Bloody Genius (15 page)

When Virgil finished making his notes on Foster, he sat in the truck for a few minutes, thinking about the case, decided he didn’t think that well in an upright position, and turned back to the hotel.

In his room, he took off his boots and emptied his pockets, plugged his laptop into the WiFi, dialed up the Lucinda Williams station on Pandora, put on his headphones, lay on the bed with his notebook on his chest, closed his eyes, and thought about it some more.

An hour later, he was back on his feet, with a short list in his notebook:

• The doctor’s conspiracy as recorded on the western music CD.
  

• The map thief.
  

• Did Quill have an illicit relationship, possibly with a prostitute?
  

• Did Quill buy drugs from somebody called China White, at a bar called the Territorial Lounge?
  

• What was happening with the supposed malpractice lawsuit against Quill and the U?
  

All of the items on the list suggested motives for the murder—a wide variety of motives. Some seemed fairly simple to eliminate, and he decided to start there. After brushing his teeth, he got on the phone to Trane.

“You have a minute?”

“Sure. I’m sitting here in the county attorney’s office like a dummy. Want to know something? Alternative newspapers suck. Especially after you’ve read them the third time.”

“Yeah, but they’re free.”

“True . . . What’s up?”

“Did you ever talk to the woman who might be a suspect in those map thefts?”

“I never got to her,” Trane said. “That didn’t seem like a major priority.”

“I agree. But . . .” He told her about the list and his idea of knocking down the items one at a time. “I thought I might be able to take care of her with one stop. Then I got a guy from the BCA I want to bring in on the China White thing.”

They discussed tactics for a few minutes. Trane gave him the suspected thief’s address, and said, “She works from seven to three—she should be headed home.” They ended the call after a few more words. Virgil put on his boots and got back on the phone to a BCA agent named Del Capslock.

“How you doin’, Virgie?” Capslock asked when he picked up. “I heard you’re on the Quill thing.”

“Yeah. Listen, Del, you know a place called the Territorial Lounge? Or where I might find a woman named China White?”

“The Territorial’s over by KSTP,” Capslock said. “Stay away from the Philly cheesesteak unless you want to spend the rest of the week on the can.”

Virgil told him about the China White tip. “If you have any sources in the area . . .”

“Let me call around,” Capslock said. “You know what China White is, of course.”

“Of course.”

“Seems like a strange name for a dealer,” Capslock said. “It’s like having a sign on your chest that says ‘Buy Your Smack Here.’ It sounds made up by somebody who looked up ‘heroin’ in the dictionary.”

“I know, but it is what it is.”

“Long as you know,” Capslock said. “I’ll get back to you.”

The suspected map thief, Genevieve O’Hara, lived in the small town of Lauderdale, not far from the university, in what looked like a postwar GI house, painted a faded yellow with white trim. An aging Nissan was parked in the badly cracked driveway, with cantaloupe-sized dents on both ends of the back bumper.

Virgil walked up to the front door and knocked. A moment later, a woman, perhaps sixty, wearing narrow rectangular glasses, opened the door and peeked out. Virgil identified himself and showed her his ID, and she asked, “Is this about the maps?”

“Not directly,” Virgil said. “I’m investigating the death of Professor Quill.”

“Oh . . .” She had been willing to attack, he thought, in her robin-like way, but now she deflated. “You better come in. The campus police asked me about the maps, and I had nothing to do with all of that. I don’t work at the Andersen anymore, and I didn’t steal a key. I turned them all in when I transferred to the Wilson. Every last one of them. The very idea!”

“Do you know how many maps they’re missing?”

“According to rumors from friends, at this point, sixteen. But they never keep a good inventory over there—it could be sixteen maps over ten years, even twenty. And some might be misfiled. So, who knows?”

Virgil stepped inside the house and was hit by the smell of death. His nose wrinkled involuntarily, and O’Hara spotted it.

“My mother’s dying in the back bedroom,” she said. “Pancreatic cancer finally got her . . . It’s been four years, and she has no more than a few days left, if that. God bless her, I hope she goes sooner. Now she’s still with us, I roll her and wash her, I give her morphine under the tongue once every two hours, she no longer has control of her bowels. I have to buy diapers for her. She hates being alive.”

