read the novel until he saw Trane coming down the street.

“Get anything from the lab?” she asked.

“One of his lab employees thinks Quill was having a sexual relationship with somebody. She said he’d sometimes come in with—and I quote—‘the postcoital, empty prostate macho glow.’ And she said he was familiar with Tinder.”

“Ah, the well-known postcoital, empty prostate macho glow. I’m
very
familiar with it,” Trane said. “Maybe a hooker emptied it for him?”

“That we don’t know. Yet. But I’m leaning in that direction. If I have time, I’m going to figure out how Tinder works, then I’m going to go sit by his house and stroke to the right. See who pops up.”

“You’re expecting something to pop up? I’m told you’re expecting children.”

“You have a dirty mind, Trane. I’m as faithful as the day is long.”

“Winter or summer?”

The desk cop walked Trane and Virgil back to Roger Bryan’s desk. Bryan was on the phone and waved them into chairs, ended the call, stuck out a hand to shake with Virgil, and said, “Virgil Fuckin’ Flowers, as I live and breathe. And how are you, Maggie? I haven’t seen you since when? Last summer on the jumper?”

“Yup. Poor kid.” She turned to Virgil, and said, “Kid jumped off the Lake Street Bridge because everybody at school unfriended him.”

“I read about it,” Virgil said. “I never know what to think when something like that happens.”

“The school held a memorial service for him, and they brought in a busload of shrinks to shrink the kids,” Bryan said. “What they should have done is taken the little assholes out to the soccer field, lined them up, and then beat the crap out of them one at a time.”

“I’ve always thought of you as the Gandhi type,” Virgil said.

“What’s going on with Terry Foster?” Bryan asked. “He’s hooked up with the Quill murder? Is that right?”

“We don’t know. We need to know about what happened to Foster. He’s part of that clusterfuck going on at the U, between Quill and Katherine Green.”

“I know, the culture professor. We asked him about that and came up empty,” Bryan said. “Right now, we’re treating it as a strong-arm robbery attempt, but there are some problems.”

“Like what?”

“Probably nothing you haven’t thought of. Ambush in a remote spot in a well-lit neighborhood. Unless he was scouting Foster, the asshole could have stood behind the garage all night and not seen anyone go by. And he was serious about this thing. If the guy in the backyard hadn’t yelled at him, I think Foster might be dead. But, you get all sorts. We pushed Foster on who might have it in for him. He couldn’t think of anyone, and he looked to me like he was telling the truth. Said there was no reason any of Professor Quill’s people would come after him, none he could think of. That’s the only recent hassle he’d been involved in, and he wasn’t much involved.”

“Drugs?”

“They did the whole bloodwork drill at the hospital and he was absolutely clean.”

“Women?”

“He says no. An on-and-off thing, nothing serious.”

“Money? Gambling?”

Bryan was shaking his head. “None of that—at least, not that he’d admit to. We talked to friends of his and they said he’s a quiet, routine guy. Likes a beer or two, or three, but doesn’t need it. Not yet anyway. That’s why we still have it as a strong-arm job—there doesn’t seem to be any other motive. We even asked if it might go back to his military service, but he doesn’t think so. He was an intelligence officer, got shot once, but he wasn’t a guy ordering anyone into combat or kicking anyone’s ass. He spent most of his time in an office. He got wounded sitting in a truck.”

Virgil said, “Wait a minute . . . He was an intelligence officer? I got the impression that he was an enlisted man . . . a sergeant or something.”

“Nope. He was a captain. You think that might be important?”

“I don’t know,” Virgil said. “Odd that he didn’t say something. I was a captain myself, and I mentioned that when I talked to him. That’ll usually bring on a few minutes of Old Home Week. You know, where were you, what’d you do, who’d you know, all of that.”

“He’s a quiet guy,” Bryan said. “He was over there for a quite a while . . . Maybe a little PTSD? Doesn’t like to talk about it?”

Trane asked, “That aside, you got anything?”

“We got zip,” Bryan said.

“Exactly what we got on the Quill case,” Trane said. “There’s an uninteresting coincidence.”

Outside again, Trane said, “I don’t know what to do.”

“I’m gonna go poke around Foster again,” Virgil said. “There’s something there. Best case, I find out who killed Quill. Average case, I catch a mugger. Worst case, I get what Bryan got.”

“Which is zip.”

Trane was parked in a no-parking zone a block in front of Virgil. Virgil got to his car before Trane got to hers and he watched her walking away, down the street, now talking on her cell phone, her free arm waving over her head. She was arguing with someone, and the argument looked hot. He started his car, rolled up the street, and Trane turned, saw him, and flagged him down. A moment later, she was off her phone and had walked back to him. Virgil rolled down his window.