“Do you have help?”

She snorted. “Barely. You know how much that costs? Mother had no home care insurance. I pay a service when I’m working; a nurse comes every two hours to check on her. Sticks her nose in the door and that’s about it. A neighbor keeps an eye out her window in case the house catches fire while I’m gone. It’s a disaster.”

She pointed Virgil to a chair in the living room, and said, “Now, about Dr. Quill . . .”

She had seen Quill in the library from time to time, she said, usually working on his laptop in the carrel or reading. “He brought in his own chair, an expensive one, leather and all that.”

He was not there often. “A lot of people want those carrels, and I don’t think he was using his even once a week. It was a shame. But I never said anything to him about it.”

She’d never witnessed any arguments, any conflicts, involving Quill. “He came and he went. By himself. I can’t remember seeing him talk to anybody.”

O’Hara’s living room was tiny, perhaps twelve by twelve, smelled lightly of pasta, and had two walls taken up by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The shelves were packed. When O’Hara’s cell phone chirped, she said, “Time for the morphine, back in a minute,” pushed herself out of her chair, and disappeared into the back of the house. Virgil stood to take a look at the books. Mostly novels, and mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British.

O’Hara came back, and Virgil reached to the highest shelf and took down a thick, battered copy of
The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
and handed it to her. “Lift this over your head and swing it at my face.”

She tried and failed. She got the book up above her hair, but that was it, and then fumbled it. Virgil grabbed the dictionary, said, “Thanks,” and put it back on the shelf.

“That was a test,” she said. “Of what?”

“We think Professor Quill was killed when somebody lifted his laptop overhead and hit the back of his skull, then his neck, and hard. Anyway, the laptop was high-tech, expensive, and heavy—more than twelve pounds. That dictionary probably didn’t weight more than seven or eight.”

“Then you know—”

“Yes. You didn’t kill Quill.”

“Of course I didn’t,” she said. “The very thought is absurd.”

Virgil smiled. “How about the maps?”

She looked at him, her face grave, and said, “I had nothing to do with the maps. I work and I take care of mother, and that’s all I do. If I stole those maps, they’d fire me and I’d lose my pension. Thirty-five years and I’d lose my pension. The medical care in this country . . . Mother couldn’t afford extended care, she just couldn’t . . .”

Tears poked out at the corners of her eyes and ran down her cheeks, and she wiped them away with the backs of her hands. Virgil said, “I believe you. I’d bet those maps are lost somewhere in the library.”

“Exactly,” she said with a hint of defiance.

Virgil gave her his card, said good-bye, and left. As he was walking away, he knew for certain that O’Hara, by her telltale eyes and body language giveaways, had stolen the maps and that she’d done it to finance her mother’s health care.

Basically, he thought, fuck a bunch of maps.

He called Trane. After the phone rang five times, she finally answered, and said, “You got me out of a conference. Thank you.”

“O’Hara didn’t kill Quill. She couldn’t lift a seven-pound dictionary more than a couple inches over her head, and then it almost pulled her over backwards. She’s about five-two.”

“Okay. I didn’t think there was anything there. Did you ask her about the maps?”

“Yeah. She says she didn’t do it. I’m willing to let it go. I’m not interested in the maps.”

“I’m with you. What’s next?”

“Where’s the CD with the cowboy songs?”

“In the evidence locker. You need it?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.”

“I made a recording of it. If you tell me where you’re at, we’ve got a gofer, I can send him there with the recorder and some headphones,” Trane said.

“I’m going over to Quill’s lab. I’ll meet him on the front steps in half an hour.”

Virgil stopped at a Holiday store for gas and a Diet Coke, made it to Moos Tower a few minutes later. A cop car was sitting out front, its blinkers flashing out into the afternoon. Virgil knocked on the passenger-side window, and when the window dropped, the cop asked, “You Flowers?”

“Yes.”

He handed over a compact recorder with two microphones shaped like extra-large thimbles—or extra-short condoms—and a pair of microphones. He said, “To play it, just push the green button. To rewind, push the rewind button. If you push the red button for any reason, you’ll record over it. That’s what Trane said.”

“How come you didn’t ask for ID?” Virgil said, as he took the recorder.

“Trane told me about the shirt. And the boots. I figured there couldn’t be two of you.”

“Well, you’re right. But pop the door, I need to sit down for a minute.”

In the cop car, Virgil played the recording once to get a feel for
the machine, then rewound the tape, recorded its message to his iPhone, and gave the recorder back to the cop.

At Quill’s lab, the same woman who’d directed him back to the lab manager’s office on his first visit was sitting at her countertop inside the door, poking at a laptop. She looked up when Virgil walked in, and said, “You’re back.”

“Yes. I want you to listen—”

She interrupted. “You know they call you ‘that fuckin’ Flowers’? It’s on the internet.”

“What? The internet?”

“Yes. After you were here, we looked you up. There was a story in a Rochester newspaper that said you were widely known as ‘that fuckin’ Flowers,’ but they put in asterisks in the ‘fuckin’.”

“I get tired of it,” Virgil said. “It started in St. Paul, when I was a cop over there, followed me over to the BCA, and it got out of hand.”

“Actually, the story was complimentary. You recovered some precious artifact from Israel.”

“A complete nightmare, believe me,” Virgil said. “My garage almost got burned down with my boat inside of it.”

“Your boat? The horror!”

“I detected a tiny bit of sarcasm there,” Virgil said. “Anyway, I want you to listen to a recording and tell me if you recognize any voices.”

“Hit me,” she said.

Virgil played the recording. She listened, gaped at Virgil, and said, “Let me hear it again.”

Virgil played it again, and when it was done she said, “Holy . . . shit . . .”

“Recognize anybody?”

“Only Dr. Quill. I don’t recognize the others,” she said.

“That’s Quill? Which one exactly?”

“The one that was pushing for the op. Man, that freaks me out. If they went ahead and did it, that’d be worth killing to cover up. I don’t care who they were, how big a shots. If they did it and that recording gets played, their careers are over.”

“If it doesn’t get out?”

“Well, then, nothing happened . . . And Dr. Quill is dead,” she said. “Has anybody else heard it?”

“Actually, we think it must be a rerecording. This could be a third- or fourth-generation recording.”

“Blackmail,” she said. “You know what? That could be years old. There’s no way to know what they’re talking about”—she looked over her shoulder as if she were frightened—“but if that recording gets out and it’s about something recent, the university will go through this lab with a flamethrower. There won’t be anybody left. I gotta get out of here. Before it’s too late.”

“Really?”

“Really. That’s some bad juju, fuckin’ Flowers. That’s a fuckin’ A-bomb.”

Virgil left the lab, walked down the hall to the elevators, took one down to the street, went outside, called Trane again. When she answered her phone, he said, “We got a problem.”

“Uh-oh. Did you screw something up?”

“Not exactly. I talked to one of the women in the lab about the
recording. It scared her. She said that the bad guy was definitely Quill, which is too bad because I was beginning to like him. She seemed sure of it, but Nancy Quill said it wasn’t him.”

“Goddamnit. They’ve been rehearsing me all afternoon, treating me like a moron, and I was so frustrated and pissed that I was going to go home and eat an entire pie, but now I have to meet up with you and push Nancy Quill up against a wall.”

“You wanna be the bad cop?”

“If she lied to me, I’ll be the bad cop whether I want to be or not because I’ll be mondo pisso,” Trane said. “I’ll meet you there. Like, right now.”

Virgil found his way back to Nancy Quill’s condo, spotted Trane parked on the street in a no-parking zone. Virgil rolled up behind her, put his BCA sign in the window, and got out.

“One good thing about this: if she lied, we might be onto something,” Virgil said, as Trane got out of her car.

“I realized that on the way over,” Trane said. “It eased the pain. But I’m still going to eat that pie.”

“What kind?”

“Apple. I’ll warm it up.”

“Vanilla ice cream?”

“It ain’t warm apple pie if there’s no vanilla ice cream.”

Quill buzzed them through the entry door. They took the elevator up and found Quill waiting in the hall outside her condo.

“What’s going on?” Quill asked. “Did you get him?”

“No,” Trane said. “Let’s sit down.”