“You won’t believe what just happened,” she said.

“Green confessed?”

“Worse. Fifty-four days ago I busted a guy for an assault for a fight, the details not being important because we had him, cold, with a bar full of witnesses. Guess how I know it was exactly fifty-four days ago?”

“Ah, maybe because of the sixty-day speedy trial law?”

“You got it. He filed for a speedy trial the day we arrested him, and the paperwork got lost. Somebody finally woke up in the county attorney’s office and asked what happened with the Logan trial,” she said. “After some major clusterfuckery, they managed to schedule a trial on day fifty-nine out of sixty, royally pissing off the judge, but I’ve had no prep at all. I didn’t even know
about the speedy trial request. Anyway, I’m getting prepped for the next couple days, and then I’ve got to be there for the trial.”

“You’re telling me that I’m on my own,” Virgil said.

Trane tipped back her head and closed her eyes. “Yeah, goddamnit. You could probably ask for more help, but you’re doing pretty good, and you know the Cities. Keep your nose to the grindstone and your feet on the fence and your ears to the ground. I’ll be back in a couple of days. Maybe three. Or four.”

“That’s so—” Virgil said.

“What can I tell you?”

“You’d think—”

“Yeah. You would,” Trane said. “Anyway . . .”

“I’ll try to make you proud.”

“Do that, cowboy.”

Virgil sat in his truck and watched Trane drive away; she was still fuming about the trial, muttering to herself. After a moment, he called Katherine Green, but she didn’t pick up. He called her again, still no answer. Finally he called Clete May, the guy with the Japanese bow. May picked up, and Virgil asked, “Do you know a woman in Cultural Science whose name is Sandy and looks like a pileated woodpecker?”

“Sure, Sandy Thomas. Personally, I wouldn’t describe her that way. She’s been studying jujitsu since she was nine years old and would kick your ass if she heard you call her that.”

“Then I’ll ask for your discretion on the woodpecker thing, if you run into her. So she’s in Cultural Science?”

“Yes. Well, sometimes. She’s twenty-six or twenty-seven and has had five or six majors, I think. Never graduated. But, right now, she’s in Cultural Science.”

“You know where she lives?”

“No, not really,” May said. “If you’re looking for her, she
teaches a jujitsu class about now. Over at the RecWell. I’ve been invited, but I’ve always had other commitments. Like, to my personal well-being.”

“She’s rough?”

“Rough and tough. My martial arts experience has been considerably more relaxed than hers. I’m not saying she’s a fanatic, but she’s a fanatic.”

There was no Recreation and Wellness Center when Virgil attended the university; at the time, even the word “wellness” probably hadn’t been invented, so he would go to “the gym.” Still, he knew where the RecWell was located because he’d driven by it a number of times.

He went there, was astonished at what he found—a fitness center that was a monument to wretched excess. He showed his badge at the front desk, was told that he was a half hour early for Thomas’s class. A female student aide, who looked like she could crack English walnuts between the cheeks of her ass, led him to a women’s locker room, left him outside, and a minute later returned with a slender, muscular woman whose red hair did indeed give her the aspect of a pileated woodpecker. She was wearing a two-piece yoga outfit in red and black that ended just below her knee. Also, below her knee, Virgil spotted an impact hematoma. As she walked up to Virgil, she crossed her arms over her chest, showing off solid biceps—both had dime-sized bruises, as though she been poked by fingertips or sticks—and asked, “What’s up?”

Virgil showed her his ID, and asked, “Have you talked to Terry Foster in the past couple of days?”

She frowned. “Well, no . . .”

“Terry was mugged—or beaten anyway—out behind his house,” Virgil said. “He’s over at Regions Hospital in St. Paul. He’s in pretty rough shape.”

She touched her lips with her fingers, and said, “Oh my God, he’s not going to—”

“He’s not going to die, but he’s pretty busted up and not in much condition to talk,” Virgil lied. “I’d like to ask you a few questions that might help us out.”

“Sure. Let’s go out in the hall, there are benches . . . When did this happen?” she asked.

“A couple of nights ago,” Virgil said.

“Okay, I haven’t seen him in a week. I’ll go over there tonight if they’ll let me see him.”

“Tomorrow might be better,” Virgil said. He didn’t want her getting there before he did. “Like I said, he’s hurting and a little drugged up.”

“I wonder why he didn’t call me?”

Virgil said, “For one thing, he can’t use a telephone—both of his arms are broken and in casts.”

“Oh, jeez.”

They found a bench under a big red “M,” and Virgil said, “Everybody says Terry’s a quiet guy and friendly. Would you know of anything at all that might have led to his being attacked? No matter how unlikely it might be?”

She looked at him for a long time, and Virgil thought, Ah—she does, and then she said, “Terry is a nice guy, and I wouldn’t want to get him in trouble.”

“Are you saying there is something?”

She looked down at her shoes for a moment, then said, “You
know that there was a professor who was murdered here a couple of weeks ago? Over in the Wilson Library?”

Virgil tap-danced. “Oh, yeah. That doctor, right?”

She nodded. “Dr. Quill. Terry’s in the Cultural Science Department—so am I, that’s how we met—and we’ve had this feud with Dr. Quill’s department. Dr. Quill and Dr. Green—she’s the head of our department—were feuding. Last time I was over at Terry’s, he told me he was going to look into it. The murder. He wanted to see if he could clear the department.”

“Look into it? How was he going to do that?” Virgil asked.

“He said . . . Well, he said he was going to check some people out. I asked him how, and he said on the internet. He knows a lot of computer stuff from when he was in the Army. He was an intelligence officer.”

“You wouldn’t know any names of who he was checking on?”

“No, but I was curious and might have nagged him a little. He said he’d gotten all the names of the people involved from the newspapers and from talking to people around Cultural Science. He said he’d run them through the mill—through the net. Including Dr. Green,” Thomas said. Then, “Oh, wait! I do know one other person. He was going to check Dr. Quill’s daughter because people were wondering if she was going to be the big financial winner from Dr. Quill being murdered. The newspapers said he was rich.”

That was all she had, but Virgil had now connected Foster to the Quill murder. There could be two reasons for Foster’s investigation: he was trying to clear Green and her department or he was monitoring the investigation to see if the cops were getting close to somebody. Or both.

One way to find out.

Fifteen minutes after he left Thomas, Virgil pulled into the parking lot at Regions Hospital and took the elevator up to Foster’s floor, walking through a hospital smell that might be alcohol that was the same in every hospital. When he looked into Foster’s room, he found a nurse hand-feeding him. Foster said, “You’re back . . . I’ll be a couple more minutes here . . .”

“Take your time,” Virgil said. He asked the nurse, “What causes the hospital smell? That makes all hospitals smell alike?”

“They don’t all smell like that anymore. It was caused by disinfectants, maybe urine. A combination. I don’t even smell it anymore.”

“Huh.”

When Foster had finished the last of the lime Jell-O and the nurse had gone, Foster said, “Thanks for the visit. It’s nice of you, but it’s not necessary.”

“This is not exactly a social visit.”

“I figured that out about three seconds after you came through the door, the look on your face,” Foster said. “What happened?”

“One of my sources told me that you’re conducting your own private investigation into the Quill murder,” Virgil said. “Since you got jumped, you might have touched a live wire. I want to know what it is. I’d like to know why you didn’t mention this the first time I was here.”

Foster closed his eyes and blew out air. Then, “That fuckin’ Sandy. I told her not to talk to anyone about it. I wouldn’t have talked to her, except I had one beer too many. I gotta quit drinking.”

“Not a bad idea, but Sandy who?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Virgil. I know and you know that Sandy and I are in bed sometimes, and you already talked to her,” Foster said. “She’s the only one who knew about me poking around.”

“I can’t—”

“I’m sore enough without getting a headache because you’re bullshitting me,” Foster said. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it since I got beat up and I don’t know what live wire I might have touched. I really don’t.”

“Who all did you talk to?”

“A few people in Cultural Science, the ones who seemed most outraged by the feud. Also, Megan Quill, because I thought she had the most to gain,” Foster said. “Her father had a house that’s got to be worth a million, plus a family fortune that’s worth way more than the house. After I talked to Megan, I, mmm, saw a copy of Quill’s will and according to its terms Megan gets exactly what she’s already getting, for the same amount of time. In other words, her trust fund continues until she’s thirty, and that’s it. She gets it whether or not Quill lives or dies.”

“I knew that. What else?”

“I was doing, uh, some research into his wife, who would have gotten hurt if the divorce had gone through. There was a tough prenup. His wife would get a hundred thousand dollars for each year they were married. There were smaller amounts for his first and second wives, and all the rest would have gone to a Quill Foundation, which would provide grants for medical research. Now with him dead while they were still married, the wife will most likely get half. I’m not exactly sure how much that would be, but I’d guess between fifteen and twenty million.”

“How were you doing this research? On the wife?” Virgil asked.

“On the internet. I’m not going to say any more about that,” Foster said. “I’d need to talk to a lawyer, and probably I’d need both federal and state immunity from prosecution.”

“You hacked somebody,” Virgil said. “Tell me this: does the information you hacked about his wife seem to suggest any level of guilt for the murder?”

“No. It doesn’t, other than the fact that she’d benefit,” Foster said.

“Hmm. I’ll have to take your word for it, and I will, unless I find something that tells me you’re lying. If that happens, you won’t like what follows.”

“Thanks a lot, pal. Look, I’m not even sure I broke any laws, but I’m not taking a chance,” Foster said. “Anyway, you should be thinking about what facts I found, not about what methods I used. I’ll tell you everything about what I uncovered but not how.”

“What else did you do?”

“I followed the wife around for a couple of days. I wanted to see if she had a relationship—because if she did and it was serious, then that guy might be looking at a major payday.”

“What came out of that?”

“She wasn’t exactly dating, but she went to dinner with a guy, a lawyer named Jared Miles, a couple of times. And twice to lunch,” Foster said. “They seemed friendly, but he never stayed overnight. And it’s possible that they were talking about the will. But he
was
age-appropriate, and they were . . . friendly.”

“Interesting. How’d you get his name?”

Foster thought for a moment, then said, “Miles picked her up at her house.”

Virgil added another moment of thought, then said, “Ah . . . You got his license tag and hacked into the DMV for his ID.”

“Virgil . . . I’ve got no comment about that.”

Virgil rubbed his face, his eyes wandering around the hospital room, with its tubes, its stainless steel, its electronics, its video screens. He turned back to Foster, and asked, “Do you think that whatever you stumbled over, if that’s what happened, was so serious that the guy who attacked you might come back?”

“How would I know that? If there’s a connection to the Quill murder, and I heard or saw something that I don’t understand, maybe he will,” Foster said. “If it was a mugging, probably not. I talked to Megan Quill and a couple of her friends and didn’t see anything but nerdy college kids. I got no hint that any of the people at Cultural Science might have killed Quill, and I don’t feel any threat from them. They were mostly shocked. The only thing that jumped out at me was the difference between what Mrs. Quill would get before a divorce and what she would get after. It’s pretty dramatic.”

“I’ve talked to her,” Virgil said. “She was in Cleveland.” And, “Why did you do all this? You must’ve known that the cops would be pissed off if they found you messing around with a murder investigation.”

Foster turned away for a moment, then turned back, and said, “Honestly—and don’t take this the wrong way because later on I realized how wrong I was—but at first I was worried that Sandy might be involved. She idolizes Katherine and hated Quill for what he did, and she’s, you know, a martial artist. Then I started getting some details from the papers, and she was over at my house until two o’clock the night that the murder probably happened. I’m not bragging, but she left in a very good mood. Not in a mood to kill someone.”

“Sandy didn’t have a boyfriend who might be jealous?” Virgil asked. “Maybe one of those stick fighter martial arts guys? And met you in the alley?”

“No. Not that I know of. It’s an interesting thought, though. I’ll ask her about that.”

“Let me know what she says,” Virgil said.

“It sounds like it comes down to a Quill connection or a mugging. Either one. Don’t tell Sandy that I checked her out. Please.”

“I won’t, if I can avoid it,” Virgil said. “Do you have any idea when you’re getting out of here?”

“It’ll be a few more days anyway. When they found out I had student health insurance, with no deductible, they jumped on me like a duck on a june bug. They’re not all that anxious to cure me.”

“Let me know before you leave,” Virgil said. They talked a few more minutes about Foster’s military career. He’d been an intelligence officer, had a degree from the University of Minnesota/Duluth, and was now a grad student. “If I get a Ph.D., I could go back into the Army as a regular officer and be almost guaranteed to wind up as a full colonel or better. The Army’s big on advanced degrees right now.”

“You didn’t do cop stuff?”

“No. I ran some agents, and when I was thinking about Quill, I was thinking I was kinda cop-like. I found out I wasn’t. I’m now embarrassed about messing with your investigation,” Foster said. “I consider myself warned off.”

Virgil shrugged and stood up. “I’m not warning you off. You want to look some more, fine with me, call if you get anything. But don’t blame me if somebody beats you to death. If somebody does, try to scratch him before you die so we can get the DNA from your fingernails.”

“Look for blood on the casts,” Foster said. “Right now, I couldn’t scratch my own balls. Which I desperately need to do.”

“Can’t help you there,” Virgil said.

Virgil got a lap desk out of the back of the Tahoe, sat in the passenger seat, and made notes on his conversation with Foster.

He didn’t know it but he’d missed something.